Demon Child (2 page)

    The pavement lighted with a reflection of a wide, jagged run of lightning.

    She almost slipped and fell on the slick macadam, regained her balance only by the sheerest luck. She found the passenger's door, opened it and slid into the small, low-slung sportscar.

    Again, yellow light shattered the even black glaze of the sky, but she felt safe from it now. She had heard that the four tires of an automobile grounded it in a storm. She was careful, though, not to touch any of the metal fixtures. She still remembered the nightmare she had had on the bus. That was an omen of some kind.

    Richard was soaked by the time he had the luggage in the compartment behind the seat and had slipped behind the wheel.

    “I feel awful, putting you through this,” Jenny said. She took a clean handkerchief out of her purse and wiped his face and neck.

    “Why?” he asked, grinning broadly. “Were you the one who made it rain?”

    She made a face at him. “Here,” she said, “let me dry your hair,” When he bent toward her, she toweled it until her handkerchief was sopping.

    “Don't worry,” he said, “I'm as healthy as a horse- as two horses!” He started the car, raced the engine once or twice, then drove away.

    “The waitress didn't think much of you,” Jenny said to start a conversation beyond mere pleasantries. besides, she was curious to know why the waitress seemed to fear a gentle man like Richard Brucker.

    “Catherine? Really? I've noticed that she treats me cooly these days, though I haven't bothered to find out why.” He drove off the main highway onto a secondary, less well-paved road where Dutch elms grew on both sides and formed a canopy above them, making the way even darker. “What'd she say?”

    “That you were responsible for some curse over a girl named Freya.”

    Richard smiled, leaned forward and turned on the headlights. If lightning still cracked above, it did not penetrate these lush branches.

    “You haven't been involved in some public scandal, have you?” she asked, teasing him.

    “Not woman troubles,” he said. “In this town, anything can make a scandal. Rural life is charming, except for its lack of privacy. In small towns, everyone's business becomes public. Freya is my cousin, from my father's side of the family. She's seven years old, has a twin brother, Frank, and she's presently having what I call psychiatric problems. Cora calls it a family curse.”

    Jenny had been surprised the first time she had heard Richard refer to his mother by her Christian name, even though she understood it was a custom among some of the very wealthy. Still, it seemed to lack respect. “A curse?”

    “Psychiatric problems,” he corrected. He sighed as if weary with the story. “The twins came from a broken home. Lena Brucker, my father's sister, married a good-for-nothing who eventually ran off with half her money. She drinks too much, likes the jet-set life too well. When Cora found that Lena planned on boarding the two seven-year-olds in separate schools, she asked Lena to leave them here. Lena didn't care one way or the other, as long as she had her freedom. That was a year ago; they've been with us since.”

    “Aunt Cora didn't say you had guests!” Jenny said. “I don't want to inconvenience anyone.”

    Richard laughed. “Jenny, sweets, the Brucker estate mansion has eighteen bedrooms.”

    “Eighteen!”

    “Our ancestors were fond of parties that lasted whole weekends, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas. People came from all over. These days, we're all too hurried to have such a leisurely celebration.”

    “You still haven't told me about the curse,” she reminded him. “Excuse me-about the psychiatric problems.”

    Ahead of them, a great road construction truck, smeared with mud, jounced into view around a curve in the road. It was traveling at better than sixty miles an hour. Richard had barely enough time to climb part of the steep bank alongside the road as the mammoth vehicle roared by, rattling and banging as each ripple in the macadam carried the length of it.

    “What a fool way to drive!” Jenny said. She was remembering the nightmare, all the nightmares she had had since Grandmother Brighton had died. If Richard's reflexes had been just a hair less sharp, or if the truck had been moving the slightest bit faster, they both might be badly hurt or dead.

    Richard grumbled. “Foolish, but average for that lot.”

    “They use this road frequently?”

    He backed off the embankment and drove ahead once more. “Ever since the superhighway construction began, fairly near the edge of Brucker property.”

