The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers Page A

him to the world, and the world now began to intrude. Hugely against his will he became aware of sounds again.
    The maid had fled, but now there were masculine voices outside the door, which shook with knockings loud enough to be heard over Crawford's continuing screams. Finally there was a heavy impact against the panels, and then another, and the third one splintered the door broadly enough so that an eye could peer in, and then a gnarled hand snaked through and pulled back the bolt. At last the door was swung open.
    The first two men into the room rushed to the bed, but after a glance at the crushed, redly glistening ruin that had last night been Julia Crawford, they turned their stiff, pale faces toward Crawford, who had by now managed to stifle his screams by biting his fist very hard and staring at the floor.
    Crawford was aware that the men had stumbled out of the room, and over the noise he himself was making he could hear shouting and a racket that might have been someone being devastatingly sick. After a while men—perhaps some of the same ones—came back in.
    They hastily bundled up his clothes and shoes and helped him get dressed in the hall, and then they took him—carried him, practically—downstairs to the kitchen; and when exhaustion had stopped his ever hoarser screaming they gave him a cup of brandy.
    "We've sent someone to fetch the sheriff," said one man shakily. "What in the name of Jesus
happened
?"
    Crawford took a long sip of the liquor, and he found that he was able to think and speak. "I
don't know
!" he whispered. "How could that—have happened!—while I was
asleep
?"
    The two men looked at each other, then left him alone there.
     
    He had known at a glance that she was dead—he had seen too many violent fatalities in the Navy to entertain any doubt—but if a body in that condition had been brought to him after a sea battle, he would have assumed that a mast section had fallen across it, or that an unmoored cannon had recoiled and crushed it against a bulkhead. What had
happened
to her?
    Crawford recalled that one of the men who broke into the room had glanced at the ceiling, apparently half expecting to see a great gap from which some titanic piece of masonry would have fallen, but the plaster was sound, with only a few spots of blood. And how had Crawford not only come through unscratched, but
slept right through it
? Could he have been drugged, or knocked unconscious? As a doctor, he was unable to discover in himself the after-effects of either one.
    What kind of husband sleeps through the brutal murder—and rape, possibly, though there would be no way to derive a guess about that from the devastated body upstairs—of his own wife? Hadn't there been something about "protecting" in the vows he'd taken last night?
    But how could a killer have got into the room? The door was bolted from the inside, and the window was at least a dozen feet above the pavement, and was in any case too small for even a child to crawl through . . . and this murder wasn't the work of any child—Crawford estimated that it would take a strong man, even with a sledgehammer, to crush a ribcage so totally.
    And how in the name of God had he slept through it?
    He was unable to stop seeing that smashed horror in the bed, and he knew that it completed a triumvirate, along with the burning house in which Caroline had died and the overturned boat in the surf that had drowned his younger brother. And he knew that these things would forever be obstacles to any other subject for his attention, like rough boulders blocking the doorways and corridors of an otherwise comfortable house.
    He wondered, almost objectively, whether he would find a way to avoid dying by his own hand.
    He had refilled his brandy cup at least once, but now he was nauseated by the sharp fumes of it, and out of consideration for their kitchen floor—
That's good
, interrupted his mind hysterically,
their kitchen floor! How about the floor upstairs, and