The Hunter Page 0,19

way out of here.

She went to the window, pulled the heavy peacock-blue curtain aside. Then she froze.

At first she simply stared, breath catching in her throat, feeling her eyes go wide like a deer's. Then she whipped the curtain back in place, jerking it past the closing point, pressing it against the window with her hands. She could hardly make herself let go of the velvety material, but she did, and then she backed away quickly. She didn't want to see outside again.

A landscape of elemental terror. Like something out of the Ice Age-as painted by a mad impressionist. A blizzard with huge ungainly shapes lumbering through it. Blue and green flashes like lightning giving glimpses of deformed creatures crawling over icy ground. Twisted pinnacles of rock corkscrewing up toward a blank white sky.

She wouldn't survive a minute out there.

When the devil goes ice-skating, Jenny thought. So what if Hell's already frozen?

Oh, how funny. Michael would appreciate that. She felt tears sting her nose, her eyes. She stood hunched and miserable, hugging her own elbows in the center of the empty room. She had never felt so alone-or so frightened.

She missed her friends desperately. Dee's courage Michael's humor, Audrey's practicality. Even Summer would give Jenny someone to protect, and as for Zach-she wanted to find out what was wrong with him. In all the years she'd known him, she'd never seen him act this way.

But most of all she wanted Tom.

Tom, she thought fiercely. He's the one in trouble. Not you. He's going through God knows what, getting Julian's special attention. And you have no business standing here moaning while that's happening.

The yelling at herself actually helped-it shut up the babbling little voices in the back of her mind telling her that she couldn't deal.

Julian had said it depended on her.

All right. She was calmer now. She knew she had to start moving-but where? Jenny tried to gather her scattered thoughts, to remember the configuration of the paper house. The parlor had been off a long central gangway on the first floor. At the end of that hallway there had been a staircase.

Upstairs, Julian had said.

Jenny found herself moving through the candle-lit hallway, past gold-framed portraits which looked down disapprovingly from the walls.

She looked up at the stairway.

It was wide, carpeted down the middle. There was absolutely nothing strange about it-and Jenny couldn't force herself to put a foot on it.

I could turn around and run, she thought. It was impossible to realize-emotionally-that she couldn't just go back into the parlor and find a way home.

But intellectually she knew there was nothing in the parlor to help her. And she didn't want to think what she might see if she opened the front door of this house.

So you can stay here and hide, or you can go up. You have to choose.

She put a foot on the stairway. It was solid. Like any stairway. She started climbing toward the darkness at the top.

The hallway on the second floor seemed to stretch on forever in both directions, so dark that Jenny couldn't see any end to it. There were candles in brass candle holders at intervals on the walls, but they were far apart and didn't give much light. Jenny didn't remember any hall in the paper house looking this way. In fact, what this place really looked like was the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. Like every other kid in southern California, Jenny had been to Disneyland so often she knew it by heart, and she recognized the creepy wallpaper.

But that was ridiculous. Why should it look like that?

She walked with fingertips brushing the wall. A dozen steps down the hall she saw something far ahead in the dimness, moving under the flickering light of a candle.

Jenny didn't know whether to run toward it or away. Then she noticed something familiar in the long legs and the greyhound build of the figure.

"Dee!"

Dee barely glanced up as Jenny reached her. She was wrestling with a door which bulged just like a door in the Haunted Mansion, the one that had always scared Jenny as a child. A lot of the things in the Haunted Mansion were simply silly, and a lot of others were mind-boggling-but only one thing there had ever really frightened Jenny when she was young ... and that was a door.

A closed door, which bulged in the middle as if a great weight was leaning on it from the inside, deforming the wood, expanding, relaxing. While all the time