Demon Child

she was beginning to grow fond of Hollycross and of their daily rambles about the estate, the horse had died. And, again, the death had been a violent one. Perhaps Freya was not the possessed soul. Perhaps it was Jenny Brighton who drew disaster like a lightning rod.
        These and other terrible thoughts fled across her mind. She knew they were doing her no good, but she could not ignore them.
        At that moment, the door opened. Cora came in, closed it gently behind her. “Are you feeling better, Jenny?” she asked. She looked very haggard herself.
        “A little,” Jenny lied.
        Cora sat on the foot of the bed, patted her niece's knee where it rested beneath the blanket. “We've gotten in touch with Dr. Malmont. He'll be along in about fifteen minutes now.”
        The woman sounded so achingly exhausted that Jenny felt a little guilty about adding to her aunt's concerns. She sat up a little straighter in the bed and brushed her dark hair back from her face. She tried a smile, then opted for a bland expression when she realized the smile must look very forced.
        “You look tired,” she told Cora. “You should have Dr. Malmont give you something.”
        “I'll be all right. But, I swear, if any more of those real estate brokers come around, I'm going to beat them off with a broom!” She wiped a hand across tired eyes, smiled. “I guess they're only trying to do their job. But we've told them again and again that we don't want to sell the estate. Can you picture all this lovely woodland built up with motels and gas stations to service that ugly superhighway of theirs? That picture, on top of our present troubles, is enough to make me sick!”
        “What has Richard done about-about Hollycross?” Jenny asked.
        “He called a veterinarian in town. They just got finished putting her in the vet's truck. Richard's acting quite mysterious about it, won't let anyone enter the stable, won't let Harold clean it out. In fact he gave Harold express orders to leave everything as it is.”
        That seemed odd. The sooner the blood was cleaned up and fresh straw put down, the sooner the stables would lose the aura of horror that it now held for all of them.
        “We're having top halves put on the other three stall doors. Richard plans to chain lock them tonight and keep the keys in his room. He believes someone had to open the door for the-wolf, or whatever.”
        “Not if it was a-well that kind of a wolf,” Jenny said. “Then no one would have had to open the door for it, would they?”
        “But Richard doesn't believe in curses,” Cora said.
        Anna did not join in the conversation at all, but kept her head tilted, busily juggling the following week's menu again.
        “But you still do,” Jenny said.
        “Yes. I believe.”
        Jenny couldn't say for certain what she herself believed. There were too many conflicting terrors loose in her mind to be able to pick one that was dominant.
        “For one thing,” Cora said, staring out the window at the noon sun, “we didn't hear anything last night. In all that terrible battle between Hollycross and the- the thing, we heard nothing. Hollycross seems not even to have whinnied. And if she tried to return the attack, there's no sign of it. Her hooves did not deal any damage out there.”
        Jenny had just long enough to contemplate the meaning of these details before Dr. Malmont arrived, huffing and puffing, cursing the number of steps from one floor of the Brucker mansion to another.
        “People must have been healthier in the previous century,” he said, his face scarlet as he dropped his bag on a chair beside Jenny's bed. “You'd have to have the constitution of an ox to go up and down those stairs every day of the week!”
        He was such a comical character-perhaps intentionally-that he helped to take Jenny's mind off the dark and unexplainable affairs of the household. His tie was askew, his shirt collar slightly open.
        She said, “Maybe people in the last century didn't ride everywhere in a car and didn't drink too many martinis or eat too many high calorie foods. Did they have potato chips back then, for instance?”
        Malmont looked down at his bulging paunch, then up at Jenny with mock consternation on his face. “Young lady, are you inferring that I have not kept myself physically fit?”
        “Oh, no!” Jenny said, exaggerating her