Small. Wet. Muffled, as if by fabric. And then a sound like something soft falling over.
Beside her, in the dark, Del whispered, "Did you hear that?"
She turned her head. He was lying exactly as he always lay, on his back, his hands folded on his stomach. But his eyes were open. Wide open, and shining a little in the faint gray light from the window, fixed on the ceiling.
"You're awake," she whispered.
"I'm always awake." He said it so quietly she almost didn't hear. "I haven't been sleeping since September, Jan. I lie here. I just lie here so I won't bother you." He swallowed; she heard it. "I've heard it every night. Every night this week. I kept telling myself it was the wood."
"Del—"
From the ceiling, another cough. Longer this time. Then a sound she knew—knew from fourteen years on a med-surg floor, from a hundred nights at a hundred bedsides—the thick, gagging heave of someone being sick.
Del was out of bed. She'd never seen him move that fast. He was at the closet, and then he was standing in the doorway with the Louisville Slugger he kept in there, the one from his softball team in 1976, and the big square flashlight in his other hand. Milo was gone from the doorway. Janet heard him down the hall, heard his claws scrabble on the kitchen linoleum.
"Stay here," Del said. "Lock the door. Call the police."
"Del, wait—"
"Call them, Jan."
She was out of bed too. Her legs felt strange, rubbery, as if she'd stood up too fast after a long sickness. She followed him into the hall. He swung the flashlight up and the beam hit the attic hatch, beige plywood, closed, a dark crack along one edge. Nothing moved. From up above, very faint, she heard something that might have been a moan.
And she smelled it. Thick now, unmistakable, seeping down through that crack along the hatch. Kerosene. Kerosene and something else, something stale and close and wrong, the smell of a closed room where a flame had been burning too long.
Every hair on her body stood up.
"Del," she said, and her voice came out flat and clear and professional, the voice she used when a monitor went off at four in the morning. "Del. Listen to me. It's not a burglar. Somebody's up there with your heater. Somebody's up there with a kerosene heater and no air, and they're sick, and we've got to get them out now."
He looked at her. In the backwash of the flashlight his face was all hollows, and she saw him understand. She saw him understand more than she did. She saw the bird-shadow go across his face and stop, and turn into something else.