Satan's Sister

Chapter 1

In the half-light of the midnight dark and stillness of the large, old room the waking girl saw her. She was standing at the foot of the bed, her teeth gleaming in the moonlight that streaked across her small face. She was laughing so silently, ever so silently as she watched the wakening terror. Her black hair fell down the sides of her cheeks, scraggly, uncombed, making her face a white diamond in the night. The scream of the girl in the bed broke through at last, and the visitor faded into the darkness.

It was the nightmare again.

Ellen’s eyes searched the room frantically, reaching into the dark shadows of the corners, into shadows behind large old pieces of furniture that had been in the room since the house was built over a hundred years ago. Furniture that could conceal the small, thin body of a nine- or ten-year-old child. The nightmare girl was still there; she could feel her eyes, hear the echo of her taunting laughter. She was hiding. Ready to jump out with her hands shaped into claws over her head, her white teeth bared, her lips drawn back, making her diamond face a mask grotesque and terrible.

The thought of these things had sent Ellen Crayley screaming to her grandmother when she was six, and even when she was sixteen. But now, having passed her twentieth birthday she had to face the truth. Even at midnight when the moonlight was thin and cold and the prairie wind blew sand against the windows. Even with the spirit of the tormenting girl still there, somewhere. It was only a nightmare that recurred when she least expected it, sometimes months apart, sometimes even a year or more. Though actually afraid to reach out her arm, she leaned over and snapped on the bedside lamp, and the shadows were revealed. Hiding no one, of course.

She still trembled, and the large, old-fashioned bedroom held the spirit of the small tormentor even with the lights on. Ellen slipped her feet into sturdy house shoes and got the heavy robe off the foot of the bed. The room was cold. There was no central heating in the old house, and little heat at all in the third story. When she was a child she had loved the height of her bedroom. To look out the windows was to feel as if she lived above all the world. Above even the mountains in the west. But tonight, and those other nights when she had run from the nightmare girl, the stairway down was narrow, long, too steep, and treacherously dark.

She paused on the second floor and looked toward the door of her grandmother’s room, but Granny had grown old and feeble and rested poorly. To wake her would be childish and unkind. She went on through the long, dark hall of the second floor, one hand touching the wall for guidance, past other closed doors and rooms no longer occupied. The old Crayley house had held several generations, but the family had gradually grown smaller. Tonight there was no one in the house but Granny, herself, and Miss Maud.

Ellen opened the door to the back stairs and saw that Miss Maud, the housekeeper, had left a night light in the hall by the kitchen. Warmth was there, coming from the big iron cookstove. She slowed, moved quietly through the hall, kitchen, and across the wide screened porch at the back of the house. Miss Maud was several years younger than Granny, but woke easily too. She was thin and nervous, and had come to live in and keep the Crayley house when Ellen was still a small child. Her rooms were just off the far end of the kitchen, and Ellen didn’t want to wake her.

The wind nearly tore the door from Ellen’s hands, but she held on to it and fought to close it quietly, and won. Then she turned, her eyes going toward the low hill just north of the barns where the moon spread pale light over tops of cedars and turned to whiten the gray, scattered tombstones of the family graveyard. Ellen didn’t mind the wind. It had blown sand from around the cedars almost ceaselessly as long as she could remember, and blown it back again so that a root was seldom exposed, a tombstone never covered or uncovered. The wind blew her hair back from her face tonight because it swept fierce down the hillside. She lifted her face toward it and took a deep breath. Then she was running, her robe whipping in the wind, her hair swept back and shining in the moonlight. She crossed the alfalfa meadow where for a while the wind was held aside by the hill, then she climbed, going among the cedars, passing the grave of her grandfather.

On the top of the hill she stopped. North lay cattle range, and the wind rolled a tumbleweed up to her, past her, where it lodged in a cedar. She stood in the center of the graveyard. Her young uncle, Lance, used to try to scare her from going there. But she had never been afraid of the graveyard. She had never been afraid of anything but the nightmare. Her mother’s grave was to the right and slightly downhill at the edge of the cedars. Although it was seventeen years old, it was the family’s most recent grave.

She went to it and sat down beside the tall gray stone. Next to Granny, and sometimes even more than Granny, it had been her source of comfort. She loved and admired her father, but as the eldest Crayley, president of the bank of Crayley, on the board of nearly everything in Crayley County, he was too busy to be bothered. The reason she and Granny were alone now was because of business in South America. Something about a new breed of cattle. She wasn’t even sure. He had called her home from college to stay with her grandmother while he was gone. He was from the old school of men who thought that a college education was not necessary for a woman. He had never really approved of her leaving home in the first place. She had been glad to come home, but she couldn’t help thinking about the oddity of the nightmare coming again after three years of freedom from it.

The cold stone against her back calmed her and she stopped trembling, but her gaze moved back and found the tall, ugly house that was known all over the county as the Crayley mansion. Moonlight glinted against the windows of her room high up under the peaked roof, and on the lower roof that slanted steeply down beneath it. There were only three rooms on the top floor and, in all her memory, the other two had not been occupied. The rest of the family slept on the second floor where eleven bedrooms more than filled the need. For the first time she wondered why she alone occupied the third floor. She must ask, she thought. And maybe even ask permission to move downstairs.

