At the Window

The note came to the office by courier eleven days later. One line, in the flat handwriting of a person who has decided something: Come to the house now. Bring help. — O.R.

They went at dusk, three of them. Theo drove. Nora sat in front. Odáliz sat in back with her hands folded and gave directions through the park, and at the last turn, where the drive came out of the trees and the house showed itself against the sky, Theo stopped the car without being asked.

The house was dark except for one room on the second floor: the study, Voss's study, the room with the good window, the one that looked down the slope at the water. The window was uncurtained.

And Adrian Voss was sitting in it.

He sat in the window seat with his hands in his lap, upright, dressed, quite calm, and even at that distance Nora could see that something was wrong with the proportions of him, that the body under the jacket was the body of a much younger man. He was watching the trees. He had the stillness of a man who has been sitting in one place for a long time and does not intend to move.

Theo said, very quietly, "Nora."

"Don't move."

Voss's head came up. He had heard the car. He looked down the slope at the three of them, and for a moment his face was entirely Adrian Voss — the man from the board dinner, urbane and tired and kind — and his hand came up an inch off the sill, and Nora's own hand came up off her knee to answer him before she had decided anything at all.

Then the face emptied.

It did not change shape. That was the thing she could never make anyone understand. The face emptied the way a room empties — something left, and the thing that had been standing behind it, waiting, sat down in the chair and looked out through the eyes and grinned, and the grin was not crazy, was not monstrous, was in fact the most ordinary and pleasant expression Nora had ever seen on a human face, and that was the whole horror of it. He raised one finger to his temple in a small saluting motion.

Then he drew the curtain.

The house went dark. Odáliz Reyes, in the back seat, said the first word any of them had spoken since the car stopped, and the word was: "Thursday." She said it once, in the dark of the back seat, and did not say it again, and did not look at either of them.