Medusa's Web by Tim Powers Page B

elbow, averting his eyes and being careful not to break the glass in the outside frame. Several of the broken pieces slid out from between the frames and whispered away in the thick shrubbery below.
    â€œNobody threw a rock,” he said.
    Madeline was staring at the floor. “Can I look now?” She glanced at him, and her eyes widened when she saw the expression on his face.“What, don’t tell me it was another of the damn patterns ? Showing up in cracks in glass ?”
    Scott now looked at the shards still stuck in the raised wooden window frame. “Well—I don’t know. I just glanced at it out of the corner of my eye, but—no, you’ve just got me spooked. This house is crooked, and settling. All kinds of stresses.” He knew he was talking to himself as much as to her. “Not surprising that windows would break.”
    â€œYou’re supposed to tighten some screws in the basements too, Ariel said.”
    â€œI bet. I’m glad we’re not going to inherit this place—it should have been condemned years ago.”
    â€œWe might.” She picked up her cup and took a sip of coffee. “Inherit it. Could I have ten dollars for gas? What about those mice?”
    Scott flicked his cigarette out the window and stepped away from it. “Let’s look.”

CHAPTER 5
    THEY WALKED OUT OF Scott’s room and down the hall to the right, to the door of their aunt’s old room. The hall was in shadow except for daylight from a window at the far end, and reflected light up from the stairs ahead of them; Scott resisted the temptation to step to the other side of the hall and knock on the Garden of Allah door. When is a door not a door?
    Madeline cocked her head beside their aunt’s door. “Hear it?”
    Scott listened, and now he could hear a faint, irregular rippling. “I don’t think it’s mice.” He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
    Their aunt’s bedroom was a sickroom. A big hospital bed with a bare, segmented mattress and high aluminum side rails occupied a good deal more of the floor space than her old bed had, and an IV pole with bare hooks stood on the far side of it. The window was closed, and the room smelled of Lysol and laundry soap.
    The walls, at least, were as Scott and Madeline remembered them—photos of various silent-movie stars, half a dozen ornately framed mirrors, and varnished pine bookcases with all the Cyclone Severiss novels in their bright dust jackets. The byline on all the books was Amity Speas, their aunt’s maiden name, since the firstone had been published in 1965, three years before she had married Edward Madden.
    On the top of a blue bedside table was ranked a collection of orange plastic pill bottles beside a mirror with a handle, and on a lower shelf was a black computer keyboard, its cord trailing on the bare wooden floor.
    The soft, irregular clicking noise was coming from the keyboard—Scott could see keys rapidly dipping and springing back up like the keys of a player piano.
    Below it, the USB plug lay on the floor, clearly not plugged in to anything.
    â€œShe’s still writing!” whispered Madeline.
    Scott’s face tingled, and he said, “Stop it!” more harshly than he had meant to. He found that he had grabbed Madeline’s arm and backed into the hallway even as his eyes were tightly focused on the impossibly working keyboard, and he could no longer hear the faint clicking over the ringing in his ears.
    The keys kept rising and falling, one at a time but rapidly.
    Scott tore his gaze from the keyboard and made himself step into the doorway again and look around the room. The bookshelves, the yellow lace curtains, and the trees outside the window gradually reasserted themselves as parts of the normal world, isolating the abnormality on the bedside table shelf.
    He made himself relax, at least to the extent of releasing his sister’s arm, though he