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Ryan had managed, during their time with the Family, to build up an accurate plan in his mind. Both
Krysty and Dean had helped him, taking him on a repeated tour of the first three floors, telling him where
all the doors and barred windows and sets of stairs were, who was in each room.
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He eased himself into the corridor, head turning, alert for any noise.
A full set of armor was just to his left, and he reached out to touch the cold metal of the breastplate. To
his right hung a large portrait of a stern-faced man. Doc had described it to him, saying he thought it was
by an inferior Dutch artist called Van Helsing.
He recalled that Norman had shown them all up to this floor, and had repeated his warning about
wandering in the night. J.B. had asked him where the threat might be, and the little man had skipped
sideways to avoid the question.
"Who knows where danger might be? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"
Mildred had given him some sort of answer to that. What had it been?
"Only the shadows know," Ryan breathed. Something like that, anyway.
He began to stalk along the passage, unconsciously closing his "good" eye, as if he were making himself
blind and was, that way, kind of controlling his own destiny.
There was a long bench seat next, and he rounded it, barely brushing its surface with the tips of his
fingers. The room where Mildred and the Armorer slept was on his right. Jak was opposite, and Dean
immediately beyond that.
Ryan hesitated, fixing his position in his mind. A bathroom was to the right, its brass handle cool against
his hand. Then there was a staircase that J.B. believed led up to the banned top floor of the rambling
mansion.
But it was kept locked.
A floorboard squeaked under his bare feet and Ryan froze, putting out his arm to steady himself, feeling
the carved wood of the heavy door, just as it had been described to him.
With one exception.
It moved at his touch, swinging away from Ryan, taking him so much by surprise that he stumbled and
nearly fell. There was a breath of cold, dark wind. For a moment Ryan had an odd thought. He knew that
he was near the attics and lofts of the building, yet the wave of air smelled as though it came from deep
underground, scented by the buried roots of old trees.
He stood statue still, hand on the butt of the blaster, waiting.
The house was quiet.
Unless
Was there a faint noise from somewhere ahead of him? Johannes Forde's room was last along there, filled
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with all his movie equipment, which he'd insisted on having carried from the stabled wag.
Beyond that was a heavily barred window covered with an ornamental tapestry. Dean had described that
to his father.
"This gaudy slut, with hardly any clothes, though there's bits of bushes and tree over all heryou know,
Dad. So you can't see nothing." Ryan had corrected the boy's grammar. "And there's this swan, with a
long neck and yellow beak." Dean had sniggered with embarrassment. "And you just wouldn't believe,
Dad, what the swan's doing to the slut."
Ryan wasn't sure whether he did believe his son, though Doc had confirmed the subject matter, making a
comment that was triple obscure, though he seemed to think that it was amusing. He told Ryan that the
picture on the tapestry was called Take Me to Your Leader .
Like most of the old man's so-called jokes, Ryan didn't understand it.
There was a draft from the opposite side of the passage, where Ryan remembered there was a fireplace
that Krysty had said looked like it had been sealed off and hadn't had a fire in it for a hundred years.
That might have been right, but the chimney had to still be open. The cold night wind surging down it
was very strong, ruffling at Ryan's dark curly hair.
There was a knocking noise ahead of Ryan, irregular and muffled, sounding like a shutter that hadn't been
properly fastened and was banging in the rising breeze.
He hesitated once more, concentrating his attention on making sure where he was.
One more door. An empty room, locked. Then came the final bedroom, with Forde sleeping in it.
If there was any nocturnal danger in the house, it would be in either Forde's room, or in the supposedly
empty chamber next door to it.
Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer. Though he was blind, he didn't need to worry about whether the automatic
blaster was fully loaded. If a single one of the fifteen 9 mm rounds had been missing from the mag, he'd
have known it immediately. It was like having a joint sliced off your little finger. No way you wouldn't
notice that.
Now he was shuffling along, crablike, trying to keep his back to the wall of the passage, feeling behind
himself with his left hand for the door of the room next to Johannes's, finding it.
Locked.
The sensation of danger was almost overpoweringly strong and he took several slow, deep breaths,
steadying himself for whatever it was he might face.
His shoulder knocked against something that rocked and began to fall.
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"Big pot on a stand filled with a bunch of dried-out dead flowers."
Now he remembered that Krysty had mentioned it to him earlier in the day.
Despite his loss of sight, Ryan's reflexes were still rattler fast, and be whipped round, reaching with his
free hand, grabbing at the ceramic stand that held the pot and steadying it. He brought up his right hand,
the muzzle of the blaster making a tiny chinking sound as it touched the heavy pot.
But it didn't fall.
Ryan edged around it, closer to Forde's room. Some kind of instinct told him that the door was open.
He breathed in again, trying to taste the air.
The brackish scent of a subterranean vault was there, and something else, something stale and bitter. And [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]