Winter Moon

staircase at the back of the house. Just an ordinary night, a dream, a bad case of jumpy nerves. She put one hand on the knob, the other on the thumb-turn of the dead-bolt lock. The brass hardware was cool under her fingers.
        She remembered the urgent need that had possessed her in the dream: Let it in, let it in, let it in. That had been a dream. This was reality.
        People who couldn't tell them apart were housed in rooms with padded walls, tended by nurses with fixed smiles and soft voices. Let it in.
        She disengaged the lock, turned the knob, hesitated. Let it in.
        Exasperated with herself, she yanked open the door. She'd forgotten the stairwell lights would be off. That narrow shaft was windowless, no ambient light leached into it from outside. The red radiance in the bedroom was too weak to cross the threshold.
        She stood face-to-face with perfect darkness, unable to tell if anything loomed on the upper steps or even on the landing immediately before her. Out of the gloom wafted the repulsive odor that she'd eradicated two days before with hard work and ammonia water, not strong but not as faint as before, either: the vile aroma of rotting meat.
        Maybe she had only dreamed that she'd awakened but was still in the grip of the nightmare. Her heart slammed against her breastbone, her breath caught in her throat, and she groped for the light switch, which was on her side of the door. If it had been on the other side, she might not have had the courage to reach into that coiled blackness to feel for it.
        She missed it on the first and second tries, dared not look away from the darkness before her, felt blindly where she recalled having seen it, almost shouted at Toby to wake up and run, at last found the switch-thank God-clicked it. Light. The deserted landing. Nothing.there. Of course. What else?
        Empty steps curving down and out of sight. A stair tread creaked below. Oh, Jesus. She stepped onto the landing. She wasn't wearing slippers. The wood was cool and rough under her bare feet. Another creak, softer than before.
        Settling noises. Maybe. She moved off the landing, keeping her left hand against the concave curve of the outer wall to steady herself.
        Each step that she descended brought a new step into view ahead of her.
        At the first glimpse of anyone, she would turn and run back up the stairs, into Toby's room, throw the door shut, snap the dead bolt in place. The lock couldn't be opened from the stairwell, only from inside the house, so they would be safe. From below came a furtive click, a faint thud-as of a door being pulled shut as quietly as possible.
        Suddenly she was less disturbed by the prospect of confrontation than by the possibility that the episode would end inconclusively. Needing to know, one way or the other, Heather shook off timidity. She ran down the stairs, making more than enough noise to reveal her presence, along the convex curve of the inner wall, around, around, into the vestibule at the bottom. Deserted. She tried the door to the kitchen.
        It was locked and required a key to be opened from this side. She had no key. Presumably, an intruder would not have one, either.
        The other door led to the back porch. On this side, the dead bolt operated with a thumb-turn. It was locked. She disengaged it, pulled open the door, stepped onto the porch. Deserted. And as far as she could see, no one was sprinting away across the backyard. Besides, although an intruder would not have needed a key to exit by that door, he would have needed one to lock it behind him, for it operated only with a key from the outside.
        Somewhere an owl issued a mournful interrogative. Windless, cold, and humid, the night air seemed not like that of the outdoors but like the dank and ever so slightly fetid atmosphere of a cellar. She was alone.
        But she didn't feel alone.
        She felt… watched.. "For God's sake, Heth," she said, "what the hell's the matter with you?" She retreated into the vestibule and locked the door. She stared at the gleaming brass thumb-turn, wondering if her imagination had seized on a few perfectly natural noises to conjure a threat that had even less substance than a ghost.
        The rotten smell lingered. Yes, well, perhaps the ammonia water had not been able to banish the odor for more than a day or two. A rat or another small animal might be dead and decomposing