Rain by Michael Mcdowel Page A

lifted the telephone, they stopped. This time, however, as soon as Queenie put down the receiver, the knob of the front door rattled frantically. Then the front door was kicked in its frame, kicked, kicked, and kicked hard, and then the steps, up and down the length of the porch, resumed, loud and angry, strides in boots. Queenie followed the sound from one end of the porch to the other. They shook the house. The glass in the windows shook; the candelabra tinkled together; the crockery shook in all the cabinets; the boxes in the bedrooms surrounding Queenie's slid about; and the small animal raced frenziedly about in the attic.
    All at once the noise left off. With a rattle, and the echo of a rattle, the house was still. Queenie huddled in her bed, waiting for the sound of the boots to begin again. All remained quiet.
    Then Queenie, still staring in the dark, slowly reached for the telephone. Just as she did so, the closed door into the hallway was suddenly framed with a white soft light, as if a lamp in the front parlor had been turned on. Then the light grew stronger, as if perhaps the chandelier in the dining room had been lighted. Another intensification, this one much greater, led Queenie to believe that the hallway light itself had been flicked on.
    Other lights came on in the house, until the doorway was framed in a blinding illumination.
    Yet all was quiet.
    Queenie, not even thinking, rose from the bed, went to the door into the hallway and opened it. She quickly closed her eyes against the glare. Every light in the house had been turned on. She moved to the switch plate in the hallway, and tried to press the off button—but it was already depressed. She pressed the on button, and the overhead light continued to shine. She pressed the off; still it remained. She went into the living room. Every lamp burned, as did the small cast-iron chandelier overhead. Queenie turned the switch on the nearest lamp, but that made no difference. She hurried to each lamp in the room, frantically turning switches. She jerked a cord from the wall, but all the bulbs shone on.
    Queenie ran down the hall and into the kitchen. There too the lights burned, even the bulbs in the closets and the flashlights in the drawers. The bathroom lights, the lights in the bedrooms, the ones in the bedroom closets, in the linen cupboards, on the back porch, in the breakfast room, above the portrait of Grace and Genevieve, behind the closed oven door. The tube of the television set glowed brightly white, but there was no image.
    Now the light seemed to grow more intense. Every one of the thousands of objects in that house, illuminated from a dozen directions at once, cast a phantasmagoria of shadows on the walls. The light beat about Queenie and was as suffocating as if she were being rolled in cotton. The light grew so bright and white and harsh that the color seemed to drain from everything around her.
    Yet all remained silent.
    Queenie stood in the doorway of the dining room, just in the spot where James Caskey had fallen dead, and stared around her in a daze. Her eyes were pained with the brightness.
    And the lights grew brighter still.
    In the living room, there was a small explosion of glass. Queenie instinctively turned toward the sound.
    Then there was a smaller burst from behind her, and then another. She turned and saw the flame-shaped bulbs of the chandelier, each burning with an intensity she had never known before, exploding one by one in tiny showers of glass. The light over the portrait of Grace and Genevieve popped with a kind of wet sizzle, and liquid fragments of melting glass poured down over the painted faces of Queen-ie's sister and niece.
    More explosions began at either end of the hallway, in the parlors at one end and in the kitchen at the other. For a moment the television shone with the brightness of the sun, then suddenly burned as intensely black, and collapsed in on itself with a crash.
    Queenie ran back toward her room. The