“Anabel,” repeated Arthur, and he sounded as if saying her name hurt him physically, “Anabel is sick.”
“You don’t say!” I replied as callously as possible. I mean, was I supposed to feel sorry for Anabel? When she’d lured me into a trap and hit me over the head with an iron torch holder? Never mind that after that she’d tied me up so that she could cut my carotid artery at her leisure. The stupid thing was that I did feel sorry for her. As we now knew, Anabel had spent the first years of her life with a weird sect that worshipped demons, along with her mother, who had committed suicide later in a psychiatric hospital. No wonder Anabel herself was totally mental.
Arthur was inspecting me attentively, as if he could read my thoughts. I swallowed and tried to look extra grim. All I needed now was Arthur thinking I could understand his ex-girlfriend. Or him, come to that. Although—well, he had loved Anabel, and everyone knows what crazy things you can do when you’re in love. And now she was in a psychiatric hospital herself, his friends weren’t speaking to him, and he wasn’t captain of the basketball team anymore. Poor Ar—no, stop that! The hell with poor Arthur! Next thing I knew, I’d be feeling guilty about breaking his jaw.
“She did some bad things, but…” Arthur hesitated for a moment, and once again I felt a surge of sympathy. “But she didn’t write that book herself.”
He meant the grubby old notebook where Anabel had found her rituals for conjuring up demons. The book had been burned on the night when Arthur and Anabel had lured me to the Hamiltons’ family vault in the cemetery, intending to free Anabel’s imaginary demon from the underworld with the help of my own far-from-imaginary blood.
Whether Anabel was traumatized or not, her knife would have killed me if Henry and Grayson hadn’t turned up in the nick of time. So that was quite enough sympathy and understanding, thank you.
“True. Someone just as nutty as Anabel wrote the book,” I said firmly.
“Could be,” admitted Arthur, and he said no more for a second or so. Then he made a gesture that managed to be helpless and arrogant at the same time as it took in the whole corridor. “So how do you explain all this, then?”
I’d asked myself the same question often enough. I shrugged my shoulders as casually as I could. “Well, how can I be here in London and talk to my grandma in Boston at the same time? How come the garage door will open if I press a button while I’m still a mile away? How can people visit each other in their dreams? So far as I’m concerned, to be honest, those are all phenomena I can’t explain. But just because I don’t understand them, it doesn’t mean they have to be the work of demons. There’s a scientific explanation for everything.”
Now Arthur had his superior smile back. “Oh, is there? Think what you like if it makes you feel better, Liv Silver. My regards to Henry.”
“Thanks, and mine to the demon Lilliburlero when you next see him,” I snapped back with my most hostile enemy-general expression as I turned to walk away. “I must be going. See you sometime—I’m afraid.”
Arthur nodded. “Yes, I guess that can’t be avoided.” And he added under his breath, “But be careful, Liv. We’re not alone in these corridors.”
I resisted the temptation to turn around and tell him what he could do with his pretended concern and/or concealed threats, and I marched away, well knowing that he was watching me, probably with his eyes fixed on my polka-dot pajama bottoms. For a moment I was tempted to make a more elegant departure by turning into a jaguar, even at this late stage, but there was always the danger that once again it wouldn’t work, and I’d be scurrying away as a silly little kitten, so I didn’t run the risk.
And where the hell was Henry? He was never around when you needed him.
6
SO AS NOT to give myself away to Arthur by walking back the way I’d come, I marched as purposefully as possible farther along the corridor, and then turned off it again to be right out of his field of vision in the unlikely event that he was still keeping an eye on me. Then, to be on the safe side, I repeated the maneuver again. When I finally stopped and took a surreptitious look around, none of the other doors struck me as in the least familiar. Where on earth had I ended up? I’d never before strayed so far from my own corridor. Maybe I should have made chalk marks on the walls to be sure of finding my way back. I felt goose bumps rising on my arms, but I forced myself to wait a little longer. Then I turned around, and three minutes later, I was cautiously peering down the corridor where I had met Arthur. Not that there was any trace of him now. No trace of Henry either.