Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
There's a stranger in the room and his hands are on my throat.
I can't see him. I can only feel the weight of him over me, the thumbs settling into my throat, patient, taking their time.
I can't move my arms. I can't make a sound, there's no air to make it with, and the dark is total.
He leans down close enough that I feel him breathe, and he says my name like he's known it a long time.
Then the sky tears open.
Thunder comes straight down through the roof and I jerk awake.
Both hands fly to my throat, clawing at my skin, but there's no one there.
The room swings into place around me, the wardrobe, the window, the gray shape of the ceiling. I'm sitting up in a knot of damp sheets, my heart going so hard it hurts.
It was just a dream.
I sit there and make myself breathe. The rain has come at last. I can hear it now, the real rain, hammering the window on my good side.
Under it, the house is dark in a way it shouldn't be.
I reach for the lamp and click it and nothing happens.
I look for the little red numbers on David's clock and they're not there.
Then they come flooding back all at once, blinking.
00:00. 00:00. 00:00.
The power must have gone out.
The clock doesn't know what time it is. Neither do I.
"Luna." I reach over. The bed beside me is empty. Of course it is, she stayed downstairs. But I put my hand on the cold sheet, and that's when I hear her.
She's barking.
Downstairs, at the back of the house, a sharp repeated bark she almost never uses.
Not the doorbell bark or the squirrel bark.
Something with an edge to it. I've heard it maybe twice in two years.
I launch myself out of bed. The floor is warm.
The rain is loud. I go out onto the landing.
The whole downstairs is black below me, and the barking is coming up out of it.
I stand at the top of the stairs, one hand on the rail.
I tell myself it's the storm. Dogs hate thunder. That's all this is.
Then the barking stops.
Not trails off. Stops, mid-sound, cut clean. The silence after it is so complete I can feel my pulse in my deaf ear, a dull underwater thud. I stand there waiting for the barking to start again.
"David?"
I don't know why I say it. He can't be back yet. But I say it into the dark of the stairwell because the alternative is to say nothing.
I start down, one hand on the rail, feeling for each step with the edge of my foot because I can't see them. The rain gets louder as I go down into it. Then there's a smell that shouldn't be there. Wet stone and night air.
I get to the bottom.
"Luna?"
Something moves against my legs. I make a sound and nearly go over.
It’s her. It’s only her, a warm shape pressing hard into my shins, shivering.
I go down on my knees and get my arms around her and she's soaked.
She's wet through, her coat cold and streaming, the smell of the lake coming off her.
I hold her and my hands go still in her fur.
"What the hell. How did…?”
She was inside. In her bed. And now she's wet to the skin in a house I locked. My mind does the arithmetic slowly, the way it does everything now, and arrives nowhere good.
I get up.
The kitchen is almost black. At the far end, something gray moves.
The terrace doors are open. One of them stands wide to the night and the rain is coming in across the floor in a fan.
The curtain is lifting and falling in the wind.
No, that’s impossible. I locked that. I stood there and turned the latch and felt it seat and said the word. I locked that door.
My eyes dart around. I go toward it. I don't run.
I'm not thinking run. I’m thinking I've done something wrong, that I've forgotten again.
I've been up half the night looking at pictures of dead people.
There's wine in me, more than I meant to drink.
I can hear David telling me to go easy on it.
This is exactly what he meant. I've frightened myself. I've left a door open like a child.
I reach it. My hand closes around the cold, wet edge and I push it to. The wind fights me for it. I get it shut and hold it there.
"David?"
No response, just the rain and the quiet of the house.
I press my back to the door and think. Luna is at my feet, pushed against me, still shivering.
I reach down and put my hand on her head and it steadies me.
A towel. Get a towel. In the drawer by the sink.
I'll dry her. I'll put the light on my phone and check the front door.
It'll still be locked. It's just me, the same as it always is, my broken alarm going off in an empty house.
I find the towel by feel. I crouch and run it over her back, and she leans into it. For a second there's only the two of us and the rain.
Then Luna goes rigid under my hands.
She doesn’t flinch. She freezes, her whole body locking as her head comes around toward the hall. A sound starts in her chest that I feel through the towel before I hear it, low and continuous, a growl with no top to it.