    “All that dirt and noise,” Jenny said. Then she remembered that Aunt Cora would surely have a maid.

    “It's not so bad,” Richard said. “The house sits well into the estate, away from the construction. It's the real-estate speculators and their constant offers for our land that drive us crazy.”

    They turned onto a narrower, better paved road, stopped before an iron gate that said: BRUCKER ESTATE. PRIVATE, KEEP OUT. Richard tapped the car's horn in a rhythm Jenny didn't catch. The gates swung open, let them by, closed behind them.

    She would have been delighted with such gadgetry if the iron gates had not reminded her of iron cemetery gates.

    They passed neatly kept stables and riding rings fenced with white-washed boards. A small lake lay to the right, a coppice of pine trees by its far shore. Under the trees were picnic tables and children's swings. In the rain and fog, the swings looked like the skeletons of long-dead creatures.

    “The house,” Richard said as they rounded a small knoll.

    The house had three floors plus a half attic whose windows were set in a black slate roof. Two wings formed an L with a courtyard and fountain in the nook of the arms. The stone cherubs in the fountain were not spouting any water at the moment.

    Richard parked before the front steps, a leisurely flight of eight, wide marble risers that ended on a granite stoop before tall, oaken main doors. Almost before the sound of the engine died, a rather elderly man in a raincoat came out of those doors. He was shielded by a black umbrella and was carrying a second umbrella which he gave Richard. He rushed around to Jenny's door, opened it and helped her under the protection of his own bumbershoot.

    He was about sixty, lean and wizened with white hair and deep, blue eyes. “I'm Harold, the manservant. You must be Jenny, for you have the Brighton beauty, dark hair and eyes. Will you come with me out of this dreadful weather?”

    “Yes!” she gasped as thunder rumbled in the ever-lowering clouds and the rain seemed to fall twice as fast as it had. Her feet were soaked, and her legs were splattered with mud and water.

    As they stepped onto the first of the marble stairs, someone moaned nearby, loud and prolonged, as if in some terrible sort of agony. It was not exactly the cry of a human being. It was too deep and too loud for that, touched with something that spoke of the supernatural.

    “What is that?” she asked.

    Abruptly, the moan rose to a shrill, wild shriek that cut off without reason in the middle of a note.

    Jenny shivered. She could see no one about who could have made the weird call.

    “Just the wind,” Harold told her. He pointed past the edge of the umbrella at the eaves of the mansion. “If the wind comes too fast from the south, it whistles in the eaves. It can keep you awake nights. Fortunately, the wind hardly ever blows this way.”

    The explanation should have quieted her nerves, but it did not. That cry seemed too filled with emotion to be made by something inanimate. Suddenly, she remembered things that she should have asked Richard. Why had he been late? Why did Catherine, the waitress, fear him so? What was this curse that Aunt Cora talked about and which he called a “psychiatric problem"?

    Lightning threw the front of the house into strange shadows; thunder shook the many windows.

    Again, the wind moaned horribly in the eaves.

    That uncontrollable fear of the unknown and the unexpected rose in Jenny. She thought of her mother and father, of Grandmother Brighton. She wished, oh so very much, that she had found something else to occupy her summer. But she realized there was no backing out now.

    She went with Harold into that bleak and foreboding house…

    

    If the exterior of the house had been foreboding, the interior made up for that. It was warm and comfortable with an air of well-being that could very nearly be touched. The walls of the entry foyer were richly papered in a gold and white antique print. The closet doors were heavy, dark oak. The few pieces of furniture were all heavy pine styled in a rustic, colonial mode that bespoke usefulness and sensibility. In such a house, one could feel protected, shielded, away from the cares of the rest of the world. The moan of the wind in the eaves was distant and unfrightening.

