hail, like the downstairs windows all being assaulted at once. Brendan and Laurel bolted up from the couch, staring into the dark, stupefied, paralyzed. The crashing went on, accelerating, deafening, and ending with a crash that was dissonantly musical, like a piano being dropped from a great height.
Then silence … just the sound of their fast, harsh breathing.
Brendan was already reaching for his sweater, which had somehow come off, and Laurel pulled her sleep shirt back down over her breasts and her leggings back up around her hips, and they were running in the hall for the main stairs.
Brendan made it down first and was already disappearing through the archway into the great room as Laurel cleared the landing of the stairs.
She ran down after him … and halted in the archway when she felt a sharp crackle of energy, like static. She gasped aloud, not sure what she’d felt. She blinked to focus.
In front of her the great room was a vast stretch of empty dark space—there was not even moonlight through the windows. The piano was a black shape in the corner of the room, where it had always been—and perfectly intact. The room was darker than it should have been but she could not see why.
Brendan stood in the middle of the room, looking around him—at the piano, at the ceiling, at the walls.
“Was it in here?”
Laurel found her voice. “I … don’t know … I thought so …”
Brendan bolted across the room and disappeared into the dining room.
Laurel rushed across the floor after him, and gasped in terror at the sight of a white shape running beside her—then realized she was seeing her own reflection in the mirrors on the long front wall.
She stopped again in the door of the dining room.
Brendan paced the room beside the table, staring around in the dark at the clock, the mantel, the wood stove, the windows, the ceiling. “Nothing here, either.”
A shadow loomed up in the opposite doorway and Laurel bit back a scream. It was Tyler, sleepily mussed but eyes wide. “What the fuck?”
“Did you see anything?” Brendan shouted at him.
There was a sound behind Laurel and she whirled again, to see Katrina in a baby doll nightgown, looking groggy, only half-awake, standing in the middle of the great room. “What happened?” she said, her voice fuzzy.
They all stood, staring at each other. The silence was deafening.
Then Laurel gasped aloud, her hand to her mouth, as the frozen grandfather clock in the corner began to tick.
Simultaneously a beeping started in the dark, faint, muffled. Brendan shoved a hand in his pocket and pulled out an object that Laurel realized was his EMF reader. He held it up in the center of the room. It continued to beep steadily, louder. “EMF is nine,” Brendan said feverishly, reading the red numbers on the digital screen. He moved around to different spots in the room, the grandfather clock. “Nine … ten …” The beeping continued, shrilly.
“It’s high,” Tyler said warily. Laurel turned from the grandfather clock and came to a halt before the mantel, in front of the antique clock in the glass dome. Her heart plummeted as she saw it had started ticking as well, much more faintly. Both clocks …
Brendan darted back into the great room and as the others followed he paced the room with his EMF reader, monitoring the levels. “Eight, nine … eleven …”
Tyler grabbed another EMF reader from the table beside the monitors and switched it on. It immediately started beeping shrilly in counterpoint with Brendan’s. Tyler walked the room on the opposite side. “Nine … ten … the whole room is hot.”
Brendan crossed to the equipment caddy and they all crowded in front of the bank of monitors. The beeping continued from the EMF readers, and Brendan said harshly to Tyler, “Shut it off,” as he clicked off his own. Tyler followed suit. Brendan backed up the recordings for the cameras in both rooms and the group stood tensely, watching the double screens as the video recorders replayed.
Each showed a fuzzy picture of a dark room, the great room and the dining room, with faint video glow. After interminable minutes there was the sudden frenzied crashing through the speakers. The sound levels jumped crazily; but the video picture of the rooms didn’t change at all. Brendan leaned closer, staring at the screen. “I don’t see anything.”
“Nothing,” Tyler agreed tensely, his eyes glued to the screen.
Onscreen there was a sudden muffled pounding and Brendan ran