Christmas Eve, 1957. 1957.

Snow. It had begun to snow early in the day, lightly at first, like a fine dusting of powdered sugar spilled across the streets and lawns. As the afternoon wore on, the cloud ma.s.ses hung lower and became a more leaden gray, evenly colored so that one could not tell where the sun lay behind the sky's shroud. By four o'clock, the road crews were plowing and cindering. Those who had dared the city streets to complete last minute shopping were finding it rough going; cars were angled oddly across the pavement as more inexperienced drivers gritted their teeth and cursed themselves for ignoring the weather reports.

Everything at the restaurants checked out as it should. They would be able to serve a record number of Christmas dinners to those who chose not to eat at home as most people did-the elderly whose children no longer thought of them, young lovers not interested in sharing a magic time with parents, single people without family and afraid to remain alone on such a quiet, bleak day. Jacob left the Bra.s.s Lantern Inn, the last of the Matherly eateries to be checked out, got his car from the garage and started the weary drive home.

At twenty minutes of six, he pulled into the garage and shut the engine off. No other cars were there. Lee and the boys were shopping. Jerry and Bess had the day off and wouldn't get back until nine or ten, early enough for Bess to start making a few preparations for tomorrow's traditional feast.

When he stepped through the front door, he sensed something was wrong, though everything looked to be in order. For a moment, he remained on the threshold where a backward step would return him to the crisp snow and the cold December wind. Then he swung the door shut and walked to the drawing room where, at that hour, he expected to find Amelia.

She was not there.

'Amelia?'

She did not answer.

In the upstairs back room, the grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour. No one had set the seven day time mechanism in motion for more than five years. Who had started it now?

'Amelia!' he called.

Silence.

He looked through the downstairs and found it uninhabited.

He went upstairs.

At the top landing, he was again possessed of that semi- clairvoyance that had forced him to halt just within the front door. Something was very, very wrong.

He wanted to go to the back room to see why the grandfather clock had been started, but he looked, first, into the nursery where the twins, Lana and Laura, lay in their cribs.

Cribs, then.

And the blood.

He did not know what the blood was. From across the room, it looked colorless, a dark substance running along the slats and legs of the cribs, staining the rug under them.

Hesitantly, he walked toward the children. They lay very still in the shadows, far too still.

He called softly, using the names which they could not yet recognize as their own, but names which he cherished.

The children did not whimper, did not move.

Then he was close enough to see the blood for what it was and to stare, morbidly, into the deep gashes of their awful wounds. Time pa.s.sed. How much time, he was never later able to ascertain. Indeed, it was as if the laws of the universe, the mechanisms of physical Nature, had stopped altogether. He might have been trapped within a bubble of non-time, staring out through the fragile walls of his prison at a frozen landscape. Whenever time began to flow again and the bubble dissolved around him, he let out a low, wild moan that swiftly escalated into a scream.

He turned and stumbled to the corridor.

The floor seemed to shift like the hinged base of a funhouse in a carnival, and it forced him to lean against the wall as he walked, lest he be pitched forward and lose his balance.

He found the room with the grandfather clock. The gla.s.s front of the case stood open, smeared with blood. The bra.s.sy pendulum was tarnished by years of neglect and by similar crimson stains.

'Amelia!' He thought he called her name. But when he listened to himself, he heard a wordless cry, a scream forced through a dry, cracked throat.

He turned and went back down the corridor, looking into each room, not certain what he would do when he found her. And then he came upon her; she had returned to the nursery and knelt by the cribs, her knees in red puddles.

She did not look at him.

She stared through the bars of Lana's crib, at the lifeless form curled there.

Her hair was in disarray, dangling along her cheeks, frizzled out over her collar as if charged with static electricity. Her clothes were stained and wrinkled, marked with huge patches of perspiration. Whatever long afternoon of madness had possessed her, it had taken quite a toll before culminating in the murders of the twins.

'Amelia,' he said softly, standing in the middle of the room, halfway between the cribs and the door. This time, he did not imagine the call, but truly spoke to her. He was finished screaming. For now.

She looked up. 'They wouldn't stop crying,' she said.

The worst of it was her voice. It was perfectly normal. It had not the slightest touch of insanity in it. It was cool, throaty and sensuous, as always. Before, it had been one of her finest characteristics. Now, it was obscene and disgusting.

'You've killed them,' he said.

'If they wouldn't have cried so much,' she said.

He could not think what to say.

'I started the grandfather clock,' she said. 'Did you see?' She wiped at a strand of hair with a red-tinted hand. She said, 'When the clock was working, we didn't have any twins. Now it's running again, but the twins are still here. I wish they'd go away. I wish things would be like they once were.'

