The bronze spiral staircase featured a railing in which the balusters were wound through by beautifully wrought vines with gilded leaves. Perhaps it was meant to represent the tree of knowledge.
At the top of the stairs, a bridge connected the two longest sides of the mezzanine. Without hesitation, I went to the left. Upon reaching the end of the bridge, I turned right.
In the southwest corner of the mezzanine, set at an angle between the bookshelves, a heavy wooden door stood under a pediment surmounted by a bronze torch with a gilded flame. I passed through the door into a junction of second-floor hallways.
The invitation to enjoy the public rooms of the main house did not include the second floor. I was abusing the privilege granted to me. I didn’t hesitate to do so. I don’t think I’m really bad, but I’ll admit to being naughty.
Considering that the head of security, Paulie Sempiterno, had so recently expressed the sincere desire to put a bullet in my face, my violation of Mr. Wolflaw’s privacy might result in something worse than a stern lecture about good manners. Caution seemed essential.
As if the very thought of Sempiterno conjured him, his rough voice rose from behind one of the closed doors along the west wing, to my right.
Another voice, more worried and less angry than the security chief’s, was unquestionably that of Chef Shilshom. He evidently had not gone to fetch a forgotten medication in his little apartment in the servants’ wing on the ground floor.
A third voice, quieter than the other two, might have been that of Noah Wolflaw. His bedroom suite lay in the west wing.
I was able to hear only the louder words, but the tenor of the conversation was clearly argumentative. I imagined that Sempiterno wanted to grind me up in a wood-chipper, Shilshom wanted to roast me with onions and carrots before serving me as a peace offering to whatever red-eyed animals prowled Roseland, and Wolflaw couldn’t bring himself to assent to my being either chipped or cooked because he was still enchanted by Annamaria for reasons that even he could not explain.
Although I was tempted to listen at the door, prudence and psychic magnetism turned me away from the voices. I proceeded along the south hallway, in the first half of which all the doors were on the right. Staying on the carpet runner, treading quietly, I was grateful that whatever power guided my feet had never required me to break into a lively dance.
Just before the south wing met the south end of the east wing, I was compelled to a door on the right. I hesitated with my hand on the knob, listening, but I heard no slightest sound beyond.
Entering, I discovered a parlor that was part of a bedroom suite. In a wingback chair sat a boy with wide, staring, all-white eyes that seemed blinded by thick cataracts.
Fifteen
WHEN THE CHILD DID NOT REACT TO ME IN ANY WAY, I quietly closed the door to the hall and stepped farther into the room.
His hands lay in his lap, palms upturned. His lips were slightly parted. Motionless, silent, he might have been dead or comatose.
The parlor and the connecting bedroom that I glimpsed through an open door were not furnished or decorated to the taste of a young boy of eight or nine. A white ceiling of ornate plaster medallions depicting clusters of bristling arrows, walls hung with tapestries featuring complexly patterned borders around scenes of stag hunts, English furniture of a period I couldn’t identify, numerous bronzes of hunting dogs on tables and consoles, and a Persian rug in rich shades of gold and red and brown were decidedly masculine but better suited to a man with decades of sporting pursuits behind him than to a boy of tender years.
The draperies were closed over the windows, and the light came from a table lamp by the sofa and a floor lamp beside the armchair, both with pleated silk shades. Shadows gathered in the corners, but I was confident that the child was alone.
I approached him without eliciting a response and stood staring down at him, wondering about his condition.
The terrible blank eyes were so white that the cataracts allowed no slightest suggestion of the irises and pupils beneath. He appeared to be totally blind.
Although I couldn’t hear him inhale or exhale, his chest rose and fell slightly. His breathing was slow and shallow.
Except for those eerie eyes, he was a good-looking boy with clear pale skin, refined features that suggested he would grow quite handsome in time, and thick dark hair. He might have been a bit small for his age; the armchair dwarfed him, and his feet didn’t reach the floor.
I thought I saw in his features a suggestion of the horse-riding woman, but I could not be certain.
