Thomas Perry - Runner

She lay on the ground and looked around her for a way out. If this was where Beale was keeping Christine, then she would have to get her out, too. By now she would either have had the baby or be about as pregnant as a woman could be. Neither condition seemed good for wall climbing. Jane was in a small pine woods. She could see that on the ground, resting on the deep layer of pine needles, was a tree about fifteen feet long that had fallen some time ago. The boughs that stuck out from the trunk at intervals of a foot or so had only a few dry, brittle needles clinging to them.

She used her pocketknife to carve off the boughs on one side of the trunk, then lifted the lighter end of it and propped it on the rim of the wall. The remaining boughs made the trunk roll to keep the bare side up. The protruding stubs from the boughs were like rungs of a ladder.

Jane began to advance through the woods toward the house. She stepped almost to the edge of the trees and studied the buildings. To her left was the long back wall of the six-car garage. Directly ahead was the main house, and close to it on the right was a pool house.

Adjusting her course, she put the pool house directly in front of her to shield her from the main house. She crossed the lawn to the pool house and looked in through the arched doorway. She saw a counter with a kitchen sink, a wooden table and chairs, a bathroom with two showers, presumably for washing the chlorine off after swimming, and another archway leading to the pool. She moved past the arch, skirted the iron fence around the pool, and made her way up to the first of the barred windows.

Over each window was an iron grate like a flat cage, a single piece bolted to the house. She knew that was an arrangement that had been popular in the forties and fifties, but it had become rare—maybe against building codes—in recent years because it prevented an occupant from getting out in a fire. She stepped back and stared at the house. A lot of modernist architecture was far older than it looked. This place could easily have been built in the thirties, and the bars could simply be relics.

But to Jane the bars looked like a sign of malicious intent. The old word otgont came to her. It meant more than simple evil. Witches—people who secretly had the power to cause disease and death—were otgont. It was potence, but it was also corruption, an unnatural degeneration from within.

She moved to the farthest window. In all the rooms in the wing the lights were off, so she had to peer in and strain her eyes to make out shapes. This one held an empty double bed, a dresser, a closet. The entrance to the bathroom was on her left. The small, high window in there had bars across it, too. She moved to the next window. The room was nearly the same, unoccupied but furnished. Jane kept moving along the side of the house until she reached the big room at the center. She stood perfectly still outside the glass wall and stared into the room. First there was a moving shadow, and then a figure appeared on the walkway above the room. There was a woman in a bathrobe and slippers moving sleepily from one set of rooms toward the other. She stopped and turned her head, as though she had to force herself to look down.

30

Ruby Beale saw the woman beyond the glass. She gave an involuntary shudder-jump, as all the muscles in her body tightened. It seemed to squeeze the scream out of her, so loud and high-pitched that she frightened herself, and her body dropped her into a crouch on the walkway. She involuntarily tried to curl up and be smaller as she stared down at the figure beyond the glass wall.

The woman was outside the glass, standing there without moving, her hands at her sides. She was all in black, and her hair was black, and Ruby couldn't make out her face with the moonlight behind her. She stood there staring at Ruby.

There were sounds of heavy, hurried footsteps on both ends of the hallway, and on her hands and knees, Ruby could feel the vibrations from the running men through the floor, and it scared her even more. Lights came on. It felt as though the walkway would be shaken loose. She looked back in the direction of her bedroom, and saw Andy running toward her in his pajamas, with a gun in his hand. From the other direction came Pete Tilton and Claudia Marshall, and both of them were carrying guns, too. The sight of so many guns did nothing to calm Ruby. Everyone was running, and all the guns seemed to be held in front of them and pointed downward, which was where she was.

They all converged and stood over her yelling at once. Andy was gasping, "Are you all right? What's the matter?" and other variations on the same theme, while the others were shouting, "What is it? What did you see?" Ruby looked over the edge of the walkway at the glass again.

The woman in black pivoted. Her silhouette was the same from the back, only the face was gone, and she walked into the dark in the garden. "There!" Ruby shrieked, and managed to point her finger. But the woman had dissolved into the night shadows.

Ruby said, "It's a woman—tall, thin, long black hair, dressed in black. She's out there."

"Sybil?" said Claudia Marshall.

"What?" It was Sybil Landreau, who had come out of another room on the top floor.

Claudia turned to see her standing behind her. "It just sounded like you."

"I was asleep."

Ruby was agitated. "It wasn't her. I would have said 'Sybil,' not 'a woman.'"

JANE WAS RUNNING. She knew they would come out after her, and that what she had to outrun was the light. The only sounds in the darkness were the balls of her feet pounding the lawn and her lungs taking in deep breaths as she sprinted. As she approached the place where the grass melted into the stand of pine trees at the end of the property, she heard the sliding of one of the glass doors at the side of the building where she had been standing. She knew they had done the right thing—they had gotten someone outside in the dark who would now get into firing position—but she knew that the tactic would give her an extra five or six seconds at a full sprint. She ran hard, counting the seconds. She dashed past the first few pine trees and threw herself down.

The bright floodlights came on, an explosion of eye-searing glare, but she could see that two of them were outside holding pistols in two-handed stance, turning their bodies as they scanned the back yard for a target. After a few seconds one waved to the other and they turned away from each other to move along the two wings of the house and then continue around toward the front.

Jane knew that this was either her chance to get up and run for the wall, or their way of inducing her to try. She guessed it was a fake, and lay still. A second later they both spun and aimed their weapons down the lawn toward her. She could see beyond the glare of the floodlights mounted along the eaves of the house that there were two people half-hidden beside the sliding doors, staring out at the gardens, trying to act as spotters.

Jane stayed low and moved toward the left, away from the long featureless wall of the garage. She was almost sure that was where they would go to wait for her, thinking she must have come by car and needed to make it over the gate in the hedge to the street.

She found her pine tree lying at the foot of the wall, propped it up so she could climb it to the top, then pushed it back down so it would fall sideways. Then she dropped to the other side. She hurried to the road, lifted her bicycle over the low wall to the street, put on her helmet, mounted, and pedaled hard. She built up considerable speed before she passed the opening in the hedge where the gate was. The only sounds were the whisper of wind in her ears and a slight hiss of her tires on the pavement.

She kept going hard, building her speed as she went. By the time she had traveled two hundred yards, she judged she must be going at least forty miles an hour. Jane knew she probably couldn't go faster than that on this road until the first downgrade. But she was sure it hardly mattered. The people who were hunting for her had not seen her leave or heard a car engine, so they would assume she was still there.