The House

The phone rang during dinner, and Laurie let the machine pick up. It was Josh, but she still wasn't in the mood to talk, and she listened to his message as she ate her asparagus.

She tried to arrange what little she remembered from her pre-adoptive years chronologically in her mind but was unable to do so. Her memories remained fragmented disjointed images, out of context, with only a vague dread linking everything together. She didn't know what was happening to her, what was going on, but she had the feeling that there was something here under the surface, an overarching connection between the past and the present that she couldn't see and wasn't sure she wanted to know about.

She went to bed early, tired.

And she dreamed of the girl.

Norton Carole's ghost would not go away.

Norton had never believed in ghosts, had always considered those who did to be naive, gullible, and superstitious, the type of people who could be easily separated from their money, but he had had to change his tune.

Carole's ghost would not go away. He remembered, years ago, taking a group of graduating students on a senior class trip to California. They'd gone to Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Sea World, and in San Diego they'd visited the Whaley House, the first two-story brick home in California. The house was supposed to be haunted, and there was corroboration by generations' worth of witnesses who had claimed to see and hear ghosts, but he'd felt nothing. Some of the girls § had gotten scared, one boy had refused to go upstairs, and all of the students later said they'd felt the "vibes" of the place, but he had put it all down to the power of suggestion and had dismissed it. There were no such things as ghosts, he told them.

But there were.

He knew that now.

Carole's ghost had shown up the day after her burial.

The funeral had been held at the Presbyterian church adjoining the cemetery, and every pew had been filled.

There'd been their friends and her friends and his friends, as well as assorted acquaintances, neighbors, and coworkers, and the whole thing had been nearly overwhelming.

He was not a social man by nature--Carole had taken charge of that aspect of the marriage--and this was the time when he felt least like being sociable, felt most like being alone, but he was thrust into the role of host, having to meet and greet, accepting condolences and offers of support, repeating endlessly that he was all right, he was okay, he was coping.

It had rained during the burial service, but a canopy had been set up over the gravesite and while the mourners were forced to stand a little closer together than was comfortable, they had remained dry despite the downpour.

Afterward, people followed him to his house, repeated their condolences, gave him casseroles and Jell-O and flowers and cards. It had been after eight before the last person finally left, and he'd gone directly to sleep after that, not only because he was exhausted, but because he didn't want to be alone, didn't want to have time to think.

In the morning, Carole's ghost was in the bathroom.

He thought at first that he was hallucinating. She was naked and standing in front of the sink, apparently looking at herself in the mirror. She had the appearance of a stereotypical apparition: her form was visible but transparent, a pale see-through representation of solid matter.

He walked into the bathroom --and she disappeared.

Despite himself, he felt slightly chilled. His lack of belief in anything beyond the physical, material world was strong, but even if its origin was in his own mind, seeing Carole's form after her death was a little unnerving.

He looked around the bathroom, checked behind the shower curtain, and, satisfied that there was no one there, walked over to the toilet to take a leak.

His mind was probably playing tricks on him, he decided.

He was so used to seeing Carole that his brain had filled in the blanks, putting her where he expected her to be.

But she'd never stood in front of the sink naked. Not in all the years they'd been married.

It was the stress, he told himself, the shock. It was making him see things that weren't there.

She was waiting for him ten minutes later in the kitchen.

Still naked.

This time, he definitely had chills. The nudity, for some reason, lent credence to the idea that the figure was Carole's ghost. That was one of the problems he'd always had with spirits. People who saw them always claimed they were clothed. Sometimes they were even supposed to be wearing hats. But that made no logical sense. Did the clothes die with the person? Were these the ghosts of their clothes that had accompanied them to the great beyond? Did ghosts somehow conjure up the appearance of clothing so as to not embarrass their earthly counterparts? It had always made more sense to him to assume that if there were such things as ghosts, they would be merely an unformed energy source with no definite shape. The idea that a human soul retained the physical appearance of the body housing it had seemed to him to be a ludicrously illogical idea.

But Carole's ghost looked just like her.

The ghost, again, was standing before the sink, this time the kitchen sink. It was facing him across the length of the room, and it smiled as he entered. He was still clinging to the thought that this was a trick of his mind, but there seemed to be a measurable decrease in temperature as he walked into the kitchen, and he did not think he was imagining that. From behind him came the familiar purr-meow of Hermie begging for his morning Friskies, and the cat jogged between his legs toward the plastic dish next to the stove.

Halfway across the linoleum, Hermie stopped. He stared at the ghost, arched his back, hissed and ran away.

Norton backed up slowly.

Hermie saw her too!

It was not a figment of his imagination, not stress or a hallucination. It was an honest-to-God apparition. He believed that now, and it scared the hell out of him.

Outside the window, a bird flew by. He could see it through Carole's head, her insubstantial form obscuring not even the slightest detail of the scene outdoors. In books, it was only evil spirits that were frightening. People claimed to be comforted by the ghosts of relatives and loved ones, as though they felt they were being watched over by a guardian angel.

Norton felt no such thing.

True, he and Carole were probably not as close and loving as they should have been, but even intense hatred would not have accounted for the feeling he got from the figure across the room. It was like nothing he had ever experienced; the emotional knowledge that he was in the presence of something profoundly unnatural, a wrongness so concentrated and powerful that it permeated the room and everything in it, creating within him a sense of complete engulfing dread. The naked, smiling ghost looked like the shade of a human being, a weakened reflection of the person it had been in life, but its aura seemed to be that of something much deeper, much more inexplicable.

It was still Carole, though.

He knew that. He could feel it.

And that was what scared him.

The figure, still smiling, reached out to him . . . and faded away into nothingness.

He'd taken a week off from work, using his two days of bereavement leave as well as three "personal necessity"

days, but he was not sure that had been such a good idea. He felt restless during the day, the suddenly empty house seemed way too large, and he thought that he should have continued working in order to keep himself busy and keep his mind off Carole.

And her ghost.

She did not appear again until the following night. He was in bed, trying to sleep, trying not to focus on the unusual sounds he'd been hearing in the house, on Car ole's death or her apparent afterlife, on anything that he'd seen or felt, when, for some reason, he was compelled to open his eyes.

And there she was.

Still naked, the ghost stood on the mattress on Car ole's side of the bed, looking down at him. There was no indentation on the mattress, no indication that any weight was being put on the bed despite the fact that the ghost feet were clearly standing flat on the sheet. This close, the detail was amazing. He could make out on the see-through skin the heart-shaped birthmark just below Carole's right breast. Between the thatch of pellucid pubic hair was the faint suggestion of pale pink lips.

He sat up, but she didn't disappear this time.

His heart was pounding with fear. "Get out!" he screamed. "You're dead! Get out and don't come back!"

He'd heard from one parapsychologist on some New Age pseudo-documentary that ghosts were people who were hanging around terrestrial life because they didn't know they had died and weren't ready to move on. He figured it was worth a shot. "You're dead! Leave me alone!"

But the ghost only smiled down at him, lifted her foot, pressed it into his face j--and disappeared.

He'd seen her several times a day ever since. She was everywhere, all over the house, and he tried ignoring her, tried talking to her, tried yelling at her, tried praying.

He tried everything he could think of to get rid of her, but she would not go away.

He was getting desperate, and he considered calling a priest or an exorcist or someone from a tabloid TV

show. He had to do something.

She appeared that night in his dream.

It was a kinder, gentler ghost in his dream. There was not that overwhelming sense of wrongness that he'd experienced in the presence of the figure in life. Instead, the ghost was the same as the real Carole--only dead.

She was standing in a field, next to a haystack, the kind of haystack that wasn't used anymore, and she was pointing toward a far-off light in the darkness.

"Return," she whispered.

He knew what she was telling him to do, and goose bumps popped up on both his arms. She was telling him to return home, to the house in Oakdale, the house of his birth. He did not know how he knew this, but he did, and even as he accepted its dream logic he was fighting against the request.

"No," he told the ghost.

"Return," she repeated.

Panic welled within him. Not because of Carole's ghost but at the prospect of returning to the house in Oakdale.

"Return."

Norton awoke, breathing hard, drenched with sweat.

He sat up in bed, reached for the cup of water he always kept on the nightstand and drank it all. He hadn't thought about the house in Oakdale for ... hell, decades.

He hadn't consciously avoided thinking about it-- at least he didn't think he had--but he realized now that that was probably exactly what had happened.

He had not been back to Oakdale since moving forty years ago.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. If he'd been so grounded and logical and rational, if he hadn't believed in ghosts, why had he never gone back?

Why had he been afraid to go back?

Those were not questions he could answer.

He got out of bed, walked over to the window.

Carole was there.

She was not in his dream now. She was outside, on the grass, next to the tree, her ghost skin absorbing rather than reflecting moonlight.

"Return," she whispered, her words echoing in his head far louder than they had any right to do. "Return."

Frightened, he shivered, turned away.

The next day was Saturday, and he decided to walk across town to Hal Hicks's place. Hal had taught biology and algebra at the high school for thirty years and had retired a few years back when Ralph Stringer came in as principal. He was a good man and Norton's best friend, and if there was anyone he could tell this craziness to it was Hal.

The farther Norton got from the house, the sillier the notion seemed, however, and before he was halfway there he had pretty well decided not to mention anything about Carole's ghost. Around him, men were mowing their lawns, women were weeding flower beds, kids were riding up and down the sidewalk on bikes, trikes , and skates. Ahead, on Main, young couples and middle-aged women were shopping in the downtown business district.

Here, in the real world, around other people, he started to believe again that it was all in his head, a figment of his imagination. There was no such thing as ghosts.

But Hermie had seen it.

He pushed that thought from his mind.

Hal was outside, in his yard, watering his fruit trees.

"Summer's over," Norton said, walking up.

"They still need their water." Hal grinned. "Don't mess with me on biology."

Norton held up his hands in surrender.

"How you holding up?" Hal asked seriously.

He shrugged. Here at his friend's all of a sudden, the events of the past few days no longer seemed quite so silly. He thought once again about telling Hal what was going on.

"Tough time sleeping?"

"Of course," Norton told him.

"You look tired." He put down the hose, walked over to the faucet, turned it off. "Come on in, I'll put on a pot of coffee."

Norton followed his friend into the house. As always, there were piles of newspapers on the couch, leftover dishes on the dining-room table. Books were scattered everywhere.

He wondered if his house would look like this in a few years, as the female influence faded.

Probably.

They walked into the kitchen. Norton sat down at the table in the breakfast nook while Hal dumped the old grounds out of the Mr. Coffee machine and put in a new filter.

Norton just came out and said it: "Do you believe in ghosts?"

He surprised even himself by bringing it up, but he did not backtrack, and he watched Hal's hands as his friend measured out the coffee, not wanting to see the expression on his face.

Hal poured a potful of water into the machine, switched it on, and walked over to the table, wiping his hands on his pants. He sat down, stared at his friend levelly. "Have you felt Carole's presence?"

Norton nodded. He wanted to retract what he'd said, wanted to pretend this was all a joke, wanted to get off this subject, but he couldn't. "Yes."

Hal sighed. "You know, after Mariette died, I thought I felt her presence around the house, too. I didn't tell anyone, didn't talk about it to anybody, but I knew she was here. I felt it. I didn't see her or anything, but it was always as if I'd just missed her. I'd walk into the living room, and it'd be like she'd just walked into the kitchen the second before. Or I'd go into the bedroom, and I knew she'd just gone into the bathroom. I can't explain it, but you know how you can tell when a house is occupied, how it feels as if someone's there even though they're in another part of the house and you can't see them? That's what it was like. I never saw her, but I knew she was there."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"Would you have believed me?"

Norton didn't answer.

"I figured everyone'd think I was crazy, want to put me in a home or something. Old widowed man thinking he's being haunted by his wife's ghost?" He shook his head.

Norton was silent for a moment. He cleared his throat.

"I haven't just felt her, I've seen her."

Hal raised his eyebrows.

"This isn't just a 'presence.' It's a full-body apparition, a naked apparition, and it appears all over the house, at different times of day, in different places and positions."

"Naked, huh?" Hal chuckled. "Maybe you just need to get yourself a littlepoon ."

Norton frowned at him.

"I'm sorry," Hal said quickly. "I'm sorry. I know it was insensitive and inappropriate. I didn't mean to offend --"

Norton waved him away. "You know me better than that, Hal."

"What is it, then?"

He hesitated. "She asked me to do something. Told me to do something."

"You've seen her and heard her?"

Norton nodded.

"What'd she say?"

"Well, it was just one word--'Return'--but I understood that she wanted me to go back to Oakdale, to my parents' old house."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"You believe this? You think it's real?"

He hesitated only a second. "Yes."

Hal thought for a moment. "Maybe you'd better go."

Norton was already shaking his head. "I can't go back there."

"Why?"

"I just can't."

"When was the last time--"

"I haven't seen it since I left."

"How long ago was that?"

"When I went into the army. When I was eighteen."

"I take it you don't have fond memories of the place."

"I'm not going back."

Hal nodded.

They were silent for a moment.

"You get more spiritual as you get older," Hal said.

"I don't know if it's because you get scared since you're closer to death, or because you're actually wiser than you used to be, but you start thinking about spiritual things, wondering why we're here, what the point of it all is, whether there's anything else. If I were you, I'd probably go. I'd probably do what the ghost said.

There's a reason for it, something we don't understand, and I think I'd have to trust that."

Norton said nothing.

"We've felt these presences or seen these ghosts because we're supposed to. We're not too far from them ourselves, it's almost our time, and who's to say whether this isn't the way it works. Maybe everybody sees ghosts before they go, only they're like me, they're afraid to mention it, afraid to tell anyone."

Norton remained silent.

"This might be a warning. About your death. About your afterlife. I don't know if you can afford to ignore it."

"I can't go back," Norton repeated.

"Why?"

"Because of what happened."

"In Oakdale?"

Norton looked at him. "In the house," he said.

"What did happen?" Hal asked quietly.

