Free Midnight Voices by John Saul

turning off the lights but checking the windows to make sure they were all securely locked. Finally she went to Laurie’s room, said goodnight, then moved on to Ryan’s room to tuck him in. As she bent over to kiss him goodnight, his arms slipped around her neck, and he pulled her close.
    “Mom?” he whispered. “Is something wrong?”
    Caroline froze for a second, but then squeezed him reassuringly. “Of course not,” she assured him. “Everything’s fine. And tomorrow’s a school day and you need to be asleep.” Tucking him in, she turned off his light, but left his door ajar so a little light would leak into the room from the night-light in the hall. Then she checked the door and windows one more time, and at last retreated to her room. Turning off the light, she went to the window and gazed down into the street.
    She saw nothing.
    And there is nothing,
she told herself.
I’m just imagining things.
    Pulling the curtains, she turned her back on the darkness, but even as she undressed, she knew she was in for another sleepless night.

    Outside, a figure stepped from the doorway across the street from the building in which Caroline Evans and her children lived. The face tipped upward for a moment, scanning the darkened windows one last time.
    A moment later, apparently satisfied, the figure vanished into the night as completely as if it had never been there at all.

CHAPTER 6
    On Monday morning, Anthony Fleming was feeling almost as dispirited as Caroline Evans had on the day before. He’d spent all day Sunday in his apartment—not a good idea, given the size of the apartment, and its emptiness.
    Children—that’s what it needed. That’s what
he
needed.
    Anthony liked children—liked their energy, their vitality. That was the one problem with living in The Rockwell these days; there weren’t enough children. In fact, there were practically no children right now. Only Max and Alicia Albion’s foster daughter, Rebecca Mayhew, but even having Rebecca in the building—sweet though she was—wasn’t the same as having half a dozen kids running from one apartment to another, making life miserable for Rodney, but giving the old building a feeling of vitality. That’s how it had been when he still had Lenore and the kids. Not just his own apartment, but the whole building had vibrated with life as the twin boys organized hide-and-seek games that were never confined to a single apartment, but ranged from floor to floor, and sometimes even into the attic.
    Once, a little girl had tried to go down into the basement to hide, but fortunately Rodney had seen her just in time, and kept her away from the maze of steam pipes and old electrical wiring that made going into the building’s substructure an adventure for anyone who had work to do there.
    But as time had inevitably gone by, the handful of children had dwindled away until only Rebecca was left. Anthony remembered well the day Max and Alicia had brought her home. Her brown eyes looked almost as large as those of the child in a terrible painting that hung in Virginia Estherbrook’s apartment. Not over the fireplace, of course; a portrait of Virginia herself occupied that spot, in costume as Cleopatra. The picture of the child hung on one of the walls, where its huge eyes seemed forever fixed on the image of Virginia. Even Virginia admitted that the painting should have been done on black velvet, but she said the child seemed to speak to her. Given its grotesquely large eyes and the single tear that ran down its left cheek, Anthony wondered just what, exactly, the seemingly genderless child might be saying, but he’d certainly never risked Virginia’s wrath by asking. When Max and Alicia had brought Rebecca down to introduce her to him and his family, the first thing that had flashed through his mind was that picture. Rebecca had hung back from Lenore and the twins, clinging to Alicia’s hand as if it were a lifeline. But then Samantha, who looked the same