Читать книгу Ashley Bell - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 30

AFTER ANOTHER TWO-WEEK REPRIEVE FROM temptation: the Sunday-morning quiet, the sunless day fogbound and chilly, the key in the lock, the creak of the hinges, the white vase on the table without flowers this time, the open inner door, the living-room threshold, the living room itself, the closed bedroom door. If the blood on the doorknob had been real on her previous visit, someone had wiped the brass clean in the meantime.

Sometimes Bibi did not understand herself. She wasn’t a foolish girl, yet she had returned. She knew that she was no coward, that she didn’t need to test her courage, but here she stood. She remained convinced that the dead didn’t come back, and yet she wondered. Worst of all, she understood that it would not be a good thing if one of them did find a way back into the world of the living; nonetheless, a part of her kind of, sort of, undeniably yearned to have just such an encounter, supposing of course that it turned out to be magical in the best possible way.

She worried that she might have dark impulses. She knew about dark impulses because she’d read about them in novels. She read at a tenth-grade level, five grades above her station, which led her to believe that she must be well informed about compulsions, fixations, obsessions, manias, and morbid drives. Such dark impulses could be of the mind or the heart. She was certain that she was not insane; and so she hoped that whatever dark impulses she had were of the heart, and were therefore not particularly dangerous.

Valiant girls routinely did brave things or else they lost their chance to be above the herd. Thereafter they became sad, timid women, washed-out wallflowers, pitiful drudges condemned to drab lives in gray rooms. Bibi had been boogie-boarding since the age of seven, full-on surfing for almost a year now, and she had no intention of becoming a would-have-been, had-been, washed-up, washed-out loser either now or fifty years from now.

You had to drop in from the peak, shoot the curl, tear it up when the surf was off the Richter. No fear. That was the difference between a true surf rat and a goob, a spleet, a wilma, and a wanker. Valiant girls could never be goobs, spleets, wilmas, or wankers.

She turned the knob and opened the bedroom door.

Everything remained pretty much as it had been back when the apartment was occupied. The bed had been stripped of its spread, blanket, and sheets, leaving only a mattress cover, and the pillows had been put away in a linen closet. Otherwise, nothing had changed.

Like a ghost sea, like high tide as high as it might have been a million years earlier, thick fog pressed at the two windows, and only a murky drowned light found its way inside. Because the bedroom lay at the back of the apartment, the lamps that Bibi turned on could not have been seen from the bungalow even if there had been no fog.

The bathroom stood open, but the walk-in closet door was closed. She surprised herself by knocking on it.

No response.

She thought, Drop in from the peak, rip it, don’t hair-out.

She opened the door, turned on the light. Valiant girls didn’t believe in boogeymen, and there wasn’t one waiting for her.

A pull rope hung from a ceiling trap door. She knew that if she yanked on the rope, the trap would come open on sturdy hinges and springs, and a segmented ladder would unfold from the back of it.

For the first time during this visit, she heard noises that she hadn’t made. They came from the attic.

She considered the rope, but, somewhat to her chagrin, she did not at once reach up for it.

Someone must have pushed hard on the trap door from above, for it swung open and the springs sang like an annoyed cat. The ladder unfolded to the closet floor.

Peering into the gloom above, Bibi said, “Captain? Are you up there, Captain?”