Fear Nothing

back, then straight down the stairs.
        Superstitiously avoiding contact with the doppelganger doll, stepping wide of it, I went to the open door of the room opposite the hall bath. A guest bedroom, simply furnished.
        Tucking my capped head down and squinting against the glare from the ceiling fixture, I saw no intruder. The bed had side rails and a footboard behind which the spread was tucked, so the space under it was revealed.
        Instead of a closet, there were a long walnut bureau with banks of drawers and a massive armoire with a pair of side-by-side drawers below and two tall doors above. The space behind the armoire doors was large enough to conceal a grown man with or without a chain saw.
        Another doll awaited me. This one was sitting in the center of the bed, arms outstretched like the arms of the Christopher Snow doll behind me, but in the shrouding brightness, I couldn't tell what it held in its pink hands.
        I switched off the ceiling light. One nightstand lamp remained lit to guide me.
        I backed into the guest room, prepared to respond with gunfire to anyone who appeared in the hall.
        The armoire hulked at the edge of my vision. If the doors began to swing open, I wouldn't even need the laser sighting to chop holes in them with a few 9-millimeter rounds.
        I bumped into the bed and turned from both the hall door and the armoire long enough to check out the doll. In each upturned hand was an eye. Not a hand-painted eye. Not a glass-button eye taken from the dollmaker's supply cabinet. A human eye.
        The armoire doors hung unmoving on piano hinges.
        Nothing but time moved in the hall.
        I was as still as ashes in an urn, but life continued within me: My heart raced as it had never raced before, no longer merely revving nicely, but spinning with panic in its squirrel cage of ribs.
        Once more I looked at the offering of eyes that filled those small china hands - bloodshot brown eyes, milky and moist, startling and startled in their lidless nakedness. I knew that one of the last things ever seen through them was a white van pulling to a stop in response to an upturned thumb. And then a man with a shaven head and one pearl earring.
        Yet I was sure that I wasn't dealing with that same bald man here, now, in Angela's house. This game-playing wasn't his style, this taunting, this hide-and-seek. Quick, vicious, violent action was more to his taste.
        Instead, I felt as though I had stumbled into a sanitarium for sociopathic youth, where psychotic children had savagely overthrown their keepers and, giddy with freedom, were now at play. I could almost hear their hidden laughter in other rooms: macabre silvery giggles stifled behind small cold hands.
        I refused to open the armoire.
        I had come up here to help Angela, but there was no helping her now or ever. All I wanted was to get downstairs, outside, onto my bicycle, and away.
        As I started toward the door, the lights went out. Someone had thrown a breaker in a junction box.
        This darkness was so bottomless that it didn't welcome even me. The windows were heavily draped, and the milk-pitcher moon couldn't find gaps through which to pour itself. All was blackness on blackness.
        Blindly, I rushed toward the door. Then I angled to one side of it when I was overcome by the conviction that someone was in the hall and that I would encounter the thrust of a sharp blade at the threshold.
        I stood with my back to the bedroom wall, listening. I held my breath but was unable to quiet my heart, which clattered like horses' hooves on cobblestones, a runaway parade of horses, and I felt betrayed by my own body.
        Nevertheless, over the thundering stampede of my heart, I heard the creak of the piano hinges. The armoire doors were coming open.
         Jesus .
        It was a prayer, not a curse. Or maybe both.
        Holding the Glock in a two-hand grip again, I aimed toward where I thought the big armoire stood. Then I reconsidered and swung the muzzle three inches to the left. Only to swing it immediately back to the right.
        I was disoriented in the absolute blackness. Although I was certain that I would hit the armoire, I couldn’t be sure that I would put the round straight through the center of the space above the two drawers. The first shot had to count, because the muzzle flash would give away my