The beast was between them and the front door, and it was padding slowly toward Rosie, as if it had all the time in the world.
Her mother ran out of the kitchen then, then, ran past Rosie—tottered down the moonlit corridor toward the great shadow, her arms flailing. With her thin fists she punched the thing in the ribs. There was a pause, as if the world was holding its breath, and then it turned on her. A blur of motion and Rosie’s mother was down on the ground, while the shadow shook her like a dog with a rag doll between its teeth.
The doorbell rang.
Rosie wanted to call for help but instead she found she was screaming, loudly and insistently. Rosie, when confronted with an unexpected spider in a bathtub, was capable of screaming like a B-movie actress on her first encounter with a man in a rubber suit. Now she was in a dark house containing a shadowy tiger and a potential serial killer, and one, perhaps both, of those entities, had just attacked her mother. Her head thought of a couple of courses of action (the gun: the gun was down in the cellar. She ought to go down and get the gun. Or the door—she could try to get past her mother and the shadow and unlock the front door) but her lungs and her mouth would only scream.
Something banged at the front door. They’re trying to break in, she thought. They won’t get through that door. It’s solid.
Her mother lay on the floor in a patch of moonlight, and the shadow crouched above her, and it threw back its head and it roared, a deep rattling roar of fear and challenge and possession.
I’m hallucinating, thought Rosie with a wild certainty. I’ve been locked up in a cellar for two days and now I’m hallucinating. There is no tiger.
By the same token, she was certain that there was no pale woman in the moonlight, even though she could see her walking down the corridor, a woman with blonde hair and the long, long legs and narrow hips of a dancer. The woman stopped when she reached the shadow of the tiger. She said, “Hello, Grahame.”
The shadow-beast lifted its massive head and growled.
“Don’t think you can hide from me in that silly animal costume,” said the woman. She did not look pleased.
Rosie realized that she could see the window through the woman’s upper body, and she backed up until she was pressing hard against the wall.
The beast growled again, this time a little more uncertainly.
The woman said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, Grahame. I spent my life, my whole life, not believing in ghosts. And then I met you. You let Morris’s career run aground. You steal from us. You murder me. And finally, to add insult to injury, you force me to believe in ghosts.”
The shadowy big-cat-shape was whimpering now, and backing down the hall.
“Don’t think you can avoid me like that, you useless little man. You can pretend to be a tiger all you like. You aren’t a tiger. You’re a rat. No, that’s an insult to a noble and numerous species of rodent. You’re less than a rat. You’re a gerbil. You’re a stoat.”
Rosie ran down the hall. She ran past the shadow-beast, past her fallen mother. She ran through the pale woman, and it felt like she was passing through fog. She reached the front door, and began feeling for the bolts.
In her head or in the world Rosie could hear an argument. Someone was saying,
Pay no attention to her, idiot. She can’t touch you. It’s just a duppy. She’s barely real. Get the girl! Stop the girl!
And someone else was replying,
You certainly do have a valid point here. But I’m not convinced that you’ve taken all the circumstances into account, vis-à-vis, well, discretion, um, better part of valor, if you follow me…
I lead. You follow.
But…
“What I want to know,” said the pale woman, “is just how ghostly you currently are. I mean, I can’t touch people. I can’t really even touch things. I can touch ghosts.”
The pale woman aimed a serious kick at the beast’s face. The shadow-cat hissed and took a step back, and the foot missed it by less than an inch.
The next kick connected, and the beast yowled. Another kick, hard against the place the cat’s shadowy nose would be, and the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.
The corridor was filled with the sound of a dead woman laughing, a laugh of exultation and delight. “Stoat,” said the pale woman’s voice again. “Grahame Stoat.”
A cold wind blew through the house.
Rosie pulled the last of the bolts, and she turned the lock. The front door fell open. There were the beams of flashlights, blinding-bright. People. Cars. A woman’s voice said, “It’s one of the missing tourists.” And then she said, “My God.”
Rosie turned.
In the flashlight’s beam Rosie could see her mother, crumpled on the tiled floor and, beside her, shoeless and unconscious and unmistakably human, Grahame Coats. There was a red liquid splashed all around them, like crimson paint, and Rosie found herself, for a breath, unable to work out what it was.