The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense

18

Having dealt the four sixes on Sunday evening, he must wait until the first employees arrive on Monday to avoid triggering the perimeter alarm. Following a route described by Amity, boy and dog slip out of the department store without being seen by any of the early-arriving guards and maintenance people.

They have no reason to wait for nightfall before approaching Theron Hall. There is no safety in darkness and perhaps more risk.

The first snow of the season fell Saturday night through Sunday morning. Already another storm has moved in. As Crispin and Harley set out for Shadow Hill, Shadow Street, and the house at the crest, new snow begins to sift down upon the old.

Winter transforms the city, white petals floating through an almost windless day, and everywhere the mantles and plowed mounds of the weekend storm remain largely pristine, not yet badly soiled by a workday. How easy it might be to think that with the casting down of this crystal manna, the great metropolis has been sanctified, that it is as innocent as these bridal veils make it seem. Easy for others, perhaps, but not for Crispin.

They approach the grand house from the back street, which is too wide and — when the pavement is visible — too ornately cobbled to be called a mere alley.

A stately carriage house, which serves as a garage, stands at the rear of the property. The pathway that leads from garage to house hasn’t been shoveled, and no footprints disturb the coverlet of snow.

According to what Amity overheard when she served Clarette and friends tea in Eleanor’s a couple of weeks earlier, the family — if such a word applies — and most of the staff are by now in Brazil.

The few who remain have evidently kept busy inside rather than venture into the cold.

Crossing the exposed ground between garage and house, Crispin searches the three floors of windows. No pale face appears at any pane.

A part of him believes that the power that has saved him often in the past few years, the power that wants him to return to Theron Hall to conclude unfinished business, has armored him against harm and will lead him to the third floor and safely away again without a violent encounter. But another part of him, a less wishful Crispin and one who knows that journeying through the fields of evil is the price we pay for free will, expects the worst.

If they know that he stole one of the spare house keys on that September night, they might have changed the lock. Or they might leave it unchanged in anticipation of his return.

Of the three back doors, he chooses the one that opens into the mud room behind the kitchen. The key works. He eases the door open.

The space is dark but for the snow light that presses coldly through two small windows.

He stands listening to a house so silent that perhaps everyone went to Rio, leaving only ghosts behind.

Because he doesn’t want to take off his backpack to use a chair, Crispin leans against the cabinetry to use the mud room’s small whisk broom to brush the caked snow from his shoes and from the legs of his jeans.

The dog shakes his thick coat, flinging off melted snow and bits of icy slush. That noisy moment of grooming doesn’t raise an alarm, which must mean that no one on the skeleton staff is nearby.

Aware that they will for a while leave wet footprints, Crispin is nevertheless disposed to move at once rather than dry his shoes and the dog’s paws with rags.

The kitchen is as shadowy and deserted as the mud room. The only sound is the hum of the refrigerators.

If three or even four of the staff have stayed behind to keep the house clean and functional, they are spread over such a vastness of rooms that he is unlikely to come face-to-face with one of them. He must also remember that, whatever else they may be, they are not demons. They are still human beings, as vulnerable as he is, as prone to error.

The boy decides to let the dog lead, and Harley takes him to the south stairs. Within the open tube of stone, the bronze railing and the spiral treads wind upward like the twisted spine of some bizarre Jurassic beast.

At the top, he leans over the railing and looks down, to be sure that no one is ascending quietly behind them. At the bottom of the stairwell, a full moon shines, as though Crispin is gazing up through a roofless tower instead of down. He assumes that whether this is a trick of light or something more, it is in either case a sign, and not a bad one, because the moon has always been to him the lamp of wisdom, a symbol of the right way to see the world.

They walk the third-floor hall and arrive at the miniature room without incident.

When Crispin switches on the overhead lights, the chandeliers and lamps within the scale model brighten as well.

Harley has never been here before. Although he’s an unusual mutt and perhaps something more than a canine, he behaves as any dog might in a new place: He puts his nose to the floor, sniffing this way and that around the solid pedestal that supports the huge scale model.

