999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [325]
The author turned to Freeboard with a bloodless surmise.
“Hollow walls?” he intoned.
Case nodded.
Freeboard flipped the Phantom mask at Dare’s face.
The brunch ended, Anna Trawley was back in her room. She sat on the edge of the bed in quiet reverie, staring at the silver-framed photo of a dimpled young girl that she held in her lap with still hands. Fleeting shadows of the rain’s trickling currents on a window crept weakly down the paleness of her face like dying prayers. At last she propped the photo on a nightstand by her bed. She’d already placed a miniature alarm clock there, a perfect square with sides of smooth shiny brass and red numerals; she had bought it while working in Switzerland during the search for a serial killer. She noted the time: 1:14. Case and Dare were still talking downstairs when she’d left them and Freeboard had gone to her room to rest. She stood up and walked over to a narrow writing desk beneath a rain-spattered gabled window, pulled out the straight-backed wooden chair, sat down, and then reached a pale hand into the drawer of the desk and from within it fetched a silvery inkfed pen and a diary bound in soft pink leather; in the center of the cover a floral design of lavender blossoms entwined in a circle. Trawley unsheathed the point of the pen, and with slender, short fingers she opened the diary; it was new and emitted a faint, quick whiff of glue and new-made paper. At the top of the blank first page she wrote “Elsewhere” in a large and rounded, elegant script. Her pen made a tiny scratching sound. She turned in her chair to check the clock, and then at the top of the next clean page she recorded the day, the date and the time. Below that she carefully penned an entry:
Finally, I am at Elsewhere. Forbidding from without, within it is warm. And yet something feels broken here, awry, though I haven’t any inkling of what it could be. Joan Freeboard, the Realtor, is an original, I am fond of her already; she seems to make me smile inside. And though it might shock him to know it, perhaps, I do find that I like Terence Dare as well; so amusing, so wounded at his core, like the world. Dr. Case, as expected, is quite professorial. He is also quite smashingly handsome. Yet I’m sensing an aura of danger about him, as well as some mystery that he exudes. I felt it when the housekeeper, Morna, appeared. He seemed somehow taken aback. Why was that? And then again when he pointed me out to her and said, “Mrs. Trawley is clairvoyant, Morna.” He said it very pointedly, I thought. And then something else: when we arrived he said, “There you all are again.” What on earth could he possibly have meant by that? It could be that he misspoke, I suppose; likely so. I feel myself attracted to the man, I must say; I suppose that’s why I had to get a closer look at Morna. (I still can’t believe I was poking around to find out if the girl was a “live-in.” Shameless!) But I find I’m unable to penetrate Case: my impressions are as stones flung and skimming off the surface of a pond in whose depths some Leviathan lurks, some puzzle that has to be solved—and yet mustn’t. I see I am wandering, making no sense. The trip has been hard on my bones, so exhausting, and I’m feeling disconnected, as if in a dream. Perhaps a little lie-down will clear away the foggies. Dreams. How I dread them; I always wake up. Who was it in Shakespeare who “cried to dream again"?
Trawley looked up at the rain-streaked window, pensive, her eyes pools of memory and sadness; then abruptly she turned to her left and listened. Immobile, she waited, head tilted to the side. Then it seemed as if a tremor had bolted through the room, the lone strike of an earthquake, faint but sharp. The psychic held still and continued to listen. Then she lowered her head to the diary and wrote:
Perhaps there is something going on here after all. Either that, or I am losing my senses completely. I have just heard