Part 5 (2/2)

The key turned easily.

”I'm not zoned for tenants,” he replied as he pushed open the door. ”No exterior staircase, no fire escape.”

”I don't smoke, either.” said Gail.

”Twenty-five off the rent.” He turned on the light, stepped inside, making room for Gail. ”It was my daughter's room.”

The same dark wooda”she still couldn't tell if it was mahogany or gumwood. Plaster walls painted a long-faded ocher.

A long bank of square windows with faded white curtains. An unadorned ceiling that slanted here and there beneath the sharply pitched roof of the house. Simply and predictable furnished with a straight chair and a round tea table on a hooked rug. A narrow painted iron bed with a chenille spread. A standing cedar wardrobe. Behind a green baize curtain were a tiny stove and refrigerator with shelving above. A small bathroom with white porcelain fixtures and yellowed tile.

And in the wall next to the bathroom, one more door.

Obviously the door of a closeta”but perhaps not quite obviously, for the door was not quite four feet high.

It was smaller than any door she'd seen elsewhere in the house, but with the same panels, the same hinges, the same bra.s.s k.n.o.b, the same keyhole. So it had been built that way.

”Is that the closet?” Gail asked.

”It was the closet,” he replied coldly. ”But it's locked now and I've lost the key.”

She tried the k.n.o.b. The door was locked.

”That's why the standing wardrobe is in here. If you don't have enough room for your things, you can put them in one of the closets downstairs.

So if you'rea””

”But why is this door so small?” she asked, interrupting him.

Fenner didn't answer the question. He ashed another in return: ”Do you want the room?”

”Yes,” she replied, startled. ”Yes, of course I do.”

In the first-floor entryway, Fenner stood still and silent, listening.

Nothing was to be heard.

Nothing from outside.

Nothing from any of the rooms that opened off of the entryway: a living room he hadn't set foot into in ten years; his study, where he spent a third of his life; the kitchen he never cooked in, where the cabinets were padlocked..

Silence from upstairs. His bedroom. A bath. Three more bedrooms filled with boxes and bottles and jars and bones and pelts and skulls and the severed hands of rare primates in which wire had been played through the fingers so the withered, dead fingers might still splay or fist.

Nothing from the third floor, where Miss Aynsley slept.

Or where Miss Aynsley, if she was not yet asleep, crept about softly on her bare feet.

Fenner locked the front door and turned off the lights.

He gave a swift, hard kick to a box of belongings Mis Aynsley had left beneath the hall table and hoped he had broken something inside. Then he went upstairs.

Gail went softly on her bare feet, folding and putting away the last of her clothes,. She arranged things in the medicine chest in the bathroom, placing a folded towel in the sink just in case she fumbled one of the gla.s.s bottles. Because hid=she had a fear of electrical shortages, she placed her hair dryer, her electric curlers, her iron, her cup warmer, her contact lens cleaner, and her slide projector in the st.u.r.diest of her cardboard cartons and shoved it beneath the bed, well away from any electrical outlet.

Gail's fear of the dark, however, was greater than her fear of being burned in her sleep, so she allowed herself the luxury of a night-light. She plugged it into an outlet near the foot of the bed, then carefully pinned the corner of the chenille away from its glowing shade.

She brushed her hair, untied the ribbon at the neck of her nightgown, and climbed into bed.

Gail shortly fell asleep and some time after that dreamed she slept beneath a chenille spread in an iron bed in a room with ocher walls and a closet door that was only four feet high.

Dreamed that something crouched on the other side of that diminutive door and turned the bra.s.s k.n.o.b this way and that, slowly and quietly, so that she, sleeping and dreaming in the bed, would not hear and awaken.

Gail awakened and sat up in the bed so quickly, the iron joints and the iron springs of the iron bed sc.r.a.ped and rocked and creaked.

The k.n.o.b of the closet door gleamed faintly in the pink illumination of the night-light.

It was not turning at all.

But Gail still thought there was something behind that closet door.

Because she could hear its nails scrabbling against the wood.

Then the scrabbling stopped.

Because whatever was inside the closet knew she was awake.

Fenner was b.u.t.toning his coat. Gail waited at the landing a moment, watching him, hoping that he'd notice her before she had to speak. But if he noticed her, he did not acknowledge her presence.

”Dr. Fenner,” she called at last.

The way he looked up, the way he wrapped the scarf around his neck, convinced her he had known she was there.

”Yes, what is it?”

”You forgot to give me keys.”

He took them from a basket on the hall table and tossed them up to her.

”They're labeled,” he said. ”I have to get to my office.”

He started for the door.

”Dr. Fenner . . .” she said in a tone of voice meant to detain him.

”Yes?” he replied in a voice meant to express his impatience at being detained.

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