What Laurie feared was failing to get out of there and up to safety before Janis Dern and Chris Whoever stopped talking about sex and death in the upstairs hall. When the vicious Dern beast returned to Laurie’s bedroom, that horrible creature would realize she had stupidly allowed her captive to escape, and she’d sound an alarm. A search of the house might begin simultaneously with a search of the immediate grounds.

To the left of the dresser was a door to the master bathroom. To the right, a closet door. In the blinding dark, her trembling fingers found the lever handle on the closet door, which would make a ratcheting noise if operated too fast. She eased the handle down from horizontal. The door, if swollen, sometimes stuttered against the jamb, so she pulled carefully on it.

In the walk-in closet, she closed the door and dared to switch on the light.

Standing tiptoe, she could barely reach the loop on the end of the cord that allowed her to pull down the trapdoor in the ceiling, to the back of which was fixed a folded ladder. The heavy springs on the trap protested, but she doubted that the sound could be heard through two closed doors and as far away as the hallway. The ladder automatically unfolded its three segments as the trapdoor opened.

She clicked the wall switch and, in blackness purified of light, climbed monkeylike on all fours. She scampered into the attic, felt blindly for the recall lever in the trapdoor frame, found it, and grimaced as the three sections of rungs accordioned upward with more noise than they had made when descending to the closet floor, although perhaps still not making enough racket to draw anyone’s attention. The ladder-loaded trap returned to its frame with a soft thump.

The attic had a finished floor of plywood. In this raftered darkness, which was high enough for her father to stand erect, boxes were stacked in rows: all of Christmas—except the tree—sealed in cardboard; excess books displaced from shelves downstairs; souvenirs of times and places that were too distant to be of current interest but too important to be discarded; Mother’s glorious wedding dress in a zippered vinyl bag inside a cedar-lined chest.…

With her arms held out to the left and right, her fingertips sliding along palisades of cardboard, Laurie inched blindly forward. Her father had installed this flooring when the house was remodeled, not long before her birth; he used the best materials and secured the plywood to the joists with screws instead of nails, but here and there between the plies were small voids that squeaked underfoot.

This center aisle pretty much aligned with the second-floor hall, where Janis Dern and Chris Hornydude might still be discussing his inexplicable lust for her and her cool indifference. If enough squeaking arose in the ceiling above them, they might decide that the cause was something more than mice.

The attic received a cleaning twice a year, but dust gathered there in the interim, and Laurie disturbed it in her passage. An unspent sneeze teased her nose, and she paused to pinch her nostrils shut until the urge passed.

Only she could hear her stampeding heart, though the pounding made it harder to judge how much noise she was making otherwise.

With the sneeze quelled, she began to move again, only to press her face through the silken strands of a spiderweb that masked her from brow to chin. Startled, she paused to wipe off those sticky threads, wondering if the eight-legged architect might even now be crawling through her hair.

Stay cool. Even if a spider was in her hair, it wouldn’t bite. If it did bite, the bite wouldn’t harm her unless the biter was a brown recluse. It wasn’t a brown recluse. She just knew it wasn’t.

Suddenly from below came the voice of the beast at a volume to rattle windows—“The little bitch, the little shit, she’s gone!”—followed by other voices and slamming doors and swift footfalls on the front stairs.

Confident that what noises she made would now be covered by the hubbub below, Laurie moved more quickly through the high dark, with her left hand still sliding along stacked boxes, but her right arm extended in front of her. She halted when her outthrust hand made contact with cold steel. She felt her way around the tight coil and entered the open spiral stairs.

The treads were padded with rubber, and the handrail kept her steady. She made only a little noise as she climbed into the round room at the very top and center of the house, where the encircling windows admitted the light of moon and stars. This space was ten feet in diameter, like an enclosed widow’s walk where the wives of fishermen went to keep a lookout for their menfolk’s boats at sea.

