Читать книгу Ashley Bell - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 34

BIBI DID NOT REMEMBER TURNING AWAY FROM the presence in the attic, but the next thing she knew, she was descending the ladder to the floor of the walk-in closet. At the bottom, when she looked up, she saw that the lights had been extinguished in the high room.

Panic had not seized her. She was in the grip of something else, perhaps shock, that rendered her half numb to all sensation. Her mind wasn’t spinning at the moment; instead each smallest impression and sentiment twitched to the next as if a pair of lever-wrench pliers in her brain were ratcheting them along in a futile attempt to restore her usual flow of thoughts.

She hesitated at the foot of the ladder, breath held, expecting someone to come into view above, uplit by the closet light. But when no one appeared, she gave the lowest segment of the ladder the hard push required to start it folding back into the ceiling. The ladder drew the trap door shut behind it, and the pull rope swayed back and forth like a pendulum.

She did not remember passing through the bedroom or the living room, but she became aware of being in the kitchen, standing at the dinette table, staring at the white vase. It had been empty when she entered the apartment. Now it contained three fresh scarlet roses.

As she descended the stairs from the balcony, thick fog flowed behind her and billowed around her as if it were the train of a magnificent white dress. In the courtyard, she could barely see the bricks underfoot, and the bungalow seemed to drift like a ghost ship on a shrouded sea, its lines visible but its substance unconvincing.

When she went into the house, her parents were still sleeping. Bibi retreated to her room, took off her shoes. Without removing her clothes, she slipped under the covers.

Something more had happened in the apartment attic than she had the fortitude to contemplate. She pushed away the memory of what had occurred, for it was both too frightening and too sad to bear, a weight no girl of ten—perhaps of any age—could carry for an hour, let alone for a lifetime. Better to put down that burden and let time bear it away.

She slept without rest, a sleep of denial and forgetting.

Her mother woke her. “Hey, sleepyhead. Get a move on. We’re going to brunch and then the movies.”

With the covers pulled to her chin, Bibi said, “I don’t want to. I stayed up all night reading.” That was a lie, but not a mortal one. “You go without me. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge. I’ll make a big sandwich.”

Picking up a book from the nightstand, where at least one novel remained always near at hand, Nancy read the title: “The Secret War in the Garden. Pretty thrilling, huh?”

“Mmmmm,” Bibi agreed.

Imagining themselves to be free spirits, footloose children of Nature, her parents encouraged their daughter to be independent and self-directing. She would never be chastised for staying up most of the night, either to read or to watch one stupid thing or another on television.

“The movie’s supposed to be totally funny,” Nancy said. “It’s the new Adam Sandler.”

Insisting on her exhaustion by keeping her eyes shut and her face in a sort of slack pout, by speaking with weary exasperation, Bibi said, “He’s not funny.”

“You’re too old for Adam Sandler, huh?”

“Decades.”

“My daughter, the fifth-grade sophisticate. Well, all right. But don’t hit the surf alone.”

“I never do. And it’s too cold, anyway.”

She remained in bed for fifteen minutes after her parents left, to be certain they were gone.

A short while later, as she sat at the kitchen table, finishing a breakfast of chocolate milk and Eggo waffles smeared with peanut butter, she began to tremble and then to shake uncontrollably, as if the hinges of her bones had come loose every one and all at once. She didn’t ask herself why the shaking. She didn’t want to know why. It wasn’t about a ghost, either real or imagined. Ghosts couldn’t harm her. Even if it had been a real ghost in the attic, she would most likely never see another. Ghosts didn’t swoop up every day, from all around, like sparrows and meadowlarks taking wing. If something else happened in the high room, some moment of insight or even revelation, it had been of so little importance that it had evaporated from memory while she’d slept, before her mother woke her. She insisted that she just had a chill. That was all. That was enough to explain the shakes.

Leaving the last few bites of the meal on her plate, she went into the living room, where the gas fireplace featured an electronic ignition; she switched it on with a remote control. Hands thrust in the pockets of her jeans, she stood at the hearth, basking in the heat, staring into the blue-and-yellow flames that leaped around the ceramic logs. Sometimes she liked to search for animals and faces in the shapen clouds of a summer day. Flames were too quick and fluid for the eye to glimpse the suggestion of any presence other than fire, and that was a good thing.

When the shakes passed, she decided to walk to the park along Ocean Avenue and sit on the bench at Inspiration Point, even if the fog still largely obscured the Pacific. The sea always calmed her, even just the scent of it and the soothing sound of waves dashing against rocks and splashing across the sand. But as she stepped onto the front porch, even before she pulled the door shut, an unexpected flood of tears spilled from her. She was not a girl who wept in front of others, and she retreated into the bungalow.

She didn’t wish to understand this bitter emotion any more than she had cared to analyze the cause of her shaking. She wanted only to stop crying, to shut off the flow before it might wash into view a reason for this grief, if it was grief, or this dread, if it was dread. When she realized that the tears might be as persistent as the shakes, she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.

Although her mother thought that Bibi had stayed up all night reading The Secret War in the Garden, which was the third young-adult novel in a beloved fantasy series, she had not yet begun the story. Now she snatched the book off her nightstand, hurried with it to the living room, switched on a floor lamp, dropped into an armchair, and sought refuge in the tale: The first rumors of war came from the field mice, who traveled daily between the garden behind the Jensen house and the world below, which was far larger than our world and still unknown to most people, though known to certain children.

At first, as Bibi read, she wiped her tear-streaked face with the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Soon, however, the blurred print became clear, and her eyes stopped sabotaging storytime.

And so it was that hour by hour, day by day, she moved away from the disturbing knowledge that she needed to put behind her. The eerie and unsettling experience in the attic became about nothing more than an apparition or hallucination. She rejected the revelation that had been part of the incident, cut it from the cloth of memory and sewed shut the hole it left—or thought she did.

She read books and wrote stories about Jasper, a black-and-gray dog who had been abandoned by his owner and sought a new home along the coast of California. A couple of weeks later, when a golden retriever came to her out of the rain, she kept him and named him Olaf. As kids do, she made a confidant of her dog and told him all her secrets—as she knew them. She told him about Captain, how wonderful he had been. She told Olaf that the apartment above the garage was an evil place, but she didn’t tell him why.