She was alone in someone else's deserted house. Someone else, who was dead. Yet she could think of a half-dozen perfectly ordinary explanations for why another person--a concerned individual like herself, a neighbor, a caretaker, a cat lover, a congenitally curious idiot with a suicidal streak--would be in the house.
Perhaps Sister Seraphina had noticed the power failure and come over to investigate.
This theory seemed even more likely when Temple realized that the scuffling sounds were coming from below. Sure, a good old-fashioned Midwest basement! The house was old enough for one. And someone had gone down to check the electrical box because of the power outage.
It would be a bit embarrassing to explain her unannounced presence, but not impossible. She was glib in awkward situations--most of them, anyway. She could talk her way out of anything; what else was a P.R. person if not convincing?
Temple was not convincing herself.
She edged quietly closer to the sounds, down a back hall jammed, she remembered, with brown-paper grocery bags full of newspapers. And support hose.
Hadn't there been a door there, another back door? Or a door to the basement?
Now she heard a voice.
Singing.
Okay. Must be a repairman. Who else would sing in a basement in the dark?
"Heav-y dev-il," came the first lyric.
Singing heavy-metal music?
"Up and up we go, where we stop nobody knows but Jesus."
Temple cocked her head to interpret the singsong voice and the odd words. Jesus? Must be a nun from next door, checking on the house, but what kind of song--psalm?--was that? "Nobody knows but Jesus ..." Familiar. An old spiritual. Nobody knows but Jesus-- Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen! Odd song for a Catholic nun.
Then the song changed, and was even odder for a Catholic nun to sing . . . unless she was an exceedingly odd Catholic nun.
"That old black devil got me in its spell, that old black devil that I know so well."
The voice was closer, but Temple couldn't tell the sex or the age any better. And the last words and melody were so familiar, too, but from another side of the compact disc to the first familiar phrase. Old black magic!
A streak of white magic suddenly outlined the door, edging it in a thin frame of light.
Temple retreated to the refrigerator, rounding its side to seek shelter just in time.
The basement door swung open until it smashed into the paper bags. Bright light bobbled around the back pantry in nervous shafts--a flashlight. A repairman would need a flashlight in a house with no power, she told herself. So would a burglar, herself talked back. Or a killer.
"Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?
No, sir, no, sir, only old bags full."
The voice was so near, and it panted between the lines of the old nursery rhyme. Something thumped at the singer's rear.
Temple peered around the edge of the refrigerator.
The flashlight's erratic beam illuminated the pantry. A figure, humped and twisted, hunkered before the closed basement door. A big burlap bag lay on the floor, obviously filled with something.
Temple's horror-movie mentality filled in the blanks. Dirt from a basement grave? A pod person left by aliens? Dead cats?
No, live cats. The bag had moved, though the semi-human silhouette was turned away and did not see.
"Heav-y dev-il," came the singsong voice again as the figure turned to lift its burden. "You'll swing for it from the church door. Pox vobiscum." A chuckle punctuated the gibberish.
Whoever it was bent over farther to hoist the bag up on a shoulder, straighten to human height . . . and spot Temple.
Like a rabbit, she took off, through the dark and the cats, feeling things fly from her milling feet--tinfoil food dishes, water dishes (she felt her ankles splashed), surprised cat bodies.
She heard equipment--flashlight, bag, bowie knives, boomerangs, bullwhips, whatever--thump to the floor, and heard the softer thump of running shoes behind her. Like a jogger downtown, yeah, coming up from behind on the poor ordinary walker.
Temple's ankle crashed painfully into a barrier that would not give, twisting her foot until the high heel slipped sideways. A step. She didn't want to climb, but had no choice. Maybe she could find Sister Mary Monica's window and heave a brick through it; all right, heave her tote bag through it. Then she could scream out the open window, and by the time anybody came, the bogeyman from the basement would have ground her bones to powder.
Temple stumbled upward on her shaky heels, tripped and banged her knees on the steep steps. She was upright and running again before the pain registered. When her foot lifted and came down on level ground, she almost jolted herself into losing balance. Teetering on her high heels, she glanced back.
Darkness was rushing up the dark stairs. A shape like wind incarnate, as black as the night around it. No pale pattern of face or hands, just darkness.
Temple rushed down the hall, not wanting to bottle herself in a room but having little choice. She felt an open doorway and dashed through. She slammed the door shut behind her, knowing it wouldn't lock, and felt for something to drag across it.
At her back, the subconscious warmth of light beckoned. She found a trunk and push/pulled/kicked it in front of the door. It was heavy: maybe there was a body in it. Then she had to turn and see the light. Now there was a phrase for religious revelation-- She recognized Miss Tyler's vintage dressing table, saw it clearly . . . fire was creeping across its dusty surface, up behind its round mirror, around its twin columns of drawers.
Fire! And in a house full of cats. Temple grabbed a small round rag rug from the floor and began beating at the dresser--top, bottom, behind. Flames flared from the wind, then sank at the first blows. The dark returned, and so did the sounds. The scrape of the trunk as it groaned across the wooden floor. Wooden floor--oh, no! The floor would catch like tinder and drop into the rooms below and turn this place into an inferno, and she was stuck on the second floor. Forget cats! What about her?
Temple cast away the smoky, charred mat and caught up another of the pesky rugs. They worked pretty good as fire dampers. The dresser, made of old, tough mahogany, was slow to catch flame. Temple continued to beat the flames down into the dark from which they sprang, thinking. The fire had not been meant to flare until the person who set it was out of the basement and the house.
Now that person was up here, with her. What to fight first? Fire, the unknown intruder or her own fear? She ran to the window, a blotch of gray beside the bed, grabbed the bedside table--a spindly, old-fashioned model that would probably splinter, she remembered--and hurled it at the window glass. Once, twice, three times until they shattered together,
glass and wood.
In the dark of night, the sound was small, liable to be mistaken for a pint of whiskey dropped in an alley, or dogs overturning garbage cans again. In neighboring houses, television sets were blaring and windows were shut against the heat, air conditioners humming away and muffling all exterior sounds.
But some people in this neighborhood were too poor for central air conditioning, and their windows stayed open on a pleasantly cool, early autumn night--
"Fire!" she yelled, as instructed to do in case of rape. "Fire!" It really is!
Her answer came from behind, a white, suspended object that closed in on her face like a wisp of cloud smelling of hospitals.
At first the wet coolness was a balm to her overheated face. Then the sickly odor seeped into her nostrils and some force kept it pressed there. Chloroform. And a fire. If she passed out now, she was French toast.
Lessons. Do the unexpected. Don't tense, relax.
She went limp, let herself sink, against all her instincts, into the unseen person behind her. Air, blessed air, slipped between her face and the encompassing cloth.
It was enough. She ducked, half falling, and spun to face her attacker, grabbing her tote bag by the handles and swinging it in an arc over her shoulder. At the same time, she kicked a heel into what she hoped was the right height for a knee.