… there’s someone here who’s in great danger and desperately needs you.…
I believed that I had found the person of whom Annamaria had spoken—and the son of the ghost rider. I didn’t know the nature of the danger, however, or what I could do for the boy.
His upturned left hand twitched and the heel of his left shoe bumped twice against the front of the armchair as if a doctor had rapped his kneecap to test his reflexes.
I said, “Can you hear me?”
When he did not reply, I sat on the ottoman in front of his chair. After watching him for a while, I reached out and took hold of his right wrist to time his pulse.
Although he was at rest and breathing slowly, his heart raced: 110 beats per minute. But there was nothing irregular in the rhythm, and he seemed in no serious distress.
His skin was so cold that I pressed his right hand between both of mine to warm it.
He did not at first react, but suddenly his fingers clutched me and squeezed tight. A small gasp escaped him, and he shuddered.
Cataracts were not his problem, after all. His eyes had been rolled farther back in his head than I would have thought possible. The irises descended. They were ginger-brown and clear.
Initially he seemed to stare through me, at something far beyond this room. Gradually his focus changed, and he looked at me, though not with surprise, as though we knew each other or as if nothing could amaze or perplex him in spite of his youth and inexperience.
His fingers relaxed their grip on me, and he withdrew his hand from mine. His frost-pale skin gradually began to color as though with reflected flames, although the nearby fireplace was dark and cold.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He blinked a few times and surveyed the room, as if reminding himself where he was.
“My name’s Odd Thomas. I’m staying in the guesthouse.”
His attention returned to me. His stare was unnervingly direct, especially for a child. “I know.”
“What’s your name?”
Instead of answering, he said, “They told me I’ve got to keep to my rooms as long as you’re here.”
“Who told you?”
“All of them.”
“Why?”
He got up from the chair, and I rose from the ottoman. He went to the fireplace and stood there, staring through the fire screen at the logs stacked on the brass andirons.
After deciding that he might not say any more without being pressed, I asked again, “What’s your name?”
“Their faces melt off their skulls. And their skulls turn black when the air touches them, and all their bones black. And then the black blows away like soot, there isn’t anything left of them.”
The pitch of his voice was that of a boy, but seldom if ever had I heard a child speak so solemnly. And more than solemnity, there was a quality to his speech that chilled me, a sadness that might be despondency, the incapacity for the present exercise of hope, perhaps not yet despair but just one stop up the line from that worse condition.
“Maybe twenty girls in uniforms and kneesocks,” he continued, “walking to school. One second to the next, their clo
thes are on fire, and their hair, and when they try to scream, flames fly out of their mouths.”
I moved to him and put one hand on his slender shoulder. “A nightmare, huh?”
Gazing into the cold firebox, as if seeing burning schoolgirls instead of logs or andirons, he shook his head. “No.”
“A movie, a book,” I said, trying to understand him.
He looked up at me. His eyes were lustrous and dark—and no less haunted by something than Roseland was haunted by the spirit rider and her horse.
“You better hide,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s almost nine o’clock. That’s when she comes back.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Tameed. She comes back at nine o’clock to get my breakfast tray.”
Glancing toward the door, I heard a noise in the hallway.
“You better hide,” the boy repeated. “If they know you’ve seen me, they’ll kill you.”
Sixteen
PAULIE SEMPITERNO HAD SAID HE WANTED TO PUT A bullet in my face because he didn’t like it. Having looked in a mirror often enough, I could understand that motive. But I could not imagine why I should have earned a death sentence merely because I’d seen the boy on the second floor. Although the child was strange, I at once believed his dire warning.
When I fled the parlor through the connecting door to the next room, I saw that the bed was made, which meant Mrs. Tameed might not need to go farther than the front room. But then I spotted the boy’s breakfast tray on a small table, on which also was a stack of books.
Through another doorway, I glimpsed a bathroom. Windows in bathrooms were usually too small to serve as escape routes, which left the tub drain.
As I peered into a walk-in closet, I realized it was no safer than the bathroom. I heard Mrs. Tameed, in the other room, ask the boy if he had finished breakfast, and I stepped into this last possible refuge, leaving the door ajar an inch.