"I don't know," Norton admitted, and a wave of cold passed through him. "I can't remember. But it was bad."

He shivered, rubbed his arms. "I know it was bad."

As usual, he was the last person at school save the custodians.

He'd stayed late in the past quite frequently, but it had become a daily routine during the time of Carole's ghost. Now that her spirit was gone, he remained out of habit.

Well, habit and the fact that he wasn't entirely sure she was gone for good.

The ghost had disappeared after that last appearance by the tree, after telling him to return home to Oakdale.

It was as if she had done what she had come here to do, had completed her mission and moved on.

Strangely enough, the house seemed even creepier now that she had left. It had been unnerving to see Carole's nude form suddenly appear in a room, stressful to know that she could show up anywhere in the house at any time, without warning. But it had been an extension of her real presence, and though they hadn't always gotten along, it was somehow comforting and reassuring to know that Carole was still in the house.

Now, though, the house seemed . . . what?

He didn't know, couldn't explain it.

On the one hand, it was empty, completely devoid of any activity other than his own. On the other hand, that seemed to be just a temporary state of affairs. He had the feeling that Carole's ghost could return at any moment.

And that she might bring others.

It was impossible to put into words, this feeling, and it might be simply the mental ravings of a doddering trauma-shocked old man, but he was more afraid of being in the house now than he had been when Carole's ghost was popping up left and right. It was stressful and it made him nervous, and its ripples were infringing on all other aspects of his life. It was even beginning to affect his teaching.

He'd considered selling the place, staying at a boardinghouse or a cheap hotel until he could find a new home or an apartment to rent, but he knew that that would not put an end to it.

There was also Oakdale hanging over his head.

Return.

He'd been thinking a lot about home, about Oakdale lately, but though he had the distinct sense that something horrible had happened there, something that had so alienated him it had kept him away all these years, the only memories he could conjure up were good the ants --and whatever bad memories he had were buried under the layer of years. While he was sure he could uncover those core truths eventually, he was not at all sure he wanted to do so. He'd lived most of his life away from Oakdale, without thinking about it, and he saw no problem with doing the same for whatever years were left to him.

But could he afford to? Whatever was at stake here, it had to be pretty damn important if a ghost had been sent out to harass him.

Sent out by whom?

That was the real question. Although he'd gone to church on and off throughout his life, Norton basically considered himself an agnostic. Well, maybe not exactly an agnostic. A deist, perhaps, like Thomas Jefferson, an adherent to the clockmaker theory. He believed that God had created everything, had set it in motion, but was now on to other projects and other planets, trusting his creation to run in the way he'd intended and not deigning to bother in the affairs of men.

But the appearance of Carole's ghost had thrown him, and for the first time in his life he considered that maybe the fundamentalists were right. Maybe there was a traditional heaven and a traditional hell, and maybe God did take a personal interest in the minutiae of men. Maybe He was an old man with a long white beard who spent all His time monitoring what happened on earth.

Maybe God was trying to communicate with him.

Return.

That was the thought to which he kept coming back, and he had to admit that it frightened him. Hal was right; even if it was not God specifically who was urging him to return to Oakdale, it was some sort of higher power, something able to summon supernatural forces.

And who was he to go argue with that? Who was he to go against the wishes of such a being? For all he knew, the fate of the world was at stake and his hesitation and procrastination might doom the human race for eternity.

What would have happened if Noah had shirked his duty? What if Moses hadn't been in the mood to lead his people out of Egypt?

Egocentric thinking, he knew. Megalomaniacal even.

He wasn't in that kind of position. The world wouldn't end because he refused to go back to Oakdale.

But could he afford to take that chance?

Hal had offered to go back with him, and as simple a gesture as it was, Norton found himself touched by it.

He knew how scared his friend was for him, and he was grateful for the support. It was almost enough to tempt him into going.

Almost.

But the bottom line was that he was afraid. Afraid of what might happen, afraid of what he might learn, afraid of what he might remember. If it was God calling him in on this, He'd have to either inject some courage into these old bones or give him another sign of some kind and let him know how important this was and why.

Otherwise, he was staying home.

Norton sighed. Deep down, though, he didn't really believe it was God trying to recruit him. It was interesting to think about, and it was the argument he tried to use on himself, but if God was really trying to get in touch with him, He would have made it a more pleasant experience. He would have used an angel or a bright white light, not the nude ghost of Norton's dead wife.

And the message would not have been so ambiguous. It would have been more direct.

If anything, this was a recruitment call not from God but from . . . the other guy.

The devil.

Satan.

There was a knock on the door and Joe Reynolds, the lead custodian, poked his head in the room. "You almost through in here, Mr. Johnson? I need to clean the floors."

Norton tossed a stack of papers and the teacher's edition of the twelfth-grade government textbook into his briefcase. "Just leaving, Joe. Don't mean to hold you up."

"Don't apologize, Mr. Johnson. I think the kids of this town would be a hell of a lot better off if all our teachers were as conscientious as you."

Norton smiled at him. "I think you're right."

He walked home the same way he'd walked to work this morning, through the field and over to Fifth Street, but there seemed something different this afternoon and he could not quite put his finger on what it was.

It was chilly once again, and there were red and yellow leaves on the sidewalks and the streets. The sun was not down, but it was low, and the neighborhoods through which he passed were shrouded in shadow. He put down his briefcase, buttoned up his coat against the cold. Fall was here, not officially but in spirit, and that cheered him up. No matter what else was going on, no matter how horrible his life became, there were still things to look forward to, still things to enjoy.

There was a lot to be said for simple pleasures.

At the next intersection, he turned right, onto Clover.

Before him, there was a trail of burnt toast on the sidewalk, and he stopped in his tracks, staring at the line of blackened squares stretching out before him.

It came back to him. Not thoughts but feelings. Not images but ambiance.

A cool breeze brushed his cheek.

The burnt toast trail led down the block for as far as he could see, and though he was aware that it could have been placed there by some child as part of a game, he knew that was not the case. It would have taken hours to burn so many pieces of toast, even in the largest toaster, and there was no real point to it. That was too much effort, too much thought, too much work for such a bizarre and meaningless effect.

This was what it had been like in Oakdale, he realized.

These were the sorts of things that had happened at home. It had been a world of sudden strangeness, of incongruous juxtapositions, a world in which the irrational was an everyday occurrence.

He stared at the sidewalk in front of him.

No child had done this.

The trail had been meant for him.

It was a sign.

Return.

The breeze was still blowing, but the coldness he felt had nothing to do with the weather. It came from within, and while he could not remember specifics of his life in Oakdale, he had a clearer sense of the overall picture, and he was even more frightened of it than he had been before.

Something was trying to communicate with him, and despite the trepidation he felt, he walked forward, down the sidewalk, following the toast.

The trail led to an empty house in the center of Sterling Avenue, two blocks away. Across the street, a mother standing on her front porch called her bundled daughters in for dinner while their friends continued to play hopscotch on the sidewalk. Several neighbors on both sides of the tree-lined drive waved and called out to each other as they walked their dogs.

No one seemed to notice the unwavering line of burnt bread, and he gathered his courage, took a deep breath, and followed it up the walk and into the open house.

Inside, the rooms were devoid of furniture. The toast trail ended at the porch steps, but there were piles of what looked like strawberry jam in the entry way, the front room, the hall, and the kitchen. Those were all the rooms he could see from the doorway, and he assumed the pattern continued through the bedroom and bathrooms.

He stepped slowly over the threshold, looking around.

There was no movement, no sign of people or ghosts or beings of any sort, but the atmosphere was charged with tension and he had the feeling that he could be jumped at any time. The smart thing to do would be to turn back, leave, retreat, but he had to know why he'd been led here and he pressed on.

The girl was waiting for him in the empty back bedroom.

She could not have been more than ten or eleven, and she was wearing a dirty white shift that hung loosely on her thin frame and threatened with every movement to slip off her shoulders. Her filthy hair hung over her forehead in a way that seemed sensuous; not a parody of the posturing of an older girl, but a casually unforced naturalness that was sexy despite her age.

She was standing in front of a window, with the light from the house next door behind her, and he was aware that he could see her legs, backlit through the thin material of the shift, and his eyes were drawn to the meeting place of her thighs.

What the hell was wrong with him? This girl was young enough to be his granddaughter.

Granddaughter?

Great-granddaughter.

The girl smiled at him, and there was something so evil in that smile, something so unnatural and corrupt, that he turned without thinking and ran. It was an instinctive animal reaction. He was absolutely terrified, utterly panic-stricken, and he sped out of the room, down the hall, running faster than he ever had in his life.

In the hall, in the front room, in the entryway, he saw bugs working their way out of the strawberry jam as he leaped over or hurriedly skirted the piles, hundreds of black bodies squirming in the thick red substance, trying to escape.

He jumped off the steps, landing on the cement walkway and scattering the squares of burnt toast. His heart was pounding so furiously and painfully that he thought he might be having a heart attack, but he kept running and did not stop until he was two houses away and almost completely out of breath.

In his mind, he still saw that dirty, sexy little girl, smiling evilly at him. He could not get the image out of his head, and it made him want to keep running, to get as far away from here as quickly as possible, but both his lungs and legs were rebelling, and no matter how frightened he was, he knew he had to rest for a few moments or he wouldn't be getting out of this neighborhood at all.

Across the street, a dog-walking couple was staring at him and frowning, curious, no doubt, as to why an old man had run like hell from an empty house in which he was not supposed to be, and he looked over at them, grimaced, and waved. They turned away, embarrassed, and kept walking.

Norton bent over, resting his hands on his knees and trying to catch his breath. The sun was now almost down, and the shadows had darkened into dusk. He did not want to be on the street when night fell, but he could not afford to push himself any more than he already had.

He exhaled deeply, inhaled just as deeply, attempting to regulate and control his breathing.

Jesus, he was in bad shape.

A few minutes later, he straightened, stood. His heart continued to pound, but his breathing had calmed down, and he decided to chance it. He started walking, crossing the street and heading toward Oak Road and Main. He moved slowly, but he didn't have to stop, and five minutes later he was on his own street in his own neighborhood.

The image of the dirty girl was still in his mind, and he started thinking that there was something familiar about her. He had not noticed it at first, but looking back on it, there'd been a spark of recognition in his initial reaction to her, a trace of the known in her appearance.

He had seen her before.

He reached his house, removed his keys from his pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped inside, flipping on the lights. He'd half expected to see Carole's ghost again, or some other manifestation, but the house was empty and for that he was grateful.

He put down his briefcase, walked into the kitchen.

Donna.

That's who the girl reminded him of.

The ants.

Why hadn't he seen it immediately, the resemblance?

It was so obvious now that he thought about it. The similarity between the two was frightening.

He walked over to the cupboard, took out a shot glass and a bottle of scotch.

Donna.

The memories flooded back. They'd been friends. At least it had started out that way. They'd played with toys, made up games, imagined adventures. But something had changed somewhere along the way. He remembered the two of them beating up other children, making them cry. Burying a live hamster. Skinning a dog.

The ants.

It had been fun and he'd enjoyed it, but then things had changed.

Then had come the sex.

He'd enjoyed that, too. He'd never known anything like it, and he knew it was something his other friends weren't getting to do, and it was not only the physical pleasure it afforded, but the exclusivity of the act and the air of the forbidden which surrounded it that so heightened the experience, that made him feel the way he did.

But then . . .

Then it had gone too far.

Donna had been younger than him but far more knowledgeable, and as things progressed, she had attempted to entice him into perversity. The sex she'd suggested had been unnatural, the acts she wanted him to perform with her things he had never even imagined. It had frightened him and he had pulled away, but he could not remember what happened after that. His memory was hazy. Had she moved? Had they simply stopped being friends?

He couldn't recall.

But he had an erection even now, just thinking about it, and for the first time since he'd been a child, he allowed himself to remember what he and Donna had done.

He put down the bottle and the shot glass and walked out of the kitchen, down the hall to the bathroom.

He thought not only of what they'd done, but of what she'd wanted to do, of the perverted acts she'd wanted him to engage in, and he recalled the way the girl in the empty house had looked with the window behind her and the meeting of her thighs visible through the thin material of her dirty shift.

He imagined what she looked like without the shift.

Breathing heavily, he pulled down his pants, knelt before the toilet bowl.

He began to masturbate.

Stormy Roberta was waiting for him when he got home.

With a lawyer.

The two of them sat on the chairs opposite the coffee table, and Stormy had no choice but to set himself down on the couch. The chairs were higher than the couch, so the two of them looked down on him while he looked up at them. He had to smile. An old movie trick. A

visual metaphor. Place the good guys at a slightly higher angle so that there would be a subliminal sense of power and authority on their part, so that they were perceived to have the upper hand and the moral high ground.

It was probably the lawyer's idea.

This was entirely unexpected, completely out of the blue, but he pretended as though it was something he'd been anticipating, and he placed his briefcase on the shag next to the couch and smiled up at Roberta. "Did we have to bring the lawyers in at this stage?"

She frowned. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Him." He nodded toward the lawyer, though he was suddenly unsure of himself.

"Mr. Reynolds? He's here," she explained patiently, "because the Finnigan brothers declared bankruptcy and you're one of their creditors."

"Is this a bad time?" the lawyer asked, looking from Roberta to Stormy.

Stormy shook his head tiredly. "No, it's fine." He found that he was a little disappointed Roberta was not trying to divorce him, and he tried to pay attention as Reynolds explained that the status of the downtown Albuquerque theater he'd bought with theFinnigan brothers with the intention of turning it into an art theater was now in limbo, but his mind kept wandering. He accepted the forms and folders given him, listened to his options, but figured he'd go over the details later at his leisure.

There were still questions as to whether, as a distributor, he was legally allowed to own a theater, and he'd remained a minority partner, owning forty-nine percent of the enterprise to theFinnigans ' fifty-one. There were a lot of cases pending before various courts that addressed this issue and he'd hoped to avoid it entirely, but apparently unless he could get another majority partner, he'd either have to jump in and buy the entire business or forfeit his interest in the project to the bankruptcy court and accept whatever they could get for the theater at auction.

