Campbell Wood (4 page)

Ramirez nodded slowly. "Thanks, Mr. Campbell. I really don't mean to be so nosy, but . . ." The cop paused. "Things have been a little strange around here since I got here, just after your mother died. I get the feeling she had a lot of influence over the people in this town, and I get the feeling that since she's been gone everybody's been in a daze. I can't find out what it's all about. It's like everyone's . . . I don't know,
waiting
for something to happen." He lifted his sunglasses again, and that cold, dead eye bored into Mark, sending a shiver down his back. "The reason I asked if you knew that kid
Phillie
McAllister is that he died pinned to a tree with a slice of wood a foot and a half long through him."

"Jesus."

Ramirez nodded. "And now with this kid dying tonight, falling out of a tree . . ." His sunglasses fell back into place. "It looks like whatever is going to happen has started." He glanced at the young cop fidgeting in the patrol car at the curb. "I'd better be going. Sorry again I had to bother you like this, but I'm just doing what I have to. Between you and me, Mr. Campbell, this town sometimes gives me the creeps." He smiled suddenly, showing his white teeth. "I may even go back to the Bronx."

L
ater, in bed, with Ellen sleeping soundly beside him, her dark hair spread out like a shadowy halo around her pillow, Mark lay with his arm behind his head, staring out at the sinking yellow half moon. There were no window curtains yet to block the pure moonlight, and the half orb was perched just above one of the huge oaks, outlining its top branches sharply.

Mark's eyes began to close, and in that time between sleep and waking, the distinct outline of a figure appeared, crouched in the crook of thick branches near the trunk of the tree. He could see no face, but he knew the figure was staring in at him.

He started awake, but when he looked out the
window in full wakefulness the figure had disappeared.

He rose silently from the bed and walked to the window. There was nothing but the empty tree and the rest of the neighborhood. He could just make out the house across the street through the tree branches, and the houses to either side of it. A short, broken snake of cars lined both sides of the roadway, painted an eerie sharp gray by the moonlight.

He yawned and turned back to bed, rolling over away from the window and putting his pillow over his head.

Outside, something moved again.

I
n the dark, Kaymie came awake holding her breath.

Something or someone was in the closet. There was a low but insistent knocking sound, as if someone were rummaging through a box of wooden blocks.

She suddenly remembered the story her friend Clara from the Bronx had told her. Clara's father had left about ten years before, and one night after her mother put her to bed and turned out the light she heard a noise in the closet next to her. The door opened. There was a man in there; he'd broken into the apartment in the afternoon and had been hiding all that time, waiting for them to go to bed. Clara said he had a wild look on his face and had started to come toward her bed, but then her mother came in and screamed and the man ran out. She said her mother was shaking for two hours after that.

The sound came again. A creaking, splintering sound now, but not loud enough for it to be a man. One of the cats? No—she'd seen both of them be
fore
she went to bed and the closet door had been closed then.

A mouse? Kaymie could handle a mouse; she'd seen one once at her cousin's house on Long Island. It had gotten stuck behind the refrigerator in a trap. It was so little she'd cried for it.

The first sound came again, like rattling blocks. Kaymie thought of screaming to bring in Mom and Dad, but for some reason she didn't. She was twelve now, had her own room for the first time in her life, and she didn't want to look like a baby over some sounds in the closet. It was probably just one of the cats who'd somehow gotten in there. She wanted to face whatever it was alone.

If there was somebody in there, she could always scream when she found out.

A scratch sounded.

Then a creak like bending floorboards.

"Is anybody there?" Kaymie called out in a loud whisper.

Silence.

"Come out or I'll scream."

Silence. Then a scratch.

Creak.

Slowly, she
slid
her legs out from under the comforter and over the side of the bed. Her furry yellow slippers were there. She wiggled her feet into them, all the time keeping her eyes on the closet. There was a Snoopy nightlight in a wall socket across the room, next to the closet; it threw a circle of light against the wall and gave a dim, dreamy luminosity to the rest of the room. She'd be able to see right away if the door to the closet began to slide open.

She stood out of bed, frozen in position, her
slippered
feet on the smooth linoleum floor, her eyes riveted like a rabbit's to the closet door.

Scratch.

Slowly, very slowly, she made her way across the room. The door to her bedroom was to the right; it was open a crack and she could see a sliver of hallway outside.

So easy to run out and call for Mom and Dad.

Scratch.

The closet drew closer.
Kaymie's
heart was pounding, and her breath came short. A perverse thrill went through her. While she was frightened, she could also see herself being frightened from a distance, as if she were in a horror movie.

It would be so easy to run.

The closet was just three steps away. She reached out her hand for the door, in slow motion, just as there was a loud cracking sound behind it.

Her hand and heart froze.

After a tick of silence, the door began to open by itself.
Kaymie's
legs were paralyzed with fear. By itself, the door slid shut again.

With a sudden, almost uncontrolled jerk of her hand Kaymie threw the door all the way open. A
fearful anticipation went through her, and she jumped back a step.

Nothing flew out at her.

