Your Heart Belongs to Me
thirty-four, had never finished growing up.
Eating alone, sitting at the wheeled table, Ryan sampled a series of old movies on the big-screen plasma TV. He sought comedies, but none of them struck him as funny.
Calories no longer mattered, or cholesterol, and at first this indulgence without guilt was so novel that he enjoyed himself. Soon, however, the adolescent smorgasbord grew cloying, too rich.
To thumb his nose at Death, he ate more than he wanted. The root beer began to seem like syrup.
He wheeled the cart out of the master suite, left it in the hall, and used the intercom to tell Kay that he had finished.
Earlier, the Tings turned down the bed and plumped the pillows.
When Ryan put on pajamas and slipped between the sheets, insomnia tormented him. If fear of death had not kept him awake, the tides of sugar in his blood would have made him restless.
Barefoot, hoping to walk off his anxiety, he went roaming through the house.
Beyond the large windows lay the luminous panorama of Orange County’s many cities on the vast flats below. The ambient glow was sufficient to allow him to navigate the house without switching on a lamp.
Shortly before midnight, lights in a back hall led him to the large butler’s pantry, where china and glassware were stored in mahogany cabinets. He heard voices in the adjacent kitchen.
Although additional members of the household staff were at work during the day, the Tings were the only live-ins. Yet Ryan could not at once identify the speakers as Lee and Kay, because they conversed quietly, almost whispering.
Usually, the Tings would be in bed at this hour. Their workday began at eight o’clock in the morning.
Although throughout his life Ryan had not once been troubled by superstition, he was now overcome by a sense of the uncanny. He felt suddenly that his house hid secrets, that within these rooms were realms unknown, and that for his well-being, he must learn all that was being concealed from him.
Putting his left ear to the crack between the jamb and the swinging door, he strained to hear what was being said.
The spacious kitchen had been designed to function for caterers when large parties required the preparation of elaborate buffets. The low voices softly reverberated off the extensive granite countertops and off the many stainless-steel appliances.
Risking discovery, he eased the door open an inch. The voices did not become recognizable, nor did the murmurs and whispers resolve from sibilant sounds into words.
Ryan did, however, additionally hear the quiet clink and ping of dishes, which seemed curious. Lee and Kay would have washed the dinnerware hours ago, and if they had wanted a late snack, they would have prepared it in the kitchenette that was part of their private suite.
He heard also a peculiar grinding noise, soft and rhythmic. This was not an everyday sound, but vaguely familiar and—for reasons he could not define—sinister.
Gradually his eavesdropping began to seem foolish. The only thing sinister in his house was his imagination, which had been dizzied and led into dark byways by the specter of his mortality.
Nevertheless, when he thought to press the swinging door inward and learn the identity of those in the kitchen, fear swelled in him. His heart abruptly clopped as hard as hooves on stone, and so fast that all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might have been approaching.
He eased the door shut, backed away from it.
With his right hand over his heart and his left hand against a cabinet to steady himself, he waited for another seizure to sweep his legs out from under him and leave him helpless on the floor.
The butler’s pantry went dark around him.
Ryan might have thought he’d gone blind, except for the lights in the hallway, beyond the open door by which he had entered.
Past the closed swinging door, lights had been extinguished in the kitchen. A wall switch in that room also controlled the pantry.
Now the hallway fell into darkness.
The windowless pantry could not have been blacker if it had been a padded silk-lined clamshell of mortuary bronze.
Able to hear nothing above the noise of his treacherous heart, Ryan became convinced that someone approached, someone whose vision was as keen in this perfect gloom as was the vision of a cat prowling in moonlight. He waited for a hand to be laid on his shoulder, or for a stranger’s cold fingers to be pressed against his lips.
The weight of his heart insisted that he sit on the
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