THUNK!
That blow was delivered with such force that Grace thought the door had been torn from its hinges. There was a splintering sound as she jumped back, and she expected to see chunks of wood exploding into the hall. But the door still hung firmly in place, though it vibrated noisily in its frame; the deadbolt rattled against the lock plate.
THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!
“Stop that!” she shouted. “Who are you? Who’s there?”
The pounding stopped, and she thought she heard
adolescent laughter.
She had been on the verge of either calling the police or going for the pistol she kept in her nightstand, but when she heard the laughter, she changed her mind. She could certainly handle a few kids without help. She wasn’t so old and weak and fragile that she needed to call the cops to deal with a bunch of ornery little pranksters.
Cautiously, she drew aside the curtain on the long, narrow window beside the door. Tense, ready to step away quickly if someone made a threatening move toward the glass, she looked out. There was no one on the porch.
She heard the laughter again. It was high-pitched, musical, girlish.
Letting the curtain fall back into place, she turned to the door, unlocked it, and stepped onto the threshold.
The night wind was raw and wet. Rain drizzled off the scalloped eaves of the porch.
The immediate area in front of the house offered at least a hundred hiding places for the hoaxers. Bristling shrubbery rustled in the wind, just the other side of the railing, and the yellowish glow from the insect-repelling bulb in the porch ceiling illuminated little more than the center of the porch. The walkway that led from the bottom of the porch steps to the street was flanked by hedges that looked blue black in the darkness. Among the many shades of night, none of the pranksters were visible.
Grace waited, listened.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, but there was no laughter, no giggling in the darkness.
— Maybe it wasn’t kids.
— Who else?
— You see them on TV news all the time. The ironeyed ones who shoot and stab and strangle people for the fun of it. They seem to be everywhere these days, the misfits, the psychopaths.
— That was not adult laughter. This is kids’ work.
— Still, maybe! better get inside and lock the door.
— Stop thinking like a frightened old lady, dammit!
It was odd that any of the neighborhood children would harass her, for she was on excellent terms with all of them. Of course, maybe these weren’t kids from the immediate neighborhood. Just a couple of streets away, everyone was a stranger to her.
She turned and examined the outer face of the front door. She could find no indication that it had been struck repeatedly and violently only moments ago. The wood was not chipped or cracked; it wasn’t even slightly marred.
She was amazed because she was certain she had heard the wood splintering. What would kids use that would make a lot of noise while leaving absolutely no marks on the door? Bean bags or something of that nature? No. A bean bag wouldn’t have made such a horrendous racket; the impact of the bag against the door might have been loud, yes, very loud indeed, if it had been swung with sufficient force, but the sound wouldn’t have been so hard, so sharp.
Again, she slowly scanned the yard. Nothing moved out there except the wind-stirred foliage.
For nearly a minute she watched and listened. She would have waited longer, if only to prove to any mischievous young observers that she was not a frightened old lady who could be easily intimidated; but the air was damp and chilly, and she began to worry about catching a cold.
She went inside and closed the door.
She waited with her hand on the knob, expecting the kids to return shortly. The first time they hit the door, she would jerk it open and catch them red-handed, before they could dart off the porch and hide.
Two minutes passed. Three minutes. Five.
No one hammered on the door, which was distinctly strange. To pranksters, the fun wasn’t in the first assault so much as in the second and third and fourth; their intent was not to startle but to torment.
Apparently, the defiant stance she had taken in the doorway had discouraged them. Very likely, they were on their way to another house, seeking a more excitable victim.
She snapped the lock into place.
What kind of parents would allow their children to be out playing in an electrical storm like this?
Shaking her head in dismay at the irresponsibility of some parents, Grace headed back the hail, and with each step she half expected the hammering to start again. But it didn’t.
She had planned to have a light, nutritious dinner of steamed vegetables covered with Cheddar cheese, accompanied by a slice or two of home-baked cornbread, but she wasn’t hungry yet. She decided to watch the ABC evening news before preparing dinner — although she knew that, with the world in the state it was, the news might put her off her dinner altogether.
In the study, before she had a chance to turn on the television set and hear the latest atrocity stories, she found a mess on the seat of her big armchair. For a moment she could do nothing but stare at the ruin in disbelief: hundreds of feathers; shreds of cloth; colorful, unraveled threads that had once constituted a needlework pattern, but which now lay in a bright, meaningless tangle amidst drifts of goosedown. A couple of years ago, Carol Tracy had given her a set of three small, exceedingly lovely, handmade needlework throw pillows. It was one of those gifts that had been clawed to pieces and left on the armchair.
Aristophanes.
Ari hadn’t ripped up anything important since he was a kitten. An act as destructive as this was quite out of character for him, but he was surely the culprit. There was not really another suspect to be seriously considered.
“Ari! Where are you hiding, you sneaky Siamese?”
She went to the kitchen.
Aristophanes was standing at the yellow bowl, eating his Meow Mix. He glanced up as she entered the room.
“You fur-footed menace,” she said. “What in the world has gotten into you today?”
Aristophanes blinked, sneezed, rubbed his muzzle with one paw, and returned to his dinner with lofty, catlike indifference to her exasperation and puzzlement.
Later that night, in her darkened bedroom, Carol Tracy stared at the adumbral ceiling and listened to her husband’s soft, steady breathing. He had been asleep for only a few minutes.
The night was quiet. The rain had stopped, and the sky was no longer shaken by thunder. Occasionally, wind brushed across the shingled roof and sighed wearily at the windows, but the fury had gone out of it.
Carol teetered pleasantly on the edge of sleep. She was a bit lightheaded from the champagne she had been slowly sipping throughout the evening, and she felt as if she were floating in warm water, with gentle waves lapping at her sides.
She thought dreamily about the child they would adopt, tried to envision its appearance. A gallery of sweet young faces filled her imagination. If it was an infant, rather than a three- or four-year-old, they would name it themselves: Jason, if a boy; Julia, if a girl. Carol rocked herself on the thin line between wakefulness and dreams by rolling those two names back and forth in her mind: Jason, Julia, Jason, Julia, Jason…
Falling off the edge, dropping into a well of sleep, she had the ugly, unwelcome thought she had resisted so strenuously earlier in the day: Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.
Then she was in a strange place where there was not much light, where something hissed and murmured sullenly just out of sight, where the purple-amber shadows had substance and crowded close with menacing intent. In that unknown place, the nightmare unrolled with the frantic, nerve-jarring rhythm of player-piano music.