In his sleep, Toby moaned softly. He said, "Go away go go away "
After falling silent for a while, he pushed back the covers and got out of bed.
In the ruddy glow of the night-light, his pale-yellow pajamas appeared to be streaked with blood. He stood beside the bed, swaying as if keeping time to music that only he could hear. "No," he whispered, not with alarm but in a flat voice devoid of emotion. "No no no " Lapsing into silence again, he walked to the window and gazed into the night.
At the top of the yard, nestled among the pines at the edge of the forest, the caretaker's house was no longer dark and deserted. Strange light, as purely blue as a gas flame, shot into the night from cracks around the edges of the plywood rectangles that covered the windows, from under the front door, and even from the top of the replace chimney. "Ah," Toby said. The light was not of constant intensity but sometimes flickered, sometimes throbbed. Periodically, even the narrowest of the escaping beams were so bright that staring at them was painful, although occasionally they grew so dim they seemed about to be extinguished.
Even at its brightest, it was a cold light, giving no impression whatsoever of heat. Toby watched for a long time. Eventually the light faded. The caretaker's house became dark once more.
The boy returned to the bed. The night passed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Saturday morning began with sunshine. A cold breeze swept out of the northwest, and periodic flocks of dark birds wheeled across the sky from the forested Rockies toward the descending land in the east, as if fleeing a predator. The radio weatherman on a station in Butte-to which Heather and Jack listened as they showered and dressed-predicted.snow by nightfall. This was, he said, one of the earliest storms in years, and the total accumulation might reach ten inches. Judging by the tone of the report, a ten-inch snowfall was not regarded as a blizzard in these northern climes. There was no talk of anticipated road closures, no references to rural areas that might be snowbound. A second storm was rolling toward them in the wake of the first, though expected to arrive early Monday, it was apparently a weaker front than the one that would hit by evening.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, bending forward to tie the laces of her Nikes, Heather said, "Hey, we've gotta get a couple of sleds." Jack was at his open closet, removing a red-and brown-checkered flannel shirt from a hanger.
"You sound like a little kid."
"Well, it is my first snow."
"That's right. I forgot."
In Los Angeles in the winter, when the smog cleared enough to expose them, white-capped mountains served s a distant backdrop to the city, and that was the closest she had ever gotten to snow. She wasn't a skier. She'd never been to Arrowhead or Big Bear except in the summer, and she was as excited as a kid about the oncoming storm.
Finishing with her shoelaces, she said, "We've got to make an appointment with Parker's Garage to get that plow on the Explorer before the real winter gets here."
"Already did," Jack said. "Ten o'clock Thursday morning."
As he buttoned his shirt, he moved to the bedroom window to look out at the eastern woods and southern lowlands. "This view keeps hypnotizing me. I'm doing something, very busy, then I look up, catch a glimpse of it through a window, from the porch, and I just stand and stare."
Heather moved behind him, put her arms around him, and looked past him at the striking panorama of woods and fields and wide blue sky. "Is it going to be good?" she asked after a while. "It's going to be great.
This is where we belong. Don't you feel that way?" — "Yes," she said, with only the briefest hesitation.
In daylight, the events of the previous night seemed immeasurably less threatening and more surely the work of an overactive imagination. She had seen nothing, after all, and didn't even know quite what she had expected to see.
Lingering city jitters complicated by a nightmare. Nothing more.
"This is where we belong." He turned, embraced her, and they kissed.
She moved her hands in lazy circles on his back, gently massaging his muscles, which his exercise program had toned and rebuilt. He felt so good. Exhausted from traveling and from settling in, they had not made.love since the night before they'd left Los Angeles. As soon as they made the house their own in that way, it would be theirs in every way, and her peculiar uneasiness would probably disappear. He slid his strong hands down her sides to her hips. He pulled her against him.
Punctuating his whispered words with soft kisses to her throat, cheeks, eyes, and the corners of her mouth, he said, "How about tonight when the snow's falling after we've had a glass of wine or two by the fire romantic music on the radio when we're feeling relaxed… "
" relaxed," she said dreamily. "Then we get together "
" mmmmmmm, together "
" and we have a really wonderful, wonderful "
" wonderful "
"Snowball fight." She smacked him playfully on the cheek. "Beast.
I'll have rocks in my snowballs."
"Or we could make love."
"Sure you don't want to go outside and make snow angels?"
"Not now that I've taken more time to think about "Get dressed, smartass. We've got shopping to do."
Heather found Toby in the living room, dressed for the day. He was on the floor in front of the TV, watching a program with the sound off.
"Big snow's coming tonight," she told him from the archway, expecting his excitement to exceed her own — because this also would be his first experience with a white winter. He didn't respond. "We're going to buy a couple of sleds when we go to town, be ready for tomorrow." He was as still as stone. His attention remained entirely on the screen.
From where she stood, Heather couldn't see what show had so gripped him. "Toby?" She stepped out of the archway and into the living room.
"Hey, kiddo, what're you watching?" He acknowledged her at last as she approached him. "Don't know what it is." His eyes appeared to be out of focus, as though he wasn't actually seeing her, and he gazed once more at the television… The screen was filled with a constantly evolving flow of arabic forms, reminiscent of those Lava lamps that had once been so popular. The lamps had always been in two colors, however, while this display progressed in infinite shades of all the primary colors, now bright, now dark. Ever-changing shapes melted together, curled and flexed, streamed and spurted, drizzled and purled and throbbed in a ceaseless exhibition of amorphic chaos, surging at a frenzied pace for a few seconds, then oozing sluggishly, then faster again.
"What is this?" Heather asked. Toby shrugged. Endlessly recomposing itself, the colorful curvilinear abstract was interesting to watch and frequently beautiful.
The longer she stared at it, however, the more disturbing it became, although for no reason she could discern. Nothing in its patterns was inherently ominous or menacing. Indeed, the fluid and dreamy intermingling of forms should have been restful.
"Why do you have the sound turned down?"
"Don't." She squatted next to him, picked up the remote control from the carpet, and depressed the volume button.
The only sound was the faint static hiss of the speakers. She scanned just one channel farther up on the dial, and the booming voice of an excited sportscaster and the cheering of a crowd at a football game exploded through the living room.
She quickly decreased the volume. When she scanned back to the previous channel, the Technicolor Lava lamp was gone. A Daffy Duck cartoon filled the screen instead and, judging by the frenetic pace of the action, was drawing toward a pyrotechnic conclusion.