She turned her face north again and pressed one cheek against the stone. A few years ago she would have carried on a one-sided conversation with her mother, telling her hopes, her longings, her fears, asking advice; but in recent years, during her vacations at home, she came to the hill merely because it seemed the most peaceful place she knew. A place where she could relax and be at rest. The feeling that her relatives were all about her had been put aside with her childhood. She sat alone now with the gray tombstones, the dark cedars, and the tumbleweeds that bounded lightly up the hill toward her. For several minutes she sat, growing colder, knowing she should go back to the house. But she didn’t want to go upstairs. Of course she could get a blanket from the linen closet and stay downstairs on a sofa.

A pale light came on in the bunkhouse, a long building west of the barns. It housed the ranch manager and the men who worked the ranch. The light meant it was four o’clock and Mr. Miller, who had been there so long he seemed a natural part of the ranch, was up and about, cooking breakfast for the men.

Ellen got to her feet, feeling half frozen, and went back toward the house.

She was walking as quietly as she could down the second floor hall to the closet near the end when a voice called to her.

Ellen?

She stopped. Yes, Granny?

What on earth are you doing up at this hour? You came up from downstairs, didn’t you? Come in here. Turn on the light.

All right.

Ellen opened the heavy door of her grandmother’s corner room and switched on the light. The old lady’s wrinkled face peeped from the great, high bed like one small raisin on a tray. Ellen went to the bed and gave herself a boost up and sat with her legs swinging. Aren’t you sleeping well, Granny?

Oh yes, off and on. But what are you doing up?

I was just going for a blanket.

The old lady’s eyes, folded into the wrinkles, were dim but searching, revealing a mind untainted by age. That old nightmare again?

Yes.

Well, why didn’t you tell me?

I didn’t want to disturb you.

Pshaw. What am I here for? I was hoping maybe you’d grown out of those. You haven’t had one for two or three years now, have you?

No. None at all while I was away at school. It makes me wonder if there is something about my bedroom that causes me to dream that particular dream. Ellen looked at her hands, smoothed the cuticle back from naturally pink, long nails. Granny, may I ask a question?

Of course.

Why has my bedroom always been up there?

Oh, family custom, I guess. She paused a moment, and then said, No, that’s wrong. The third floor was always reserved for guests until your dad married. Your mother wanted her room up there, so naturally you were put in an adjoining room.

Ellen looked up, surprised. But Dad’s room is down here!

Only since your mother died. You can understand why he wouldn’t want to remain up there—he missed her. But you were settled, and to move you would have been hard on you, or any child barely three years old. We hired a lady to take care of you for a while and she slept on a cot in your room. Do you remember her?

No, I don’t. My memory doesn’t go back very far, I’m afraid.

Well, she stayed less than a year, so it’s no wonder. Anyway, Maud came then, and looked after you. As well as the rest of us. You could go up and down those stairs like a kitten so we felt you were as safe there, or safer, than you’d have been on the second floor.

Is it all right if I move now?

Of course it is, child, you know that. I feel like one monkey in a barrel anyway, with your dad away so much and Lance never here at all, and all these empty rooms. But you’d better get your rest now. She yawned, and Ellen smiled to herself and leaned over to kiss the aged cheek.

Good night, Granny.

Ummm. It’s nearly morning.

Good morning then.

She slid off the bed and ran out of the room, closing the door softly behind her.

Though she took a blanket and went downstairs to a sofa, she sat wide awake until dawn. Some activity from the barns reached her ears. A voice once, laughing, that sounded like the ranch manager, Rodney Jarvis. Excitement quickened her heart. She had developed a schoolgirl crush on him when he came to manage the Crayley ranch five years ago. Her years away at school evidently hadn’t completely cured her. The sound of the jeep came then as it roared away north. Rodney probably going to see about cattle. For a moment Ellen’s thoughts followed the jeep and its good-looking driver. How lovely it would be for her to be riding along in the early October dawn, the cool wind blowing in her face. She knew now why she had been more than glad to come home, why the ranch seemed to her the most exciting place in the world.

But then the sound of the jeep was gone, and her thoughts went back to her third floor bedroom, and the dream that was so realistic it was more like a memory than a dream. The girl was nine or ten years old, she was sure of that. But the hate and malevolence in that diamond-shaped face was as old as Satan. Once, years ago, when she had run screaming from the nightmare, sobbing out in Granny’s arms, Sh-she wants to k-kill me, Granny ... her grandmother held her back, arm’s length, and looked into her face and demanded, What does this girl look like, Ellen? Tell me! So Ellen described her. Teeth that gleamed, black hair covering her cheeks. And as she talked she watched Granny’s face turn pale. Who is she, Granny? she asked, but Granny only hugged her tight in her warm arms and said, Hush, baby, she’s no one. She’s only a bad dream.

Ellen remembered now, and felt the same uneasiness. As if, for a moment, even Granny saw the girl and knew her, and thereby made her real. A girl with hate and evil so fierce that it someday would reach her, a girl who lived among the shadows of the vacant rooms on the third floor and came at night into her bedroom to watch her from the foot of the bed.

That’s ridiculous, Ellen said softly aloud and stood up, shaking her robe down. She folded the blanket and