    Yet, even as she gave less thought to the fears that had bothered her only moments ago, Jenny wondered if this were not a false sense of security that prevailed in the house. At times, you had to be careful, cautious. Just when you turned your back on some danger, smug in your certainty of safety, it might spring up anew and attack you when you least expected it.

    
A car on a rain-slicked highway…

    
A burst blood vessel in an old woman's brain…

    She shivered.

    “Cold?” Harold asked as he took her coat and hung it in the closet.

    “A little.”

    “A touch of brandy should clear that up,” he said. “Would you like a drop or two in your coffee?”

    Under normal circumstances, Jenny did not approve of liquor. She felt that it was a crutch against the burdens of the world. But at this moment, she could see little harm in giving in to Harold's suggestion. She really was quite cold and nervous. She nodded her consent.

    “Good,” Harold said, slipping his own coat into the closet. “Your aunt should be in the drawing room. Straight down this corridor, on your left through the curtained arch. If you will excuse me, I'll take the back hall to the kitchen and get the coffee ready. You look positively chilled to the bone!”

    He left her standing there, alone in the house for the first time. Abruptly, the front door opened behind her, admitting the throbbing moan of the wind in the eaves and the hiss of rain drumming the driveway. Richard fought inside with the umbrella and the suitcase, set the bag down.

    “One more,” he said.

    “I should have helped you with those!”

    “I've got my bumbershoot,” he said.

    “And it isn't doing you a bit of good.”

    “You hurry along to Cora. She'll be waiting for vou”

    He plunged back into the downpour. The rain slashed under the rim of his umbrella and soaked his clothes.

    She supposed there was nothing she could do for him. She turned and followed the corridor, fascinated by the rich oil paintings hung against the polished mahogany paneling. The frames alone were more expensive than the framed lithographs she had been used to in her own home as a child.

    Cora's family had warned her against the marriage. They had been as opposed to her marrying to a higher station in life as many families might have been against a girl marrying beneath herself. The Brightons had a fierce pride and a stubborn insistence that a Brighton should earn his way and not marry or inherit wealth. Fortunately, Aunt Cora had followed the dictates of her own heart and had ignored them all.

    The marriage had been happy. Alex and Cora Brucker behaved like newlyweds throughout the years, right up until his death two years before. Money was never a problem. Neither was his business, for he had inherited it when it was running smoothly and needed to spend only one or two days a week attending to the larger details. Richard presented no source of conflict for his step-mother. Though not of Cora's blood, he was always polite to her, obedient, free with his love. He remained their only child, and the years passed un-marred.

    Engaged in such thoughts, she came to the archway into the drawing room before she realized it. Aunt Cora was placing a silver tray of sandwiches and chips upon a low cocktail table, engrossed in making the decorative garnish as well-placed as possible. Behind her, on a deep green sofa, two blonde-haired and blue-eyed children sat. Though one was a boy and one a girl, they were quite obviously twins. They saw her in the doorway and stared at her. They did not smile or speak, but watched her cautiously.

    Like shy children, she told herself.

    Yet she couldn't stop wondering if their silence and their inspection of her were more than that.

    But what?

    Neither Freya nor Frank looked like a child who was supposedly under the sinister influence of some mysterious family curse-nor like a child with deep psychological problems. They were healthy, tending toward chubbiness, with eyes that were quick and alert and almost too blue to be real. She smiled at them to show her own desire to make friends.

    Neither child returned her smile.

    In that instant, Cora caught sight of her and stood abruptly erect, startled. She was a lovely woman who looked a decade younger than her fifty-one years. Her dark hair was tinted with gray that she chose not to conceal with some artificial rinse. There were no wrinkles in her face, no weariness of age in her eyes. She took three quick steps from the table and embraced her niece.

    For the first time in months, Jenny felt as if she were safe. Here were arms to encircle her and someone to love and be loved by. Since Grandmother Brighton's death, the world had seemed more and more inhospitable as time went by. She had the silly, impossible wish never to have to leave the Brucker Estate again.