The Dead Town

Chapter 61

As Rusty Billingham reached the top of the dark staircase with Corrina, the door chimes sounded again. This carillon was pleasant in ordinary circumstances, two bars of something classic, perhaps a piece of Beethoven, but now each note was icy and sinister, vibrating through him as if his spinal column were a tubular bell. Pressing the bell push twice in rapid succession, at a dark house, seemed to be a taunt if not mockery. They were saying, We know you’re in there. If you won’t come out to play, we’ll bring the game to you.

Windows opened onto the back- and front-porch roofs. But one of these killers, whatever they might be, was on each porch. No way out, only farther up.

“You’ve got an attic?” Rusty asked.

“Yes, but—”

“Where’s the entrance to it?”

“The master-bedroom closet.”

Glass shattered. The sound seemed to come from the back of the house.

“Show me the way,” Rusty said. “Quick.”

He had been on the second floor of her house only once, on a tour before dinner, each of them with a glass of good red wine, the evening thoroughly pleasant, the world so normal then. She knew the house better than he did, and even in the dark with only the ambient light of the night pressing at the windows, Corrina led him along a hallway, through a door, across the bedroom, and into the walk-in closet.

As more glass shattered downstairs, Rusty closed the door behind them and fumbled for the light switch. A cord hung from a ceiling trapdoor. He pulled, and the trap swung down on heavy-duty springs, revealing a folded ladder attached to it.

Corrina said, “But there’s no way out of the attic. We’ll be cornered up there.”

Unfolding the ladder, he whispered, “I’m not going up. Just you.” He loosened the simple knot that fixed the pull cord to a ring on the lower face of the trap. “Then I’ll distract them. As far as they know, I might be the only one in the house. They get me, they stop searching as hard.”

“No. I can’t let you.”

He whispered, “Stupid for both of us to die.” He grabbed her by both shoulders, kissed her as he had never kissed her before in their determinedly platonic romance, and said, “Go. Go!”

She climbed into the darkness.

As she reached the top, he called after her, “Stay quiet.”

She turned to look down, face as wan as a wafer of unleavened bread. “Until … when?”

“Until I come back for you.”

She didn’t ask what she should do if he never returned. If she had asked, he would have had no answer.

When Rusty folded up the ladder, the counter-weighted trap swung shut with a soft thump that made him wince, closing Corrina in the attic. He tucked the detached pull cord onto a shelf above her hanging clothes.

After turning off the closet light, he stood for a moment with one ear to the door, listening for activity in the bedroom. All was silent, but he knew it might be the silence of something waiting for him to emerge.

He eased open the door. The master bedroom was black except for two rectangular windows barely revealed by the snow-veiled glow of streetlamps.

He crossed the threshold and after a moment identified the open doorway to the upstairs hall, which was slightly less dark than the black wall through which it cut.

If anything like the blonde in the blue robe had been waiting for him here, it would already have attacked. He vividly remembered the striking-snake speed with which she had gone after the people in the Trailblazer.

Bent forward, hands reaching out low to search for obstructing furniture, Rusty eased toward the doorway. He needed to get as far as possible from the master bedroom before calling attention to himself and drawing them away from Corrina. He felt around an armchair, past a tall chest of drawers, and reached the open door without making a sound.

His mouth was as dry as a salt lick. Stomach acid burned in the back of his throat, as it had not done since the war.

For a long moment, he stood in the doorway. The airless-moon hush suggested that the killers either had not entered the house or had already left it.

He took just two steps into the upstairs hallway and halted again, listening. No windows here. Dim light rising from the foyer windows and from a stairway-landing window below, revealing nothing.

Silence. Silence. A distant clink-clink-clink. He thought the sound had come from the lower floor. Clink-clink-clink. Wrong. Not downstairs. It issued from the farther end of the pitch-black hallway in which he stood. Clink-clink-clink, clink-clink. This time he got a better fix on the source: to his left, an arm’s length away.