Dark Rivers of the Heart

from the latter of which peer vaguely luminous faces with eerie expressions as inscrutable as the ideograms Of an alien language evolved on a world millions of light-years from earth.
        In the kitchen, the honed-limestone floor is cold beneath my feet.
        During the long day and all night it has absorbed the chillfrom the freon-cooled air, and now it steals the heat from my soles.
        Beside the back door, a all red light burns on the security-system keypad.
        In the readout window are three words in radiant green letters: opened AND SECURE. I key in the code to disable the system. The red light turns green. The words change: READY TO ARM.
        This is no ordinary farmhouse. It isn't the home of folks who earn their livingfrom the bounty of the land and who have simple tastes.
        There are treasures within-fine furnishings and art-and even in rural Colorado, precautions must be taken.
        I disengage both deadbolts, open the door, and step onto the back porch, out of the frigid house, into the sultry July night. I walk barefoot across the boards to, the steps, down to theflagstone patio that surrounds the swimming pool, past the darkly glimmering water in the pool, into the yard, almost like a boy sleepwalking while in a dream, drawn through the silence by the remembered cry.
        The ghostly silver face of the full moon behind me casts its reflection on every blade of grass, so the lawn appears to be filmed by a frost far out of season.
        Strangely, I am suddenly afraid not merely for myself but for my mother, although she has been deadfor more than six years and is far beyond the reach of any danger My fear becomes so intense that I am halted by it.
        Halfway across the backyard, I stand pale and still in the uncertain silence. my moonshadow is a blot on the false frost before me.
        Ahead of me looms the barn, where no animals or hay or tractors have been kept for at least fifteen years, since before I was born. To anyone driving past on the county road, the property looks like a farm, but it isn't what it appears to be.
        Nothing is what it appears to be.
        The night is hot, and sweat beads on my face and chest.
        Nevertheless, the stubborn chill is beneath my skin and in my blood and in the deepest hollows of my boyish bones, and the muggy heat can't dispel it.
        I remember too clearly the late-winter coldness of the black day in March, six years ago, when they found my mother after she had been missing for three days. Rather they had found her brutalized body, crumpled in a ditch along a back road, eighty miles from home, where she had been dumped by the sonofabitch who kidnapped and killed her Only eight years old, I'd been too young to understand the full meaning of death. And no one dared tell me, that day, how savagely she'd been treated, how terribly she had suffered; those were horrors still to be revealed to me by a few of my schoolmates-who had the capacity for cruelty that is possessed only by certain children and by those adults who, on some primitive level, have never matured. Yet, even in my youth and innocence, I had understood enough of death to realize at once that I would never see my mother again, and the chill of that March day had been the most penetrating cold that I'd ever known.
        Now I stand on the moonlit lawn, wondering why my thoughts leap repeatedly to my lost mother, why the eerie cry that I heard when I leaned out my bedroom window strikes me as both infinitely strange and familiar, why I fear for my mother even though she's dead, a d why I fear so intensely for my own life when the summer night holds no immediate threat that I can see.
        I begin to move again, toward the barn, which has become the focus of my attention, though initially I had thought that the cry had come from some animal out in the fields or in the lower hills. My shadow floats ahead of me, so that no step I take is on the carpet of moonlight but, instead, into a darkness of my own making.
        Instead of going directly to the huge main doors in the south wall of the barn, in which a smaller, man-size door is inset, I obey instinct and head toward the southeast corner, crossing the macadam driveway that leads past the house and garage. In grass again, I round the corner of the barn and follow the east wall, stealthy in my bare feet, treading on the cushion of my moonshadow all the way to the northeast