John Saul - Nightshade

A little better.

He took another breath, and the strange suffocating panic began to release its grip on him.

And then he felt something else.

Eyes.

Eyes watching him in the darkness.

Caught!

Someone had come upstairs and —

He spun around, his eyes searching.

Nothing! The door was still closed, the room still empty.

He started toward the door, and again was seized by the irrational feeling that unseen eyes were following his every move.

Once again he turned, and this time he saw it.

A pair of eyes pierced the darkness, seeming to hang suspended in the blackness, fixing on him with an intensity that made his skin crawl. As his heart raced, he fumbled for the light switch by the door, found it, and flipped the toggle. He blinked as light flooded from the chandelier in the center of the ceiling, and then he saw it.

The picture!

It was the picture of his aunt that hung over the fireplace. Now, in the bright light of the chandelier, the eyes lost the terrible intensity they had possessed in the darkness, and he found himself looking at nothing more than a carefully posed photograph of a beautiful girl who appeared to be no more than a year or two older than he was.

Nothing that bore any threat at all.

Then why had her eyes frightened him so much? Why had they seemed to glow in the dark almost as if they were lit from within?

His fingers trembling, he reached for the light switch, plunging the room back into darkness. As he waited for his eyes to readjust to the gloom, the strange suffocating claustrophobia closed around him again, but this time he fought it, his fingers clutching at the doorknob, tightening on it harder with every second that passed. Then, very slowly, Cynthia Moore’s eyes emerged out of the darkness, fixing on him.

No, he told himself. It’s not possible — it’s just some kind of trick of the light! But even as he tried to reassure himself, the eyes seemed to reach out to him, reach into him, peer into the depths of —

“No!”

The word exploded from him in a choked gasp of panic, cut off even before it was fully formed. Reflexively, his hand twisted the doorknob and he pulled the door open, spun out into the corridor, then jerked it closed behind him. He stayed there a moment, his heart pounding, his breath coming in panting gasps. As the panic slowly ebbed, as the terror drained away, he began to understand what must have happened.

Of course he’d been reminded of the house on Burlington Avenue: the odor in the room his grandmother had filled with all his aunt’s stuff smelled just like it. Until tonight he’d always thought the strange musky scent in his grandmother’s house was just the way that particular house smelled.

Now he knew it wasn’t that at all. It had been his aunt’s perfume, filling his grandmother’s house the way it now filled the room he’d just left.

And as for the eyes — the eyes that seemed to loom in the darkness as if lit from within — that was easy. It must have been a beam of moonlight straying in through the window, hitting the portrait at just the right angle. Putting the last of his fear aside, Matt went to his room, stripped off his tuxedo, and, even though it was barely ten o’clock, climbed into bed.

When he finally turned out the light an hour later, he fell asleep before noticing that the moon had not yet risen.

So it never occurred to him that it must have been something else that lit his aunt Cynthia’s eyes…

* * *

THE DARKNESS AROUND him was redolent with the same musky scent that had filled his aunt’s room, and Matt knew he was no longer alone.

Gentle fingers touched his naked skin, caressing him.

He moved, trying to pull away from the touch, but the fingers followed him, moving down his back, across his hip to his thigh…

“No,” he whispered, but his throat constricted so tightly that no sound at all emerged from his lips.

“It’s all right,” a voice whispered. “I love you. You know I love you… ”

Again Matt tried to pull away from the touch and the voice, but there was no escape. No escape, at least, for his body.

But as the gentle hand caressed, and the soft voice whispered, his mind pulled away, sinking into a darkness where, no matter what might happen to his body, it, at least, would be safe…

THOUGH THE MORNING was clear and crisp and the whole world seemed suffused with the golden light that filtered through the fall foliage, Matt’s mood was as dark as when he had awakened an hour ago to the shrill buzzing of the alarm. He’d snaked one hand out from under the quilt — wrapped so tightly around him that it felt like a shroud — silenced the clock, and wondered why he couldn’t just stay in bed.

It was his birthday, wasn’t it? Why couldn’t he just do whatever he wanted to do? Besides, it didn’t feel like he’d slept at all. Then he rolled over, turning his back on the morning light streaming through the window; closing his eyes against it.

It had not worked.

His skin still crawled with the memory of the touch during the night — the touch that had to have been no more than a dream, but that even now he could still feel in his loins. Better to face the day than risk slipping back into the nightmares of sleep.

But he was starting to think he was wrong, that maybe he should have just stayed in bed.

When he’d come downstairs to find his stepfather waiting for him, he knew right away that nothing from last night had yet been forgotten. His dad hadn’t said anything, but Matt could tell he was still pissed off. As they checked over the guns on the big refectory table in the den, Matt waited for the storm to break, but as the minutes had ticked by and the silence held, he finally figured out his dad’s game. He’s gonna wait for me to apologize. Well, why should I? What did I do? It’s not my fault. None of it’s my fault! He thought things would get better when Eric and Pete got there, but as soon as they came in with their fathers, he could tell that Pete was still pissed at him too.

And now, an hour later, the six of them were deep in the woods to the west of the house, and hadn’t had so much as a glimpse of a deer, and it seemed like nobody was speaking to anybody.

“Why don’t we just give it up?” Matt asked, stopping abruptly.

“What’s the matter, Moore?” Pete Arneson said, his voice edged with sarcasm. “You want to quit on this the same way you quit on me?”

Matt glowered at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Pete and Eric Holmes exchanged a glance, silently sharing the moment on the practice field when Matt had purposely let Eric charge through, then Pete’s eyes settled on Matt again. “You know what it means.”

The two boys stood glaring at each other, and their fathers remained silent as well. Then Bill Hapgood spoke. “What’s he talking about, Matt?”

“I don’t — ” Matt began, but Pete didn’t let him finish.

“You’re screwing up! You’re screwing up everything. What the hell’s wrong with you lately?”

“Nothing!” Matt flared. “Why don’t you all just leave me alone, okay?” The words were out of his mouth before he even realized he was going to say them, and now it was too late to snatch them back. He could see the anger burning in Pete’s eyes, and feel Eric glaring at him too. “Who needs any of you?” he shouted. He turned away, pushed past Eric and Pete, Marty Holmes and Paul Arneson, and started down the trail.

“Matt!” his stepfather barked, breaking the tense silence in the aftermath of Matt’s outburst. From force of habit, Matt stopped and turned back. “You don’t talk to your guests that way.”