Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror (21 page)

It was as she was watching Garrett finish up the last of his breakfast that she heard a strange noise.

“Listen,” she said, cocking her ear toward the front of the house. “Do you hear that?”

Garrett stopped crunching on his shredded wheat and listened. “So?” he murmured, at a loss as to why she found the sound so mystifying.

“Do you know what it is?”

“It’s the phone ringing,” he said matter-of-factly. Suddenly Lauren realized he was right and jumped up from the table and raced into the coachmen’s waiting room. When she reached the telephone she muttered a silent prayer as she picked up the receiver. As she did so she noticed that Garrett had followed and was watching her curiously. “Hello?”

The same scratchy white noise greeted her once again, but in the background she heard a faint voice. “Hello?”

It was Marty, Stephen’s manager.

“Yes, hello!” Lauren answered breathlessly. “Can you hear me?”

“Hello?” Marty repeated, and from the tone of his voice it was clear he had not heard her. “Hello? Hello?”

“Hello! Yes, I’m here!” Lauren shouted, panicking at the thought of being tantalized by a call from the outside world but not being able to communicate back. “Hello! Oh, please, hello!”

Alarmed by her obvious anxiety, Garrett moved closer to her.

“Lauren, is that you?” Marty said. “Listen, I think we’ve got a bad connection. Hang up and let me call you back.”

“No!” Lauren bellowed. “Marty, listen, something’s wrong with the phone! Don’t hang up! I can hear you and I’ll just keep talking loud!”

Marty paused, but from his silence she realized he had heard her and was just processing the information. “Fine. If that’s what you want to do.”

“It’s what I want to do!”

He paused again as if gathering the courage to tell her what he had to tell her. “Listen, Lauren, Stephen’s told me about the blowup you two had.”

She remained silent, but her grip on the telephone tightened.

Marty got right to the point. “He still loves you, Lauren. He’d like a reconciliation. But you’ve got to talk about the kid and a few other things. Stephen feels he gave it a fighting chance, but he’s just not cut out to be a father.” Lauren glanced briefly down at Garrett. “Is he coming back up here?” she shouted without emotion, feeling very strange about having to scream out something that under other circumstances she would have delivered only in a half-voice.

“No,” Marty returned simply.

In a way she was glad that Stephen had decided to abandon them and negotiate their marriage through his manager, for it eliminated even the slightest possibility of her weakening.

“What now?” she yelled impassively.

“Okay,” Marty said in a voice more businesslike than emotional. “Stephen would like to know what
you
want to do. Do you want to stay on there for a while or come back to New York?”

“We want to get out right away!” she shouted. “Send someone for us right away!”

The static on the line intensified for a moment. “What?” Marty asked, unable to hear her.

She began to panic again. “Marty, please, you’ve got to get us out of here as soon as possible!” she yelled frantically. “Could you please call a car service or something and get us out of here right away!”

“Hold on,” Marty said, and she heard the telephone click amid another blitz of static as he put her on hold. But from the way he had spoken she had not been able to tell whether he had heard her or not.

“Oh, God!” she cried.

Her outburst caused Garrett to become even more frightened. “Mom, what is it?” he asked, tugging on her arm.

But she was too terrified that the connection, which she saw as their last remaining lifeline to the outside world, was going to become completely overwhelmed by static, and instead of answering she just put her arm around him and held him against her.

She remained on the line for what seemed like an eternity. As the seconds turned into minutes, and the minutes into vast pools of psychological time without dimension or boundary, she became increasingly gripped by the fear that she was no longer on hold at all. But then finally Marty came back on the line.

“Lauren?”

“Yes!”

“I’ve had my secretary call a couple of car services, but apparently they’re pretty booked this time of year. We offered to pay them double their usual fare, but she says the earliest they can get someone up there to pick you up is tomorrow.”

Lauren thought about what he had said for a moment. The idea of spending even one more evening in Lake House filled her with alarm. But she resolved to stay calm. What danger were they in, really?

