Barbara Michaels - The Walker in Shadows

She had almost decided nothing was going to happen, and that Mark had fallen asleep on his perilous perch, when the boy's dark outline jerked forward. The window of Kathy's room, which had been a black square between the white-painted shutters, began to glow.

Pat's hand clamped on Kathy's forearm as the girl started to rise.

"No-wait! We promised."

Kathy subsided, with a moan of distress. Pat continued to clutch her arm. It was almost more than she could bear to remain where she was; on the other hand, she was reluctant to lose sight of what was happening. By the time she got down the stairs and out of the house it would be too late to render assistance, even assuming there was anything she could do to help.

In spite of her self-control she let out a yelp when Mark started crawling along the branch toward the window. He did not try to enter, but remained in a crouching position. He stayed there for an interminable period-almost a minute, in real time-and then Pat realized, with indescribable relief, that the light was not growing stronger. Between one breath and the next-and she was breathing quickly-it vanished altogether, as if a door had slammed between one world and another.

"Where's Dad?" Kathy demanded. "Where is he? I'm going over there!"

"No," Pat said again. "It's gone… I think. It's all right. Look, Mark is waving."

He waved both arms, then slid down from his perch and went toward the front of the house. When he came back into sight, on the walk, Josef was with him.

Pat realized then that her anxiety had not been solely for her son. Josef also turned and waved reassuringly. Then the two men stood by the gate talking. Pat saw Mark's arms move; he always gesticulated when he was excited.

"Men!" She exclaimed angrily. "They know we're dying to hear what happened; why don't they come? I'm going out to the gate and make rude gestures at them."

"I…I think I'll go and wash my face," Kathy said.

Her voice betrayed that she had been crying. Well, Pat thought, naturally she was nervous about her father, but all the same… Then she remembered how she had felt as she stood on the outer fringes of the unspeakable aura. Kathy had been in the thick of it, not once, but twice.

"Good idea," she said, and patted the girl on the back.

She went quickly down the stairs. After the darkness of the bedroom the lamplit hall looked warm and serene. However, she must have left a window open somewhere; there was a draft of cold air blowing…

Pat stopped in midstride, her nose wrinkling. Without quite knowing how she had gotten there, she found herself backed up against the kitchen door, staring down the length of the hall. Both doors were closed. How could there be a draft? There had been none on the stairs. And… no, surely not; surely it was her imagination. It must have been imagination, for it was gone now-the faintest possible suggestion of that foul, well-remembered odor she had sensed under Kathy's window.

The brown cardboard carton was medium-sized- two feet square by about a foot and a half high. Pat stared blearily at it, wondering how her fogged brain had been able to produce even that approximation of dimensions. She turned an even less enthusiastic gaze on her son. He was at the stove. The smell of bacon, usually so appetizing, did not improve Pat's disposition that morning.

She had taken a sleeping pill the night before, the first time she had done so for over six months. It had left her groggy and cross. She would still be asleep, and glad of it, if Mark had not shaken her awake. He had given her time to put on a bathrobe, but she was groping under the bed for her slippers when Mark had snatched her up and carried her downstairs, showing off for Kathy, who followed them giggling and making admiring comments.

The bathrobe was an old green terrycloth garment, snagged by Albert's claws, and not very clean. It added at least fifteen pounds to Pat's apparent weight. She had not been able to find her good robe; probably it was still in Kathy's closet, or, if she knew teenagers, crumpled on the floor of Kathy's room. She had not had time to comb her hair or wash her face or put on makeup, and she hated Mark. Kathy too.

She added Josef to the list as he entered, neatly dressed, freshly shaved, every hair in place. If the lines on his face were perhaps a little deeper than they had been when she first met him, that didn't count for much when weighed against the snagged old bathrobe and the straggly hair.

"Good morning," he said brightly.

Pat lifted her lip in a silent snarl and snatched at the coffee Kathy put in front of her.

"Is that it?" Josef transferred his attention from Pat to the carton. Not that she blamed him. Even a worn, battered cardboard box looked better than she did this morning.

"That's it." Mark turned, waving his spatula. "I barely caught Jay; he was ready to take off when I got there, and I had to bribe him before he would let me have the material."

"What with?" Pat demanded. Even her voice sounded rusty and antique. She cleared her throat. "An invitation to dinner tonight?"

"I mentioned your name," Mark said innocently. "He really thinks you're a cool lady, Mom."

An eloquent, ancient Anglo-Saxon four-letter word leaped into Pat's mind. She managed not to say it.

"I hope you didn't give anything away," Josef said. He seated himself at the table. "You have asked this young man to violate the rules by loaning out such material; you must have given him a pressing reason."

"I just told him Mom wanted it," Mark said.

Pat, who was fairly familiar with the moral codes of the younger generation, knew that to Jay and to Mark this was a perfectly adequate reason. They were all so hostile to rules and regulations; they took a perverse delight in breaking the rules, especially for someone they liked.

She felt no need to explain this to Josef, even if she had been capable of rational conversation. She drank her coffee.

"We'll have breakfast and then open the carton," Mark went on. He flipped an egg. Grease spattered, followed by a horrible smell of burning oil.

"Can I help?" Kathy asked.

"You could set the table," Mark answered, turning. Their eyes met; for a long moment Mark stood still, his spatula poised, dripping grease onto the kitchen floor.

"The eggs," Pat said.

"Oh." Mark turned back to his cooking while Kathy set the table. Pat knew Josef was looking at her, but she refused to meet his gaze. She kept her eyes fixed on her coffee cup.

It wasn't only lack of sleep or the sleeping pill or even her awareness of how she looked that made her silent and sullen. Convinced, and yet unwilling to believe, her mind raged against the events of the previous night.

The two men had entered swaggering, as they had left; but Josef admitted he needed a drink, and Pat had observed that his hands were not completely steady when he poured it. All the same, he had insisted, he was not completely converted to Mark's theory of a sentient, conscious intelligence as the agent behind the manifestations.

"But it came and went without completely materializing," Mark had argued. "Damn it-excuse me-Mr. Friedrichs, you must have felt it. I was outside the room, and I felt it. Something came-realized you were not what it was after-and left."

"It was bad enough, even half formed," Friedrichs muttered.

"Compared to what Kathy and I encountered, that was nothing," Mark insisted. "We saw it, and felt it. It hit every sense."

Josef had the last word.

"If your ideas are correct, Mark, we'll see the proof of them tonight. Your hypothetical entity will come, dismiss you as it dismissed me-or it will have learned, from to-night's experience, that Kathy has left the house, and it will not return."