As she listed her blessings, Tina was astonished at how much difference one year could make in a life. From bitterness, pain, tragedy, and unrelenting sorrow, she had turned around to face a horizon lit by rising promise. At last the future looked worth living. Indeed, she couldn’t see how anything could go wrong.
Chapter Nine
The skirts of the night were gathered around the Evans house, rustling in a dry desert wind.
A neighbor’s white cat crept across the lawn, stalking a wind-tossed scrap of paper. The cat pounced, missed its prey, stumbled, scared itself, and flashed lightning-quick into another yard.
Inside, the house was mostly silent. Now and then the refrigerator switched on, purring to itself. A loose windowpane in the living room rattled slightly whenever a strong gust of wind struck it. The heating system rumbled to life, and for a couple of minutes at a time, the blower whispered wordlessly as hot air pushed through the vents.
Shortly before midnight, Danny’s room began to grow cold. On the doorknob, on the radio casing, and on other metal objects, moisture began to condense out of the air. The temperature plunged rapidly, and the beads of water froze. Frost formed on the window.
The radio clicked on.
For a few seconds the silence was split by an electronic squeal as sharp as an ax blade. Then the shrill noise abruptly stopped, and the digital display flashed with rapidly changing numbers. Snippets of music and shards of voices crackled in an eerie audio-montage that echoed and re-echoed off the walls of the frigid room.
No one was in the house to hear it.
The closet door opened, closed, opened…
Inside the closet, shirts and jeans began to swing wildly on the pole from which they hung, and some clothes fell to the floor.
The bed shook.
The display case that held nine model airplanes rocked, banging repeatedly against the wall. One of the models was flung from its shelf, then two more, then three more, then another, until all nine lay in a pile on the floor.
On the wall to the left of the bed, a poster of the creature from the Alien movies tore down the middle.
The radio ceased scanning, stopping on an open frequency that hissed and popped with distant static. Then a voice blared from the speakers. It was a child’s voice. A boy. There were no words. Just a long, agonized scream.
The voice faded after a minute, but the bed began to bang up and down.
The closet door slammed open and shut with substantially more force than it had earlier.
Other things began to move too. For almost five minutes the room seemed to have come alive.
And then it died.
Silence returned.
The air grew warm again.
The frost left the window, and outside the white cat still chased the scrap of paper.
WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 31
Chapter Ten
Tina didn’t get home from the opening-night party until shortly before two o’clock Wednesday morning. Exhausted, slightly tipsy, she went directly to bed and fell into a sound sleep.
Later, after no more than two dreamless hours, she suffered another nightmare about Danny. He was trapped at the bottom of a deep hole. She heard his frightened voice calling to her, and she peered over the edge of the pit, and he was so far below her that his face was only a tiny, pale smudge. He was desperate to get out, and she was frantic to rescue him; but he was chained, unable to climb, and the sides of the pit were sheer and smooth, so she had no way to reach him. Then a man dressed entirely in black from head to foot, his face hidden by shadows, appeared at the far side of the pit and began to shovel dirt into it. Danny’s cry escalated into a scream of terror; he was being buried alive. Tina shouted at the man in black, but he ignored her and kept shoveling dirt on top of Danny. She edged around the pit, determined to make the hateful bastard stop what he was doing, but he took a step away from her for every step that she took toward him, and he always stayed directly across the hole from her. She couldn’t reach him, and she couldn’t reach Danny, and the dirt was up to the boy’s knees, and now up to his hips, and now over his shoulders. Danny wailed and shrieked, and now the earth was even with his chin, but the man in black wouldn’t stop filling in the hole. She wanted to kill the bastard, club him to death with his own shovel. When she thought of clubbing him, he looked at her, and she saw his face: a fleshless skull with rotting skin stretched over the bones, burning red eyes, a yellow-toothed grin. A disgusting cluster of maggots clung to the man’s left cheek and to the corner of his eye, feeding off him. Tina’s terror over Danny’s impending entombment was suddenly mixed with fear for her own life. Though Danny’s screams were increasingly muffled, they were even more urgent than before, because the dirt began to cover his face and pour into his mouth. She had to get down to him and push the earth away from his face before he suffocated, so in blind panic she threw herself over the edge of the pit, into the terrible abyss, falling and falling—
Gasping, shuddering, she wrenched herself out of sleep.
She was convinced that the man in black was in her bedroom, standing silently in the darkness, grinning. Heart pounding, she fumbled with the bedside lamp. She blinked in the sudden light and saw that she was alone.
“Jesus,” she said weakly.
She wiped one hand across her face, sloughing off a film of perspiration. She dried her hand on the sheets.
She did some deep-breathing exercises, trying to calm herself.
She couldn’t stop shaking.
In the bathroom, she washed her face. The mirror revealed a person whom she hardly recognized: a haggard, bloodless, sunken-eyed fright.
Her mouth was dry and sour. She drank a glass of cold water.
Back in bed, she didn’t want to turn off the light. Her fear made her angry with herself, and at last she twisted the switch.
The returning darkness was threatening.
She wasn’t sure she would be able to get any more sleep, but she had to try. It wasn’t even five o’clock. She’d been asleep less than three hours.
In the morning, she would clean out Danny’s room. Then the dreams would stop. She was pretty much convinced of that.
She remembered the two words that she had twice erased from Danny’s chalkboard — NOT DEAD — and she realized that she’d forgotten to call Michael. She had to confront him with her suspicions. She had to know if he’d been in the house, in Danny’s room, without her knowledge or permission.
It had to be Michael.
She could turn on the light and call him now. He would be sleeping, but she wouldn’t feel guilty if she woke him, not after all the sleepless nights that he had given her. Right now, however, she didn’t feel up to the battle. Her wits were dulled by wine and exhaustion. And if Michael had slipped into the house like a little boy playing a cruel prank, if he had written that message on the chalkboard, then his hatred of her was far greater than she had thought. He might even be a desperately sick man. If he became verbally violent and abusive, if he were irrational, she would need to have a clear head to deal with him. She would call him in the morning when she had regained some of her strength.
She yawned and turned over and drifted off to sleep. She didn’t dream anymore, and when she woke at ten o’clock, she was refreshed and newly excited by the previous night’s success.
She phoned Michael, but he wasn’t home. Unless he’d changed shifts in the past six months, he didn’t go to work until noon. She decided to try his number again in half an hour.