“Okay, tomorrow then! Do you know about what time the car will be picking us up?”

She heard Marty asking his secretary in the background.

“The driver will leave here early tomorrow morning, so look for him sometime in the late afternoon, early evening.”

“Okay, Marty. Please make sure he’s here.”

But the line was once again seized by interference, and she could not hear his response.

Although she was reconciled to the fact that she had gravely misjudged Stephen’s character and had no choice but to leave him, the decision still left her feeling bereft. As she left the coachmen’s waiting room it was all she could do to keep from crying.

Sensing her sadness, Garrett tagged along silently beside her as she went into the drawing room and sat down.

After some time had passed, he asked delicately: “Are you and Stephen going to get a divorce?”

Lauren took a deep breath as she fought back the tears. “Yes.”

“Is it because of me?”

She smiled at him and ran her fingers through his hair affectionately. “No, sweetie. It’s because of some things I found out about Stephen.” She paused, trying to think of how best to explain the situation to him. “You see, you were right about Stephen all along. I found out that he wasn’t the person I thought he was. In fact, I found out he’s not really a very nice person at all.”

He pondered the words solemnly.

“Is that why you were so anxious to get back to New York? Are you afraid of Stephen?”

“No, honey.”

“Then why did you keep telling Marty that we’ve got to get out of here right away?”

She tried to think of some excuse to allay his concerns. “Because being here reminds me too much of Stephen. I would just prefer to be back in New York.”

He appeared to accept the answer, but still he remained agitated about something.

“But we’re not leaving until tomorrow?”

“No—apparently that’s the earliest Marty can send a car for us.”

He lapsed into a troubled silence. “Mom?” he asked after a long pause.

“Yes?” she returned, hoping he was finally going to reveal what was bothering him.

“How do you know when you should trust someone or not?”

Because Lauren did not know about the torment he was going through over whether or not to continue trusting the thing, she assumed he was referring to her own situation. The precociousness this suggested startled her.

“I don’t know, Garrett,” she said, gazing off into the distance and trying to figure out how to respond to a question whose answer she didn’t know. “Sometimes it’s obvious when you can trust someone. Like when you’ve known a person for a long time, you just know whether you can trust him or not. But sometimes it’s not so easy. If you haven’t known a person for a long time or if he really wants to fool you, all you can do is follow your instincts.” She paused. “But even then you can be wrong about a person. Like the way I was wrong about Stephen.”

Her mention of Stephen seemed first to jar him, and then to rouse in him a sudden passion. “But I tried to tell you about Stephen. Why didn’t you listen to me?”

His chiding grated on her a little. “I don’t know, Garrett. All I know is that when you told me, I just didn’t see what you were talking about.”

“But why didn’t you see?”

“I don’t know why.” She sighed. “I just didn’t. But one thing I do know is that someday when you’re a little older you’re going to find yourself in the same situation. For some reason or other you’ll want to trust someone and someone you know is going to warn you not to, and you’re going to find that it isn’t always easy to know what to do in a situation like that. Things aren’t always as black and white as the decision I had to make with Stephen may seem to you now. Life can be very complex.”

“But what do you do when you
want
to trust someone, but you don’t know whether you should or not?” he asked concernedly.

“Well, sometimes all you can do is take a blind stab and trust him.”

“But what if that turns out to be completely the wrong thing to do? Wouldn’t it be better not to trust him?”

She smiled softly. “I guess that’s the age-old question. Should we go through our lives giving people the benefit of the doubt, or should we always be wary of them? Because we get burned now and then, should we stop trusting everyone? I guess my natural inclination has always been to trust people, to pick myself up after getting burned and take another stab at trusting someone else. I just wouldn’t want to live in a world in which I felt I couldn’t trust anyone, in which I had to live my life imprisoned in a fortress of cynicism and suspicion. I figure if you don’t keep trying, you have no hope of ever winning.” Her voice trailed off. “But maybe I’m just being a fool. I mean, it’s obvious that my way doesn’t work so well. I don’t know.”

