She slid the phone into her pocket and turned to the panel.
The door was where she'd drawn it. Page forty-seven. Flush with the wall, hinge concealed, cylinder satin-brass. She put her left palm against the panel and turned the key with her right.
The lock gave without sound.
The corridor on the other side was unlit except for an LED strip at the floor, and it smelled of dust and dry paint and the long stale of a passage that had not been used since the last set of photographers. She slipped through. The latch closed behind her with a click smaller than her own breath.
Her shoes came off at the top of the stair. Both. She held them in her left hand by the straps and went down barefoot, the runner under her feet thin as paper.
Four steps down she stopped.
Below her, in the kitchen, two voices held the register men held in a room they had already turned into a trap. The first stood near the island — the click of a phone set face down on stone, the small dry sound of a hand laid flat on a counter. The second man was at the door that gave from the kitchen into the side hall, three steps from where this back stair ended; he shifted weight once and the floorboard under the threshold answered. Outside, at the corner of the house, a fourth body shifted weight on gravel. The gravel made one specific sound she had never heard before from inside a wall.
That left the man she had walked through the master suite with. The one with the face she could not have described twice. He was somewhere above her, and as she stood with the runner under her feet, the ceiling carried his step across the landing of the master floor, one footfall, then another, the spacing of a man who was not searching but waiting to be told where to go.
She could not make out the words from the kitchen. The words did not matter. Two below. One above. One on the gravel. She had brought two visitors into this house. She had counted footsteps, twice. Five. Maybe six.
The kitchen was the wrong way out.
The intake of her breath came up through her diaphragm at a frequency the house did not match — too quick against the slow hum of the refrigeration in the kitchen below, too loud against the dead air of the corridor. The runner under her feet smelled of the dye in the wool. The men in the kitchen — one of them wore cologne, citrus and something sharper, layered over a body underneath that had a sour wet note her tongue half-tasted before her mind found a word for it. Fear. Fear had a smell. She had never known that. The information arrived inside her without asking and she set it aside as she had been setting things aside since seven o'clock.
She kept going down.
The stair ended at a small mudroom. Left into the kitchen. Right into a service hall that ran the spine of the house to the delivery door at the rear. She had walked the service hall once, in daylight, in flats, and made a note about the hinges.
Right. Delivery door. Forest.
She moved.
She was twenty feet into the service hall when a man stepped around the far corner ahead of her.
He was the unnamed visitor from upstairs. Gray suit. The face she could not have described twice. He had been standing by the window of the master suite eleven minutes ago and now he was at the other end of a corridor he should not have known existed unless he had been reading the listing PDF in real time. He saw her. He did not look surprised. His hand went inside his jacket.
Her right arm lifted on its own count.
She was watching it from somewhere just behind her own shoulder — the bones across the back of it lifted and re-seated themselves as they had in the dressing room, except that this time they kept going. Her fingers narrowed. The skin over the second knuckle of each finger split, not painfully, the way a glove splits along its seam. Something dark came through the splits and went past the end of her fingertips by an inch, an inch and a quarter, curving. Along the back of each finger a fine dark line of hair pushed up under the skin as if drawn there with the side of a pencil.
The man's mouth opened. The hand inside his jacket was still inside his jacket.
She closed the distance in two steps. She did not know how she covered the floor that way. She put what was on her right hand into the soft hollow under his jaw and pulled, and the resistance of him was less than a body should have offered.
The sound he made was not a word.
He dropped against the wall and then dropped past the wall to the floor. The paper between his shoulder and the doorframe went wet.
Her right shoe heel caught the edge of the runner. The strap snapped. The shoe came off her left hand and rolled against the baseboard, where it stayed.
The brass key was no longer in her bra. When it had left her bra she could not say. The corridor had it now.
She stood over him for one second. Two. Long enough to see that what had come out of her fingers was going back into her fingers the way a cat's claw retracted, smooth as something practiced, and that on the back of her hand, where the skin was her skin again, the small dark hairs lay along the line of each finger as if she had grown them in a year and not eight seconds.
The sound she made was a sound her throat had never made before.
Her right hand belonged to her again, on its surface; underneath, the joints of her fingers held a memory of a different shape and the memory did not fade. Her shoulder ached from a throw she had not practiced. The wet on the rug had a heat to it she could feel from where she stood, and the heat had a name in her chest she did not name. The body at her feet was not anyone's husband and not anyone's son to her; she made it not be those things by not looking at his face. The face was easy. The face was already gone from her.
Her own smell came up to her then — sweat, the iron in the man on the floor, the dye of the rug, and something underneath all of it that was not any of them. Something that was hers. That she did not recognize. That was warm.
The horror that arrived was not the man on the floor.
In the kitchen, a chair scraped.
She ran.
The bolt at the delivery door turned under the hand that had just done what it had done, and the door opened on the gravel motor court at the back of the property and the cold sea air came in at her. She went out into it. The other shoe was still in her hand. She had no memory of picking it up.
Behind her, voices — two — and the kitchen door slammed against the wall of the house with the dull report of a thrown thing.
Her car was at the front. The front was the wrong way.
Three strides put her across the motor court and through the wall of rhododendron behind it the way deer went through rhododendron, low, fast, more parts of her than were usually working. The service path dropped through spruce toward the bluff. She had walked the path once, in daylight, to take a photograph of the house from below for the listing's hero image.
The pine needles under her soles registered every stone and the registration came and went without her doing anything with it. The trees came at her in sequences. The salt got stronger. The inside of her mouth tasted of the iron she'd opened in her lower lip an hour ago when she had bitten herself to be quiet, and the iron came up the back of her throat as she went.
Somewhere on the slope the second shoe left her hand. She heard it strike a stone behind her. She kept her course.
The path bent twice. Between the first bend and the second, something behind her, well off the path and lower than her ear had any right to register, made a sound that was not a voice and was not a dog. It was long. It was low. It came up through the ground first and then through the air, and the small bones of her inner ear answered it before her mind did. She did not turn. Turning was not what the sound wanted.
She kept her course down the slope and the salt got stronger and on the second bend a granite ledge stuck up from the soil like a tooth, and she came around the tooth and ran straight into a smell that had nothing to do with the woods.
She stopped.
The stop was not a choice. Her body refused the next step as a hand jerks back from a hot pan.
Ten meters in front of her, on the path, something stood between her and the water.
It was the size of a small horse. It was not a horse. It was on four legs and the shoulder of it came to the level of her sternum. Its head was angled toward her with a slow, evaluative tilt that did not belong to any animal she had ever read about, and its eyes — its eyes were what stopped her, before the shape, before the weight, before the impossibility of the proportion. They were the color of a coal in a banked fire, the underside of a coal where the heat lived, orange that wanted to be red, red that had not yet cooled to orange. Not bright. Not glowing. Lit from inside, the way her own had been in the brushed-steel doors of the elevator at sublevel two, except that what had been a half-second of gold in steel was here a steady, patient, watching light.
She knew, with a calm she had not asked for, that the thing on the path was not deciding whether to run at her. It was looking at her face.
Inside the body in front of her was a mind. A person, pressed there. Whatever was looking through those eyes was not the same kind of thing as the man on the floor in the service hall and not the same kind of thing as her either, but it was thinking. It was thinking about her in particular.
It tilted its head the other way.
Then, very slowly, it opened its mouth.