His mind was still on divorce, though. Somehow, this false alarm seemed to have lent him the confidence he'd lacked until now. He realized, for the first time, that an end to the marriage was a realistic possibility. Before now, it had been an abstraction, a fantasy almost, and for some stupid reason he'd assumed that if there was going to be a divorce, it would be initiated by her.

But why?

He could start divorce proceedings himself. He could take an active role in this. Instead of passively waiting for something to happen to him, he could take the initiative and do it himself.

Reynolds stood, handed him a card. "I guess that concludes it. If you have any questions over the next few days, feel free to call."

"I'll talk to my lawyer," Stormy said, "and have him get in touch with you."

Reynolds nodded. "My phone and fax number are on the card."

Stormy saw the other man to the door, watched him get into his black Bronco, and waved good-bye. He shut the door and looked back toward Roberta, who was still standing next to the coffee table.

She stared at him. "You really thought I wanted a divorce?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

She said nothing, only nodded and walked into the kitchen, an unreadable expression on her face.

He drove down to Albuquerque the next day.

Overnight, he'd pretty much given up his dream of owning an art theater. It was an old dream anyway, concocted in L.A. during his college days, when such places were the hip spots for hip students to hang out. Times had changed, though, and cable TV and the multiplexes had pretty well killed off the independently owned art house. Today's viewers were simply not as willing to make the effort to leave their homes and take a chance on quirky, unknown films when they knew they could catch the movies on cable in six months.

Hell, more people saw art films on video today than had ever seen them in a theater.

But it was still depressing.

He pulled up in front of the building and got out of the car to take a last look around. Now that he was out of the project, divorced from the hopes and wishes connected with it, he could see that the idea had been a shaky one. The neighborhood surrounding the theater was not commercial but industrial, having shifted some twenty years ago when downtown retail businesses moved to a newer area of the city. Not the greatest part of town even in the daytime, at night it would be downright spooky to anyone living above the poverty line.

He stared up at the broken marquee and peeling, weathered facade. They'd purchased the building but had not yet started on any of the renovations. Not that there were going to be that many. Art theater patrons liked a dingy, slightly seedy low-tech ambience. It differentiated them from other moviegoers, imparted a feeling of exclusivity to the viewing experience, made them think they were intellectual because they were willing to endure hardship for their love of art.

Still, the building was not up to code and its deteriorated condition was a little too run-down even for the art crowd.

Stormy walked up to the front doors, unlocked and opened them. He was supposed to drop his keys off at the real-estate office, but he wanted to see his baby one final time before putting it up for adoption.

He walked into the lobby and immediately the hair on the back of his neck prickled. It was a physical sensation, a biologic response, not something originating in his mind. Some instinctive animal part of his nature sensed danger here, and though he would ordinarily put such a reaction down to stress or psychological factors and immediately dismiss it, this time he was not quite so ready to ignore his response.

He thought of what Ken had said about Tom Utchaca and his father, about what was happening on the reservation.

Once again, the idea of a living doll jogged his memory, but he couldn't quite recollect what in his past would provide a correlation.

Maybe there was a doll somewhere in the theater.

His goose bumps doubled, tripled, and he was tempted to walk out the way he'd come, drive straight to the real-estate office, and drop off the keys. Even with the front door open, the lobby was dark, its edges shadowed, and both the stairway to the balcony and the open door to the theater proper were pitch-black.

He moved over to the ticket booth, flipped the series of light switches for the building. Soft yellow bulbs flickered on but did little to dissipate the gloom.

The idea that there was akachina doll--a living kachi nadoll--somewhere in the theater was stupid, but the image was undeniably powerful. In his mind, he could see one of the strange figures skulking under the projector in the booth, crawling under the seats in the theater, lurking behind the screen in the storage area.

He'd never been one to let fear get the best of him, though. If he even suspected he was scared of something, he'd meet it head-on, fight it and tame it. He'd had a fear of flying. Now he had a pilot's license. He'd had a fear of the ocean. He'd taken a cruise to Alaska. This was smaller, more specific, but that didn't make it any less acceptable, and he wasn't going to let doubt and fear and superstition run him out of his own building in the middle of the day.

He walked forward, through the double doors on the left side of the concession stand. Before him, rows of red seats sloped slightly downward. He saw no sign of movement in the aisles or on the abbreviated stage below the ripped screen, but he was still chilled, and he stood there for a moment, waiting, watching.

Nothing.

The interior of the theater was quiet, the only sound came from outside, and the silence made him feel a little better. He heard no claws on cement floor, no soft rustling, none of the sounds a doll would make if it was looking for him, coming after him.

If it was looking for him? Coming after him?

Where had he come up with that?

He didn't know.

But he knew the sounds.

He'd heard them before.

The silence was no longer quite so reassuring. He backtracked into the lobby. There was no reason for him to be here. He should lock up, turn in the keys, sign the papers, and get his butt back to Santa Fe before the afternoon rain started.

But he didn't want to feel like he was running away.

He stood for a moment, staring at the dust-covered popcorn machine, then turned and walked upstairs to the balcony.

By rights, this should have been scarier. It was darker, smaller, more claustrophobic, but the tension he'd felt downstairs faded up here, and as he looked down at the screen he felt nothing. It was an old run-down building, that's all. There was nothing unusual here, nothing out of the ordinary.

Why did he think he knew the sounds a doll would make if it was alive and coming after him?

Why did he think he'd heard them before?

He didn't want to even consider that.

He walked slowly back downstairs, intending to lock up and leave. He was past the curve of the stairwell, looking down at his feet, when movement caught his eye. He glanced up from the steps.

And saw the door to the men's rest room closing.

Ten minutes ago, he would've freaked and run out.

But his fear seemed to have fled, and all Stormy thought now was that he'd left the front door open, and some homeless guy had wandered in. He was going to have to find some way to get him out.

Great, he thought.

He hurried down the remaining steps, pushed the restroom door open, and said loudly, "All right--"

And stopped.

There was no one there.

Like the rest of the building, the bathrooms had fallen into a state of serious disrepair, and there were no stalls, no urinals, only a sink and one toilet amid the rubble and pipe fixtures.

The toilet had been used recently. Splashes of water dripped down from the lip, had wet the surrounding floor. Stormy stepped closer. The toilet had not been flushed, but what lay in the bowl water did not look like human waste. It looked like a fruit salad, and there was something about the incongruity of the fruit salad's appearance and its placement that set his already jangled nerves on edge.

He glanced over at the sink, saw a long-stemmed red rose embedded in a chunk of cheddar cheese that protruded from the drain.

This was too weird. This was too fucking creepy. He had no idea what was happening here or what it meant, all he knew was that he did not want to be a part of it.

He no longer owned any portion of this building, and at this point he didn't care if they razed it and replaced it with a nuclear power plant. He just wanted to get the hell out.

He stared at the rose.

Living dolls were spooky enough, but they were at least understandable. They were within the range of acknowledged supernatural phenomena, like ghosts and witches and demons. But this was something else entirely.

This was . . .

He didn't know what this was.

All he knew was that it scared the shit out of him.

He ran through the deserted lobby and, with trembling fingers, locked the theater doors. He hurried back to his car.

Maybe this was an isolated occurrence. Maybe this was entirely unconnected to what was going on up at the reservation.

Maybe.

But he didn't think so.

He drove to the real-estate office, turned in his keys, signed the papers, and got the hell out of Albuquerque as quickly as he could.

But the fear followed him all the way to Santa Fe.

And it did not abate that night or the following day.

Mark Dry River.

Rounded propane tanks in white trash backyards, tilted clotheslines of rusty pipe, plastic toys in sandy dirt, Dobermans behind chain-link fence. Liquor store, no name market, Texaco gas station. The familiar hues and shades of the surrounding country: dark against light as the irregular shadows of clouds drifted, shifting, across low desert mountains.

Mark nodded his thanks to the man who'd dropped him off in front of the post office, watching him drive away before turning to survey the town. It was depressingly familiar after all these years, changed hardly at all. Past the bridge that spanned the town's namesake, huge cottonwoods lined the street, shading the buildings below. There were several bicycles parked in front of the small brick library, cars in front of the bar. Two barefoot boys walked toward the trailer park pool, carrying towels. The only noises in the still air were the competing mechanical hums of swamp coolers and air conditioners, and the occasional cry of a high-circling hawk.

Down the road to his left was a new subdivision that had not made it--six identical homes on a dead-end cul de-sac surrounded by several acres of cleared desert-- but other than that, everything seemed to be the same.

He started walking, moving past the diner, the tack and feed store, and an empty lot filled with enormous spools of telephone cable, until he could look east toward the ranches.

Sure enough, their house still towered over everything on the plain, its black bulk intimidating even from here.

Kristen.

His gaze swept immediately toward the cemetery on the opposite side of town. Should he go there first? Or should he seek out the mortuary?

No. He wanted to go home before anything. Wanted to see for himself what, if anything, had happened at the house. He hefted his backpack, slipped his arms through the straps, and started off toward Ranch Road.

He passed the high school on his way, saw boys in green and gold football uniforms skirmishing on the field. Saturday morning practice. He remembered it well.

He'd joined nearly every school activity imaginable in order to get away from the house, and although he'd been a piss-poor athlete, he'd made it onto all of the varsity sports teams because there wouldn't have been enough alternate players otherwise.

He walked away from town down theungraded road toward the hulking behemoth that had been his home.

It had a powerful effect on him even after all this time, and though it was still several miles away, the dark structure was clearly visible in the flat desert, and he found himself slowing down, not walking so fast, not wanting to reach the house before he had time to mentally prepare himself.

He wished he still had The Power.

There was a roaring, rumbling, clattering sound behind him, and Mark turned to see an old red pickup truck bumping along the road, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. The operator of the vehicle seemed to be driving erratically, swerving from left to right in order to avoid known potholes and sections of washboard, and Mark moved to the edge of the road, trying to stay out of the truck's way.

With a sliding, dirt-churning stop, the pickup braked to a halt next to him. He waved the swirling dust away from his face, coughing, and saw through brown cloud that the driver was rolling down the passenger window.

Mark moved forward, squinting.

The man was wearing a stained tank top. His lined face was red, his hair thin and greased, combed back.

Classic Arizona alky.

Was it someone he knew? Hard to tell. The desert aged people, the sun and the hard scrabble lifestyle combining to add years not yet lived to younger features and faces, but he thought there was something familiar about the man.

"Where you going?" the driver asked.

"The McKinney ranch."

"Kristen's place? Ain't no one out there. She passed on a few days ago."

"I know. I'm her brother."

The alky squinted. "Mark? Is that you?" He laughed, shook his head. "Didn't recognize you, boy."

He knew now who the man was. Dave Bradshaw's older brother, Roy.

"Hop on in. I'll give you a lift."

Mark opened the dented door and climbed into the pickup, pushing his backpack onto the seat between them. He nodded to the driver. "Thanks, Roy. Much obliged."

"Never expected to see you here again. Heard you hit the road and were never comin' back."

"Yeah, well ..."

Roy shifted into gear and the truck, lurched forward.

"It's a shame about Kristen. A damn shame."

Mark swallowed, took a deep breath. "Is there going to be a funeral?"

"Already over. Nearly everyone showed up. Kristen was quite a popular gal 'round these parts. Not like your parents." He glanced over at Mark. "No offense."

"None taken." They drove in silence for a few moments, Mark listening to the clatter and roll of the truck on the rough road. "Who found her, Roy? Who . . .

discovered that she was dead?"

"Guy who delivered bottled water. She didn't answer the door, he had a hunch and dialed 911. Course, by the time they got out there she was gone."

"Was it--"

"Heart attack. Don't usually happen that way to someone so young, but . . ." He trailed off, shook his head. "It's a damn shame." He reached over Mark's leg, popped open the glove compartment, pulled out a half finished bottle of rye. "Like a little drink?"

Mark shook his head.

Roy drove for a few seconds with his knees as he expertly opened the bottle, taking the wheel again with his left hand as he used his right to tilt the bottle to his lips. "Aaaah!" he sighed, grinning.

"Dave still in town?" Mark asked.

"Hell, no. Moved to Phoenix after Mom passed on.

It's just me and the old man now."

"How're things going here?"

"They're going."

What he really wanted to ask about was Kristen, her funeral, the details of her death, but some of his parents'

reticence must have rubbed off on him, because he didn't feel comfortable discussing personal matters, family matters, in public. Especially not with someone like Roy.

Ahead, through the dirty windshield, to the right, the bulk of the house was growing ever bigger, ever closer.

Giant.

Roy took another swig from his bottle. "You know,"

he said. "I never did like your house. Never understood why Kristen stayed after your parents passed on. She could've sold it, moved somewhere else, somewhere nice."

Mark didn't understand either, not really, and a slight chill caressed his spine. He licked his lips. "Is Mr. Billings still there?"

Roy frowned. "Billings? Never heard of 'im."

"Hired man? Used to work for my father? Had a retarded daughter?" He tried to jog Roy's memory, but the other man just kept shaking his head.

"Don't ring no bell."

That wasn't entirely surprising. As Roy said, his parents hadn't exactly socialized with their neighbors, and it had been a long time ago. Maybe his father had eventually fired Billings. Or laid him off. Or Billings had simply moved on.

And taken his retarded daughter with him.

"Fuck me in the ass."

He tried to imagine the girl as a teenager; as an adult, but he couldn't. She'd have to be in her mid-twenties now, but Mark could not picture her as anything except the child he remembered.

"Your father does it."

"Kristen didn't live alone, though. She had help--"

"No. Far as I know, she lived by herself."

"No other people came to the funeral? No one you didn't recognize? No . . . hired help?"

"No one 'cept her friends from Dry River." He looked over at Mark. "How'd they ever get in touch with you? I heard tell Frank Neeson was tryin ' like hell to find your sorry ass but no one knew where you were.

