Dean Koontz - Intensity

Lest he hear her child-shallow exhalations, Chyna held her breath.

She was glad that she wore no perfume. She was certain that he would have smelled her.

He switched off the light, stepped into the hall, and pulled the door shut as he went.

His footsteps moved off the way he had come, for her room was the last on the second floor. His tread swiftly faded, cloaked by the fierce pounding of her heart.

Her first inclination was to remain in that narrow haven between the carpet and the box springs, wait until daybreak or even longer, wait until there came a long silence that ceased to seem like the stillness of a crouched predator.

But she didn’t know what had happened to Laura, Paul, or Sarah. Any of them — all of them — might be alive, grievously wounded but drawing breath. The intruder might even be keeping them alive to torture them at his leisure. Any newspaper regularly reported stories of cruelty no worse than the possible scenarios that now unreeled vividly in her mind. And if any of the Templetons still lived, Chyna might be their only hope of survival.

She had crawled out of all the many hideaways of her childhood with less fear than she felt when she hesitantly slid out from under this bed. Of course she had more to lose now than before she had walked out on her mother, ten years ago: a decent life built on a decade of ceaseless struggle and hard-won self-respect. It seemed madness to take this risk when safety was assured simply by her staying put. But personal safety at the expense of others was cowardice, and cowardice was a right only of small children who lacked the strength and experience to defend themselves.

She couldn’t simply retreat into the defensive detachment of her childhood. Doing so would mean the end of all self-respect. Slow-motion suicide. It’s not possible to retreat into a bottomless pit — one can only plunge.

In the open once more, she rose into a crouch beside the bed. For a while that was as far as she got. She was frozen by the expectation that the door would crash open and that the intruder would burst in again.

The house was as echo-free as any airless moon.

Chyna rose to her feet and silently crossed the dark guest room. Unable to see the trio of blood drops, she tried to step around the place where they had fallen earlier.

She pressed her left ear to the crack between the door and the jamb, listening for movement or breathing in the hall. She heard nothing, yet she remained suspicious.

He could be on the other side of the door. Smiling. Deeply amused to think that she was listening. Biding his time. Patient because he knew that eventually she would open the door and step into his arms.

Screw it.

She put her hand on the knob, turned it cautiously, and winced as the spring latch scraped softly out of its notch. At least the hinges were lubricated and silent.

Even in the inkiness to which her vision had not totally readapted, she could see that no one was waiting for her. She stepped out of her room and soundlessly pulled the door shut.

The guest quarters were off the shorter arm of the L-shaped upstairs hall. To her right were the back stairs, which led down to the kitchen. To her left lay the turn into the longer arm of the L.

She ruled out the back stairs. She had descended them earlier in the evening, when she and Laura went out to walk the vineyards. They were wooden and worn. They creaked and popped. The stairwell acted as an amplifier, as hollow and efficient as a steel drum. With the house so preternaturally silent, it would be impossible to creep down the back stairs undetected.

The second-floor hall and the front stairs, on the other hand, were plushly carpeted.

From around the corner, somewhere along the main hallway, came a soft amber glow. In the wallpaper, the delicate pattern of faded roses appeared to absorb the light rather than reflect it, acquiring an enigmatic depth that it had not previously possessed.

If the intruder had been standing anywhere between the junction of the hallways and the source of the light, he would have cast a distorted shadow across that luminous paper garden or on the wheat-gold carpet. There was no shadow.

Keeping her back close to the wall, Chyna edged to the corner, hesitated, and leaned out to scout the way ahead. The main hallway was deserted.

Two sources of faint amber light relieved the gloom. The first came from a half-open door on the right: Paul and Sarah’s suite. The second was much farther down the hallway, past the front stairs, on the left: Laura’s room.

The other doors all seemed to be closed. She didn’t know what lay beyond them. Perhaps other bedrooms, a bath, an upstairs study, closets. Although Chyna was most drawn to — and most afraid of — the lighted rooms, every closed door was also a danger.

The unplumbable silence tempted her to believe that the intruder had gone. This was a temptation best resisted.

Forward, then, through the paper arbor of printed roses to the half-open door of the master suite. Hesitating there. On the brink.

When she found whatever waited to be found, all her illusions of order and stability might dissolve. The truth of life might then reassert itself, after ten years during which she had diligently denied it: chaos, like the flow of a stream of mercury, its course unpredictable.

The man in the blue jeans and black boots might have returned to the master suite after leaving the guest room, but more likely not. Other amusements in the house would no doubt be more appealing to him.

Fearful of lingering too long in the hall, she sidled across the threshold, without pushing the door open wider.

Paul and Sarah’s room was spacious. A sitting area included a pair of armchairs and footstools facing a fireplace. Bookshelves crammed with hardcovers flanked the mantel, their titles lost in shadows.

The nightstand lamps were colorfully patterned ginger jars with pleated shades. One of them was aglow; crimson streaks and blots stained its shade.

Chyna stopped well short of the foot of the bed, already close enough to see too much. Neither Paul nor Sarah was there, but the sheets and blankets were in tangled disarray, trailing onto the floor on the right side of the bed. On the left, the linens were soaked with blood, and a wet spray glistened on the headboard and in an arc across the wall.

She closed her eyes. Heard something. Spun around, crouching in expectation of an assault. She was alone.

The noise had always been there, a background hiss-patter-splash of falling water. She hadn’t heard it on entering the room, because she had been deafened by bloodstains as loud as the angry shouting of a maddened mob.

Synesthesia. The word had stuck with her from a psychology text, more because she thought it was a beautiful arrangement of syllables than because she expected ever to experience it herself. Synesthesia: a confusion of the senses in which a scent might register as a flash of color, a sound actually might be perceived as a scent, and the texture of a surface under the hand might seem to be a trilling laugh or a scream.

Closing her eyes had blocked out the roar of the bloodstains, whereupon she had heard the falling water. Now she recognized it as the sound of the shower in the adjoining bathroom.

That door was ajar half an inch. For the first time since she had entered from the hallway, Chyna noticed the thin band of fluorescent light along the bathroom jamb.

When she looked away from that door, reluctant to confront what might wait beyond it, she spotted the telephone on the right-hand nightstand. That was the side of the bed without blood, which made it more approachable for her.

She lifted the handset from the cradle. No dial tone. She had not expected to hear one. Nothing was ever that easy.