Striding quickly, she rounded the last curve before home. The road grew even darker, if that was possible, the high canyon walls effectively blocking out all but the narrowest segment of sky. There was a full moon tonight, but the moon was still low in the east, and its light was not yet able to penetrate down here.
A full moon.
She knew there was nothing to that. It was just a bunch of superstitious hogwash, but the power of myth was greater than the power of facts any day of the week, and now it was not only the fictional terrors of Hollywood that took up residence in her mind, but the more believable bogeymen of serial killers and psychopaths.
Gathering up her courage, she whirled around.
And there was no one there.
She scanned the shadows and the dark, searching for signs of movement, a person or an animal, but visibility was too limited, the night too black and inky to be able to tell whether someone was hiding behind a rock or a bush. The only thing she knew for sure was that no one was on the road behind her. The dirt street was lighter than everything else, and even in this dimness she would have been able to see the smudged outline of anyone—anything
—on the road.
Maybe it had been an animal making the noise, she thought. A jackrabbit. Or a bobcat.
Maybe.
But she didn’t think so.
She broke into a jog. Her little cottage was only a couple of hundred yards ahead, and if she hurried, she could be home and safely inside in a matter of moments. A motion detector switched on the sharp fluorescent beam of a driveway spotlight on the house to her right, and her attention was automatically captured and pulled in that direction. There was no sign of any person or animal on the gravel in front of the house, but in the diffused glow of peripheral illumination, she saw movement on the cliff wall above the residence, a white, misshapen figure that clambered down an impossibly steep slope at an unbelievable rate of speed.
She started running toward home as fast as her legs would carry her.
The road was rough, the hard-packed dirt filled with rocks and ruts, and several times she nearly stumbled, but she never fell and she kept moving forward, frantic to get as far away from the freakish form as she could. She was not at all sure that home would provide any protection, but she could at least lock herself in and call the police and let them take care of the problem.
She kept her eyes focused on the street in front of her and on the darkened square at the end of the lane that was her cottage, but the ultraquick movement of the thing on the cliff remained at the edge of her vision and the forefront of her consciousness, and as it dropped past the roof level of the house and she lost track of it, she increased her speed.
Or tried to.
For she was already running as fast as she possibly could, her leg muscles aching and breath coming in harsh gasps that were so loud in her ears they would have drowned out even the sound of a scream.
She didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know what that figure was, but she knew that it was not human and she knew that she did not want to come in contact with it. At this point she was not even sure if the creature was aware of her existence. If she had imagined the noises behind her on the road, if that had been entirely unconnected and the monster on the cliff had been concentrating on the rock wall it was descending, maybe it had not spotted her. She prayed for that to be the case, and it was only the hope that she had not been noticed that kept her from screaming.
She reached her gate and pushed it open as she ran forward, already fumbling with her keys as she dashed up the wooden steps to the cottage door.
A loud, sharp thump on the roof of the porch did make her scream and startled her into dropping her keys. She heard them hit the rock between the open steps.
She looked up to see the source of the thump.
And saw it peeking over the edge of the roof at her.
The figure grinned, its teeth abnormally long in its too-skinny face.
She cried out, but this time no sound emerged, and before she could adjust her brain to rectify that, its cold, gelatinous hands were around her mouth.
Eight
1
It was the first time he’d been alone in the house.
And Adam was scared.
He didn’t know why, but he was. He sat there watching TV, and after a while he had to go to the bathroom and realized that he was afraid to do so—afraid to go upstairs to his parents’ bathroom, afraid to go to the bathroom by Teo’s room, afraid to leave the living room, period.
He crossed his legs, held it in.
The house was dark. Even in the daytime it was dark, and after all this time he still did not feel comfortable in it. Part of it was no doubt due to what Scott had told him about it being haunted, but the truth was that he’d felt this way even before he’d known anything about that. It was an instinctive reaction, a response to the place that had nothing to do with stories or rumors or third-hand accounts, and now that he was here alone, he found that he was not quite as nonchalant about it all as he had been with his friend.
He thought about the banya.
He tried not to think about the banya.
Babunya was doing Molokan things, and his parents and Teo were out shopping, buying groceries and picking out videotapes: a Russian film for his grandmother and a Disney movie for Teo. Sasha was over at one of her friends’ houses. Although his parents had invited him to come along with them, he had declined, explaining that he had some math homework to catch up on, and they’d left him here alone.
He’d been waiting for just such an opportunity to sneak into Sasha’s room and do a little exploring, but now he was afraid to go upstairs at all, and his sick impulse would have to remain unacted upon until some other time, until he became braver.
Jesus. What the hell was wrong with him? Something sure had happened since they’d moved to Arizona. He’d turned into a complete wuss, for one thing. Jumping at every little sound, afraid of his own shadow. And he’d become some sort of pervert, stalking his own sister and trying to peek up her skirts, trying to catch her naked, wanting to examine the contents of her room in hopes of finding… what? A diary?
Yes. A diary.
In his sickest and most elaborate fantasy, he found her diary and discovered that she had intentionally flashed him on his birthday, had purposely allowed him to look between her legs and see her underwear as part of his birthday present. She had been waiting ever since for him to make a move and had put down all of her sexual thoughts about him in her diary.
It was ridiculous, of course, but he grew hard just thinking about it, and for a brief moment he forgot that he was alone in the house and afraid.
Then he heard what sounded like something heavy being dropped on the floor upstairs, and he jumped, spilling the sack of potato chips on his lap. He moved the potato chip bag aside, listening carefully, ready to run out of the house if he heard any other sounds, but all was quiet save for the lame jokes and canned laughter of the rerun on the television. He waited a few more minutes, but there was nothing else, and he put it down to the settling of the house—his father’s all-purpose excuse for unexplained noises—then reached for the remote and turned up the television volume.
He and Scott had stopped by Dan Runninghorse’s house on the way home from school yesterday. Dan lived at the edge of the reservation, and his dad was the chief, but even though the other Indian kids were always kissing his ass, they didn’t much like him, and the feeling was reciprocal. They were nice to him, but only because of who he was and what he could do for them, and Dan resented that. He and Scott, though, had been pals since kindergarten, natural outcasts who had banded together, and they shared a relaxed, easy camaraderie that reminded Adam of himself and Roberto and made him feel a sharp pang of homesickness.