Demon Child

up the reins, pulled the horse around and set off in the direction of the sinkholes. She continued murmuring to the horse and soothing it lest another clap of thunder should undo her again.
        The last leg of the journey was through a forested area where they were forced to maintain a less strenuous pace. At least, Jenny thought, the heavy canopy of elms would cut down on the sound of thunder and would all but eliminate the bright lightning.
        As they covered this last quarter of a mile, she had time to think, and she thought-of course-about Walter Hobarth. She realized that, while he had been giving her hints, these past couple weeks, that he was more than a little interested in her, she had done nothing to show him that the affection was reciprocal. She had gone to her room each night, adding up the debits and the credits of the day, wishing against reason that he would come to feel about her as she felt about him -but she had done nothing to show him that she felt the way she did! How stupid!
        Fortunately, this evening when he had been ready to leave the house to follow Richard to the limestone caves, her natural reticence had broken down and she had hugged him. She had been afraid that he was not going to return, and that fear had forced her feelings into the open. Thank God for that much! If she had not hugged him, she would not have felt that pistol in his pocket, and she would never have realized that something unpleasant was going to happen before the night ended.
        They broke out of the trees in the next moment and felt the renewed lash of the rain which had been momentarily softened by the branches of the elms. Ahead was the nightmarish landscape of the sinkholes. Only a few scrub brush and locust trees managed to root and survive in the forbidding terrain. Even they were unhealthy looking, scraggly, their twisted limbs like grasping claws, undecorated by any form of blossom and with a low leaf yield. Masses of smooth, round limestone thrust up in pillars and domes. At other places, the land fell abruptly away into black caverns. There was little grass, and what there was of it was gray-green and wiry.
        A good fifty yards to her left, a stallion was tethered to the low limb of an elm tree which edged the barren land. She did not know whether it was the horse that Richard had ridden or whether Walt had already arrived. But, seeing no other horse about, she preferred to think that she had somehow still managed to arrive before the doctor, though that seemed impossible after the long delay when Tulip had thrown her.
        She dismounted and tied Tulip's reins to the trunk of a young tree nearby, then walked forward into the foreboding limestone miasma ahead. She had gone only a hundred feet when Richard appeared around the bulk of a gray stone pedestal some ten feet wide and eight high.
        “Jenny?” he asked, stopping to look at her more closely.
        Her heart beat faster. She could not see a rifle, but she knew he might have disposed of it if he had already used it.
        “Where's Walter?” she asked.
        “Haven't seen him.”
        “You're sure?”
        “I assure you,” he said, “I'd remember if I saw him or not.” His tone was sarcastic. Then he took command of the situation away from her. “Just what are you doing out there?” he asked.
        For a moment, she did not answer. She could not answer, for her fear was great enough to interfere with the quickness of her wits.
        In a moment, he closed the space between them and stood before her, the rain running from his pale face, droplets of water beaded on the dark lashes above his dark eyes.
        “You shouldn't be out on a night like this. Did anyone come with you?”
        “No,” she said. “Why are you here?”
        Perhaps it was the gloomy atmosphere of the storm or the positively hellish landscape in which they stood.
        Perhaps it was his eyes, seeming to glint from within, boring at her, demanding. Perhaps the accident with Tulip had affected her more than she had realized, had undermined her self-control. Whatever she felt, it drove her to say things to him which she had dared not say earlier, even in the warmth and relative safety of the mansion.
        “I don't trust you,” she said.
        “What?”
        “I don't think anyone should trust you. I think you or someone you hired is behind these things. I think it was you or someone you hired who