Demon Child

checked the subject index of the volumes and began absorbing everything they had to say about curses and werewolves.
        At eight-thirty, Harold came to collect her tray and to ask if she would be wanting anything to snack on later. The commotion downstairs seemed not to have interested or bothered him in the least. He was the same dignified old man as he had been before.
        Twice, she gave him openings to talk about the ruckus between Cora and Richard.
        Twice, he pretended not to catch what she was hinting at, as if the argument had been of little note, even though the volume of it had suggested some degree of bitterness.
        At last, she realized that the only way to find out what she wanted was to bluntly ask him.
        “The fight,” she said. “What were they arguing about?”
        “Fight?” Harold asked, raising snowy eyebrows.
        “I heard parts of it,” Jenny told him.
        “Oh,” Harold said, “you mean the discussion between Mrs. Brucker and young Richard?”
        He was too much the gentleman to admit that his employers had been engaged in the next thing to a donnybrook.
        “That's it,” Jenny agreed, smiling to herself.
        “It was over Miss Freya,” Harold said.
        He picked up her tray, looked about for a misplaced glass or napkin, found nothing.
        “And?” Jenny asked.
        “Mrs. Brucker has agreed to allow a psychiatrist to come live here in the mansion and treat the child. Richard has been busy, since, arranging that with Dr. Malmont.”
        She sensed that the old man did not want to speak about things of this nature, that he considered it some minor betrayal of confidence, even though Cora and Richard's argument had been so loud. When he ascertained that she was not wanting anything, he departed with the dinner tray.
        For a time, Jenny lay there wondering about the wisdom of subjecting a child so young to the grueling experience of psychotherapy. She tended to side with Cora. Love alone might do the job, with much less of a drain on the little girl than cold, professional treatment might be.
        She told herself there was nothing she could do about it.
        She returned to the books she had been reading. These disturbed her more than they helped. If she had been pre-disposed to laugh off the idea of werewolves and the supernatural, the book gave her material for second thoughts. It was unsettling to discover that the Church in Europe did not laugh off such suggestions, but that it actually contained rituals for the exorcism of such evil spirits. Modern day Rumanians, Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs-all these believed, to one degree or another, in such unlikely things as men who walked as wolves at night, in vampires and ghouls. Indeed, she discovered that many Rumanians slept with dried garlic leaves nailed above each window and door of their houses, to ward off things with fangs that sought victims after the sun had set.
        If such beliefs survived so strongly, even into this industrial age, who was to say they were any less true than the beliefs of, say, the Christian church?
        She read until very late, and she closed the drapes that hung aside the windows, so that the darkness could not watch her through the thin glass.
        The legends of those European countries-and not, incidentally, the stories that originated in them as late as the middle 1960s-were so fascinating that she read on until she fell asleep over the books.
        She slept fitfully. Many times, she half rose from bed, her heart beating furiously, only to drop quickly into troubled slumber again. She whimpered unintelligibly to no one and often kicked out at the covers that seemed to hold her down like heavy wings.
        In the morning, she felt more on edge than ever before, as if she were standing before a monumentally huge jack-in-the-box, waiting tensely for the unexpected moment when it would leap out on a heavy spring, leering at her…

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    6
        
        By the following morning, after she had showered and dressed and lightly perfumed herself, Jenny knew that she wanted to leave the Brucker estate, wanted it more than anything she had ever wanted before. If the unexpected were to be sprung upon her, there was no more likely place for it than this curse-ridden house. The dream-voices of her dead family seemed to return to her, even when she was awake, urging her to flee.
        She had come here, in