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The sense of being watched had not entirely left Holly even after she had entered the house Now, as she stared at Lena Ironheart’s face in the photograph, the feeling of being under observation grew so acute that she abruptly wheeled around and looked back across the living room

She was alone

She stepped quickly to the archway and through it into the front hall

Deserted

A dark any staircase led up to the second floor The dust on the newel post and bannister was undisturbed: no palht, she said, "Hello?" Her voice sounded queerly flat in the empty house

No one responded to her

Hesitantly, she started to climb the stairs

"Who’s there?" she called

Only silence answered her

Frowning, she stopped on the third step She glanced down into the front hall, then up toward the landing again

The silence was too deep, unnatural Even a deserted house had some noise in it, occasional creaks and ticks and pops fro, a rattle froer of wind

But the Ironheart house was so hushed, Holly one deaf, except that she could hear the sounds she ain

She still felt she was under observation It was as if the old house itself watched her with malevolent interest, alive and sentient, possessed of a thousand eyes hidden in the wood s and in the pattern of the wallpaper

Dust ht pressed its purple face to the s

Standing just four steps below the landing, partly under the second flight that led into the unseen upstairs hallway, she beca for her on the second floor It was not necessarily The Ene horrible, the discovery of which would shatter her

Her heart was ha When she sed, she found a lued sound

The feeling of being watched and of tre on the brink of athat she turned and hurried down the steps She did not flee pell-mell out of the house; she retraced her path and turned off all the lights as she went; but she did not dally, either

Outside, the sky was purple-black where it met the mountains in the east, purplish-red where it touched the olden fields and hills had changed to pale gray, fading to charcoal, as if a fire had swept them while she was in the house

As she crossed the yard and moved past the barn, the conviction that she was under observation only grew lanced apprehensively at the open black square of the hay loft, the s on either side of the big red double doors It was a gut-clenching sensation of such primitive power that it transcendedin a laboratory experiment, ires hooked into her brain, while scientists sent pulses of current directly into the raw cerebral tissues that controlled the fear reflex and generated paranoid delusions She had never experienced anything like it, knew that she was teetering on the thin edge of panic, and struggled to get a grip on herself By the tiraveled drive that curved around the pond, she was running She held the extinguished flashlight like a club, prepared to swing it hard at anything that darted toward her

The bells rang Even above her frantic breathing, she heard the pure, silvery trilling of clappers rapidly striking the inner curves of perfectly tuned bells

For an instant she was amazed that the phenomenon was audible out side the wind was halfway around the pond fro flickered in her peripheral vision even before the first spell of ringing ended, and she looked away froht, originating at the center of the pond, spread outward toward the banks in tight concentric circles, like the measured ripples that radiated from the point at which a dropped stone struck deep water That sight brought Holly to a sturavel rolled under her feet

When the bells fell silent, the criht in the pond was immediately snuffed out The water was much darker now than when she had first seen it in er had all the somber hues of slate, but was as black as a polished slab of obsidian

The bells rang again, and the cri outward She could see that each new bright blossom was not born on the surface of the water but in its depths, di like an overheated incandescent bulb when it neared the surface, casting waves of light toward the shore

The ringing ceased

The water darkened

The toads along the shoreline were not croaking anyworld of nature had fallen as silent as the interior of the Ironheart farmhouse No coyote howl, no insect cry, no owl hoot, no bat shriek or flap of wing, no rustling in the grass

The bells sounded again, and the light returned, but this tih it was brighter than before

At the water’s edge, the feathery white panicles of the palowed like plu fro luminescence faded with the next cessation of the bells, Holly stood in the grip of awe and fear, knowing she should run but unable to e this time No red tint at all more than ever

Holly broke the chains of fear and sprinted toward the windht enlivened the dreary dusk

Shadows leapt rhyth around a war fire

Beyond the fence, dead cornstalks bristled as repulsively as the spiny legs and plated torsos of praying ingstopped and the light went out as she reached the open door of the mill

She raced across the threshold, then skidded to a stop in the darkness, on the brink of the lower chah theThe blackness was tarry, cloying As she fuht, she found it hard to draw breath, as if the darkness itself had begun flowing into her lungs, suffocating her

The flashlight caain She slashed the bea was there in the gloo for her Then she found the stairs to her left and rushed toward the high room

When she reached theat the halfway point, she put her face to the pane of glass that she had wiped clean with her hand earlier in the day

In the pond below, the rippling bull’s-eye of light was brighter still, now a for Ji stairs

As she went, lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry, studied an age ago in junior high school and thought forgotten, rang crazily through hertime, time time, In a sort ofRunic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells bells bells, bells, Bells, bells bells She burst into the high roolow of the Cole in a circle and looking expectantly at the walls around him