to certain tree-climbing serpents.
  When at last Chyna overcame her racking nausea and was certain that she wouldn't betray 
herself by being suddenly and violently sick, she crept out of the corner and silently 
crossed the room.
  She wouldn't have been safe in the master suite anyway. Before the visitor left, he was 
likely to return here for one last look at poor Sarah in the shower with her slender arms 
crossed in a pathetic and ineffective posture of defense.
  At the half-open door, Chyna paused to listen. Directly across the hall, the faded 
roses on the wallpaper seemed more mysterious than ever. The pattern had such enigmatic 
depth that she was almost convinced she might be able to part the thorny vines and step 
out of that paper arbor into a sunny realm where, when she looked back, this house would 
not exist.
  With the light from the nightstand lamp behind her, she could not ease cautiously into 
the doorway and take her time peeking left and right, because when she moved onto the 
threshold, she would cast a shadow on those faded roses across the hall. Dawdling behind 
that unavoidable announcement of herself would be dangerous.
  Seduced by a long silence that seemed to promise safety, she finally sidled between the 
half-open door and the jamb, into the hallway and he was tbere. Ten feet away. Near the 
head of the front stairs, which lay to the right. His back was to her.
  She froze. Half in the hallway. Half on the threshold to the master suite. If he 
turned, she would not be able to slip away before he glimpsed her from the corner of his 
eye-yet she was unable to move now while there was still a chance to avoid him. She was 
afraid that if she made any sound whatsoever, he would hear it and spin toward her. Even 
the microwhispers of carpet fibers compressing under her shoe, if she moved, seemed 
certain to draw his attention.
  The visitor was doing something so bizarre that Chyna was as transfixed by his activity 
as by her fear. His hands were raised in front of him, stretched as high as he could 
reach, and his spread fingers languorously combed the air. He seemed to be in a trance, 
as though trying to seine psychic impressions from the ether.
  He was a big man. Six feet two, maybe even taller. Muscular. Narrow waist, enormous 
shoulders. His denim jacket stretched tautly across his broad back.
  His hair was thick and brown, neady barbered against the nape of his bull neck, but 
Chyna could not see his face. She hoped never to see it.
  His seining fingers, stained with blood, looked crushingly strong. He would be able to 
choke the life out of her with a single-hand grip.
  “Come to me,” he murmured.
  Even in a whisper, his rough voice had a timbre and a power that were magnetic. “COME 
TO ME."
  He seemed to be speaking not to a vision that only he could see but to Chyna, as if his 
senses were so acute that he had been able to detect her merely from the movement of the 
air that she had displaced when she'd stepped soundlessly through the doorway.
  Then she saw the spider. It dangled from the ceiling on a gossamer filament a foot 
above the killer's reaching hands. “Please."
  As if responding to the man's supplications, the spider spun out its thread, descending.
  The killer stopped reaching, tamed his hand palm-up. “Little one,” he breathed.
  Fat and black, the obedient spider reeled itself down into the big open palm.
  The killer brought his hand to his mouth and tipped his head back slightly. He either 
crushed the spider and ate it-or ate it alive.
  He stood motionless, savoring. Finally, without looking back, he went to the head of 
the stairs on the right, at the midpoint of the hallway, and descended spider-quick and 
almost spider-silent to the first floor.
  Chyna shuddered, stunned to be alive.
  The house held a drowning depth of stillness as a dam held water, with tremendous 
pent-up power and pressure on the breast.
  When Chyna found the courage to move, she cautiously approached the head of the stairs. 
She feared that the visitor had not fully descended to the first floor, that he was 
toying with her, standing just out of sight, waiting, smiling. He would reach for her, 
palms up, and say, Come to me.
  She held her breath, risked exposure, and looked down. The stairs curved through 
gradients of gloom to the foyer below. She could see just well enough to be sure that he 
wasn't there.
  As far as Chyna could discern, no lamps were on downstairs. She wondered what he was 
doing in that darkness, guided only by the pale moonglow at the windows. Perhaps he was 
in a comer, crouched like a spider, sensitive to the faintest changes in the patterns of 
the air, dreaming of silent stalkings and the frenzied rending of prey.
  She went quickly past the head of the stairs, into the last length of hallway, to the 
next open door and the second source of amber light, dreading what she might find. But 
she could cope with both the dread and the finding. it was always not knowing, turning 
away from truth, that caused night sweats and bad dreams.
  This room was smaller than the master suite, with no sitting area. A corner desk. A 
double bed. One nightstand with a brass lamp, a dresser, a vanity with a padded bench.
  On the wall above the bed was a poster-size portrait of Freud. Chyna loathed Freud. But 
Laura, dear of heart and idealistic, clung to a belief in many aspects of Freudian 
theory; she embraced the dream of a guiltless world, with everyone a victim of his 
troubled past and yearning for rehabilitation.
  Laura was lying facedown on the bed, atop the sheets and the blankets. Her wrists were 
handcuffed behind her. A second pair of handcuffs secured her ankles. Linking both of 
those shiny steel restraints was a shackling chain.
  She had been violated. The pants of her baggy blue pajamas had been cut off with a 
neatness worthy of a conscientious tailor; the blue panels of cloth had been smoothed 
across the blankets to both sides of her. The pajama shirt had been shoved up her back; 
now it was gathered in rumpled folds across her shoulders and the nape of her neck.
  Chyna moved deeper into the room, her fear equaled now by a swelling sorrow that seemed 
to enlarge her heart yet leave it cold and empty. When she caught a faint odor of spilled 
semen, her fear and sorrow were matched by anger. As she stooped beside the bed, her 
hands curled into such hard fists that her fingernails pressed painfully into her palms.
  Sweat-damp blond hair was pasted to the side of Laura's face. Her delicate features 
were salt-pale and clenched in anxiety, and her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.
  She was not dead. Not dead. It seemed impossible. The girl-terror had reduced her to 
the condition of a girl-was murmuring so softly that the words couldn't be heard even 
from a distance of inches, yet so urgently that the meaning was harrowingly clear. It was 
a prayer, one that Chyna had recited on numerous nights long ago, in far places: a prayer 
for mercy, a plea to be delivered from this horror untouched and alive, dear God, please, 
untouched and alive.
  On those other nights, Chyna had been spared both violation and death. Already, half of 
Laura's petition had gone unanswered.
  Chyna's throat tightened with anguish, and she could barely speak: “It's me.” Laura's 
eyelids sprang open, and her blue eyes rolled like those of a terrified horse, wide with 
disbelief. “All dead.”
  “Ssshhh,” Chyna whispered.