She leaned her head against him and hugged him, but to her surprise he still felt tense and rigid.

“Is something wrong, Garrett?” she asked.

“No,” he returned quickly.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he mumbled, and although she consciously accepted his answer, for the first time somewhere deep in the back of her mind, a part of her wondered fleetingly if he was keeping something from her.

After she had recovered from her conversation with Marty, Lauren spent the rest of the morning packing. Taking her clothes out of the closets and placing them in suitcases made her feel she was doing something to make their return to New York more imminent. It helped her ignore the dread she felt about being forced to remain in the house for another day. Indeed, despite the brilliance of the morning sun, she turned on all the lights in every room she entered, and silly though the measure was, somehow that also made her feel better.

By late afternoon she and Garrett had finished packing, and to get his mind off things, she had sent him into the drawing room to watch television. When she tried the telephone for the umpteenth time—in hopes of contacting Annie and seeing if she could arrange for a car to pick them up sooner—she discovered that it was still gripped by a blizzard of static. Suddenly something happened which caused her heart to stop.

The lights in the entrance hall clicked off and then on again.

Lauren froze, wondering if she had actually seen what she had thought she had seen. But when the flickering was repeated a minute later, and then again thirty seconds after that, she knew her eyes had not been deceiving her.

Garrett ran in from the drawing room. “Mom, the electricity keeps going on and off.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe we had better go and talk to Mr. Foley and find out.”

Huddling together like two frightened children, they opened the door.

Outside the landscape looked as peaceful as always, but suddenly even the sunlight and the chirping of the birds seemed sinister to Lauren.

Together they walked briskly across the lawn, and when they reached the generator building she knocked on the door to Mr. Foley’s living quarters.

“That’s funny,” Garrett said. “He doesn’t usually shut this door during the day.”

“I know,” Lauren said nervously. She knocked on the door again, this time even louder, but still there was no reply.

She opened the door cautiously.

Inside, Mr. Foley’s sparse living quarters looked as harmless and unthreatening as the mountain landscape surrounding them. His bed was unmade. There was a book lying open and facedown on a chair.

But there was no sign of Mr. Foley.

“Mr. Foley!” Lauren called. “Mr. Foley, are you here?”

Becoming more jittery by the moment, she crossed through the living quarters and opened the door to the room housing the generators. Inside was a row of gigantic diesel-guzzling, exhaust-belching contraptions that looked like something out of a World War I submarine. The myriad of levers, flywheels, and assorted gauges were mostly inscrutable to both of them, but about every thirty seconds or so a weathervane-like governor on one of the generators kept striking an adjacent pipe and shutting the entire system down.

Picking up a nearby rag, Lauren went over to the pipe and tried to bend it back away from the governor. However, it took all of her strength just to budge the pipe a little, and even then it showed every indication of wanting to inch back into the governor’s path.

“I guess this is one of the things that needs constant attention,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she murmured. She placed her hands on her hips and turned around irritatedly. “Mr. Foley!” They both were silent for a moment. “Oh, where is that man?” she groused.

As she turned to leave, Garrett ran ahead of her, and when she reached Mr. Foley’s living quarters he looked up at her with concern. “You know what? I think Mr. Foley’s things are gone.”

“What?”

“Look in the closet. He used to have his clothes in there, but now it’s empty. And he always kept his whittling here on the dresser.”

“His what?”

“His whittling. He used to whittle. But now that’s gone too.”

Garrett’s words ricocheted in Lauren’s skull. “But he couldn’t. Why would he leave without telling us?”

Although she was completely mystified by Mr. Foley’s rapid and unannounced departure, suddenly every instinct she possessed told her that it was imperative they return to the house as quickly as possible.

“Come on,” she said, guiding Garrett brusquely out the door.

As they hastened back across the lawn, Lauren felt a nervous prickle move up her spine and across her cheeks, and although she did not know why, she could not shake the feeling that suddenly they were in some kind of danger.