A False Mirror - Charles Todd [122]
Rutledge had lost track of the time. Eternity, he thought, must be like this. A world where there was no mark for day or night, or for sunrise or sunset, just an endless expanding infinity. He wondered what the rector would make of that.
The crash, when it came, seemed to shake the foundations of the house. Later, thinking about it more clearly, he told himself it had done no such thing.
Felicity Hamilton cried out, and came at once to the door, fumbling with the lock.
“No, stay where you are,” Mallory murmured in her direction. “Rutledge, where did it come from, that noise?”
“I couldn’t tell. The back of the house, I think.”
She had the door open, standing there outlined in the dim glow of her shaded lamp, fully clothed and clutching a shawl around her shoulders. “Don’t leave me!” she begged. “I won’t stay here by myself.”
“Felicity, for God’s sake—”
“No, if you go, I’m going too. I won’t be cornered like this.”
Rutledge said, “We’ve got a choice. Stay and wait, or go and investigate.”
They listened, holding their breath as they did. But there was no other sound from below.
“If he’s in the house, he could be anywhere,” Rutledge said softly. “We could walk straight into him before we knew he was there.”
“He must be searching rooms. One at a time. It sounded as if he’d knocked over something.”
“It was more like a window breaking—glass falling,” Rutledge said.
“I think it must have been the dining room,” Felicity whispered. “It was in the back, at least. I know how this house creaks in the wind, like a ship at sea. It wasn’t like that.”
“Which bedroom is over the dining room?” Rutledge asked her.
“The guest room, second door beyond the stairs. On your right.”
“I’ll go and have a look,” he said, but Mallory stopped him.
“We shouldn’t separate. That was the bargain.”
“I went down alone before.”
“That was different, damn it. It was suspicious, but not threatening.”
They were on their feet, standing together in the dim light. Mallory turned to Felicity. “If you must stay here, shut that door. I can’t see with your light in my eyes.”
She did as he asked, and the passage was dark again. Rutledge nearly jumped out of his skin as her hand brushed the back of his shoulder, so certain it was Hamish that he nearly cried out. But she was just moving nearer, he could smell the scent she wore as she clutched at Mallory’s arm, the paleness of her shawl picking her out as his eyes adjusted again to the lack of light.
“You won’t shoot him, promise me you won’t. If it’s Matthew, we don’t want to hurt him,” she was whispering importunately.
“Shhh.” Mallory leaned forward, as if to help his ears penetrate the shadows that lay between them and the top of the stairs.
But nothing came up the stairs, neither a figment of their imaginations nor a shambling wounded man half out of his mind.
Rutledge thought, standing there, It’s easy to believe in monsters in the dark. Young Jeremy was not alone.
And Hamish, whose ears had always been the sharpest, said, “He isna’ coming.”
Rutledge replied silently, “You can’t be sure. The stairs are carpeted.”
“He’s no’ coming. It’s a game.”
And although they stood there for another quarter of an hour, pinned where they were by the tension of not knowing, Hamish proved to be right.
In the end, the three of them ventured down the stairs as the first gray threads of light broke over the horizon and the head of the staircase loomed ghostly in front of them. It didn’t take them long to find what they had heard. A long black length of tree limb had been driven through the panes of the dining room window, protruding like a battered and obscene spear above the shattered bits of glass scattered on the polished floor below it.
Rutledge went outside then, but beneath the window the thick matting of leaves blown against the foundations masked any sign of footprints.
He could see the tree where the limb had