The sea in this case was the plain that stretched to every horizon, lush with tall grass, and when anyone climbed up here with dread in his heart, he came to monitor not fishing trawlers but the progress of fire. Some years the rains didn’t come but the sun did, and the wind did, and the sun and the wind made dry kindling of the grass across those thousands of acres. Nature nurtured, but it also afflicted. There were times when thunder seemed to announce a storm, but the sky proved to be filled with more bang and flash than with rain, the latter falling in barely enough quantity to chase the birds to their roosts for a few minutes, while the lightning spat fire onto the plain. If the wind was fierce, the vast fields of wild grass could raise walls of flame thirty feet high, even higher, and the fire front moved as fast as a train. Owning a quantity of horses and not enough transports to move them all at once, you wanted to monitor the burning plain from a high vantage point, to know in which direction and at what pace the blaze might be advancing.

The round chamber was mostly glass, but on a shelf between two windows stood one of the eight-line hybrid phones that also served as an intercom, featuring an indicator board with labeled buttons for nearly every room in the house and for each of the stables.

Laurie was pretty sure they would search the house for her but that the search wouldn’t extend to the attic. They would expect that she had fled, perhaps to mount a horse or to run out to the state highway in hope of encountering a motorist who might help.

Whatever these people were, they weren’t real FBI. Real FBI agents didn’t want to use brain implants to make slaves out of people, and they didn’t tear up a kid’s book collection, and they didn’t promise to make you over into Little Miss Lickspittle. These FBI imposters wouldn’t want the county sheriff’s department showing up to check out a report of armed thugs holding hostages. Maybe they would just skedaddle.

As Laurie reached for the phone, she was struck by the thought that perhaps these intruders were FBI after all—FBI gone bad like in the movies, wicked and corrupt. If they had real ID and could prove to the sheriff who they were, then maybe the sheriff would just go away.

Or what if …

If some FBI agents could be so evil, maybe the county sheriff and his deputies couldn’t be trusted, either. Maybe they would take her call and listen with concern and promise to come right away with sirens blaring … but would instead phone the hideous Dern beast or Chris Sexfiend and say, The little bitch is in the lookout at the top of the house. Then the FBI bad hats would come running up here and inject her, and she would have to kiss the Dern monster’s ass every time she was ordered to kiss it.

Laurie stood in the dark room, gazing out at the dark plain, and all that darkness seemed to be seeping into her through her eyes and ears and nose. Although rain had fallen this season and the grass was green, she wished for fire and wind and walls of flame to scare away these hateful invaders.

Then she realized who she could trust. Firemen.

The county had several well-equipped fire stations here and there, and a network of volunteer firemen and firewomen who had undergone training. Her dad was one of them. The firemen were all good people, looking out for one another. She knew many of them, because they got together on Memorial Day and Labor Day for a picnic and games, and again for an evening celebration at a rented hall in Worstead each December.

The chief of the volunteers was Mr. Linwood Haney. His wife, Corrine, was a firewoman. They had a daughter—Bonnie Jean, better known as Beejay—who was Laurie’s age. Beejay, who liked horses and motorbikes, wanted to be a Marine sniper when she grew up, and the Haneys lived only three miles away, which was just about next door, so it was inevitable, like destiny or something, that she and Laurie were friends. Mr. and Mrs. Haney would for sure believe her, and they would come with other firemen and firewomen.

Until she picked up the handset, Laurie forgot that doing so would cause a green indicator light to appear on the intercom panel beside the label marked FIRE WATCH. In fact, the same green indicator had at that instant lit on every phone in the house and the stables, just to the right of the dark buttons labeled MASTER BED and MASTER BATH.

Maybe none of these intruders had previously noticed the words FIRE WATCH on the phone boards. But if one of the creeps happened to be looking at a phone now, he’d wonder where the fire watch was and who might be using a phone at that location.

She quickly returned the handset to its cradle. The green light winked off.