Weren't even in Kristen's phone book or nothing. Guess he finally tracked you down, huh?"

"Yeah," Mark said, not wanting to explain.

"Didn't tell you much, though, did he?"

Mark shook his head. "No."

They reached the ranch gate, and the pickup skidded to a stop. "Here's where I let you off," Roy said. He peered through the open passenger window at the black gabled building. "Still don't like that house," he said.

Mark opened the door and pulled his backpack by one of the shoulder straps. He hopped out and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of a sleeve.

"Thanks for the lift," he said. "Appreciate it."

"I'll be coming back this way in about an hour or so.

Want me to stop by, give you a ride?"

Mark looked up at the hot blue sky, nodded.

"Sounds good."

"Bewaitin ' for me by the gate here. I'll give three honks. If there's no sign of you, I'll head on."

"All right." Mark waved as the pickup took off, but even if Roy had been looking, he wouldn't have been able to see through the dust. Coughing, Mark backed away from the road and turned away. Before him was the closed gate and beyond that the drive that led to the house.

He lifted the latch, swung the gate open, closed it behind him, and stood there for a moment. He was afraid. He'd known that already, of course, but the emotional reality of it had not penetrated until now. He stared at the dark structure, and though the front of the house was facing the sun, there was no glare off the windows. The entire facade of the house was the same flat black, its specific features differentiated only by slight variations in tone. It was as if the building swallowed the sunlight, absorbed it, and Mark noticed that the bushes and plants that were in what would be the perimeter of the house's shadow were all brown and dead.

He was just being overly dramatic. The plants were dead because there was no one here to water them.

Without daily attention, everything except cactus and sagebrush died in the desert, and Kristen was no longer here to take care of the property.

That meant that Billings was gone.

It felt as though a weight had been lifted off his chest.

From what Roy had said, it sounded as though the assistant was no longer here, but Roy was obviously not the most reliable of witnesses and Mark had always been a hope-for the best and expect the-worst kind of guy. There was no way Billings would have allowed the plants to die, though, and to Mark that was as good a proof as any that the assistant was gone.

That meant his daughter wouldn't be here either.

"Fuck me in the ass."

His gaze swept involuntarily to the window where he'd last seen the girl, but it was as flat and lifeless as the rest of the house and he saw nothing there.

He walked slowly forward, rippling heat waves creating a mirage puddle on the drive ahead and filtering the bottom of the house through a wavy mirror. In back of the house and to the side were the chicken coops, but Mark could see even from this far away, even through the heat waves, that they'd fallen into a state of disrepair and were no longer used. More proof that Billings was not here.

Why was he so concerned about the assistant?

Because Billings frightened him. He did not know why, and it had never been the case when he'd lived here, but he was terrified of running into the assistant again. In his mind, Mark saw the man looking exactly the same as he had all those years ago, and that, more than anything else, engendered a feeling of dread within him. The assistant's kindness and bland passivity now seemed to him to be masking an unnatural patience and an unfathomable intent. He could imagine Billings waiting, biding his time, picking off the family one by one until there was only Mark left and he was drawn back to the house.

God, he wished The Power hadn't deserted him.

Even more frightening was the prospect of running into Billings' daughter, of seeing the girl again. He remembered how she hadn't aged before, and he could easily imagine her unchanged, bending over a chair in that dark endless hallway and flipping up her shift.

"/ like it hard. Fuck me hard."

He should've gone to the mortuary first, the cemetery, the sheriff's office. It was a mistake to have come here unprepared and all alone. What the hell could he have been thinking?

Still, he continued forward, down the dual-rutted drive with its ever-retreating mirage water, past the sandstone boulders that lined the ragged, shallow, irregularly shaped hole his father had intended to be a pond. The sweat was dripping down the sides of his face, and he had to keep wiping his forehead with his sleeve, but inside he was cold, and the ice within him kept the goose bumps alive on his arms.

He reached the house, walked up the deep porch steps, aware suddenly of how quiet it was. There were no whirs, hums, or other mechanical sounds, none of the noises of civilization. That was to be expected. The ranch was far from town, and the house was empty, everything shut off. But even nature was silent, and that he found more than a little creepy. In this heat, there should have been cicada buzzes, snake rattles, hawk cries.

But there was nothing.

Only the sound of his own feet on the porch boards and the wheeze of his overheated breath.

He no longer had a key for the front door--he'd tossed it off the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge in his own private exorcising ritual several years back--but he knew where his parents had kept a spare, and sure enough, Kristen had continued the tradition. It was on the top of the porch light, just behind the lip edge, and he felt around up there until his fingers found the dusty object.

Once again, he considered turning back, leaving, but he reminded himself that he was not doing this for his own peace of mind, he was doing it for Kristen. He had failed her, and if he was a little uncomfortable at the moment, well, that was just too damn bad. She'd put up with a hell of a lot worse, and it was the least he could do.

The chill in his body intensified as he opened the door and walked inside the house. It was exactly as he'd remembered.

Kristen had not altered even the arrangement of the pictures on the walls. Everything was untouched: furniture in place, throw rugs unmoved. It took his breath away, this sudden wholesale immersion in the past, and he stood there for a moment, stunned.

The heavy wood, the dark walls and floor and ceiling, all seemed horribly oppressive to him, a reminder of his childhood, and he wondered how his sister had put up with it. Could she have possibly found this atmosphere pleasant? Comforting?

The thought of Kristen living in this unchanging house, all alone, tugged at his heart, and his fear abated somewhat, replaced by an aching sense of loss.

Why hadn't he come back earlier?

Why hadn't he taken her away from this?

He walked slowly forward. To his left, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something out of place in the front sitting room, and he turned in that direction, the blood freezing in his veins even before he recognized what he saw.

Billings.

Sitting in his father's high-backed smoking chair.

As he'd feared, as he'd known, the assistant had not changed at all.

Billings smiled. "Welcome back, Mark. I've been waiting for you."

Daniel It was raining, a heavy fall Pennsylvania rain that drew a curtain over the city and blurred even the houses across the street into indistinct shadows of gray. The snow would be coming soon, and Daniel knew that as tough as it was trying to find a job in good weather, it was absolute hell in the winter. He might as well just write off the next five months and hibernate until spring.

From down the hall, he heard Margot and Tony laughing about something. He'd been getting the cold shoulder from both of them ever since he'd disposed of the doll, and he was getting pretty damn sick of it. He and Margot hadn't made love in a week, and she seemed to be dead serious about wanting him to seek psychological help. He'd tried to explain to her how he felt, what he'd seen, why he was acting this way, but his far-flung concerns had no connections, there were no discernible bridges between the disparate elements of his only partially tied-together tale, and he had to admit that his story sounded loony even to himself.

Tony seemed to be afraid of him.

Daniel sighed. Maybe he did need help. Maybe everything was in his mind, and nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The world was a logical, rational straightforward place, and the thoughts he'd been thinking had a place only in pulp fiction and B movies.

Margot walked into the kitchen, looked at him, and for the first time this week, the sight of him did not knock the smile off her face. She was finally beginning to thaw. He attempted a halfhearted grin and was grateful when she passed by and touched his shoulder.

"Are we pals again?" he asked.

"We're always pals."

He reached for her hand, gave it a small squeeze.

There was a lot more he wanted to say, a lot more he wanted to ask, a lot more he wanted to tell her, but while he was in her good graces again, it was only by a slim margin, and the slightest misstep could send him back. He'd have to broach things slowly, subtly, carefully for the next few days.

Margot opened the refrigerator, took out a plastic bag of tomatoes from the vegetable drawer. "Brian's coming over for dinner tonight," she said.

The last thing he wanted right now was to spend the evening with her brother, but he smiled and nodded and said, "Great."

The evening didn't turn out to be that bad. Brian didn't bring up Daniel's job status even once, and he left early, just after nine-thirty. While he was there, he was pleasant, playful with Tony, cheerful with Margot, and after dinner, when the two of them were alone--Tony having disappeared into his bedroom, Margot washing the dishes--even he found Brian entertaining and fun to be around. The two of them would never be best buds, but Daniel thought that he'd probably been too hard on his brother-in-law, and he vowed to be nicer to him in the future.

It was still raining pretty heavily outside, and he wanted to go to bed and get into some makeup sex, but Margot said she wasn't tired and wanted to stay awake a little longer. There was nothing on HBO or any of the other channels, so he ran through their videotape titles.

None of the movies sounded good, and they finally settled on watching some episodes of Fawlty Towers, Margot's favorite TV show of all time.

She went off to go to the bathroom while he fast forwarded to an episode they hadn't seen in a while, the one with Manuel's rat. On an impulse, he walked back to Tony's room. The door was closed, and he pressed his ear to it but could hear nothing. Margot was still in the bathroom, and he paused a moment, then pushed open his son's door.

A half-finished doll lay on the center of Tony's bed.

This one, if possible, was even worse than the one before. Like its predecessor, it was made up of junk food cups and plastic straws, toilet-paper tubes and toothpicks. But the newspaper photographs that had been cut out and taped together to form its composite face were angry and wild: widely staring eyes, flared nostrils, screaming mouth. The effect was one of discordance and derangement, and Daniel looked from the doll to his surprised son, who belatedly moved his body in front of the figure to hide it.

Daniel stared at the boy, felt the anger rise within him. "I warned you, didn't I?"

"There's nothing wrong with it!" Tony replied defensively.

"It's just my project!"

Daniel crossed the room in two steps, moved the boy aside with one arm, grabbed the doll with the other.

Did Margot know about this?

If she did, he'd get into it with her. Sticking up for her son in an argument was one thing, but deliberately going behind his back and helping Tony to deceive him was another.

The doll felt strange in his hand. Heavier than it should. More solid. He squeezed it hard, tried to crumple it, but only succeeded in creating two slight indentations in the cup body.

He shook the doll at his son. "I told youyou couldn't do this, didn't I?"

Tony cowered before him. "You don't have to go crazy."

He was a little more out of control than he should be, more adamant than he wanted, and he tried to calm down. "I specifically told you--"

"Mom!"

Daniel turned to see Margot standing in the doorway.

She hadn't known about the doll. There was a split second expression of surprise upon her face, then what looked like fear crossed her features as her gaze passed over the figure. Her eyes met Daniel's, and the two of them exchanged a wordless understanding.

Margot stepped into the room, her face set. "Your father told you not to make another one of those dolls."

"It's not a doll!"

"You purposely disobeyed him."

"But, Mom!"

"No 'buts,' " Daniel said. He was still holding the doll in his hand, but he wanted to drop it, get rid of it. The irrational fear that it would come to life and suddenly attack him, biting his face with its newsprint mouth, had come over him and refused to be dislodged from his brain. He could not let his son see that he was afraid of the figure, though, and he shook it again at the boy.

"You're grounded for a week. And if I ever catch you doing this again, you're going to be in big, big trouble."

Margot looked at him again, her eyes worried, before turning once more toward Tony. "Why is this thing so important to you? Why are you doing this?"

Tony stared down at his shoes. "Nothing," he said.

"The answer to 'why?' is never 'nothing.' "

"I don't know."

"Look at me, young man." He glanced up at his mother. "There's something going on here that you're not telling us."

"I'm sorry. I won't do it again."

"What is the big deal about this doll?"

"It's not--"

"It's a doll," she said flatly.

"Where did you learn how to make it?" Daniel asked.

"Doneen," Tony said reluctantly. "Doneen taught me how to do it."

Doneen?

Margot's expression was blank. She'd obviously never heard of anyone named Doneen .

But he had.

In the House.

"Who's Doneen ?" he asked.

"A new girl. She lives over on Edgecomb ."

"When did you meet her?" Margot asked. "And why haven't you said anything to us about her?"

Tony shrugged uncomfortably.

"Is she in your class?"

"Not exactly."

Daniel felt cold. "You can't see her anymore," he said. "You understand me?"

"Why not?"

"I don't want you to."

"She's a nice girl."

"I don't care."

"Her dad said he wanted to talk to you."

"Her dad?"

"Mr. Billingsly ."

The coldness intensified.

Billingsly.

He'd heard that name before, too.

Daniel dropped the doll in the trash can, wary of holding on to it any longer. He'd pick it up later and make sure it was destroyed. He sat down on the bed next to Tony, putting an arm around his son's shoulders.

"Look," he said. "Whether you believe it or not, we're doing this for your own good."

"But--"

Daniel held up his hand. "Let me finish. I'll go talk to this Mr. Billingsly tomorrow, but until your mother or I tell you otherwise, you are not to see this girl Do neen and you are not to make any more dolls."

Tony stared up at him. There was no duplicity in the boy's eyes, no indication that he was lying or intentionally trying to deceive them. Daniel had the feeling that his son didn't really know why the doll was so important to him or why he was so compelled to work on the object.

He found that frightening.

His anger had abated somewhat, and for the first time he saw both himself and Tony as pawns, small players in a much larger game. He had no clue as to what that game was or who was playing it or what its purpose might be, but he was determined to find out before anything happened to his family.

He glanced up at Margot, saw both concern and confusion in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," Tony said.

"You're off the hook this time," Daniel told him.

"Just don't let it happen again."

They lay in bed, reading their respective magazines.

Or pretending to. The television murmured softly in the background.

Margot put down her Time and shifted in the bed, turning toward Daniel. "I'm scared," she said.

He wrapped a protective arm around her shoulder.

"I thought you were overreacting about Tony's . . .

'project.' I'm sorry I didn't back you up. I didn't realize it was this obsession with him."

"At least it's not drugs."

"I almost wish it were," she said softly. "At least we'd know how to deal with it."

"You don't mean that," Daniel said.

She sighed. "I suppose not. But it's not normal, his fixation on making this doll. It's like he has to do it, like he's driven to do it. And he has to use exactly the same things to make it with." She twisted her neck to meet his eyes. "And what's with this girl and her father?"

"I don't know."

"The father of the girl who taught him to make this doll wants to meet you? What's that all about?"