Crispin begins with the drawing room where, on the afternoon of the feast of the archangels, the two mouse-size cats perched on the window seat and peered at him through the French panes.

At once a white feline form enters the miniature room from the hallway, races to the window seat, springs up, and blinks its little green eyes. When Crispin touches one fingertip to the window, the cat rubs its face against the inside of the pane, as though yearning for contact with him.

The boy has had more than three long years to think about this extraordinary reproduction of Theron Hall, and he is not surprised that only a single cat greets him this time. Three cats for three children. With Mirabell dead, two cats appeared to Crispin on the afternoon before Harley was chained to that altar. Now, of Clarette’s three little bastards, only one remains, therefore one cat.

As the cats were somehow reduced to three inches and imprisoned in the miniature Theron Hall, so the three children were in their own way imprisoned in the real house. The cats were avatars of Mirabell, Harley, and Crispin; and if the cats ever escaped, the children would cast off their spells and break free, too.

Now that Mirabell and Harley are dead, two cats are gone. An avatar is an embodiment of a principle. If the principle — in this case a child — ceases to exist, the avatar might cease to exist, too, if you think of the child as just an animal, a meat machine.

Every child, every human being, however, is more than just a physical presence, which Giles Gregorio and his freak-show family well know. These apostles of the dark side want not only the blood of the innocent — a perversion of “Do this in remembrance of me”—but also their souls.

When a child is murdered in a ritual act, the soul will not be condemned forever. No action of an innocent could earn damnation.

Crispin is certain, therefore, that in the way that matters most, Mirabell and Harley are still alive, their spirits imprisoned in the scale model of Theron Hall.

He has survived so that he might free them.

Years of brooding on the subject leads him to the conclusion that the souls herein don’t have the same freedom of movement within the miniature structure that the avatar cats enjoyed. If they are captive, they will be in the room that the Gregorios regard as the most important — the altar room behind the steel-slab door.

The only level of Theron Hall not represented in this model is the basement. But it must be here, hidden in the presentation plinth on which the aboveground floors now stand.

As Crispin finishes shrugging off his backpack, the dog whines softly to attract his attention.

At the south end of the thirty-five-foot model, Harley sniffs vigorously at the overhanging surbase of the plinth.

Easing the dog aside, Crispin feels under this lip … and finds the switch.

Motors purr, the structure rises from the base that supports it, and inch by inch the underground level appears. Because ceilings in the basement are at only nine feet, the fully exposed cellar measures twenty-seven inches high in one-quarter scale, and it is presented as a long expanse of poured-in-place concrete.

Crispin hurries to his backpack, removes a claw hammer from a zippered compartment, and goes around to the back — the east — side of the model.

If any of the remaining staff is on the third floor, this is the most dangerous moment of the operation. The foundation concrete through which he needs to break is phony of course, but the top three floors of the model must rest on this, so there will be some sort of structure behind the faux concrete. The noise might not be contained within this room.

He swings the face of the hammer first, caving in a swath of the basement wall, and at once he discovers that the noise he makes here will be dwarfed by the greater noise of the west basement wall of the real house sustaining damage identical to that wrought upon the model. The miniature Theron Hall and the real one shudder, and as Crispin continues to hammer, he hears great slabs of debris crash to the basement floor four stories under him.

He reverses the hammer, using the claw to tear away chunks of the wall. As supports far below in the true house groan and as the floors on every level creak and pop, he exposes the altar room in the model.

In there, a thousand flickering electric lights in a thousand tiny glass holders mimic the candles that he saw on the night that his brother was killed. He is behind the altar, having knocked aside the upside-down crucifix. He reaches into the satanic church, seizes the marble table that serves as an altar, and rips the eighteen-inch miniature from its mounts. He places it on the floor and hammers it twice, until it cracks in pieces.