'The clock hasn't run in five years,' he said. It made no sense. He was beginning to sound as deranged as she.

'It's running now,' Amelia said. 'And it will be fine in just a little while. Everything will be fine. The twins will be gone and, I'll be happy again, and Lee and I can go places like we used to. Two children are plenty, Jake. Lee will agree. All I did was turn the clock back.'

He had walked the rest of the way to her, though he avoided looking at the dead twins. He said, 'You killed them!'

'Turned the clock back,' she countered.

Despite her disarranged hair and the wilted look of her clothes, her face was triumphantly beautiful.

That, too, seemed wrong to him. He wanted to make her understand all this and then watch her grow old and ugly within the instant.

'You stabbed your own children, over and over and over. You're a murderer, Amelia.'

'Didn't you see the clock?'

For some reason beyond his understanding, he had to hurt her and knew that the clock was the avenue of attack through which she was most vulnerable. He said, 'The clock isn't running.'

'It is!'

'I was just in to see it,' he said. 'It's stopped again.'

'No.'

'Rusted workings.'

'No!'

'The clock won't ever work again.'

She leaped to her feet, her face suddenly contorted. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a wild, wide leer of a smile. Her nostrils were flared. Her eyes were wide and shocked, staring into the distance.

He reached for her.

She stepped back, raised the knife and swung it at him.

He had forgotten the knife or had thought she had dropped it. She had been holding it at her side, half concealed in her hand and by the folds of her dress. He tried to back up, failed to avoid the blow. The blade scored his shoulder and brought an intense pain that dredged up the abandoned scream.

He fell, clutching his arm, feeling blood rush through his fingers. Unconsciousness swooped over him like a great, dark bird. He knew that he must avoid it, or Amelia would murder him while he lay dazed. But the bird was too heavy and too insistent. It settled on his face and blanked out the world.

When he woke, he had lost a cup or more of blood, though the wound only dribbled now. He was alone in the nursery with the corpses, but he was desperate to escape from there, even if it meant summoning Amelia by the noise of his movements.

In the corridor, he staggered toward the stairs and started down them, wary of the dense shadows of the lower floor. But when he reached the bottom, he realized he could stop worrying now. When she had fled from the upstairs, she must have tripped on the carpeting and fallen down the steps. Her neck was broken, and she lay in an untidy bundle on the last riser.

Curiously, aware now that he was in no personal danger and that the nightmare was drawing toward an end when he could get help, he did not react as logically as he should have. He stood there, over the dead body of the mad woman, and for a long while, he screamed, as if the explosion of air and noise carried the despair from him.

Christmas Eve, 1957. 1957.

Chapter 8.

Elaine closed the door to Jacob Matherly's room and leaned against it for support. She had managed to sit through the grisly story of the Christmas Eve murders and had waited with Jacob until the night's sedative had taken effect and he had fallen asleep. In all that time, she had tried to keep in mind that her own actions were not important. What mattered was making Jacob feel at ease and giving him no need to worry more than he had. He was, after all else was considered, her patient, her very reason for being here, the center of her new life. So she had commiserated with him and tried to soothe him, had done much tongue-clucking and hand-patting, all the while forcing her fear deep inside where he would not be able to see it. Now, out of the old man's sight at last, the fear rose up and bubbled through her darkly.

What was she doing in this house?

Oh, yes, there was the job, the money and the room and board-and the feeling that she was getting ahead for the first time in her life, standing on her own feet. But that was not enough to keep her here, was it? She could as easily obtain a job in a happier home, away from the brooding evil that hung like a pall over the Matherly place. First of all, there was that fifteen-year-old double-murder and all that such a nightmare left behind it, the residue of insanity which no one would ever be able to cleanse from these rooms or from the minds of those people who had lived through the aftermath of the killings. And, much closer to home, there was Paul Honneker's drinking, which disturbed her more than she had realized. She had never liked being around drunks, for they were unstable, cut off from reality, too p.r.o.ne to fantasize. And there was Dennis Matherly and his frivolity. He and the house, together, made her terribly uneasy. And there was, of course, the stabbing of Celia Tamlin. And, perhaps most frightening of all, Jacob Matherly's early insistence that one of his own family was the guilty party.

Leave.

Go away.

Get another job.

But she could not do that. She could not, chiefly because that would be like running away from a problem, refusing to face up to reality. And she had never run away. Not from anything. There had been times, when she was yet a child and the coldness and inhumanity of the orphanage and its staff had bitten into her and made her afraid, that she had contemplated running. She had dreamed of being found by a wealthy couple and taken into their house and nourished and nurtured and given much love. But she had soon discarded those dreams and learned to cope with what really was. Now, so many years later, she could not give way to the childish impulses for escape which had plagued her then.

