Demon Child

weekends, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas. People came from all over. These days, we're all too hurried to have such a leisurely celebration.”
        “You still haven't told me about the curse,” she reminded him. “Excuse me-about the psychiatric problems.”
        Ahead of them, a great road construction truck, smeared with mud, jounced into view around a curve in the road. It was traveling at better than sixty miles an hour. Richard had barely enough time to climb part of the steep bank alongside the road as the mammoth vehicle roared by, rattling and banging as each ripple in the macadam carried the length of it.
        “What a fool way to drive!” Jenny said. She was remembering the nightmare, all the nightmares she had had since Grandmother Brighton had died. If Richard's reflexes had been just a hair less sharp, or if the truck had been moving the slightest bit faster, they both might be badly hurt or dead.
        Richard grumbled. “Foolish, but average for that lot.”
        “They use this road frequently?”
        He backed off the embankment and drove ahead once more. “Ever since the superhighway construction began, fairly near the edge of Brucker property.”
        “All that dirt and noise,” Jenny said. Then she remembered that Aunt Cora would surely have a maid.
        “It's not so bad,” Richard said. “The house sits well into the estate, away from the construction. It's the real-estate speculators and their constant offers for our land that drive us crazy.”
        They turned onto a narrower, better paved road, stopped before an iron gate that said: BRUCKER ESTATE. PRIVATE, KEEP OUT. Richard tapped the car's horn in a rhythm Jenny didn't catch. The gates swung open, let them by, closed behind them.
        She would have been delighted with such gadgetry if the iron gates had not reminded her of iron cemetery gates.
        They passed neatly kept stables and riding rings fenced with white-washed boards. A small lake lay to the right, a coppice of pine trees by its far shore. Under the trees were picnic tables and children's swings. In the rain and fog, the swings looked like the skeletons of long-dead creatures.
        “The house,” Richard said as they rounded a small knoll.
        The house had three floors plus a half attic whose windows were set in a black slate roof. Two wings formed an L with a courtyard and fountain in the nook of the arms. The stone cherubs in the fountain were not spouting any water at the moment.
        Richard parked before the front steps, a leisurely flight of eight, wide marble risers that ended on a granite stoop before tall, oaken main doors. Almost before the sound of the engine died, a rather elderly man in a raincoat came out of those doors. He was shielded by a black umbrella and was carrying a second umbrella which he gave Richard. He rushed around to Jenny's door, opened it and helped her under the protection of his own bumbershoot.
        He was about sixty, lean and wizened with white hair and deep, blue eyes. “I'm Harold, the manservant. You must be Jenny, for you have the Brighton beauty, dark hair and eyes. Will you come with me out of this dreadful weather?”
        “Yes!” she gasped as thunder rumbled in the ever-lowering clouds and the rain seemed to fall twice as fast as it had. Her feet were soaked, and her legs were splattered with mud and water.
        As they stepped onto the first of the marble stairs, someone moaned nearby, loud and prolonged, as if in some terrible sort of agony. It was not exactly the cry of a human being. It was too deep and too loud for that, touched with something that spoke of the supernatural.
        “What is that?” she asked.
        Abruptly, the moan rose to a shrill, wild shriek that cut off without reason in the middle of a note.
        Jenny shivered. She could see no one about who could have made the weird call.
        “Just the wind,” Harold told her. He pointed past the edge of the umbrella at the eaves of the mansion. “If the wind comes too fast from the south, it whistles in the eaves. It can keep you awake nights. Fortunately, the wind hardly ever blows this way.”
        The explanation should have quieted her nerves, but it did not. That cry seemed too filled with emotion to be made by something inanimate. Suddenly, she remembered things that she should have asked Richard. Why had he been late? Why did Catherine, the waitress, fear him so?