He shook his head, hoping his face didn't betray the unease he felt.

Margot's voice was flat. "Maybe he's involved in a cult," she said. "Maybe he's turning into one of those suburban kids who are into devil worship."

"I don't think so."

"What is it then?" Margot asked.

It was his chance to come clean, to tell her about the shadow and what he remembered about the House, what he thought and what he suspected, everything. But he wanted to protect her, didn't want her involved.

"I don't know," he said.

Doneen and Billingsly .

Daniel started the car, turned on the windshield wipers.

The names were connected in his mind with the House, but he could not recall their origins or put a face to either of them. He'd heard the names before, though.

Of that he was sure, and he pulled out of the driveway and drove around the block to Edgecomb Avenue.

The rain had abated during the night, but it had started up again a half hour ago, and he drove slowly through the puddle at the intersection, careful not to splash a pair of raincoated kids waiting on the sidewalk to cross.

Tony had stuck to his story about the girl and her father, had insisted that Mr. Billingsly wanted to talk to him, but it was obvious that his son did not want him to go over and meet either of them. He was purposely vague about which house the Billingslys lived in, and he kept insisting that it was over, he'd learned his lesson, he'd never make another doll again.

Something was going on here.

Daniel vowed that he'd find the Billingslys if he had to knock on every door and ask every single person in every single house on Edgecomb .

He parked at the end of the street and got out of the car, opening his umbrella. The rain was back down to a drizzle. Daniel was grateful for that, and he hopped over the running gutter onto the sidewalk. He felt a little strange walking up to the door of the first house, a little foolish, but by the time he reached the fifth house, he had his spiel down pat and his embarrassment had given way to uneasiness.

Before he'd finished with the first side of the street, he knew the truth.

There was no one named Billingsly living on Edgecomb .

No one had seen or heard of a girl named Doneen .

He went up the opposite side of the street just in case, but the result was the same. Neither adult nor child knew anything about Tony's mysterious acquaintances.

Daniel got back into the car and sat for a moment behind the steering wheel, staring out the windshield at the rainy street.

What bothered him the most was that he knew his son was not lying. Doneen was not simply a made-up person or a figment of Tony's imagination. She and her father were real. Or, rather, Tony had really met them.

How did he know that? How could he be so sure?

Because he'd met them himself as a child.

There it was again, on the tip of his consciousness, just that side of recollection. He knew he'd met them but could not recall any specifics. He tried not to derail this train of thought, tried to keep his mind on that narrow track, but other thoughts intruded, expanding his concentration outward, and his brief tenuous grasp of the past slipped, any hope he had of pinning down those memories gone. There remained only the certainty, not backed up by detail, that he had once metDoneen and Mr.Billingsly , and that Tony had too.

He started the car, pulled out into the street. Rather than back up or execute a three-point turn in the rain, he drove down to the end ofEdgecomb and turned left, intending to drive around the block and return to their street.

He was halfway down Edgecomb when he saw it.

There, in the rain, in the middle of the street, a small shadow, the same shadow he'd seen before in the alley.

Doneen?

He braked to a halt, jumped out of the car, but it was gone. The street was empty, the sidewalks vacant, no sign of anyone or anything out of the ordinary. The rain chose that moment to stop entirely, and through a thin curtain of white amid the dark clouds above, the light of the sun poked through, illuminating the neighborhood.

Nothing.

That was it, the last straw. This was enough. He had to know. He'd had his fill of these half remembrances and partial sightings and nebulous portents. He wanted to know about the House. He wanted to know what had happened to him there and what it had to do with Margot and Tony. He wanted to know why he couldn't remember his past. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.

He'd talk to Margot about it, call a psychiatrist tomorrow, one that specialized in hypnosis and regression therapy.

Her insurance had to have some type of mental health provisions. He could say he suspected that he'd been molested as a child. Hell, he could just tell the truth, explain what he'd been seeing and hearing and thinking, and he'd have no problem finding a shrink willing to uncover the dark secrets of his past.

He didn't have to go to a psychiatrist, though.

It came back on its own.

All of it.

Laurie Laurie dug through the box of her parents' photographs looking for a clue, trying to find some documentation of her previous life, some hint of her pre-adoptive days.

Josh sat next to her on the floor, sorting through additional piles of pictures, attempting to help her reconstruct a past that neither of them knew anything about.

She stared at a photo of herself and Josh at Disney land, waving and smiling in front of It's A Small World.

She was adopted.

It shouldn't have affected anything, but it did, and already she felt distanced from Josh, not as close to him as she had been before. She'd give anything in the world to bring back her old feelings, but the knowledge that they were not really related had completely changed the emotional dynamics of their relationship, and she felt simultaneously as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and as if she were floating off into space, her tether broken.

She had to bear in mind that it was only her feelings that had changed. He had known all along, so his perception of her was exactly the same as it had always been.

He loved her like a sister.

She felt guilty that she was allowing the concrete sciences of biology and genetics to affect the fragile nature of her own feelings and emotions.

"Hey," Josh said excitedly. "I think we have something here. Look at this."

He scooted next to her on the floor, handing her an old black-and-white photo.

Their parents were standing with her biological parents.

In front of the house.

It was everything at once, in one picture, and she stared at it dumbly, taking it all in. There was the forest behind the house: old growth redwoods, holding in darkness.

The Victorian mansion: black gables and shuttered windows and wraparound porch, retaining even in the photo the aura of spookiness she so clearly remembered.

In front of the house, on the circular dirt drive, were her parents.

All four of them.

The ones who had brought her up, the only parents she knew, Josh's parents, were smiling for the camera, their flowered paisley clothes loud even in black-and white, a large trunk on the ground to the left of them.

On the other side of the trunk, unsmiling, wearing formal clothes and equally formal expressions, were her real parents, her biological parents.

She looked closely at first her mother's face, then her father's, then back again. She recognized the faces now, but they engendered no response, triggered no emotion within her. She didn't know what she'd expected--some cathartic rush of long pent-up feeling perhaps--but she wasn't prepared for this detached, objective reaction. As she stared at the photo, her feelings were for her other parents, her adoptive parents, and for the first time since she'd learned what had happened to her, she was glad Josh's parents had adopted her, glad she had not grown up with this sober, grimly humorless couple.

She looked over at Josh, and once again he felt like her real brother.

She focused her attention on the photograph. It was all familiar to her, everything in the picture, and, despite her lack of feeling for the man and woman who had brought her into this world, the relentless curiosity about her past and compulsive thirst for self-knowledge that had been driving her for the past several days, ever since she found out she'd been adopted, had not abated at all.

If anything, those impulses were stronger, and her desire to know what had happened to her, why she'd been adopted why her parents had been murdered --was a palpable hunger, almost a physical need. She felt strongly that whatever had happened at that house, whatever cataclysm had destroyed her family, was connected with the dreams she was having now, with the girl.

Dawn.

"Do you know this place?" she asked, pointing at the photo. "Do you know where it is?"

Josh nodded. "I remember that house." He thought for a moment, turned to her. "Do you?"

She shivered. "How could anyone forget it?"

"It's on a vortex," he said.

Cut out the New Age crap, she wanted to tell him, but something kept her from it.

"Of course, we didn't know what that was back then.

Especially not me. I was what? Four? But even I could tell there was something . . . powerful about that house."

"You mean it was haunted."

"Is that what you remember?"

She nodded.

He took the photo from her. "That's how I remember it, too."

"Do you know where it is?" she repeated.

He stared at the picture. "I was pretty young, but I

know we were traveling around northern California for a month or so. I can't recall if we were on a vacation or just bumming around--you know how Mom and Dad were--but we'd stopped in this small gold-rush town somewhere in the Sierras. I don't remember the name, but I'd probably be able to pick it out if I saw a map or something."

She smiled at him, punched his arm playfully. "And you were only four years old? That's pretty impressive."

"I grew up to be an under achiever."

"So what happened?"

"We stayed in town for a day or so, then we went out to visit these people. They might've been friends of Mom and Dad's or maybe someone in town told them about them. I can't remember. All I know is that pretty soon we were driving down this winding little road through the forest, looking for these people who sold lamb's wool blankets. We passed through a clearing where there were people selling juice and fruit from a little roadside stand, and Dad bought me some blackberry juice. That part's pretty clear. Then the next thing I remember is being at this big giant house in the middle of nowhere." He tapped a finger on the picture. "This house." He frowned. "Come to think of it, I think they might've been friends. It seemed like they knew each other from somewhere before, because they greeted each other like they were old pals."

"Did you stay there?"

"Oh, yeah. For several days."

Laurie shook her head wonderingly. "How come I

don't remember any of this?"

"That's the funny thing. I don't remember you either. I mean, you must've been there, but I

just remember this weird old couple--" He looked at her. "Sorry. No offense--and this . . . overpowering house. I mean, I know now that the house was on a vortex, but back then I just thought it was scary."

"So you don't remember me at all?"

He shook his head.

What about the man who'd lived with them? she wondered.

Her father's friend. She thought hard, tried to remember his name. She could see his face, hear his voice, but she couldn't quite- Billington.

That was it.

"Do you remember anyone else?" she asked.

He frowned. "No . . ." he said slowly. "I don't think so."

"Who took the picture?"

He looked at it again. "I don't remember. A man, I think."

"Was his name Billington or something like that?"

"I don't remember."

"Did you see anyone else while you were there?" She licked her lips. "A girl maybe?"

He picked up on it instantly, glancing sharply at her.

"The girl in your dreams?"

She nodded a reluctant acknowledgment. "I think her name was Dawn."

"And that's the same girl you saw in the alley?"

Already there were goose bumps on her arm. "I

think so."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"I didn't know before. I just sort of ... It's coming back slowly. And I can't remember half as much as you remember. And you were younger than me." She paused. "Trauma, probably."

"Trauma?"

"I think my parents were killed."

A pause. "I figured it was probably something like that."

"You don't remember anyone except my parents?"

"Sorry." He shook his head. "But I want to know more about this girl. Dawn. When you saw her in the alley, when you dreamed about her, she looked like she did ... then?"

"She looked exactly the same."

"You think she was killed, too?"

"I don't know. I don't think so."

"You think you saw a ghost?"

"No."

"A hallucination?'

"No."

They were both silent for a moment.

"So what happened while you were there?" Laurie asked finally. "What else do you remember?"

Josh chewed his lower lip, a thinking habit he'd had since childhood. "I remember being scared. I remember a long hallway. With dark wood and red velvet. Like a Victorian whorehouse. I remember not being able to sleep because I kept hearing weird noises. A tapping.

Like someone was knocking on my door, trying to get in. I remember that I thought your parents didn't really seem happy to see us. Like we'd come at a bad time or something. Like they were fighting but had to pretend to get along because they had company." He met her eyes. "And I remember that your dad got really mad at me because I was late for breakfast. I was tired and Mom and Dad let me oversleep, and your dad went crazy. My parents and your parents almost got in a screaming match, and I felt really guilty. I'd already woken up and come downstairs to eat, and I heard them fighting and I started crying. Mom and Dad tried to comfort me, but your dad said something like, 'That's what he deserves.' " Josh's voice had fallen almost to a whisper.

"Your dad scared me. I didn't like him."

Laurie hugged her brother. "I don't think I would've either." She smiled at him. "I'm glad Mom and Dad adopted me."

"I am too."

She pulled away. "What else?"

"That's it, really. I think we did buy some blankets from them, although I'm not sure that's why we really went over there."

"Then what?"

He shrugged. "We left. Continued on with our vacation or our travels or whatever it was. We finally settled in Thripp's Crossing, and a couple months later, you showed up."

"I just showed up?"

"Well no, not literally. Mom and Dad left. I stayed with Mrs. Kylie, and when they came back they had you."

"They never told you why? Never explained why you suddenly had a new sister?"

"Nope."

Laurie sighed. "I don't remember any of that at all. I

wish I did, but it's all a big blank."

Josh handed her back the photo. "I never put two and two together before this. I never realized that those people were your real parents. I remembered them, I remembered the trip, but I don't remember you there, so I never connected it. When I saw that picture, though .. .

something clicked."

"For me too." She grabbed another handful of photographs out of the box. "Let's see if we can find some other ones."

"There's one more thing," Josh said slowly.

Laurie looked up, and she realized that she was already holding her breath.

"I've never told this to anyone before, and I don't know if it really happened or if I just dreamed it or . . ."

He trailed off.

"What?"

"I might've just imagined it."

"What?"

"I think I watched your mother kill a lamb."

She shook her head, confused. "I don't ... I don't understand. You watched her slaughter a lamb?"

"No. The lamb was in my room. I don't know why. It wasn't night, it was daytime, but it was always dark inside that house and there wasn't much difference. I'd just come in from outside and I was going to ... I don't know, get a comic book out of my suitcase or something. I ran upstairs as fast as I could because I wanted to get back down to where Mom and Dad were as quickly as possible, and there was this lamb in my bed. Just standing there on the mattress. The covers were pulled down, and it was just . . . baaing. It couldn't really move because it was heavy and the mattress wasn't that stable, and it looked at me and cried.

"And then your mom came out of my closet and told me she was sorry, the lamb wasn't supposed to be in my room, and she lifted it off the bed and . . . slammed it onto the ground."

Laurie could not believe she'd heard right. "What?"

"She lifted the lamb over her head, like a weight lifter or something, and threw it down on the floor as hard as she could and . . . killed it. It didn't move, didn't make any noise, and she picked it up and smiled at me and apologized again and carried it out of the room. There was blood dribbling out of its mouth, but the carpeting was dark red already and you couldn't really see where it dripped. Like I said, I don't know if that was a nightmare and I imagined it or if it really happened, but I

never told Mom and Dad and I never said a word about it to anyone until now."

Laurie picked up the photo again, looked at the face of the grim woman who had been her mother.

She could see her throwing a lamb down hard enough to kill it.

"I dreamed about Dawn and a butcher. You saw my mom slaughter a lamb. This is just too close for comfort."

Josh nodded. "I agree."