And other things held her here, she realized. There was Lee Matherly, whose fort.i.tude throughout this ghastly affair of Celia Tamlin, had been indeed admirable. He was strong and tall, and he had borne the grim circ.u.mstances well, even if he had grown more pale and less cheerful through them. He was a father-image, she supposed. He was the stern, able father she had always longed for and never really known. And there was Gordon. She didn't like to think about that, because she was afraid that she was deluding herself. Yet, when they pa.s.sed in the hallway or met for meals, they exchanged looks that made her certain he felt the affection for her which she, cautiously, was beginning to admit for him.

She tried to remember that Jacob Matherly had apparently given up the notion that one of the family was the guilty party in Celia Tamlin's case. The old man a.s.sured her that he no longer held to the notion that the madness which had infected Amelia Honneker-Matherly had also infected some other with her blood. He was subscribing, now, wholeheartedly to Captain Rand's theory about the hitchhiker. That should make her feel more at ease.

It did not.

She admitted to herself that she did not believe the old man's newfound optimism. He was too eager to accept Rand's proposal. He was too vocal in his support of the possibility of a stranger having committed the crime. Behind his expression of relief and his concern that this strange hitchhiker be found and punished, lay the doubts he had evidenced before, in times when he wished to be more honest with himself. Jacob Matherly still believed that either Dennis or Gordon or Paul had been responsible. He was frightened near to death, waiting for something to break.

And so was she, she realized.

'Have you been hired as a guard now?' Gordon Matherly asked. He had come up the stairs to the landing before she realized he was there.

She looked confused for a moment.

'Given up the nurse's duties for guarding grandfather's door?'

She smiled. 'No. I was going to my room, but I seem to have run out of energy at this point.'

He said, drawing her away from the door, 'How is he?'

'His angina seems not to be bothering him, despite the continued excitement. I'd say, all in all, he's doing well.'

'I worry about him,' Gordon said. 'I don't want to lose him.'

She smiled. 'He's a wonderful old man.'

Gordon agreed, enthusiastically, and then said, 'I came up to ask if you'd like to come downstairs and play a few games of billiards with me.'

She giggled, and immediately she was amazed at hearing herself do so. She blushed and said, 'I can't play. I never have.'

'I'll teach you,' Gordon said.

It was one of the most enjoyable evenings of her life. Bess brought them soda and snacks halfway through the evening, but they were otherwise left alone in the game room. Ordinarily, Elaine would not have been much interested in games, for she thought them a waste of time. But Gordon was careful to explain that pool, unlike many other games, was beneficial, since it tested the players' mathematical judgment and sense of relationships. He proceeded to teach her the game as if it were a puzzle to be solved, explaining bank shots and how to hit a ball to make it go left or right. It was all very fascinating, and his company made it doubly rewarding.

When she went to bed around 11:30, she felt elated. Despite what had happened to Celia, despite the gloom that hung over the house, despite everything and anything, she felt fine.

Because of Gordon.

When she dreamed, it was of Gordon. They were walking together in an endless garden, where all the gra.s.s was mown and all the shrubs tended to. Wild fruit grew on many of the trees. Birds sang overhead and followed them, like special servants, wherever they went. The sky was blue, the air warm, and the rest of the world a million-billion years away.

She woke up to thunder that exploded like a bomb on the roof*

At first, she did not recognize the source of the noise or, indeed, the room in which she had awakened. The thunder shattered the flat, gray sky again and again, slammed ethereal fists upon the Matherly house, rattled the windows in their mountings and set the very air itself into sympathetic vibration. Lightning, coaxed from another dimension by the heavenly cannonade, played yellow-white fingers on the gla.s.s and thrust brittle shards of ghostly light across the floor and over the spread on the bed in which she lay. When half a dozen bursts of that strobe-like illumination had stabbed into the dimly lighted room, she remembered the Matherly house, her job, her patient, the attack on Celia Tamlin, the story of Christmas Eve*

Her dream of peace was gone.

Her dream of Gordon had evaporated.

She rose and went to the window.

The morning was intensely black, the low sky heavy with sheets of cold rain which swept through the trees and across the tidy grounds of the estate. The storm was so fierce, the rain so dense, that she could not even see the colonial Bradshaw house which was usually visible from her window, even at dusk.

A particularly violent thunderclap made her start and jump backwards. When it was gone, she was angry. There was a time-of very recent vintage- when she would never have been frightened of thunder, when she would have thought of it only as noise, harmless noise. This house was changing her, and she was not offering enough of a battle against it.

She turned away from the storm, showered, dressed, and checked on Jacob. He was still filled with a false certainty that the would-be killer of Celia Tamlin was a stranger.