3

Don and Ricky Hawthorne were alone on the staircase. "It didn't used to be like this," Ricky said. "Not at all, you know. This place used to be so beautiful, then. The rooms downstairs-and her room, up there on the landing. Just beautiful."

"So were Alma's rooms," Don said. He and Ricky could hear Sears's footsteps on the boards of the lower room. The sound brought a new awareness flooding across Ricky's features. "What is it?"

"Nothing."

"Tell me. Your whole face changed."

Ricky blushed. "This is the house we dream about. Our nightmares are set here. Bare boards, empty rooms -the sound of something moving around, like Sears just now, down below. That's how the nightmare begins. When we dream it, we're in a bedroom-up there." He pointed up the staircase. "On the top floor." He went up a few steps. "I have to go up there. I have to see the room. It might help to-to stop the nightmare."

"I'll go with you," Don said.

When they reached the landing, Ricky stopped short "Didn't Peter tell you this was where-?" He pointed to a dark smear down the side of the wall.

"Where Bate killed Jim Hardie." Don swallowed involuntarily. "Let's not stay here any longer than we have to."

"I don't mind splitting up," Ricky hastily said. "Why don't you take Eva's old bedroom and the rooms on the next landing, and I'll prowl around on the top floor? It'll go faster that way. If I find anything, I'll call for you. I want to get out of here too-I can't stand being here."

Don nodded, agreeing with him wholeheartedly. Ricky continued up the stairs, and Don climbed to a half-landing and swung open the door to Eva Galli's bedroom.

Bare, desolate; then the noises of an invisible crowd: hushing feet and whispers, rattling papers. Don hesitantly took a step deeper into the empty room, and the door crashed shut behind him.

"Ricky?" he said, and knew that his voice was no louder than the whispers behind him. The dim light guttered; and from the moment he could no longer see the walls, Don felt that he was in a much larger room -the walls and ceiling had flown out, expanded, leaving him in a psychic space he did not know how to leave. A cold mouth pressed against his ear and said or thought the word "Welcome." He swung around to the source of the sound, thinking belatedly that the mouth, like the greeting, had been only a thought. His fist met air.

As if playfully to punish him, someone tripped him, and he landed painfully on hands and knees. A carpet met his hands. This gradually took on color-dark blue -and he realized that he could see again. Don lifted his head and saw a white-haired man in a blazer the color of the carpet and gray slacks above mirror-polished black loafers standing before him: the blazer covered a prosperous little paunch. The man smiled down in a rueful fashion and offered him a hand; behind him other men moved. Don knew immediately who he was.

"Have a little accident, Don?" he asked. "Here. Take my hand." He pulled him upright. "Glad you could make it. We were waiting for you."

"I know who you are," Don said. "Your name is Robert Mobley."

"Why, of course. And you read my memoir. Though I wish you could have been more complimentary about the writing. No matter, my boy, no matter. No apologies necessary."

Don was looking around the room, which had a long, slightly pitched floor ending at a small stage. There were no doors he could see, and the pale walls rose almost to cathedral height: way up, tiny lights flashed and winked. Under this false sky, fifty or sixty people milled about, as if at a party. At the top end of the room, where a small bar had been set up, Don saw Lewis Benedikt, wearing a khaki jacket and carrying a bottle of beer. He was talking to a gray-suited old man with sunken cheeks and bright, tragic eyes who must have been Dr. John Jaffrey.

"Your son must be here," Don guessed.

"Shelby? Indeed he is. That's Shelby over there." He nodded in the direction of a boy in his late teens, who smiled back at them. "We're all here for the entertainment which promises to be very exciting."

"And you were waiting for me."

"Well, Donald, without you none of this could have been arranged."

"I'm getting out of here."

"Leave? Why, my boy, you can't! You'll have to let the show roll on, I'm afraid-you've already noticed there are no doors here. And there's nothing to fear- nothing here can harm you. It's all entertainment, you see-mere shadows and pictures. Only that."

"Go to hell," Don said. "This is some kind of charade she set up."

"Amy Monckton, you mean? Why, she's only a child. You can't imagine-"

But Don was already walking away toward the side of the theater. "It's no good, dear boy," Mobley called after him. "You're going to have to stay with us until it's over." Don pressed his hands against the wall, aware that everybody in the room was looking at him. The wall was covered in a pale felt-like material, but beneath the fabric was something cold and hard as iron. He looked up to the winking dots of light. Then he pounded the wall with the flat of his hand-no depression, no hidden door, nothing but a flat sealed surface.

The invisible lights dimmed, as did the imitation stars. Two men took him, one holding an arm, the other a shoulder. They forcibly turned him to face the stage, on which a single spotlight shone. In the middle of the spot stood a placard board. The first placard read:

RABBITFOOT DE PEYSER PRODUCTIONS

TAKES PRIDE IN

PRESENTING

A hand dipped into the light and removed the sign.

A SHORT WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

The curtain went up to reveal a television set. Don thought it was blank until he noticed details on the white screen-the red brick of a chimney, the "snow" which was real snow. Then the picture jumped into life for him.

It was a high-angled shot of Montgomery Street, taken from over the roof of Anna Mostyn's house. Immediately after he recognized the setting, the characters appeared. He, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne struggled up the middle of Montgomery Street: he and Ricky looking at the house for as long as they were in frame, Sears looking down as if consciously to give contrast to the shot. There was no sound, and Don could not remember what they had said to each other before marching toward the house. Three faces in fast-cut closeups: their eyebrows crusted with white, they looked like soldiers conducting a mopping-up operation in some Arctic war. Ricky's tired face was obviously that of a man with a bad cold. He was suffering: it was much clearer to Don now than it had been outside the house.

Then a shot of his reaching in through the broken window. An exterior camera followed the three men into the house, tracking them through the kitchen and into the dark hallway. More unheard conversation; a third camera picked up Don and Ricky climbing the stairs, Ricky pointing to the bloodstain. On Ricky's civilized face was the expression of pain he had seen. They parted, and the camera left Don just as he pushed at the door to Anna Mostyn's bedroom.

Don uneasily watched the camera following Ricky up the stairs. A jump-cut to the end of an empty corridor: Ricky seen in silhouette pausing on a landing, then going up to the top floor. Another jump cut: Ricky entering the top floor, trying the first door and entering a room.

Inside the room now: Ricky came through the door with the camera watching him like a hidden assailant. Ricky breathing heavily, looking at the room with open mouth and widening eyes-the room of the nightmare, then, as he had guessed. The camera began to creep toward him. Then it, or the creature it represented, sprang.

Two hands gripped Ricky's neck, choking him. Ricky fought, pushing at his murderer's wrists, but was too weak to break his grip. The hands tightened, and Ricky began to die: not cleanly, as on the television programs this "commercial" imitated, but messily, with streaming eyes and bleeding tongue. His back arched helplessly, fluids streamed from his eyes and nose, his face began to turn black.

Peter Barnes said they can make you see things, Don thought, that's all they're doing now…

Ricky Hawthorne died in front of him, in color on a twenty-six inch screen.