And there was no way her grandfather could have severed his own head.
Thunder again, the loudest yet, directly over the house. The light struggled to hold-
– shivered-
– and then went out.
Darkness.
Jeanette held her breath.
“Come back on,” she whispered.
But the darkness remained.
“Oh, God,” she said, a pathetic little cry.
How terribly dark it was. Gripping the box of matches in her left hand, she felt around for the candle with her right. What if the power didn’t return? The little stub would never last… She moved her hand over the tabletop. Where was the candle? It had been sitting right there! The darkness was absolute. Deep and thick. The rain kept up its pummeling of the roof. She prayed for a flash of lightning just to show her the candle. But all she got was a low rumble of thunder.
There!
She felt something in the dark. The candle-
She moved her fingers to grip it.
And whatever it was that she touched-moved!
It was a hand! A human hand!
Someone was in the dark with her!
Jeanette screamed.
“Who’s there? Who is it?”
Finally, a crash of lightning. The room lit up for an instant. Jeanette saw she was alone in the room.
And there-there was the candle!
She grabbed it as the darkness settled in again. She fumbled for the matches, her hands trembling so much she worried she wouldn’t be able to light one. But she managed and lit the wick of the candle. A small, flickering circle of light enveloped her. She sat back on the couch, her heart thudding in her ears.
The memory of that hand-
It was real, she told herself. It moved.
No, she argued with herself. It was just the candle I was feeling. It was just my imagination again.
She lifted the candle and stood. She was far too anxious to stay seated. Whatever might come, she would face it on her feet. But as she moved into the center of the room, she realized she was stepping in something sticky.
Was rainwater dripping in from the walls?
She lowered the candle.
And she could see plainly that it wasn’t water.
It was blood.
Jeanette screamed.
She spun around, just as another bolt of lightning illuminated the room. And there, on the far wall of the living room, just as she’d imagined her, was Beatrice, impaled by that pitchfork, her blood dripping all over the floor.
Jeanette screamed again.
In her terror and panic, she dropped the candle. She was returned to utter darkness.
This can’t be happening! This can’t be real! I am a student of philosophy at Yale University! I am a liberated woman! I am a child of the twentieth century! This cannot be real!
But her shoes still made sticky, squishy noises in the blood on the floor.
From somewhere in the room came the sound of crying.
A child.
A baby.
Jeanette was paralyzed with fear. Her mind could no longer process what was happening. She simply stood there, trembling, terrified-
Until the door blew open-and she saw the man with the pitchfork again in the doorway.
Jeanette turned and ran. The room was small, but suddenly it seemed cavernous. Such a small space-and yet she ran and ran, for many minutes it seemed, down an endless corridor that stretched farther and farther off into the distance. How could this be happening? How could she keep running for so long? What had happened to this room?
Behind her, the man’s footsteps echoed as he pursued her. Thunder clapped overhead. Jeanette just kept on running, down that impossibly long corridor.
Finally she reached what seemed to be the end. There, in front of her, illuminated by a burst of lightning, sat a baby, its round button eyes staring in terror up at Jeanette. The baby began to cry. She tried to speak, but she found herself slipping in the blood on the floor. As she tumbled down face-first, she saw a pair of men’s boots hurrying toward her.
She screamed.
Now there was nothing. No sound. No man. No baby.
Her heart thudding in her ears, she began to crawl across the floor. She looked up and saw the window. If she could only get to the window. If she could only pull herself up there somehow and open the window and squeeze herself outside into the rain. She might be safe then.
Or would the man still follow her, across the grounds, over the cliffs?
Something was moving in the dark. In a matter of moments, Jeanette was sure, the man would stand over her with his pitchfork as she lay there helpless on the floor.
The window.
It was her only chance.
No guarantee.
But a chance.
She forced her eyes to look up at the window.
She got to her knees, and then to her feet.
The window. She had to make it to the window.
FORTY YEARS LATER
Chapter One
Carolyn Cartwright had met the strange old man with the crooked back only once before, when he’d made his way slowly into her office in New York, one arm swinging at his side, his little tongue darting in and out of his mouth, constantly licking his lips. She had watched him approach her desk with a mixture of fear and fascination. This was the man Sid had told her would change her life.
Now, stepping out of the cab, Carolyn glanced up at the strange old man’s house. It was magnificent, just as he had promised. A forty-room stone mansion high on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Carolyn could hear the waves crashing below.
“You sure you don’t want me to wait?” the cabbie asked her again.
Carolyn leveled her eyes at him. It was all too much like those creaky old horror movies she used to watch as a kid: the dark old house, the locals warning the newcomer to stay away. The cabbie hadn’t exactly warned her to turn back, but he had muttered a few times under his breath about Howard Young being crazy. “Richest man in Maine they say, ayuh,” the cabbie told her in his heavy upstate accent. “And all his many far-flung relatives are just waiting for him to kick so they can divvy up the spoils.”
Carolyn was not about to engage in idle gossip. She just paid the cabbie and told him that waiting would be unnecessary. “As I mentioned,” she said, “I’m here as Mr. Young’s guest for a couple of days. I’m doing some work for him.”
“Ayuh, so you said, though you never did say what kinda work you had with such a strange old man,” the cabbie muttered, taking her money. He handed her a business card in return. “You be sure to use that number on there if you need to make a fast getaway. I’ll be back up this hill as fast as I can. A pretty girl like you alone in that big old house with that man…” He shuddered.
The cabbie’s words frightened Carolyn, though she wouldn’t admit it. Mr. Young unnerved her, too. The day they had met in her office, she had sat watching him warily. His rheumy old eyes had moved back and forth; his slithery little tongue had kept darting between his lips. He was ninety-eight years old, he told her, but he insisted that his mind was clear. Jeanette wasn’t so sure. The things he said to her that day, sitting in front of her desk, his gnarled hands clasping the wolf’s-head handle of his cane, had made little sense to her. But Sid had assured her Howard Young could be trusted.
And for what Mr. Young was paying her, a little unease was worth it.
Carolyn thanked the cabbie one more time, then gripped her bag and turned to walk toward the house. The sun was low in the sky. Long dark shadows stretched across the grass. Ancient oak trees, their branches bent and twisted by decades of wind off the ocean, surrounded the house like sentinels. Built of granite and brownstone, the house seemed to become less distinct as she approached rather than more, the edges of its stone façade smoothed and muted by time and salt air. The only lights in the entire place were scattered along the lower floor, just to the east of the front door. The glow that emanated from the windows wasn’t strong, however. It flickered, almost as if cast by candlelight.