Demon Child Read Free

any water at the moment.
        Richard parked before the front steps, a leisurely flight of eight, wide marble risers that ended on a granite stoop before tall, oaken main doors. Almost before the sound of the engine died, a rather elderly man in a raincoat came out of those doors. He was shielded by a black umbrella and was carrying a second umbrella which he gave Richard. He rushed around to Jenny's door, opened it and helped her under the protection of his own bumbershoot.
        He was about sixty, lean and wizened with white hair and deep, blue eyes. “I'm Harold, the manservant. You must be Jenny, for you have the Brighton beauty, dark hair and eyes. Will you come with me out of this dreadful weather?”
        “Yes!” she gasped as thunder rumbled in the ever-lowering clouds and the rain seemed to fall twice as fast as it had. Her feet were soaked, and her legs were splattered with mud and water.
        As they stepped onto the first of the marble stairs, someone moaned nearby, loud and prolonged, as if in some terrible sort of agony. It was not exactly the cry of a human being. It was too deep and too loud for that, touched with something that spoke of the supernatural.
        “What is that?” she asked.
        Abruptly, the moan rose to a shrill, wild shriek that cut off without reason in the middle of a note.
        Jenny shivered. She could see no one about who could have made the weird call.
        “Just the wind,” Harold told her. He pointed past the edge of the umbrella at the eaves of the mansion. “If the wind comes too fast from the south, it whistles in the eaves. It can keep you awake nights. Fortunately, the wind hardly ever blows this way.”
        The explanation should have quieted her nerves, but it did not. That cry seemed too filled with emotion to be made by something inanimate. Suddenly, she remembered things that she should have asked Richard. Why had he been late? Why did Catherine, the waitress, fear him so? What was this curse that Aunt Cora talked about and which he called a “psychiatric problem"?
        Lightning threw the front of the house into strange shadows; thunder shook the many windows.
        Again, the wind moaned horribly in the eaves.
        That uncontrollable fear of the unknown and the unexpected rose in Jenny. She thought of her mother and father, of Grandmother Brighton. She wished, oh so very much, that she had found something else to occupy her summer. But she realized there was no backing out now.
        She went with Harold into that bleak and foreboding house…

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    2
        
        If the exterior of the house had been foreboding, the interior made up for that. It was warm and comfortable with an air of well-being that could very nearly be touched. The walls of the entry foyer were richly papered in a gold and white antique print. The closet doors were heavy, dark oak. The few pieces of furniture were all heavy pine styled in a rustic, colonial mode that bespoke usefulness and sensibility. In such a house, one could feel protected, shielded, away from the cares of the rest of the world. The moan of the wind in the eaves was distant and unfrightening.
        Yet, even as she gave less thought to the fears that had bothered her only moments ago, Jenny wondered if this were not a false sense of security that prevailed in the house. At times, you had to be careful, cautious. Just when you turned your back on some danger, smug in your certainty of safety, it might spring up anew and attack you when you least expected it.
         A car on a rain-slicked highway…
         A burst blood vessel in an old woman's brain…
        She shivered.
        “Cold?” Harold asked as he took her coat and hung it in the closet.
        “A little.”
        “A touch of brandy should clear that up,” he said. “Would you like a drop or two in your coffee?”
        Under normal circumstances, Jenny did not approve of liquor. She felt that it