Midnight

flapping profusion. Some flew against the walls, as if struck blind, battering insistently until they broke their necks, or until they snapped their wings and fell to the ground where they fluttered and squeaked until they were exhausted or had perished. Others, equally frenzied, found open doorways and windows through which they entered without damaging themselves.
    Though wildlife within a two-hundred-yard radius had heard the call, only the nearer animals responded obediently. Rabbits leaped, squirrels scurried, coyotes loped, foxes dashed, and raccoons waddled in that curious way of theirs, through wet grass and rain-bent weeds and mud, toward the source of the siren song. Some were predators and some, by nature, were timid prey, but they moved side by side without conflict. It might have been a scene from an animated Disney film—the neighborly and harmonious folk of field and forest responding to the sweet guitar or harmonica music of some elderly black man who, when they gathered around him, would tell them stories of magic and great adventure. But there was no kindly, tale-spinning Negro where they were going, and the music that drew them was dark, cold, and without melody.

2
    While Sam struggled to lift Harry up the ladder and into the attic, Tessa and Chrissie took the wheelchair to the basement garage. It was a heavy-duty motorized model, not a light collapsible chair, and would not fit through the trap. Tessa and Chrissie parked it just inside the big garage door, so it looked as if Harry had gotten this far in his chair and had left the house, perhaps in a friend's car.
    "You think they'll fall for it?" Chrissie asked worriedly.
    "There's a chance," Tessa said.
    "Maybe they'll even think Harry left town yesterday before the roadblocks went up."
    Tessa agreed, but she knew—and suspected Chrissie knew—that the chance of the ruse working was slim. If Sam and Harry really had been as confident in the attic trick as they pretended, they would have wanted Chrissie to be tucked up there, too, instead of sent out into the storm-lashed, nightmare world of Moonlight Cove.
    They rode the elevator back to the third floor, where Sam was just folding the ladder and pushing the trapdoor into place. Moose watched him curiously.
    "Five forty-two," Tessa said, checking her watch.
    Sam snatched up the closet pole, which he'd had to remove to pull down the trap, and he reinserted it into its braces. "Help me put the clothes back."
    Shirts and slacks, still on hangers, had been transferred to the bed. Working together, passing the garments like amateur firemen relaying pails of water, they quickly restored the closet to its former appearance.
    Tessa noticed that traces of fresh blood were soaking through the thick gauze bandage on Sam's right wrist. His wounds were pulling open from the exertion. Although they weren't mortal injuries, they must hurt a lot, and anything that weakened or distracted him during the ordeal ahead decreased their chances of success.
    Closing the door, Sam said, "God, I hate to leave him there."
    "Five forty-six," Tessa reminded him.
    While Tessa pulled on a leather jacket, and while Chrissie slipped into a too-large but waterproof blue nylon windbreaker that belonged to Harry, Sam reloaded his revolver. He had used up all the rounds in his pockets while at the Coltranes'. But Harry owned a .45 revolver and a .38 pistol, both of which he had taken with him into the attic, and he had a box of ammunition for each, so Sam had taken a score or so of the .38 cartridges.
    Holstering the gun, he went to the telescope and studied the streets that lay west and south toward Central School. "Still lots of activity," he reported.
    "Patrols?" Tessa asked.
    "But also lots of rain. And fog's coming in faster, thicker."
    Thanks to the storm, an early twilight was upon them and already fading. Although some bleak light still burned above the churning clouds, night might as well have fallen, for cloaks of gloom lay over the wet and huddled town.
    "Five fifty," Tessa said.
    Chrissie said, "If Mr. Talbot's at the top of their list, they could be here any minute."
    Turning from the telescope, Sam said, "All right. Let's go."
    Tessa and Chrissie followed him out of the bedroom. They took the stairs down to the first floor.
    Moose used the elevator.

3
    Shaddack was a child tonight.
    Circling repeatedly through Moonlight Cove, from the sea to the hills, from Holliwell Road on the north to Paddock Lane on the south,