The Servants of Twilight Read Online Free PDF

old lady at the window. If it was just a dream . . . then what was Brandy barking at? He don’t bark just to hear himself. Never does. You know how he is.”
    She stared at Brandy, who had plopped down on the floor beside the bed, and she began to feel uneasy again. Finally she got up and went to the window.
    Out in the night, there were a lot of places where the grip of darkness was firm, places where a prowler could hide and wait.
    “Mom?”
    She looked at him.
    He said, “This isn’t like before.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “This isn’t a ’maginary white snake under my bed. This is real stuff. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
    A sudden gust of wind soughed through the eaves and rattled a loose rain gutter.
    “Come on,” she said, holding out a hand to him.
    He scrambled out of bed, and she took him into the kitchen.
    Brandy followed. He stood in the doorway for a moment, his bushy tail thumping against both jambs, then came in and curled up in the corner.
    Joey sat at the table in his blue pajamas with the words SATURN PATROL, in red, streaking across his chest. He looked anxiously at the windows over the sink, while Christine telephoned the police.
     
     
    The two police officers stood on the porch and listened politely while Christine, in the open front door with Joey at her side, told them her story—what little there was to tell. The younger of the two men, Officer Statler, was dubious and quick to conclude that the prowler was merely a phantom of Joey’s imagination, but the older man, Officer Templeton, gave them the benefit of the doubt. At Templeton’s insistence, he and Statler spent ten minutes searching the property with their long-handled flashlights, probing the shrubbery, circling the house, checking out the garage, even looking in the neighbors’ yards. They didn’t find anyone.
    Returning to the front door where Christine and Joey waited, Templeton seemed somewhat less willing to believe their story than he had been a few minutes ago. “Well, Mrs. Scavello, if that old woman was around here, she’s gone now. Either she wasn’t up to much of anything . . . or maybe she was scared away when she saw the patrol car. Maybe both. She’s probably harmless.”
    “Harmless? She sure didn’t seem harmless this afternoon at South Coast Plaza,” Christine said. “She seemed dangerous enough to me.”
    “Well . . .” He shrugged. “You know how it is. An old lady . . . maybe a little senile . . . saying things she really didn’t mean.”
    “I don’t think that’s the case.”
    Templeton didn’t meet her eyes. “So . . . if you see her again or if you have any other trouble, be sure to give us a call.”
    “You’re leaving?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “You’re not going to do anything else?”
    He scratched his head. “Don’t see what else we can do. You said you don’t know this woman’s name or where she lives, so we can’t go have a chat with her. Like I said, if she shows up again, you call us soon as you spot her, and we’ll come back.”
    With a nod of his head, he turned away and went down the walk, toward the street, where his partner waited.
    A minute later, as Christine and Joey stood at the living room windows, watching the patrol car drive away, the boy said, “She was out there, Mom. Really, really. This isn’t like the snake.”
    She believed him. What he had seen at the window could have been a figment of his imagination or an image left over from a nightmare—but it hadn’t been that. He had seen what he thought he’d seen: the old woman herself, in the flesh. Christine didn’t know why she was so sure of that, but she was. Dead sure.
    She gave him the option of spending the rest of the night in her room, but he was determined to be brave.
    “I’ll sleep in my bed,” he said. “Brandy’ll be there. Brandy’ll smell that old witch coming a mile away. But . . . could we sorta leave a lamp on?”
    “Sure,” she said, though she had only recently