Black Creek Crossing (10 page)

Crouching down, Angel peered under the bed.

Nothing.

The closet?

The door was still ajar, and Angel pulled it wide.

No sign of the cat at all.

Angel searched the room again, then gave up. However the cat had gotten in, it must have gotten out the same way. “Houdini,” she said softly, as rain slashed against the window. “If you ever show up again, that’s going to be your name.” With one last glance around the room, she went back downstairs.

Her mother was unpacking boxes in the kitchen, a kettle of water was coming to a boil on the stove, and there were three mugs on the table, along with a box of hot chocolate mix.

“I thought a cup of cocoa might do us all some good,” Myra said, offering Angel a wan smile that didn’t quite cover the nervousness the storm was causing her. She glanced out the window. “They certainly didn’t say anything like this was going to happen on the weather reports.” Another bolt of lightning struck, and Myra winced as the thunderclap immediately followed. “Go tell your father his hot chocolate will be ready in another couple of minutes.”

The memory of what had happened upstairs flooded back to Angel, and she hesitated. Should she tell her mother? But what
had
happened, really? Her father thought she was in the other room, that’s all.

And nothing had happened.

So there was nothing to tell her mother.

Nothing at all.

Chapter 11

HE SOUND WAS SO LOW THAT AT FIRST ANGEL WASN’T
sure she heard it at all. She was sitting in her bedroom in the new house, looking out the window. Across the road she saw a tree, a huge maple, whose limbs seemed to be reaching toward the house—toward Angel herself. At first the branches appeared friendly, as if they wanted to cradle her, and she felt an urge to go out into the night and climb the tree, disappearing into its foliage—able to see out, but knowing that no one could see in. But then the branches took on a threatening look, as if the giant maple wanted to reach across the road and through the window and pluck her from the safety of her room. Though she told herself that it was only a tree—that it couldn’t hurt her—she’d still been unable to tear her eyes away from it.

Until the sound came.

Its first faint whisper wasn’t enough to penetrate Angel’s consciousness. The sound grew, though, almost imperceptibly, so that when she finally became conscious of it, it didn’t seem out of place.

Rather, it seemed just one more of the sounds that filled the night—the chirping and whirring noises of insects, the soft croaking of frogs, and the muted hooting of owls. Yet as the sound crept out of the background and grew, it began to take on form as well.

By the time Angel recognized it as being apart from the rest of the sounds of the night, she also realized what it sounded like.

A girl.

A girl her age.

A girl crying.

Her attention torn from the tree beyond the window, Angel turned, half expecting to see the crying girl behind her. But except for herself, the room was empty.

Herself and the shadows, deep and dark, that filled the corners, for there was barely a moon tonight, and even its faint light kept fading as clouds scudded across it.

Yet she could still hear the crying, and she no longer felt alone in the room.

She squinted, straining her eyes to see where the girl might be hidden.

The crying grew louder, and finally Angel left the window and moved into the center of the room. At first the crying seemed to be coming from everywhere, echoing off the walls and ceiling and even the bare floor. It grew louder, until Angel was certain her mother or father would wake up and hear it.

Then she realized that it wasn’t coming from inside the room at all.

It was coming from the closet.

The crying became harsher, as if the girl was in some kind of pain.

A ray of light, barely visible, crept from under the closet door, then brightened, turning from a faint orange to a brighter yellow. Angel stared at the light, and it began pulsating, mesmerizing her.

Meanwhile, the sound grew, until Angel could feel it as well as hear it.

Yet somehow she didn’t feel frightened.

Instead, she felt herself being drawn toward the closet door.

Slowly, she moved toward it, her eyes fixed on the yellow light pulsing from the gap beneath the closet door, her ears filled with the now-howling sound of the girl’s cries.

She reached for the door. Heat seemed to radiate from it, yet still Angel felt no fear.

Her fingers tightened on the knob, and she turned it and pulled the door open.

To her amazement, the closet was filled with flames, and in the midst of the flames stood a figure, its back to her. As Angel stood rooted to the spot, the figure turned.

The face of the girl was gone, its flesh burned away. But the empty sockets where the girl’s eyes had been stared straight at Angel.

The girl raised her right arm and reached toward Angel in eerie imitation of the branches of the tree she’d been staring at moments earlier.

Just before the fingers touched her face, Angel stepped back and slammed the closet door.

And as the door slammed shut, she jerked awake, sitting bolt upright in her bed.

Her heart was pounding and she was covered with a sheen of sweat that felt hot but quickly turned cold and clammy. She was gasping for breath and her lungs hurt.

Hurt almost as if they’d been burned.

Angel sat perfectly still, waiting for the terror of the nightmare to pass, but even as her breathing returned to normal and her heartbeat calmed, the image of the girl, her flesh burned away by the raging flames, remained vivid in her mind. Finally, when even the sweat that covered her skin had dried, she lay back down and pulled the covers up until they were snug around her throat.

A nightmare,
she told herself.
That’s all it was.

She turned over, wrapped her arms around the pillow, and closed her eyes. But the vision still hung in the darkness, and a moment later she rolled over again, this time opening her eyes to look at the dimly glowing hands of the alarm clock that sat on the scarred table next to the bed.

Just a little after midnight.

Though she felt so tired from unpacking boxes all day that her whole body ached, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she banished the terrible image of her dream from her mind.

Throwing back the covers, she got up, pulling the blanket off the bed and wrapping it around her shoulders. She moved toward the closet, intending to open the door to prove to herself that nothing was inside except the clothes she’d hung there herself. Yet when she reached out to turn the knob, her hand hovered in the air a few inches from it, and she found herself unable to close her fingers on the brass.