At that moment, from the hole that he has made in the basement wall of the model, a flock of what he first takes to be immense white moths or butterflies erupts, brushing his face, fluttering around his head. But then he sees that their wings are white dresses or choirboy robes and that they are children, some as small as six inches, the tallest perhaps twelve. There must be twenty of them. Although they appear to be laughing or singing, they make no sound, yet their joy is evident in their exuberant flight, as they soar and swoop and dance in midair.

They do not belong here now that they are freed, and they don’t linger, but quickly fade, vanishing in flight, until only the most recently imprisoned two remain.

Crispin drops the hammer and reaches out to this last pair. For only a moment, they settle upon the palm of his hand. They are his sweet sister and his beloved brother, as ever they looked, only so much smaller.

The dog stands on his hind feet, forepaws against the model plinth, eager to see.

This Mirabell and this Harley in Crispin’s hand have no weight, yet they are the heaviest thing he has ever held.

They should not linger, nor should he want to detain them. He says only, “I love you.”

The pair rise from his upturned palm, and by the grace of their flight and by a sudden golden glow just before they vanish, they seem to return to him the love that he expressed.

Things are still crashing far down in Theron Hall, and the model is trembling and tweaking.

Snatching up the hammer, Crispin hurries around to the front of the model, where the last of the three cats is still on the window seat, peering hopefully out.

After a hesitation, he taps the hammer against one of the little windows, cracking through the stiles and muntins, shattering the tiny panes.

If the cat was once a real cat, reduced to the size of a mouse to serve as an avatar, if it was a standin for a human soul until the soul could be captured, it is not evil. It was as ruthlessly used as Mirabell and Harley were used.

The three-inch cat leaps through the missing window, into the palm of his hand. He holds it low to allow the dog to inspect it, and Harley approves. Crispin puts the tiny cat in a jacket pocket, certain that in this mysterious world, it will be at some point an important and valued companion.

As ominous rumbling rises far below, Crispin takes a can of lighter fluid from his backpack and a butane match from a pocket of his jeans. He squirts the fluid into the ground-floor drawing room from which the cat escaped and lights the dribbled trail with the match. Flames roar at once through the miniature room and into the ground-floor hallway.

He hammers out a couple of windows on the second floor, floods two more rooms with lighter fluid, and sets them afire.

Intuition tells him that he has no more time, that he shouldn’t even hesitate to retrieve his backpack. He has left his deck of cards and all his money with Amity. He doesn’t need to take from Theron Hall anything he brought to it, except the dog.

He holds fast to the hammer, however, in case he needs a weapon, and Harley precedes him from the room into the third-floor hallway.

Smoke. The burning rooms are on the second and ground floors, but smoke has already found its way to the third, thin gray tendrils weaving through the air like malevolent spirits.

Boy and dog run for the south stairs.

They are three-quarters of the way along the corridor when Mr. Mordred explodes from an open doorway with all the suddenness of a joke snake springing from a can. He tears the hammer out of Crispin’s grasp, throws him against a wall, and swings the weapon he has just confiscated. As Crispin ducks, the struck wall booms above his head.

Nothing about the tutor is amusing now. His face is contorted in hatred, his eyes bloodshot. From him issues a continuous stream of curses and a spray of spittle as he the turns the hammer in his hand and swings with the claw end as the weapon. The smooth back curve of the wicked instrument grazes Crispin’s face. No damage. He dodges and twists, but the next assault is a closer thing, the claw snags his jacket, and the denim rips.

As the house fire alarm starts to shriek, the dog leaps onto Mordred’s back, knocking the hulking man off balance, driving him face-first into the floor.

Crispin snatches up the dropped hammer, the dog does a 180-degree spin on Mordred’s back, and they are off for the south stairs once more.

There’s not the pale fire of the moon at the bottom of the stairwell this time, but real fire, bright as the sun, and smoke churning upward. They can’t go all the way down, only as far as the second floor.

Harley leads along this new corridor, where the fire is toward the farther end. They race down one of the curving front staircases to the foyer, though this route is forbidden to children and staff, not to mention dogs.

As he comes off the bottom step, Crispin hears the shot and in the same instant the bullet ringing off the head of the hammer, which falls from his hand.

