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“Holy shit, I’m burning up!” she grimaced.

And then Trawley leaped up, and then Dare. “Where’s this godawful heat coming from?” he complained. He followed Freeboard and Trawley into the Great Room. Of them all, only Case seemed completely unaffected. He came to the library door and watched calmly, although not without a look of great interest and concern.

“Dear God!” Trawley cried.

With a look of surprise, she staggered backward a step, as if shoved by an invisible assailant. And then surprise was transmuted into gaping fear as she staggered yet another step back, and then another. “Someone’s pushing me!” she gasped. Another shove. “Oh, my God!” she started crying; “Oh, my God!”

And now the sound of a blow against the mansion’s outer wall.

“Oh, my Christ!” breathed Dare in terror. “Oh, my Christ!”

“I’m burning up, Terry!” cried Freeboard. “I’m burning!”

The pounding at the outer walls continued, thunderous, painful, penetrating bone. Lamps and tables began tipping over, scraping, sliding, hurtling through the room while huge paintings were ripped by a force from the walls and sent flying, spinning through the air of the Great Room as agony and madness descended upon it, on the house, on their bewildered, burning souls. “Someone tell me what’s happening!” Freeboard screamed, hands pressed against her ears and the torment of the poundings, and suddenly Trawley was shrieking in pain as a bloodless furrow slashed down her cheek, as if plowed by an invisible white-hot prong. A ritual chanting in Latin began, nightmarish, reverberant, and low, as if murmured by a hundred hostile voices, and then Freeboard was lifted by an unseen force and sent hurtling, shrieking, across the room to slam into a wall with a sickening final thud and crunch of shattered bone. Dare and Trawley couldn’t see anymore, all their blood had rushed up into their brains as now they too were seized by the force and carried up swiftly, spinning, toward the ceiling, spread-eagled, eyes bulging in terror, screaming, until they had slammed into the mansion roof and then plunged to the floor like crumpled hopes.

It was not a dream. It was real.

PART THREE: DÉJÀ VU

Chapter Twelve

The carved front door of the mansion burst open as if by the force of a desperate thought. “Holy shit, is this a hurricane or what!” exclaimed Freeboard. Sopping in a glistening yellow sou’wester, she staggered and tumbled into the entry hall with a keening wind at her back. She turned to see Dare rushing up the front stoop, and Trawley, carrying a bag, behind him, slower, deliberate and unhurried. A rain of all the waters of the earth was pelting down.

Freeboard cupped a hand to her mouth:

“You okay, Mrs. Trawley?” she squalled.

“Oh, yes, dear!” the psychic called back. “I’m fine!”

A booming thunder gripped the sky by the shoulders and shook it. Dare entered and dropped a light bag to the floor. “Joan, I owe you a flogging for this,” he complained. “I knew that I never should have done it.”

“Well, you did it,” Freeboard told him. “Now for shitssakes, watch your mouth, would you, Terry? I had to practically beg these two people to do this.”

She removed her yellow windjammer hat and then gestured to the open door, where the psychic seemed to falter as she climbed the front steps. “Terry, give Mrs. Trawley a hand,” ordered Freeboard. Dare snailed toward the psychic unhurriedly and reached for her bag with a drooping hand. “May I help you?”

“Oh, no thank you. I’m fine. I travel light.”

“Yes, of course. Tambourines weigh almost nothing.”

“Jesus, Terry!”

Trawley entered, took off her hat and set down her bag. “That’s all right,” she told Freeboard with a smile; “I didn’t hear it.”

Freeboard leaned into the wind and shut the door. In the silence, it was Dare who first noticed the music. “Dearest God, am I in heaven?” he exclaimed. “Cole Porter!” The author’s face was alight with a child’s pure bliss as from behind the stout doors that led into the