"I want to see the house," Laurie said. "I want to go there. You said you'd recognize the name of the town if you saw it?"

"I just need something to jog my memory."

"Let's find a map, then."

"All right." Josh looked at her. "Let's do it."

They left before dawn, and it was still only midmorning by the time they reached the town of Pine Creek.

The country here was beautiful. Wooded foothills, redwoods, the snowcapped Sierras high to the east. The two-lane road wound through valleys and skirted canyons, twin borders of green leafy ferns hemming in both sides, low gray clouds providing a ceiling to the forest, light mist shrouding the shadowed areas between the trees.

But Laurie barely registered the scenery flying by the windows. She kept trying to remember exactly how her parents had been killed. They'd been murdered--of that she was fairly sure--but the details remained hazy, the specifics unspecific, and try as she might, she could not mentally reconstruct the events that had led to her adoption.

She had only a vague feeling that the girl, Dawn, was involved somehow and that the grim couple in the photograph whom she knew to be her biological parents had died a horrible, gruesomely unnatural death.

It all came back to her when she saw the house.

They drove out of Pine Creek and down a narrow winding road. Josh said nearly everything had changed in the years since he'd been there. There'd been no McDonald's in town then, no Wal-Mart, no Holiday Inn, and the condos that had sprung up on seemingly every side of Pine Creek had certainly not been there.

But he grew quiet as they drove into the countryside, as they moved farther away from town. He recognized this road, he said. He recognized this area. And Laurie could tell from his tone of voice that he felt the same oppressive dread she did as the car sped beneath the overhanging branches of the trees.

They drove up and down side roads, pulling in and backing out of long dirt drives, and after an hour or so, through this process of trial and error, they finally found it.

The house.

It looked exactly as they both remembered. It had not been repainted or refurbished. It had not deteriorated or gone to seed. It looked just as it had all those years ago.

And everything came back to her.

It was as if an entirely new door had been opened in her mind. Memories suddenly flooded in: knowledge, emotions, events, sensations. Things so thoroughly forgotten that she'd been unaware she'd ever known them, their presence in her mind having left not even a residual trace.

She recalled the meal rituals, the way they'd all held hands and hummed before eating breakfasts that corresponded precisely to the dawn, dinners that always accompanied sundown.

She remembered Mr.Billington , the man who lived with them, the man who was supposed to have been her father's friend but of whom her father had always seemed afraid and who apparently had no intention of ever leaving.

She remembered the animals. The way her mother had incorporated their unpredictable disappearances and sometimes terrifying reappearances into children's stories designed to make her feel that this was normal and not something of which she should be afraid.

She remembered her parents' deaths.

She'd been playing with Dawn, not in the woods, where Dawn wanted to play, but in the barn, which was also supposed to be off-limits. They were practicing their marriage ceremony, Dawn as usual taking the role of both minister and groom. For rings, they had Coke can pull-tabs and were wearing wreaths they'd woven from weeds. Laurie pretended to be enjoying the game, but there was something unsettling about it all, about Dawn's solemnity and almost ferocious dedication to strict marriage tradition.

Dawn had just pronounced them husband and wife and had given herself permission to kiss the bride when they heard a softly muttered "Shit!" from the yard outside.

"Hide!" Dawn ordered.

Laurie hurriedly ducked into the tool closet, closing the door. It was her father, and she knew he'd take the strap to her if he caught her in the barn after he'd specifically told her she was never to go near it.

She expected Dawn to follow her or to find a hiding place of her own, but her friend stood her ground as the big door opened and her father entered.

"Hello, Ralph," Dawn said.

Ralph! She dared to call him by his first name?

Against all odds, her father didn't seem to mind.

Didn't seem to even notice. To Laurie's shock and surprise, her father chuckled, and in a voice more tender than any she'd ever heard him use with her mother or herself, he said, "Dawn."

There was whispering then, whispering and low murmuring, and what sounded like her father's belt buckle being unfastened.

Was Dawn going to get the strap?

Laurie knew it was dangerous, knew she should remain still and quiet, but she could not resist, she had to know what was going on, and she pushed open the door a fraction of an inch and peeked through the crack.

She didn't know what she'd expected to see, but it was definitely not this.

This was something she could not have thought up in her wildest imaginings.

Her father stood there, in the center of the barn, and his pants were pulled down. Dawn was kneeling before him and his hands were on her head and his peepee was in her mouth.

Laurie grimaced with distaste, not crying out in disgust only because of the fear that now filled her completely.

She did not know what was going on out there, she did not understand what was happening, but it made her sick inside and she felt like throwing up. Holding her fingers against the door, she slowly let it close.

She was suddenly certain that Dawn had known this would happen, had known her father was coming to the barn.

And had wanted her to see it.

The tool closet had another door at its opposite end, one that led outside to the yard, and carefully, quietly, Laurie inched toward it, careful not to touch or disturb the scythes and machetes, rakes and clippers hanging on the walls. Her father was saying something, murmuring in a low soothing voice, and she did not want to hear it, she did not want to know what it was.

There was no lock on the rough wooden door, no catch, but the hinges were squeaky, and she pushed the door open slowly, slowly, trying to prevent the escape of a single sound. When there was enough room between the door and the jamb for her to sneak out, she slid through and, just as slowly, closed the door once again.

She hurried across the open yard and was almost to the house when she saw her mother emerging from the garage, carrying what looked like the can of gasoline her father used for the tractor. Laurie was about to call out, but she changed her mind when she saw the look of grim determination and single-minded purpose on her mother's face.

The feelings of shock and disgust within her were replaced by a feeling of dread, the overwhelming sense that her mother knew what was going on in the barn and was going to do something about it.

Laurie wanted to hide, to run upstairs to her room and pretend that none of this was going on and play with her dolls until her mother called her for lunch, but she knew that ignoring what was happening would not make it go away, and she was not at all sure that her mother would even be making lunch today.

She was not sure that her mother--or her father-- would still be alive come lunchtime.

She had no idea where that came from, but it grew from a fear into a certainty as she saw her mother stride over to the barn and throw open the big door.

Laurie dashed back across the trampled grass. Her mother had run into the barn and opened up the can and was furiously splashing gasoline over the bodies of Dawn and her father, now on the dirt floor without their clothes. Her father was sputtering angrily, yelling sounds that were supposed to be words, but Dawn was laughing, and it was that high tinkling musical sound that scared Laurie more than anything else.

"No!" Laurie cried. "Stop!" But no one seemed to hear her, and her mother tossed the gasoline can aside and pulled out a matchbook and lit a match. Screaming crazily, she threw the lit match onto the gasoline covered bodies.

"You bastard!" she yelled. "She's mine! She's mine!"

There was a huge rush of flame, a sucking explosion that simultaneously drew in air and expelled agonizing heat.

"Mom!" Laurie cried.

Her mother pushed her aside and, stone-faced, strode through the door and across the yard toward the house.

Laurie saw Dawn's hair catch fire, the skin of her face darken and crinkle. Her father's back blistered and peeled open, his blood bubbling black the second it hit the flames. They were both writhing and rolling on the dirt, trying to get away, but the fire was not around them, it was on them, and there was no way they could escape from it.

Laurie ran around to the side of the barn, got the hose, turned it on full blast, and squirted water on the fire, but it didn't do any good, didn't make a dent, and she ran sobbing back to the house to tell Mr. Billington to call the firemen, knowing even as she did so that they would not arrive in time to save her father, Dawn, or the barn.

"Mr. Billington !" she screamed. "Mr. Billington !"

Her father's friend was nowhere to be seen, but her mother was lying on her back on the floor of the kitchen, her skirts hiked up.

With Dawn.

The girl was naked, but she was not burned and not dead, and the shock of seeing her here, alive, only seconds after watching her burn in the barn, overrode for a second the shock of what was happening.

Then Laurie noticed what was going on.

"Yes," her mother was saying, and Dawn's head was between her legs, moving slowly around. Laurie screamed at the top of her lungs, a desperate cry for help from someone, anyone.

All of a sudden, as her mother moaned in pleasure, the girl became a goat, arms turning to legs, gray hair growing over skin, and she started bucking, shoving her head forward with animal roughness, the horns spearing through the bare flesh of her mother's stomach, as her mother's expression of happiness and bliss changed instantly to one of horror and agony.

"Mom!" Laurie screamed.

For the first time since seeing her mother in the yard with the can of gasoline, her mom seemed to hear her, recognize her, acknowledge her. She was screaming in pain, trying to push the bucking goat away, but her eyes were hopeless, sad and despairing, filled with agonized regret, and they kept darting between Laurie and the door, and Laurie took the hint and ran.

She did not know where to go. The barn fire had not spread as she'd expected but seemed to have gone out, and that seemed ominous. Laurie ran unthinkingly, away from the barn, away from the house. Part of her wanted to find Mr.Billington , but another part of her, a deeper truer part, knew that he was somehow involved in this, so she did not call his name, did not call out anything, but simply ran.

She could not go into the woods--Laurie knew that much--but she was afraid to stay near the house, so she headed through the trees that paralleled the drive, heading toward the road. She heard Mr.Billington call her name, from somewhere far behind her, but she kept running.

She slept that night in a ditch by the side of the road, and the next day made it into Pine Creek, where she stumbled into the police station and blurted out everything that had happened.

No one believed her, of course. Or at least they didn't believe all of it, but they found the bodies of her parents --her father's charred corpse, her mother's gutted form--and Laurie spent several weeks in a foster home until one day, somehow, some way, Josh's parents showed up and took her away to live permanently with them.

Laurie glanced over at Josh and, not for the first time, she was grateful that she'd been adopted. What had happened to her real parents was terrible, horrifying, but as emotionally scarring as it had been, she was aware of the fact that she'd been better off without them, better off away from the house, better off with Josh and his parents.

Their parents.

Yes. Their parents. No matter who had sired her, they had raised her and it was their love, their values, their influence that had shaped her into the woman she was today.

"Are you all right?" Josh asked, looking over at her.

Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded.

Josh parked the car in front of the garage. Laurie got out silently, looked to her right at the barn, to her left at the house. Nothing had changed in all those years. It was as if the place had remained frozen in time, waiting for her return.

She thought of Dawn. Shivered.

"Where do we start?" Josh asked, squinting against the early afternoon sun. He stared up at the house.

"Damn. This place is as creepy as I remember it."

Laurie smiled wryly. "Tell me about it."

She walked toward the front of the house, saw in real life the angle they'd seen in the photograph.

"It is a place of power," Josh said.

She ignored him. She wasn't in the mood for metaphysical chats, and though she wasn't exactly sure what she hoped to find here or what she hoped to accomplish, she knew she wanted to get it all done this afternoon.

She did not want to be anywhere near the house when night fell.

Taking a deep breath, Laurie walked forward, gravel crunching beneath her feet. She reached the porch stairs, and it was as if her body were on automatic pilot. She grabbed a corner of the banister, leaned on it, then trailed her fingers along the wooden railing as she walked the four steps. It was the way she'd walked up these stairs as a child, and though the movements were instinctive, she was acutely aware of them, and she found it disconcerting to think that even though her mind had forgotten about the place for many years, her body apparently had not.

Josh followed close behind her, and the two of them stood on the porch for a moment, looking out at the yard, the drive, the surrounding trees. Everything seemed perfectly kept, well maintained, as though someone had been caring for the place all these years.

Mr.Billington .

No. That was impossible.

Still, the thought of it gave her a chill, and brave modern businesswoman that she was, she was glad Josh was here to protect her. Just in case.

She turned, looked at the front door. Dark brown wood with a small leaded-glass web window up above.

What if it was locked? Neither she nor Josh had a key.

It wouldn't be locked.

She knew that.

Laurie hesitated for a moment. She wanted to go inside, but what did she hope to see, what did she hope to find, what did she hope to discover? Did she really think that answers to the questions she had would be found within the house's empty rooms? It was pointless, really, to go inside. They'd probably learn more by talking to neighbors, hunting down members of the local historical society.

An alarm was going off in her head, some hunch or intuition telling her to stay out, but that was exactly why she had to push on. There was something in the house.

She didn't know what it was or how she knew of its existence, but she knew that she could only find out what she needed to know by going into her old home.

She tried the door handle. It wasn't locked, and she glanced over her shoulder at Josh. "Let's go in," she said.

She walked through the doorway.

And the door slammed shut behind her.

"Josh!" she screamed.

The door had obviously caught him as he was trying to enter. There was a thin line of blood on the edge of the wood, a small clump of hair at head level. Her heart was pounding crazily, and from the other side of the door she heard her brother scream.

"Josh!" she yelled. She tried the door, but now it was locked, and the pounding of her heart, the thumping of blood in her head, was almost as loud as her pounding on the door.

"Josh!" she demanded. "Are you all right?"

"I'm okay!"

She heard his voice as if from a distance, as if more than simply a closed door separated them. It was a strange sensation and a frightening one, and she kept talking to him, telling him to push on the door the same time she pulled, as his voice grew fainter and fainter and then finally disappeared entirely.

She yanked once more on the door handle, then looked frantically around. There were no windows in the entryway save for the one high above the door, no way she could look out and see her brother, so she ran around to the front sitting room to look out the window, but when she pushed aside the lace curtains and pulled up the shade, she saw not the drive, not the yard, not the trees, not the porch, not Josh, but thick white fog that pressed flat against the glass, obscuring the entire world beyond.

She felt like a child again, like a little girl, scared and frightened and alone, and she wished that, dreams or no dreams, strange experiences or no strange experiences, they'd never come up here.

There was the sound of movement, the quiet shuffle of shoes on hardwood floor. A chill stabbed through her, but she did not turn around.

The clearing of a throat.

A man's voice.

She recognized it, and though she didn't want to, she knew that she had to look behind her.

She turned, faced him.

It was exactly who she'd known it would be.

"Laurie," he said quietly. "It's so nice to see you again."

Norton When Norton awoke, his bed was covered with burnt toast.

