He starts up the stairs, pauses, continues, pauses, looks down to the floor below, looks up, continues, pauses, and he wonders the same thing he always wonders at some point while chasing a cat: what is he doing here? If there is not food, if there is not a female in heat, if there is not anyone here to pet and scratch and play with him, why is he here? He doesn’t really know why. Maybe it is just the nature of a dog to wonder what is around the next corner, over the next hill. Dogs are special. Dogs are curious. Life is strange and interesting, and he has the feeling that each new place or each new day might show him something so different and special that just by seeing and smelling it, he will understand the world better and be happier. He has the feeling that a wonderful thing is waiting to be found, a wonderful thing he can’t imagine, but something even better than food or females in heat, better than petting, scratching, playing, running along a beach with wind in his fur, chasing a cat, or even better than catching a cat if such a thing was possible. Even here, in this scary place, with the smell of the thing-that-will-kill-you so strong he wants to sneeze, he still feels that a wonderfulness might be just around the next corner.
And don’t forget the woman, the boy. They’re nice. They like him. So maybe he can find a way to keep the bad thing from bothering them any more.
He continues to the top of the steps into a narrow space. He pads along, sniffing at doors. Soft light behind one of them. And very heavy, bitter: the thing-that-will-kill-you smell.
Not afraid, not afraid, he is a dog, stalker and hunter, good and brave, good dog, good.
The door is open a crack. He puts his nose to the gap. He could push it open wider, go into the space beyond it, but he hesitates.
Nothing wonderful in there. Maybe somewhere else in this people place, maybe around every other corner, but not in there.
Maybe he can just leave now, go back to the alley, see if the fat man left out more food for him.
That would be a cat thing to do. Sneaking away. Running. He is not a cat. He is a dog.
But do cats ever get their noses scratched, cut deep, bleeding, sore for days? Interesting thought. He has never seen a cat with a scratched nose, has never gotten close enough to scratch one.
But he is a dog, not a cat, so he pushes against the door. It eases open wider. He goes into the space beyond.
Young-man-bad-thing lying on black cloths, above the floor, not moving at all, making no sound, eyes closed. Dead? Dead bad thing on the black cloths.
He pads closer, sniffing.
No. Not dead. Sleeping.
The thing-that-will-kill-you eats, and it pees, and now it sleeps, so it is like people in many ways, like dogs, too, even if it isn’t either people or dog.
What now?
He stares at the sleeping bad thing, thinking how he might jump up there with it, bark in its face, wake it up, scare it, so then maybe it won’t come around the woman and boy any more. Maybe even bite it, just a little bite, be a bad dog for once, just to help the woman and the boy, bite its chin. Or its nose.
It doesn’t look so dangerous, sleeping. Doesn’t look so strong or quick. He can’t remember why it was scary before.
He looks around the black room and then up, and light glistens in a lot of eyes floating up there in bottles, people eyes without people, animal eyes without animals. Interesting but not good, not good at all.
Again he wonders what he is doing here. He realizes this place is like a drain pipe where you get stuck, like a hole in the ground where big spiders live that don’t like you sticking your snout in at them. And then he realizes that the young-man-bad-thing on the bed is sort of like those laughing boys, smelling of sand and sun and sea salt, who will pet you and scratch behind your ears and then try to set your fur on fire.
Stupid dog. Stupid for coming here. Good but stupid.
The bad thing mumbles in its sleep.
He backs away from the bed, turns, tucks his tail down, and pads out of the room. He goes down the stairs, getting out of there, not afraid, not afraid, just careful, not afraid, but his heart pounding hard and fast.
6
Weekdays, Tanya Delaney was the private nurse on the graveyard shift, from midnight until eight o’clock in the morning. Some nights she would rather have worked in a graveyard. Jennifer Drack-man was spookier than anything Tanya could conceive of encountering in a cemetery.
Tanya sat in an armchair near the blind woman’s bed, silently reading a Mary Higgins Clark novel. She liked to read, and she was a night person by nature, so the wee-hour shift was perfect for her. Some nights she could finish an entire novel and start another one because Jennifer slept straight through.
Other times, Jennifer was unable to sleep, raving incoherently and consumed by terror. On those occasions, Tanya knew the poor woman was irrational and that there was nothing to be afraid of, yet the patient’s angst was so intense that it was communicated to the nurse. Tanya’s own skin would prickle with gooseflesh, the back of her neck would tingle, she would glance uneasily at the darkness beyond the window as if something waited in it, and would jump at every unexpected noise.
At least the pre-dawn hours of that Wednesday were not filled with shouts and tortured cries and strings of words as meaningless as the manic babble of a religious passionary speaking in tongues. Instead, Jennifer slept but not well, harried by bad dreams. From time to time, without waking, she moaned, grasped with her good hand at the bed rail, and tried without success to pull herself up. With bony white fingers hooked around the steel, atrophied muscles barely defined in her fleshless arms, face gaunt and pale, eyelids sewn shut and concave over empty sockets, she seemed not like a sick woman in bed but like a corpse struggling to rise from a coffin. When she talked in her sleep, she didn’t shout but spoke almost in a whisper, with tremendous urgency; her voice seemed to arise from thin air and float through the room with the eeriness of a spirit speaking at a séance: “He’ll kill us all… kill… he’ll kill us all….”
Tanya shivered and tried to concentrate on the suspense novel, though she felt guilty about ignoring her patient. At the least she should pry the bony hand off the railing, feel Jennifer’s forehead to be sure she was not feverish, murmur soothingly to her, and attempt to guide her through the stormy dream into calmer shoals of sleep. She was a good nurse, and ordinarily she would rush to comfort a patient in the grip of a nightmare. But she stayed in the armchair with her Clark book because she didn’t want to risk waking Jennifer. Once awakened, the woman might slip from the nightmare into one of those frightening fits of shouting, tearless weeping, wailing, and glossolalic shrieking that made Tanya’s blood turn to ice.
Came the ghostly voice out of sleep: “… the world’s on fire… tides of blood… fire and blood… I’m the mother of Hell… God help me, I’m the mother of Hell….”
Tanya wanted to turn the thermostat higher, but she knew the room was already a bit too warm. The chill she felt was within her, not without.
“… such a cold mind… dead heart… beating but dead…”
Tanya wondered what the poor woman had endured that had left her in such a dismal state. What had she seen? What had she suffered? What memories haunted her?
7
The Green House on Pacific Coast Highway included a large and typical California-style restaurant filled with too many ferns and pothos even for Harry’s taste, and a sizable barroom where fern-weary patrons had long ago learned to keep the greenery under control by poisoning the potting soil with a dribble of whiskey every now and then. The restaurant side was closed at that hour.