But the light was dim. Someone could be pressed against the back wall, out of sight.

He could be back there, waiting for her to go back to sleep.

Waiting like the man in Clara's room, with wild eyes and a knife in his hand.

She turned from the closet and with a quick move turned on the lamp on the nightstand next to her bed. The room brightened, blinding her momentarily. In that moment she imagined she felt a hand on her shoulder, a hand cold and hard. She squinted against the new light: no one was there.

And the closet, the part she could see, was still empty.

It was a walk-in closet, five feet deep with shelves across the back. One whole side was illuminated now, but the sliding door made a
shadowland
of the other half.

Kaymie put her head cautiously into the cubicle, holding her breath.

The tiny room was empty.

She moved with care to the back, looking for what could have made the sounds. There was silence. Something sounded behind her and she turned with a gasp. It was only a small box falling
over. She picked it up and placed it squarely in position.

There was nothing obvious that could have made the other sounds. Most everything was still in moving cartons. Kaymie turned over a few shoeboxes and a carton of her comics and books on the back shelves, but found nothing out of the ordinary.

As she was replacing the last of the shoeboxes there was a crack overhead. Kaymie looked up to see a
slat
of wood from the top shelf above her breaking away. She turned her head aside, narrowly avoiding it as it fell into her box of books.

She picked it up and examined it, stretching up to see where it fit in the shelf. There was nothing up there in that spot that could have weighed it down. The piece of shelving looked as though it had been sawed off, the break was so clean. It was almost perfectly rectangular. Could a mouse do this? She didn't know.
 
But just to make sure she brought a crate over to stand on and examined the whole length of the shelf. She laid the piece of wood at the back and climbed down.

Kaymie stepped out of the closet and slid the door firmly shut behind her. She was about to get back into bed when her dollhouse, the only thing in the room she had unpacked, caught her eye.

This was her special possession, the only thing of her grandmother's that she owned. Her grandmother had made her grandfather promise that if Mark ever got married and had a daughter, he would give this house to her.

It was beautiful. The whole front of the structure swung open on two hidden hinges, revealing neatly decorated rooms within. There were three floors counting the attic, which Kaymie used to store her extra furniture. There were doorways between the rooms and exactly built staircases leading from floor to floor.

Kaymie found herself staring at the front of the house as if she had never seen it before. There was something about it she had never noticed before. Something—

Kaymie suddenly realized that her dollhouse was an exact miniature of their new house, right down to the little window in the attic and the front and back porches.

"Wow," she said under her breath. She swung open the front of the house and began to tinker, straightening things out and moving them a little bit this way or that. She moved a few pieces in the attic to get at her favorite part, a tiny secret cupboard that was built into a hollowed-out section of one wall.

Suddenly she yawned.

I must be more tired than I thought.

She closed up the house and climbed back into bed. A strange dream came to her. She was lying in bed, and unknown faces drifted out of the open closet door at her. It was a colorful dream. Trees grew out of the closet, twisting like snakes out and around the room. The room became a forest of trees, all moving around each other and around her bed. The trees began to part, and figures floated toward her from the closet, one after another. They were all staring at her. They circled her bed and then moved off into the forest. She was alone again, and the trees began to move once more, but differently this time. She saw that where the closet was they were forming a dark, deep tunnel, and way off down the tunnel a figure was coming toward her.

A cold finger traced up her back. This figure was wearing a cloak. She could not make out the figure's face, even though it came closer and closer. Kaymie saw that the figure's head was covered with a cowl. The figure moved in a floating, languid motion, as if it were under water.

It came close to her, right up to her bed, and leaned over. Kaymie shrank back, but it leaned down close to her face. Kaymie saw that it was wearing a crown over its hood, an almost imperceptible thing of spun gold with tiny sparkling diamonds in it.

The folds of material over the specter’s face began to fall away.

Kaymie reached up with shaking fingers and pulled the last fold back.

There was nothing there but blackness. Kaymie screamed then, and the cloak spun out of her hands and around and around, at a higher and higher speed. It shot back down the tunnel
toward
where the closet had been. The trees closed down around the tunnel, and it disappeared in interlocking branches.

The trees began to close in around Kaymie, climbing closer, twisting layer by twisting layer. Her bed disappeared beneath her, the wooden pieces joining the forest around her, and the other parts, the mattress and covers, pulled under and through the forest and away, crushed and consumed. She was cradled by tiny humping, twining branches.

The roof of the forest closed down around her. Kaymie found it difficult to breathe; then she could not breathe at
all, as
the wood closed coffin-like over her. She gasped, pulling into her lungs only the sickly sweet smell of pine sap and rotting foliage. She tried to scream but could not.

Darkness dropped down around her, and the dream drifted away. The night, now dreamless, moved on.

T
he rising sun shining through his window woke Seth.

"Kaymie?" he called in a sleepy whisper, not realizing for a moment that she wasn't in the room with him. For the first time in his life he had slept alone, in his own bedroom, and the feeling was disorienting. "Kaymie?" he called again, and then he remembered where he was. The shadows on the walls were different in this place, and there were boxes piled all around.