In the foyer, wearing a black knit suit and red scarf, Nanny Sayo advances with a pistol in both hands. “Piglet,” she says. “You wouldn’t leave without a kiss for Nanny, would you?”

For the first time ever, the dog growls.

“There’s nothing special about you, piglet. Now you’ll be food for worms, just like your sister and brother.”

“You’ve lost,” he says.

She smiles and moves toward him. “You little fool. I’ve bent a hundred like you and broken a hundred more. I look young, but I am older than Jardena.”

Less than an arm’s length away, she halts.

The fire alarm continues to shrill, and smoke begins to slither down the dual staircases.

Crispin stares into the muzzle of the pistol, but then he meets her eyes, which are as beautiful and as magnetic as ever.

“Food for worms … or not. Your choice. But Nanny has so much to teach you, pretty piglet, and you’ll love learning all of it. You’ll find my lessons quite delicious.”

Although thirteen, the boy feels nine again, and in her thrall. He remembers her warm hand on his bare chest as if the touch occurred only minutes earlier.

“What you saw Nanny doing in front of the altar that night … Oh, my pretty piglet, Nanny would love to do the same to you.”

Her eyes are bottomless wells into which a boy might fall.

He knows he should say something, counter her words, but he remains mute. And trembles.

“But before Nanny can be for you what you need her to be, she has to know she can trust you. Come here, sweetie. Prove to Nanny that you love her. Come here and put your mouth around the barrel of the gun.”

Before he can take a step toward her, if indeed he will, the fire-sprinkler system goes off, and a hard rain falls into the foyer as elsewhere in the house.

Startled, Nanny Sayo takes a step backward, swings the pistol to the left, and then to the right.

Swift-moving water. The cascades in the park behind which he has sometimes taken shelter. A rushing stream. Now this indoor rain. This is a dispensation that Nature in its mercy bestows on him and the dog, invisibility to this woman and all her kind.

He and the dog go to the front door, which he opens.

Moving warily, seeking him in the wrong part of the foyer, a sodden Nanny Sayo fires a round, trusting to luck, and then squeezes off one more that comes nowhere near him.

He says, “Mirabell and Harley live,” and she swivels, shooting out one of the sidelights flanking the door.

Another portion of the underpinnings of the house collapses with a boom. The walls shudder and the chandelier sways.

Nanny Sayo totters as the foyer shifts under her.

When Crispin steps outside with Harley, into what will soon be a blizzard if a wind rises, he closes the door, turns away, and hears what might be the foyer floor collapsing into the basement.

Strangely — or perhaps not so strangely — he and the dog are dry, untouched by the sprinkler-system rain.

Across the street, through the heavy snow, the Pendleton at the moment looks less like a great mansion than like a work of primitive architecture such as Stonehenge but much larger, or like a place the Aztecs might have built in which to offer up the freshly taken hearts of virgins. In fact, although the city below is so modern, a home for many high-tech companies, Crispin can almost see another city through the veil of glamour, a huddled place that is ancient and dangerous and full of stone idols to gods with inhuman faces.

He is grateful for the masking snow.

He and Harley follow Shadow Street down Shadow Hill, staying on the sidewalk. Fire trucks will soon roar up the eastbound lanes.

The snowflakes are smaller than the silver-dollar variety with which the storm began, but still large, lacy dime-size hieroglyphics full of meaning but whirling past too fast to read.

A faint meow reminds Crispin, and he looks down to see the tiny cat, his avatar, the claws of its forepaws hooked over the edge of his jacket pocket, its small head poked out. The cat regards the snow with what seems to be wonder.

Briefly the descending flakes appear to stutter, as if they are a special effect produced by a machine that has lost its current for a second, but then they continue falling as smoothly and gracefully as ever. Crispin suspects that at the instant of the stutter, someone in Broderick’s turned on the artificial snow that will spiral down all day on the model of the store that stands at the center of the toy department. From time to time, things in this world fall out of harmony, and there is a need to synchronize.