Houses of Stone, KATHY [classic literature books TXT] 📗

had vanished. Everything was the same shade of pallid gray—her winter-whitened skin, the worn paint of the door, the surrounding air.

Karen stepped back, putting her hands in her pockets. They were ice-cold. Small wonder, she told herself. The air was cold—wet—chill. Even if the door were not locked, which it probably was, she had no business inside the house. Retreating a little too quickly, she followed a brick walk between low hedges of boxwood toward the west side of the house.

The windows on this side were lower than those in front, or the ground was higher; standing on tiptoe, she was able to look in. The view was discouraging—an empty room, swept clean of furniture and every other object. It might have been a library. The opposite wall, the only one she could see with any degree of clarity, had rows of shelves below a stretch of what appeared to be dark-paneled wood. The shelves were bare.

Her spirits plummeted. She reminded herself this was what she had expected.

The house was larger than it had appeared from the front. Instead of extending wings on either side of the main block, the owners had simply stuck another group of rooms onto the back when additional space was required. There was no attempt at architectural symmetry; the end product was a hideous hodgepodge of different materials and disparate shapes. There seemed to be no end to it, and the farther she went, the more apparent were the long years of neglect.

Finally the wings and extensions ended and she found herself in what might loosely be described as the backyard. The weeds there were not so high or so pervasive; they rose from what had been cultivated soil. She deduced that the area had once been a garden. A vegetable garden, no doubt; Great-Uncle Josiah wouldn't have bothered with flowers. Behind the plowed earth was a wall of tangled wilderness. The heavy stems of poison ivy and honeysuckle wound tight around tree trunks and hung in green curtains from dead boughs; fallen branches interlaced with prickly thorns lay in tumbled heaps.

There was a single narrow opening in the barricade. As Karen approached, she saw it was the entrance to a path of sorts, low-roofed by leaves. An animal trail? But surely deer wouldn't come so close to the house, not when they had acres of wilderness in which to roam.

She had not seen any outbuildings, barn or sheds or the like. Perhaps that was where the path led. Ducking under a low branch, she followed it. After the first few yards it began to descend, gently at first, then at a steeper angle before it ended, abruptly, in an open space, sunken and roughly oval in shape. Hickories and white pines enclosed it, and a jagged outcropping of rock formed a natural wall along one side. The ground underfoot was thick with fallen needles that muffled her footsteps.

Except for the drip of water from the leaves, the air was utterly still. "A savage place, as holy and enchanted ..." Not a comfortable verse to recall just then; but at least the moon wasn't waning and she was not tempted to wail for a demon lover. There was something uncanny about the place, though. Why should anyone beat a path to an empty clearing? And why wasn't it overgrown with weeds and brambles, like the rest of the woodland?

At first, when she heard the sound, she took it for the murmur of water—a stream tumbling over rocky rapids or the ripple of the river, which could not be far distant. Abruptly, shockingly, the murmur changed direction. It sounded as if it were coming straight toward her. It sounded as if it were just beyond the trees, closer, closer, under the ground at her feet, in the air itself, rising in pitch and volume until there was nothing else in the universe except that piercing undulating scream.

Karen ran blindly, arms across her face to shield it from the branches that stretched out as if to block her passage. By the time she broke out into the open, there was no sound except the drip of water and her own harsh breathing. As she stood struggling for control a shift in the direction of the wind carried a sweet scent to her nostrils. The bushes beside the enclosed back porch were lilacs. Though they needed pruning, the deadly vines had been stripped away and the branches were heavy with bloom. They were a reminder of normalcy and of beauty. Her breathing slowed. Stupid of her to be panicked by some unusual acoustical phenomenon . . .

The clouds overhead had darkened and mist veiled the wet ground. She knew she ought to go. Just one more look, she told herself. One more window. That one, to the left of the porch. The exquisite scent of lilac surrounded her as she forced her way between the bushes.

The sudden sound struck at her like a physical blow. It was a human voice—a man's voice, raised in a shout. "I know you're there! Come on out." He said something else, but she didn't hear the words; jumping forward, in an instinctive attempt at concealment, she felt the ground give way under her feet.

She did not fall far, but the jolt of her landing sent a stab of pain through one leg and took her breath away. She caught at the wall beside her for support. The rough surface rasped her fingers. The wall was of stone—large, roughly trimmed blocks. A single small window broke its solidity, a window heavily barred with rusted iron.

A yell of triumph from the invisible pursuer brought her reeling brain back to reality. The stone wall wasn't that of a prison cell, it was part of the foundations of the house. The grilled window, four feet below ground level, must open into the basement. Her weight had broken through the rotted covering of a window well. She stood ankle-deep in stagnant water.

The well wasn't deep; the top