I go still with her.
"David?"
I turn my head, putting the hall on my good side, and listen into the dark past the kitchen. There's nothing at first. Only the rain, the dog, the blood in my ears.
Then the dark at the end of the hall changes.
It isn't a sound. My body knows it before my mind does. A piece of the black has weight. It's closer than the wall beyond it, and as I stare, it resolves into a man.
He stands at the mouth of the hallway, still, unhurried, watching me on the kitchen floor with my hand on my dog.
I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
The lights come up.
Not on. Just for half a second, the house glows amber, the fridge shuddering awake, and in that stutter of light I see him whole. The dark hoodie. His hands loose at his sides. The terrible calm. He isn't startled. He was waiting for the room to have me in it.
Then the light dies again, the dark comes down, and he moves.
I turn and run.
I get four steps.
There's another one.
He comes up out of the dark ahead of me, between me and the front of the house. He's bigger than the first. His forearm catches me across the chest. My feet go out from under me and I hit the floor on my shoulder. The pain is white and instant. My breath vanishes.
I try to scream, but there isn't any air in me to do it.
Somebody's hands are on my ankle, dragging me.
"No!" The scream comes out, torn and raw.
The floor is cold. There's grit under my cheek, tracked through the house from the renovation for six months.
Nobody has ever swept it all up. I claw at the boards.
My fingers scrape over dust and grit and find nothing to hold.
I'm being pulled down the hall toward the gutted rooms at the back of the house where no one ever goes.
I think, with total clarity, they're going to take me in there.
Then the lights fail completely, and the world is black.
Thunder comes down on the house like something falling.
Then, somewhere a long way off, on my bad side where sound barely reaches me, a voice cuts through.
"MALLORY."
What happens next comes apart even as it's happening. There's no sequence to it. Only pieces, and the pieces don't join.
The hands leave my ankle.
There's a shout, and it isn't a word.
There's a noise like a table going over. Something crashes in the dark. Then I hear footsteps, more than one pair, heavy and fast.
I'm crawling backward with my ruined shoulder screaming and my hands slipping on the floor.
Then a lot of glass breaks somewhere, and I know it's the terrace doors.
Thunder comes again, and the rain doubles with it. Someone is shouting, over and over, and I can't make out the words. It comes from the wrong side. Everything else does too. I have one ear in this world and the storm has taken it.
I’m still on the floor in the dark, listening to men fight over the top of me, and I can't tell who is who.
Something goes down the deck steps.
That much I do have. It's the one piece that's mine, the only one I'd swear to. Somebody goes down those steps in a way no one ever should. It's heavy, wrong. A tumbling sound over wood, then a thud on the flagstones below. And it stops.
Then it's just the drum of rain.
There are footsteps coming across the kitchen toward me. I couldn't run now if I wanted to.
A hand touches me in the dark, and every part of me recoils from it at once.
"Mallory. Mallory."
There's a light in my face. A phone, held low. Behind it, a shape crouches over me in the dark.
I go for his eyes with both hands.
"Whoa, it's Henry. Henry Westburn. It's okay.”
I hit him anyway. I get a fistful of shirt and I pull. I’m making a sound I've never made, and he doesn't fight me. He just stays there, crouched, taking it. He keeps saying my name in that low voice until it starts to mean something.
"It's over," he says. "One of them ran. The other's down out back, but he's not getting up. Nobody's going to hurt you. There's nobody here now but me."
Henry gets me into a chair.
The power comes back, rising to a steady amber.
That's when I see it. The devastation. The kitchen assembles itself around me, all of it wrong.
The island has been shoved out of square, and my stool is on its side.
My laptop lies face down on the floor, the wine spilled across the counter.
The terrace doors stand open with the rain coming straight in, one pane knocked clean out of the frame.
Glass is scattered across the boards, and watery footprints track through it.
Henry is soaked through. His hair is flat and his shirt is stuck to him. He's bleeding a little from the knuckles of his right hand, but he doesn't seem to notice.
He's on the phone to the police. He gives them the address. He gives them 5261 without asking me for it.
Then he crouches in front of me again and takes my hands. They're shaking so hard they're knocking against each other. He holds them still.