Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

It was not until he was trudging through a blue twilight on his way to the place where he had left the car that he realized what the letters had told him. Another death. Randolph ’s triumphant career seemed to be unnecessarily littered with corpses.

He forgot this new piece of the puzzle, which was merely an addition to his list rather than a clue as to why the list existed, as he drove through the streets of the village near Randolph ’s estate. The street lights had come on and the houses looked peaceful and homey, with lights twinkling through the gathering darkness. The temperature had dropped, though; the wind that tossed the boughs was sharp. He rolled up the car window.

He hit a snag when he turned into the curving streets of the suburb. He had already observed that the inhabitants of Brentwood liked their privacy. There were no quaint mailboxes with names on them along the curving drives and walled estates. There weren’t many street lights, either. Maybe the rich didn’t need them. They had their own methods of guarding against crime-burglar alarms, dogs, even private guards.

Nor did Andrea court publicity. Michael found the house at last only because it was at the end of the sole road that was unpaved and unland-scaped. A survival from a simpler past, he thought, jouncing down the rutty lane. If there was a house down here, it was well hidden. Mud squelched under the tires, and he had visions of being thoroughly stuck, at the end of a road that petered out into forest.

As the thought formed, the road ended. The dark shapes of trees loomed up, and Michael jammed on the brakes, skidding. He saw the gate, and knew that he had arrived.

It was the sort of gate Andrea might have had constructed to her specifications if she had set up shop as a newly certified witch-wooden, rickety, sagging on rusted hinges. Thick, untrimmed shrubs concealed the path beyond and leaned out over the fence like watchful sentries. The house beyond was visible only as a crazy shape of roofs and chimneys that cut off a section of starry sky. There was no light, and no sign of human life.

Shapes other than man-made cut off the starlight. Half the sky was curtained by clouds. The wind lifted Michael’s hair from his forehead and turned the boughs of the tall shrubs into armed appendages, which thrust out in abrupt challenge. The clouds hung heaviest toward the east. As Michael watched, distracted from his search by the eerie movement of the night, a glow of light flickered above the tops of the pines, like the ghost of a sick sunset. It was followed by a slow, far-off roll of thunder.

Practical considerations intruded on the fascination of the approaching storm. This trek might turn out to be more disastrous than a plain old wild-goose chase. The road was already gluey with mud; another heavy rain could maroon him in this abandoned lane. He had better check the house and get out.

The mental call that had brought him a hundred miles was gone.

When it had left-if it had ever existed, save in his imagination-he could not remember. But its absence left him feeling blind or deaf, bereft of a sense that had, even in so short a time, become something he depended on as uncritically as he accepted the use of his eyes. For the first time in nearly twenty-four hours he examined his activities in the cold light of reason, and found them folly. Only his inborn stubbornness brought his hand to the latch of the gate.

It screeched rustily. He had half expected that it would, but the sound, shattering the quiet night, made him jump. As he took a tentative step forward, something streaked across the path in front of him. He grabbed instinctively at the branch of the shrub, stabbed his thumb on something sharp, and let out a yell. The shrub had thorns.

The darting streak that crossed his path hadn’t triggered any fantasies, though; he knew what it was-a cat, one of the dozen that Andrea was reputed to keep. He wondered where the others were, and what arrangements Andrea made for their comfort while she was off on her frequent trips. Then he realized that all the shrubbery was alive with movement. The action of the wind made the foliage mutter; but there were other sounds. Small, ground-level movements rustled branches and made leaves whisper. He saw something glow into life at the base of a bush near the house-two small round dots of red fire. The cats prowled.

He went down the path, feeling with feet and extended hands. The clouds had grown heavier; there was no moon, and even the faint starlight became increasingly obscured. He found the house by running into it, literally. By daylight it was probably attractive; there was a low porch, flanked by pillars and draped with vines. He had banged his head on one of the pillars. The roof hung low, almost brushing his head. He made his way to the door and fumbled for a bell or a knocker.

This was the moment of low ebb. The expedition seemed utterly futile, his mood of the last few hours a wild delusion. The door did not seem to have a bell, and even if he found some means of making his presence known, he did not expect an answer. Then lightning split the sky-nearer now, a thin sword of light instead of a far-off glow. For a split second he saw the details of the door starkly outlined-brass knocker shaped like a frog’s head, small leaded window, even the splinters in the wooden panels where impatient cats had demanded entry. Then the light vanished, leaving his eyes blinded. But his muscles remembered, and his hand found the knocker.

The damn thing made a sound like a bass drum. Echoes rolled into the windy night; he heard them mutter and die inside, beyond the door. Then the panels moved.

The inside of the house was darker than the night. He saw only the pale oval of her face, suspended in blackness. He never doubted her identity, even though she seemed smaller than he remembered, as small as a child, as small as a bent old woman.

“I knew it was you,” she said, in a breathy whisper.

Michael nodded, then realized that she could see no more of him than he could see of her.

“I figured you’d be here.”

“Why didn’t you come before?”

“It wasn’t until last night that I got your-” Michael stopped; it was hard enough to mention his fantastic experience, but the phrase he had been about to use reduced it to inanity, as if the thing he had received had been a telegram or phone call.

Then he realized she was not listening. She was looking past him, out into the dark garden.

He was slower to perceive. He realized first that the wind had died; leaf and bough hung motionless, as if in apprehension of what was coming. He thought, This is going to be one hell of a storm. And he knew the thought for what it was-the desperate defense of the commonplace against a phenomenon it was afraid to admit. For the stillness was abnormal. Linda’s hand gripped his arm, her fingers digging in like claws. At the same instant the silence burst. He recognized the sounds, but they sounded different, here, than they had coming from the back alleys of the city. Cats. The howls and snarls seemed to come from more than a dozen feline throats. The shrubbery was animate with glowing eyes and flying bodies.

The fury of the cats might have warned him, if he had had time to think. The next flash of lightning came too quickly; it caught him unprepared. The storm was moving in. All the horizon was dark with boiling masses of cloud, and the thunderclap came close on the heels of the light, booming like a cannon’s roar. In the ghastly gray-blue light he saw it. Standing stiff-legged and huge, it might have been only a monstrous image, cut out of basalt or obsidian. But the pricked, listening ears were alive, and so were the eyes, glowing with an inner fire. When the darkness returned, he felt as if every light in the world had failed, and the darkness was worse than the vision itself, because he knew it was still out there, waiting-the black dog.