Pieces fell as he stirred, dropped off the bed as he sat up, but he could tell that someone something --sometime during the night had placed burnt toast over every square inch of his bed: the quilt on top of him, the empty pillow next to him, the spaces of open mattress.

Donna.

For some reason, he did not suspect Carole's ghost. It was that evil little girl whom he believed had covered his bed. A burnt toast trail had led him to her, had been laid for him to follow, and he assumed that the consistent use of the toast here was purposeful, was meant to send him a message.

The pressure was being increased. Whatever lay behind this campaign desperately wanted him to hurry up and get back to Oakdale.

Return.

He picked up a piece of toast, smelled it, tentatively touched it to his tongue. It was real. It was burnt bread, not some sort of disguised alien substance or supernatural manifestation.

What was the significance of it? he wondered. What did it symbolize? What did it mean?

He got out of bed, searching through the house for something else out of the ordinary or out of place, but everything was normal, everything was as it should be.

He walked back into the bedroom to get dressed, saw the blackened squares on the bed and the surrounding floor, and he imagined that evil child placing them there, her slight shift blowing in the cold night breeze that passed through his perpetually open window, and he found himself becoming aroused.

Norton walked into the bathroom, looked at his unshaven face in the mirror, at his baggy eyes and wildly uncombed white hair. He was still erect, and he considered masturbating in the shower, but he resisted the temptation.

This couldn't go on, he realized. The pressure was only going to escalate and sooner or later he was going to have to return to Oakdale. He did not know why, he did not know what would happen, but as frightening and intimidating as he found the prospect, it also offered the only relief he could see from this dark situation in which he found himself.

He shaved, combed his hair, dressed, then called the district office. No one was there yet, so he left a message on the answering machine, telling them he was sick and specifically asking for Gail Doig to be his substitute. Gail was an ex-student, and she'd subbed for him last year on the one day he'd been ill and had done an excellent job.

It was still early, only six-thirty, so he made himself breakfast--no toast--and ate it, reading the morning paper, before giving Hal a call.

His friend was already up, had been up for several hours. Norton hadn't told Hal about his encounter with the girl, but he told him now and he described waking up with the burnt toast covering his bed.

He took a deep breath. "I have to go," he said. "Back to Oakdale. Will you come with me?"

Hal sounded annoyed. "I told you I would, didn't I?"

"It's far. It'll be almost a day's drive, and I don't know what's going to happen when I get there or how long I'll be staying--"

"Are you deaf? I told you I'm going with you."

"What's the bee in your bonnet?"

There was silence on the other end of the line.

"Hal?"

Norton heard his friend sigh even over the phone. "I

felt Mariette's presence in the house."

"Did you see her?"

"No. It was like before. I could just tell that she was here."

"You think it's connected to what's happening to me?"

"I don't know," Hal said tiredly. "Maybe it's because we're both going to die soon. Hell, I don't know.

But ..." He trailed off.

"But?" Norton prompted.

"Her presence isn't comforting like it was before.

It's . . . scary."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"Nothing, asshole! I just want to get out of the house and get away from here! Is that all right with you?"

"Jesus, bite my head off."

"Do you want me to come or not?"

"Of course I do. That's why I called."

"Then when are we going to go?"

Norton looked up at the clock. Seven-ten. "I'll pick you up in an hour. Bring a suitcase and a couple days'clothes just in case."

"I'll be ready."

There was a click on the other end and Norton gingerly put the receiver back on its hook. Hal sounded shaken, and he found that a little disconcerting. He also didn't like the fact that Hal believed the ghost of his wife had returned. It was too close to be unrelated, and he didn't like the idea that whatever supernatural forces were trained on him had also focused their attention on his friend. Hal was frightened, and he didn't think he'd known Hal ever to be frightened.

Oakdale loomed before him. And the house.

He knew that whatever had happened there was bad, that its horror was so overpowering and overwhelming it had erased any trace of its existence from his mind, blanking out his memory. Within the past weeks, his worldview, his belief system, the rational tenets of thought that had supported his intellectual life for the past half century, had been turned upside down, and now he was seeing ghosts and encountering evil children and witnessing unexplainable events, but he had the feeling that that change was minuscule compared to what lay ahead.

He was terrified by the thought of returning to Oak dale, and only the fact that Hal was accompanying him, would be there to offer moral, intellectual, spiritual, and, weak as it was, physical support, kept him from feeling totally incapacitated in the face of his fear.

But Hal was being targeted. By telling Hal what had happened, by bringing him into this, Norton had quite possibly put his friend in danger. A danger that neither of them understood.

Maybe he should call it off, wait it out, see what transpired.

There was no real reason for him to go back to Oakdale, to the house.

Yes there was.

He didn't know what that reason could be, but it was there, and Norton could not let his own cowardice prevent him from doing what he knew was right, what he knew had to be done. He'd spent his entire professional life lecturing students about history, going over the past and second-guessing, making moral judgments about decisions that were made, and telling both his students and himself that they should have been made differently.

Well, now was his opportunity to put his money where his mouth was. He had a decision to make here, and he knew what needed to be done. Did he have the guts to do it?

Yes.

But he could not drag Hal into this. As grateful as he was for his friend's advice and support, for his willingness to share the burdens to be borne, he knew deep down that the responsibility was his own. This was something he had to do himself. He could not risk endangering Hal.

He walked into the bedroom, threw the blanket and the toast atop it to the floor, and got his suitcase out of the closet, throwing it onto the mattress. He began packing underwear and socks, shirts and pants.

No, he decided. He would not pick up Hal. He would leave his friend behind.

He would go back to the house alone.

* * *

There were signs along the way.

It was remarkable how quickly and completely his thinking, his mind set, his outlook had changed. He who had always been so literal and logical and concrete, who had never entertained the possibility that anything outside the material world existed, was now reading import into roadside occurrences, seeing omens in passing phenomena glimpsed through the windshield of his car. It was egocentric, this thinking, this belief that supernatural forces were creating portents out of landscapes and natural objects just for his sake.

But he knew that's what was happening.

Over the town of Magruder , he saw a black rainbow.

No clouds, no rain, only the black-banded arch, stretching across the clear blue sky.

It began in a pasture this side of the town.

Its end appeared to be somewhere in the vicinity of Oakdale.

There were other signs as well. In Shaw: bodies of dead squirrels piled into a pyramid on the empty front island of an abandoned gas station. In Edison: a sycamore that had been carved into the shape of a girl bearing an eerie resemblance to a thin and stretched-out Donna. In Haytown : a bearded wild-haired hitchhiker by the side of the road, holding a homemade sign that read: "Return."

He almost chickened out. Driving into Oakdale from the east side of town, he could see the weather vane on the roof of the house's central gable, visible even above the bank building. He passed through the downtown, grown from two blocks to five in the intervening years and now populated with fast-food restaurants and gas stations, and emerged into open farmland. Ahead, off the road, was the house, its dark bulk contrasting sharply with the low white buildings of the other farms.

The black rainbow ended at the foot of the drive.

It disappeared almost instantly, and his first instinct was to make a U-turn and head back to Finley.

But then he thought of Carole's ghost and the trail of toast and the dirty girl in the empty house and he knew he had to go forward.

Return.

He drove down the road, up the drive, to the house.

There was a plucked chicken waiting for him.

It was on a stick in the center of the drive, speared through the buttocks, and though there was no sign or message taped to it, he knew that it had been meant as a greeting. The animal looked freshly killed, had obviously not been sitting out too long in the Midwest sun, and the orange beak in its naked face made it look as though it were smiling.

One featherless wing pointed toward the house.

His gaze followed the pointing wing, and as he scanned the length of the front porch and the various darkened windows, he realized that he was holding his breath.

He was expecting to see Donna.

Donna.

It returned to him all of a sudden in vivid detail, what had happened to his family, and Norton sat there, staring at the chicken, trembling.

Donna.

He could see her face clearly in his mind, her over bright eyes and sly smile and tanned dirty skin. He could not remember when he'd first met the girl, but it seemed as though she'd always been around. They'd played together as children. The house had no close neighbors, and both his brother and two sisters were considerably older than he was, so he really had no other playmates until he began going to school. Even then, Donna remained his best friend.

They'd done typical children's things at first--built forts and dug tunnels and played imaginary games--but, gradually, things changed. Even now, Norton did not know how it had happened or why he'd gone along with it. He knew what he was doing was wrong even at the time, and he felt guilty and ashamed. He was smart enough to keep it from his family, smart enough not to tell his parents or his brother or his sisters, but he was not smart enough to avoid doing it, not smart enough to keep from getting involved.

It started with a group of ants. Donna had found an anthill out in back of the house, in the area between the house and the silo. She showed it to him, then stepped on it, and they both laughed as they watched the ants scurry around. Then she told him to wait and ran off into the house. She returned a few moments later with a kerosene lamp and a match. He knew what she wanted to do, and he didn't like the idea--he knew they'd get in trouble for it--but she smiled at him and told him to gather some dry weeds and twigs, and he did. He tossed the sticks and weeds on top of the flattened anthill, and Donna dribbled some of the kerosene on top of it, set down the lamp, and lit the match.

It was like a little explosion. The twigs and weeds went up instantly, and all of the ants stopped dead in their tracks and shriveled into tiny black balls. Donna crouched down next to the fire and watched, laughing and pointing, and while he knew it was wrong, he also thought it looked kind of neat, and he helped her pick up some of the stray ants that had escaped, the ones outside the fire range, and drop them into the flames.

They crackled and popped as they burned, and the two of them spread out, looking for other bugs. Donna found a beetle and threw it in. He kicked a grasshopper across the dirt and into the fire. They tossed in a whole bunch of spiders and crickets. Donna found a kitten and was about to drop it onto the blaze, but by that time the flames had died down to almost nothing, and the animal got away.

He was glad.

It went on from there, though, and it got worse over the next year or so. They buried a hamster alive. They skinned a dog. He remembered holding a neighbor girl down while Donna . . . assaulted her with a stick.

She loved it, all the violence, all the torture, all the death. It excited her. As kids today would say, she "got off" on it.

Then she started demanding sex.

They did it and he loved it, but even there things changed, got rougher, and the type of sex she wanted became more unusual, more exotic.

Unnatural.

He was tempted to try what she wanted, of course.

But he was more frightened than anything else. She scared him, and that was what finally brought him back to his senses and made him realize that what they were doing was wrong. They'd never been caught, never gotten in trouble for anything they'd done, no one had ever told. But he knew it wasn't right, and he latched on to this as a way to put a stop to it all, to end the whole thing and just ... backtrack.

So he broke it off. He stopped seeing her. She'd want to play and he'd be busy; she'd try to sneak into his room and he'd make sure his doors and windows were locked. Eventually, she just . . . went away. He was not sure how, exactly. There was no final fight, no big to do, they simply stopped seeing each other, and then one day he noticed he didn't have to make an effort to avoid her anymore. She was gone.

He did not see her again until he was eighteen.

He'd been drafted into the army, and just before he was scheduled to go into basic training, he went into town to buy a card, a sort of Don't-Forget-Me card for Darcy Wallace, his girlfriend at the time. He returned home, and the second he walked through the door, he could smell something burning. He called out but no one answered. He thought maybe his mother had left something in the oven and forgotten about it. She'd done that before. His brother, who was already in the army, and his sisters, who were living together in an apartment in Toledo where they were both going to secretarial school, were supposed to come home for the big going-away party, and he figured his mother was making something special, a roast or a turkey.

He rushed into the kitchen, pushed open the swinging door. The entire room was filled with smoke. Black smoke that smelled like burnt toast.

He didn't know what had happened at first. He shut off the oven and opened the windows and the back door.

Donna was standing in the yard in her dirty shift, staring back at him, unmoving, but he didn't have time to fool around with her, and he hurried back over to the stove.

She'd killed them and cut off their heads and put their heads in the oven.

All of them.

His parents, his brother, his sisters.

He was fanning out the smoke when he saw his father's burned head, sitting on the middle rack. The old man's eyes were gone and his lips were flattened and all of the fat and flesh seemed to have melted off, but Norton recognized who it was. Next to that, his mother's head had fallen over and parts of her were sticking to the grill. His brother's and sisters' heads were smoldering in the back, all lumped together.

They reminded him of the burned ants.

He never saw Donna again. Just that last look through the door, through the smoke. And when he thought back on it, later, he realized that she looked the same as she had before. She hadn't aged at all. She still looked twelve.

Now Norton sucked in a deep breath and looked up at the house, then turned back toward the plucked chicken and its pointing wing. Was this a joke or a warning?

Was it meant to be threatening or welcoming? It was impossible to tell; the mind behind it was so alien to his own. Nevertheless, he got out of the car and walked purposely toward the house, up the porch. He thought he heard a child laughing.

A girl.

Donna.

He pressed down on his erection.

The front door opened even before he had a chance to knock, and their old hired hand stood there, within the dark entryway, smiling at him, looking exactly the same as he had all those years ago.

"Hello, Billingson ," Norton said, trying to keep the quiver from his voice. "May I come in?"

Stormy Roberta was gone.

There'd been no hint, no warning, no indication that she'd been planning on leaving him. She'd been even colder and more diffident to him than usual after the misunderstanding with theFinnigan brothers' bankruptcy lawyer, but that wasn't a drastic departure from her typical pattern of behavior, and it had hardly registered on his emotional radar.

But he'd come home on Monday and she hadn't been there, and now she'd been gone for three days. There'd been no note, he hadn't heard from her, and since she'd packed several suitcases and taken the Saab, he assumed that she'd left him.

And he found that he didn't really care.

He cared about the hanging threads, of course. The unresolved details. He didn't like loose ends, didn't like having anything hanging over his head. But he assumed she'd talk to a lawyer at some point and the lawyer would contact him and they'd work out some sort of settlement.

Then he'd be free.

It was a strange feeling and he wasn't entirely used to it yet. Everyone was telling him good riddance, even Joan, and bothRanee and Ken had offered to reintroduce him to the singles' scene, teach him the ropes, but the truth was that he was not ready to start dating again.