She went to the window then and gazed out at the huge maple across the street, and slowly the vision of the horror inside the closet began to fade as the memory of the tree’s branches reaching out to her rose in her mind once more.

But in the dream, the tree had been covered with the bright green foliage of summer, and now, as she gazed out into the autumn night, she could see that its leaves had shriveled and fallen, until now its branches were almost bare.

It didn’t look at all as it had in the dream.

Turning away from the window, Angel gazed again at the closed door of the closet.
There’s nothing in it,
she told herself.
Nothing but my clothes and a bunch of other junk.
Yet even as she steeled herself and started toward the closet again, her heart began to race, and a clammy sheen of cold sweat once more broke out on her body. But she didn’t stop. She forced herself to keep going until she once more stood before the door.

This time she closed her fingers on the cold brass, she turned the knob, and pulled the door open.

Just as she had told herself, there was nothing inside the closet except the clothes she’d hung up this afternoon.

On the floor were her three pairs of shoes.

On the shelves were some boxes filled with stuff she hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw away.

And nothing else, except for a strange odor.

The odor of something burning . . .

“Angel?” Myra Sullivan said as her daughter came into the kitchen the next morning. “Are you all right?”

“I guess I didn’t sleep very well,” Angel replied, rubbing her eyes with the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I had a bad dream—”

“Well, that’s hardly a good sign, is it? You should have had wonderful dreams on your first night in our new house. What was it?”

As Angel tried to recall and relate the strange dream she’d had, Myra found the box she’d packed especially for this morning—buried, of course, under half a dozen other boxes, all of them heavier than the one she was after—opened it, and began taking out cereal bowls, glasses, and plates. “Rinse these for me while we talk,” she told Angel, stacking them on the counter next to the sink. “Everything gets so dirty when you pack it up.”

Angel ran the hot water and began rinsing and drying the dishes and silverware as she began once more to reconstruct the strange dream she’d had the night before, but already some of the details were starting to slip away.

“But the weirdest thing was that when I finally woke up, the whole thing still seemed so real that I got up and looked in the closet.”

Her mother smiled thinly. “Just like when you were little, remember? You always made me open the closet door in your room to prove that there were no monsters inside.” She looked up from the oatmeal she was stirring. “And you didn’t find anything, did you?” she asked, her voice taking on an edge. “It was just a nightmare then, and it was just a nightmare last night. You didn’t actually hear anything, or see anything, did you?” Angel shook her head. Yet the look on her face told Myra there was something her daughter hadn’t yet told her. “What is it?” she pressed. “There’s something you’re holding back.”

“I—I don’t know,” Angel stammered. “It’s just—well, it sounds sort of crazy. . . .”

Myra stopped stirring the oatmeal. “I think I can be the judge of that. Why don’t you just tell me what you think happened, and maybe I can figure it out.”

Angel hesitated, and then blurted it out: “I smelled smoke.”

Myra frowned. “Smoke? You mean like wood smoke?”

Again Angel hesitated. “Well, sort of, but not really—I mean, it sort of smelled like burning wood, but there was something else too.”

“Something else?” Myra prodded when Angel fell silent. “Am I supposed to figure it out myself, or are you going to tell me?”

“Well, it was weird,” Angel said. “Remember when you burned yourself with the iron?”

Myra winced at the memory, and her eyes went to the scar that still showed clearly on the back of her left hand. It had happened five years ago, when she’d been talking to Angel while pressing Father Raphaello’s vestments and accidentally placed the scorching steam iron on her own hand.

“It smelled like that,” Angel said. “And like the time I scorched my hair trying to blow out the candles on my birthday cake.”

“Good heavens! I thought you would have forgotten about that years ago. You were only two.”

“Forget it?” Angel echoed. “I’ll never forget it—I thought I was going to burn up!”

“Well, there you are, then,” Myra told her. “That’s probably where the dream came from—maybe moving into our own house made your subconscious decide to start clearing out a bunch of old memories. And if lighting your head on fire scared you as much as it scared me, I’m amazed you haven’t had nightmares about it for years.” She moved the oatmeal off the stove and started scooping it into the three bowls Angel had rinsed and dried. “But if it scared you that much, how come you never told me? We could have talked about it.”

“I didn’t want you to think I was a baby.”

Myra laughed out loud. “But you
were
a baby! And I don’t know why I didn’t understand that you must have been even more scared than I was.” Abandoning the oatmeal, she put her arms around Angel. “I’m sorry, honey. Really I am.”

“Come on, Mom,” Angel groaned, pulling away from the embrace. “I hardly even remember it. Maybe I don’t—maybe I only remember Daddy talking about it on every birthday I’ve ever had, and I just feel like I remember.”

“If you didn’t really remember, I don’t think you would have had that nightmare. And if you thought you smelled smoke, why didn’t you wake me up? Or wake your father up?”

At the mention of her father, the memory of him walking in on her when she’d been changing her clothes yesterday rose in her mind.

Walking in on her and looking at her and—

The image of her father framed in the doorway of her room was abruptly replaced by the reality of his figure framed in the kitchen door.

“Wake me up?” he asked. “I’m awake—what’s going on?”

“It’s Angel,” Myra explained. “She had a nightmare last night.”

“About me?” Marty Sullivan asked, his eyes fixing on Angel with an intensity that made her pull the bathrobe more tightly around her. “Why would she have a nightmare about me?” he asked, speaking to his wife, but his eyes remaining fastened on Angel.