When she was at least a hundred feet from the road, she altered her course to the left, toward the Beale estate. She kept the move gradual, still stepping from one piece of cover to the next. She couldn't see anything on the Beale property. It seemed to be simply a great blackness, a place where seeing ended. She moved toward it.
There was another wall, this one at least ten feet high. She touched its rough surface. It seemed to be cinder block covered over with stucco so the surface would be even and featureless. When she stood beneath it and looked up, she could make out a slight irregularity near the top, as though there were bricks up there laid at an angle.
She walked along the wall for twenty paces looking for a way over, or even a handhold. It was not beyond imagining that there might be a gate. Neighbors didn't have to be strangers. Sometimes they built gates. At forty paces she gave up the idea of a gate. She looked the other way. She was now far enough from the road so she could see the front of the neighbor's house. Could there be a ladder somewhere? Even a long board would do, or a rope. She could have brought a rope. Why hadn't she realized this might happen?
As she walked on, Jane noticed one tree on her side of the wall seemed much thicker and nearer to the wall than some of the others. There was a thick limb that extended almost to the top of the wall. She quickly climbed the tree to the place where the limb branched away from the trunk.
She crawled out on it, listening and feeling for some warning that the limb wasn't strong enough to hold her. She could see over the wall into the Beale estate now. It occurred to her that she could simply sit here on the safe side of the wall and watch and listen. She could see the shape of the house from here. It looked huge. In the center part of the house the side wall facing Jane seemed to be all glass. There were sliding doors at ground level and big panes starting on the frame above them, and then a framework above that, so the room was three stories high. There were small, dim, bluish lights low on the walls of the gigantic room, like the safety lights in movie theaters. At the second-floor level, a walkway lit by the same bluish lights stretched across the room. On either end of the room the high part of the house extended thirty or forty feet, then dropped so the two wings were single-story extensions.
Her eye followed the wings, and she saw something that excited her. On the right wing, the back of the house, really, there were four windows with bars on them. She crawled out farther, clinging to the limb, and swung her feet to the top of the wall, eased herself forward for balance, and let go. She had no idea whether she would find anything on the far side of the wall that would get her back up here if she went in, but she knew she had to go. Caution was insanity now. Jane turned around and lowered herself until she was hanging from the top of the wall by both hands, then dropped. Her feet hit a layer of pine needles, and she rolled to break her fall.
She lay on the ground and looked around her for a way out. If this was where Beale was keeping Christine, then she would have to get her out, too. By now she would either have had the baby or be about as pregnant as a woman could be. Neither condition seemed good for wall climbing. Jane was in a small pine woods. She could see that on the ground, resting on the deep layer of pine needles, was a tree about fifteen feet long that had fallen some time ago. The boughs that stuck out from the trunk at intervals of a foot or so had only a few dry, brittle needles clinging to them.
She used her pocketknife to carve off the boughs on one side of the trunk, then lifted the lighter end of it and propped it on the rim of the wall. The remaining boughs made the trunk roll to keep the bare side up. The protruding stubs from the boughs were like rungs of a ladder.
Jane began to advance through the woods toward the house. She stepped almost to the edge of the trees and studied the buildings. To her left was the long back wall of the six-car garage. Directly ahead was the main house, and close to it on the right was a pool house.
Adjusting her course, she put the pool house directly in front of her to shield her from the main house. She crossed the lawn to the pool house and looked in through the arched doorway. She saw a counter with a kitchen sink, a wooden table and chairs, a bathroom with two showers, presumably for washing the chlorine off after swimming, and another archway leading to the pool. She moved past the arch, skirted the iron fence around the pool, and made her way up to the first of the barred windows.
Over each window was an iron grate like a flat cage, a single piece bolted to the house. She knew that was an arrangement that had been popular in the forties and fifties, but it had become rare—maybe against building codes—in recent years because it prevented an occupant from getting out in a fire. She stepped back and stared at the house. A lot of modernist architecture was far older than it looked. This place could easily have been built in the thirties, and the bars could simply be relics.
But to Jane the bars looked like a sign of malicious intent. The old word otgont came to her. It meant more than simple evil. Witches—people who secretly had the power to cause disease and death—were otgont. It was potence, but it was also corruption, an unnatural degeneration from within.
She moved to the farthest window. In all the rooms in the wing the lights were off, so she had to peer in and strain her eyes to make out shapes. This one held an empty double bed, a dresser, a closet. The entrance to the bathroom was on her left. The small, high window in there had bars across it, too. She moved to the next window. The room was nearly the same, unoccupied but furnished. Jane kept moving along the side of the house until she reached the big room at the center. She stood perfectly still outside the glass wall and stared into the room. First there was a moving shadow, and then a figure appeared on the walkway above the room. There was a woman in a bathrobe and slippers moving sleepily from one set of rooms toward the other. She stopped and turned her head, as though she had to force herself to look down.
30
Ruby Beale saw the woman beyond the glass. She gave an involuntary shudder-jump, as all the muscles in her body tightened. It seemed to squeeze the scream out of her, so loud and high-pitched that she frightened herself, and her body dropped her into a crouch on the walkway. She involuntarily tried to curl up and be smaller as she stared down at the figure beyond the glass wall.
The woman was outside the glass, standing there without moving, her hands at her sides. She was all in black, and her hair was black, and Ruby couldn't make out her face with the moonlight behind her. She stood there staring at Ruby.
There were sounds of heavy, hurried footsteps on both ends of the hallway, and on her hands and knees, Ruby could feel the vibrations from the running men through the floor, and it scared her even more. Lights came on. It felt as though the walkway would be shaken loose. She looked back in the direction of her bedroom, and saw Andy running toward her in his pajamas, with a gun in his hand. From the other direction came Pete Tilton and Claudia Marshall, and both of them were carrying guns, too. The sight of so many guns did nothing to calm Ruby. Everyone was running, and all the guns seemed to be held in front of them and pointed downward, which was where she was.
They all converged and stood over her yelling at once. Andy was gasping, "Are you all right? What's the matter?" and other variations on the same theme, while the others were shouting, "What is it? What did you see?" Ruby looked over the edge of the walkway at the glass again.
The woman in black pivoted. Her silhouette was the same from the back, only the face was gone, and she walked into the dark in the garden. "There!" Ruby shrieked, and managed to point her finger. But the woman had dissolved into the night shadows.