[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
could have come from so quickly. They spread out to form a line and
advanced purposefully across the yard, across the patio, past the
swimming pool, toward the rose garden, probing with the flashlights,
menacing figures as featureless as demons in a dream.
The faceless pursuers and the thwarting mazes that trouble us in sleep
were now reality.
The gardens stepped in five broad terraces down a hillside. In spite
of these plateaus and the gentleness of the slopes between them, I was
gathering too much speed as I descended, and I was afraid that I would
stumble, fall, and break a leg.
Rising on all sides, the arbors and fanciful trellises began to
resemble gutted ruins. In the lower levels, they were overgrown with
thorny trailers that clawed the lattice and seemed to writhe with
animal life as I fled past them.
The night had fallen into a waking nightmare.
My heart pounded so fiercely that the stars reeled.
I felt as though the vault of the sky were sliding toward me, gaining
momentum like an avalanche.
Plunging to the end of the gardens, I sensed as much as saw the looming
wrought-iron fence: seven feet high, its glossy black paint glimmering
with moonlight. I dug my heels into the soft earth and braked, jarring
against the sturdy pickets but not hard enough to hurt myself.
I hadn't made much noise, either. The spear-point verticals were
solidly welded to the horizontal rails; instead of clattering from my
impact, the fence briefly thrummed.
I sagged against the ironwork.
A bitter taste plagued me. My mouth was so dry that I couldn't spit.
My right temple stung. I raised a hand to my face. Three thorns
prickled my skin. I plucked them out.
During my flight downhill, I must have been lashed by a trailing rose
brier, although I didn't recall encountering it.
Maybe because I was breathing harder and faster, the sweet fragrance of
roses became too sweet, sharpened into a half-rotten stench. I could
smell my sunscreen again, too, almost as strongly as when it had been
freshly applied-but with a sour taint nowbecause my perspiration had
revitalized the scent of the lotion.
I was overcome by the absurd yet unshakable conviction that the six
searchers could sniff me out, as though they were hounds. I was safe
for the moment only because I was downwind of them.
Clutching the fence, out of which the thrumming had passed into my
hands and bones, I glanced uphill. The search party was moving from
the highest terrace to the second.
Six scythes of light slashed through the roses. Portions of the
lattice structures, when briefly backlit and distorted by those bright
sweeping swords, loomed like the bones of slain dragons.
The gardens presented the searchers with more possible hiding places to
probe than did the open lawn above. Yet they were moving faster than
before.
I scaled the fence and swung over the top, wary of snaring my jacket or
a leg of my jeans on the spear-point pickets. Beyond lay open land:
shadowed vales, steadily rising ranks of moonlit hills, widely
scattered and barely discernible black oaks.
The wild grass, lush from the recent winter rains, was knee-high when I
dropped into it from the fence. I could smell the green juice bursting
from the blades crushed beneath my shoes.
Certain that Sandy and his associates would survey the entire perimeter
of the property, I bounded downhill, away from the funeral home. I was
eager to get beyond the reach of their flashlights before they arrived
at the fence.
I was heading farther from town, which wasn't good. I wouldn't find
help in the wilderness. Every step eastward was a step into isolation,
and in isolation I was as vulnerable as anyone, more vulnerable than
most.
Some luck was with me because of the season. If the searing heat of
summer had already been upon us, the high grass would have been as
golden as wheat and as dry as paper. My progress would have been
marked by a swath of trampled stalks.
I was hopeful that the still-verdant meadow would be resilient enough
to spring shut behind me, for the most part concealing the fact that I
had passed this way. Nevertheless, an observant searcher would most
likely be able to track me.
Approximately two hundred feet beyond the fence, at the bottom of the
slope, the meadow gave way to denser brush. A barrier of tough,
five-foot-high prairie cordgrass was mixed with what might have been
goatsbeard and massive clumps of aureola.
I hurriedly pushed through this growth into a ten-foot-wide natural
drainage swale. Little grew here because an epoch of storm runoff had
exposed a spine of bedrock under the hills. With no rain in over two
weeks, this rocky course was dry.
I paused to catch my breath. Leaning back into the brush, I parted the
tall cordgrass to see how far down into the rose gardens the searchers
had descended.
Four of them were already climbing the fence. Their flashlight beams
slashed at the sky, stuttered across the pickets, and stabbed randomly
at the ground as they clambered up and over the iron.
They were unnervingly quick and agile.
Were all of them, like Sandy Kirk, carrying weapons?
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]