Not yet. His friends' descriptions of one-night stands with young nubile women willing to do anything, no matter how kinky, were admittedly tempting, and even at his fringe of the entertainment industry the opportunities were there, but he just didn't seem to be in the mood to immediately jump back into the social whirl, to begin forming new emotional attachments. He felt tired, drained, a little burned out, and he wanted to collect himself, charge his batteries a bit before starting up again.

Fruit salad in the toilet.

Rose and cheese in the sink drain.

Those images had never been very far from his mind, and he supposed that was one reason why he was so reluctant to commit to anything new. He'd been haunted by his experience in the theater. He'd been having dreams ever since that day, dreams of his parents' old house in Chicago. Nightmares filled with recurring images:

living dolls and walking dead fathers and dirty sex crazed children.

But it was what he had seen in the theater that scared him the most. Ghosts and zombies and the other traditional trappings of horror were indeed frightening--particularly in real life, outside the make-believe context of film--but it was the irrational incomprehensibility of what he'd seen in the demolished bathroom that made him feel truly afraid. For these were things that were not categorized or recognized, that were not part of fiction or folklore, and they made him realize how ignorant and inconsequential he really was.

There was meaning in what he had seen--of that he was sure--but the fact that he could not begin to even grasp the superficialities of intent shook him to the core of his being.

Something was going on, something just underneath the surface realities, something so huge and all-encompassing that it was breaking through in unexpected places and in unfathomable ways.

Once again, he thought about the events on the reservation and the idea that these supernatural occurrences were spreading outward from a common cause over an epic area of ground.

It terrified him, but a perenially practical part of his mind told him that it might not make for a bad movie.

There was a knock on his door frame, and Russ Madsen, this semester's intern, poked his head into the office.

"Mr. Salinger? Could I speak to you for a moment?"

Stormy nodded, waved him in. Like most of the interns he'd had over the past two years, Russ was terminally overeager and far too obsequious for his own good.

He was a nice kid, but Stormy had entered into an agreement with the university in Albuquerque because, as he understood it, the kids would get real world experience, he'd get free workers, and the school would collect tuition without having to teach. From his perspective, though, the internship program had turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. The students who came to his company were all wannabe film makers and they seemed to spend most of their time trying to impress him with their knowledge and talent rather than doing the jobs he assigned them.

Russ was a little better than the others. He was just as adept at brown-nosing, and he tried just as hard to impress, but he did actually do the work and he completed the assignments given him.

Stormy smiled at the intern. "What is it, Russ?"

"I have a tape I think you might like." He placed a videocassette on the desk. "It's an unreleased feature by a local filmmaker, and I think it's terrific. It's sort of a horror movie, but it's . . . different. I don't really know how to explain it. But I thought you might want to take a look at it."

"Your film?"

"No." He smiled. "That would be conflict of interest."

"Excellent answer." Stormy reached for the tape, picked it up. The title on the label was Butchery.

"Good title," Stormy observed.

"Good film. I know I'm just an intern, but I think it has potential. I watched it last night, and I was so blown away that I had to let you see it. I lied and told the guy who gave it to me that I hadn't watched it yet and asked if I could hold on to it for another day so I could get it to you."

Stormy looked over at Russ. He'd never really talked to the boy before, and he was impressed by what appeared to be his genuine love and enthusiasm for movies. Most of his other interns had been closer in temperament to his old L.A. cronies, film snobs who would probably end up in businesses entirely unrelated to the industry but who still looked down on the direct to-video market and considered their time here to be a form of slumming. Russ seemed to be more like himself, and he thought that maybe he'd been a little too quick to rush to judgment.

"You do have a film of your own, though? Right?"

"Yeah," the intern admitted.

"Something you think we'd be interested in here?"

"I think so. It's an action flick and I made it on a shoestring budget, but the production values are pretty good, and the female lead's a real find. I think the actors are really impressive.

"I'd like to see it sometime."

"That'd be great! I'm in post now, but I'd love to let you look at it when I'm done. Any help or advice you could give me would be ... I mean, I'd really appreciate it."

"All right," Stormy said, smiling. He held up the videocassette.

"Thanks for dropping this off, and I'll take a look at it today."

Russ understood that the meeting was over, and he awkwardly excused himself and hurriedly left the office.

Butchery.

Stormy toyed with the tape in his hand. With all of the other things going on, it might be relaxing to view a little video carnage. It might take a little of the edge off what passed for reality these days. There was a lot of paperwork he had to do, some agreements he had to go over that would allow a few of his more explicit titles to be sold in Canada, but he was having a difficult time concentrating on work this morning, and he told Joan to hold all his calls, closed the door, popped the tape in his VCR, settling back in his chair to watch the movie.

The title was misleading. There was no butchery in the film. There was not even any blood. There was instead a gothic mansion and an ambiguously manipulative butler and a misunderstood young boy with a crazy grandmother and two emotionally distant parents.

Stormy felt increasingly cold as he watched the film, filled with a growing sense of dread.

He knew this house.

He knew this story.

It was his parents' place in Chicago, and the unnamed boy was himself as a child, navigating the treacherous waters of the unstable household, trying to maintain for himself a normal existence despite the continuous undefined threats of the strange insular world around him.

He'd forgotten a lot of this, forgotten the butler, forgotten the intimidating house, forgotten the feeling of being always off balance, always nervous, always floundering, but it came back to him now as he watched the movie, and when the boy was seduced by the butler's sly daughter, posing as a homeless street urchin, Stormy mouthed the girl's name.

"Donielle."

If the film fell into any genre, it would be psychological horror, but that limiting label did not begin to convey the scope of the work. Russ was right. The film was amazingly accomplished. As good as the Hopi kid's flick.

It created an unsettling universe of its own, and despite the rather slow pace of the movie, it drew the viewer in, and it made one care deeply about the fate of its protagonist.

It was not the film's artistic merit, however, but the personal connection, the references to himself, to his own life, to his childhood, that gripped Stormy, that left him staring at the snow-filled screen for several minutes after the movie had ended.

It meant something, he knew, but again he didn't know what.

He thought of what he'd seen in the theater, and the connection was made.

Theater.

Film.

There was a thread linking his childhood in that horrible frightening house to the disappearing figure, the fruit salad in the toilet, the rose in the cheese in the sink drain. It was a connective tissue so fine as to be almost nonexistent, but it was there, and it was extant, and he was suddenly possessed by the need to meet the person who had made this movie.

There was a feeling of urgency about it, an imperative sense that, like a house of cards, it all might fall apart and whatever tentative connections had been established would disappear.

He burst out of his office. Joan, at her desk, jumped.

"Where's Russ?" he demanded.

"Duping room."

Stormy strode down the hall to the technical facilities and held up the videocassette. "Where did you get this film?" he demanded.

Russ looked up from the equipment, startled. "A, uh, friend of mine gave it to me. He got it from P. P. Rod man, the guy who made it."

"Where is this Rodman?"

"Do you want to buy the distribution rights?"

"I want to meet the person who made this film."

"He lives on the reservation."

The reservation.

It was all connected, the house and the dolls and the theater and TomUtchaca's dead dad, andStormy's almost frantic need to meet this filmmaker immediately intensified. Whatever was going on here, it was big, something that he could only barely imagine, but he was filled with the unfounded, absurd but unshakable conviction that if he could figure out the core cause of all of this craziness, he could put a stop to it before anything catastrophic happened.

Catastrophic?

Where had that come from?

"Do you have Rodman's phone number?" he asked.

Russ shook his head. "He doesn't have a phone."

"Do you know how to get in touch with him?"

"My friend carpools with him to school. I could give him a call."

"Do it."

Stormy hurried back to his office, gave Ken a quick call. Ken was more familiar with the reservation than he was, knew quite a few people there, and Stormy gave a thumbnail sketch of where he was going and why and asked his friend if he'd come along.

"I'm at the office. Pick me up on the way."

Russ knocked on the door frame. "Doug says P.P.

doesn't have classes today. He should be home."

"You have an address?"

"I know where it is."

"You're coming with me, then. Let's go."

A half hour later, Stormy, Russ, and Ken were bumping along the dusty road across the mesa that led to the pueblo serving as tribal headquarters.

Ken's accounts of supernatural occurrences were not exaggerated. If anything, they'd underrepresented the degree of infiltration. Stormy pulled to a stop in front of the headquarters. Kachina dolls were indeed walking around, and they were doing so in the open. There were dozens of them on the flat ground in front of the pueblo, lurching, waddling, and crawling in different directions.

Several stood like sentries on the ledge above the door, swiveling about. On the other side of the creek that bisected the open gathering area, a group of dead men were standing in a circle, apparently speaking among themselves.

Stormy sat for a moment in the car. The extent of what was happening here was overwhelming, and he marveled at how the few people he saw walking about completely ignored the dolls and the dead. Human beings, he thought, can get used to anything.

But perhaps whatever was behind all this knew that.

Maybe it was starting here because the Native American culture was more open in regard to the supernatural, more readily accepting of the nonmaterial world. Maybe this was the first assault in a full-fledged invasion of ghosts and spirits and demons and monsters. Maybe they were easing in gradually, getting people used to them before they . . . What? Took over the world?

He'd seen too many movies.

But movies were the only real reference point for what was going on. There was no parallel in the real world, no factual, historical correspondence.

Ken hopped out of the car. "I'll be back in a sec," he said, running into the tribal office. "I'm just going to tell them we're here."

Stormy turned, looked at Russ in the backseat. The intern's face was white, blanched.

"What's going on?" Russ asked.

Stormy shook his head. "I don't know."

The dolls were not as frightening to him as he'd thought they'd be. He supposed it was because they were out in the open, in the daylight, with people around.

There was an old saw in the horror film industry about ghosts and monsters being more frightening when they were juxtaposed against normal, everyday life, but he had never believed that to be true. A ghost in a mall was nowhere near as scary as a ghost in an old dark house, and the same thing was true here. The kachinas were obviously alive, their wooden bodies and feathered faces were moving in a terrifyingly unnatural way, a way that shouldn't be possible, but they were nowhere near as frightening to him as the thought he'd had of a lone doll sneaking around the house --the inside of the abandoned theater.

Ken came running back. "It's cool. Let's go."

"Two streets down," Russ said from the back. "The white house."

Stormy put the car into gear. "Pretty fucking spooky,"

he said.

Ken nodded. "You're telling me." He glanced at the circle of dead men as they drove by. "I'd like to get a close-up look at one of them," he said.

Stormy shivered. "No you wouldn't."

"What's going on?" Russ asked again.

Neither of them answered him.

It was like driving through a foreign country, Stormy thought. Or an alien landscape. No, it was more surreal than that. Like passing through a Fellini world or a David Lynch world or ... No. Even film analogies broke down here.

On the side of the road, a woman popped into existence.

She hadn't been there a second before, and then she was, and she smiled and waved at them.

"Turn here," Russ said, pointing. "That's his house."

Stormy braked to a halt in the middle of a short dirt driveway in front of a small dilapidated home. P. P. Rod man was already out the front door and walking toward the car before Stormy had even shut off the engine. The filmmaker was a scrawny little half-and-half who looked as though he was about sixteen. Russ had told him that Rodman was in grad school, but had he not known, he would have guessed high school freshman.

Stormy got out of the car and walked toward the filmmaker, hand extended. "Hello," he said. "I'm Stormy Salinger--"

"President of Monster Distribution." Rodman nodded.

"I know."

"Russ here gave me a tape of Butchery, and I have to say, I was very impressed."

Rodman squinted against the sun. "Thanks."

"Did you write the film?" Stormy asked.

"Wrote and directed it," Rodman said proudly.

"Where'd you get the idea?"

The kid frowned. "It came to me in a dream."

A dream.

Stormy tried to maintain the bland expression on his face. "I thought it might have been inspired by"--he motioned toward the land surrounding them--"everything that was happening."

"Are you kidding? I wrote the original draft two years ago. It took me a year to film it."

Two years. That was even more unsettling. He could not get the thought out of his mind that the movie had been made specifically for him, that an unknown power had inspired this kid, knowing he would make this film and that his friend would pass it to his friend and that that person would be working for Stormy's company and would show him the video. It was a frighteningly comprehensive plan, hidden behind an apparent series of coincidences, and Stormy found himself intimidated by the sheer scope of it all, by the complex and concentrated linkages.

He didn't know if he was being warned or threatened, but the idea that this kid was just a messenger, his film the message, and that it had been meant for him and him alone, remained strong in his mind.

He licked his lips. "Where's the house?" he asked.

"Special effect," the filmmaker said. "It's a model. I

based it on the house in my dream."

Stormy was sweating. "How close is the film to your dream?"

"I thought you were interested in distributing my movie."

"Humor me," Stormy told him. "How close?"

"It's almost the same."

"Was there anything in your dream that you didn't put in the movie? Any additional images you cut out because they'd interrupt the narrative flow?"

"What narrative flow?"

"Was there anything you cut out?"

"No."

He continued questioning Rodman, but the kid was a blank, and Stormy understood that whatever meaning he was supposed to get from this, he was supposed to get from the film itself.

"Have you seen any of the dead?" he asked before they left.

Rodman snorted. "Who hasn't?"

"What's it mean?"

"You tell me."

They left after that. Stormy was just as in the dark as he had been before the visit, and he felt both frightened and frustrated. He intended to watch the videotape again, but he had the distinct feeling that there was something else he was supposed to be doing. Should he return to the theater? Get the keys back from the real estate agent and check the bathroom again?

What would that do? He'd seen the kachinas , seen talking dead men and a reappearing woman, and he hadn't learned anything from that. Was there anything else that could be learned from the theater?

He needed to go back home.

It was as if he were a cartoon character and a lightbulb had suddenly gone off above his head. That was exactly what he was supposed to do. Why hadn't he seen it before? Everything he'd felt or experienced or heard about pointed in that direction. He'd just been too dumb to pick up on it. He needed to go back to Chicago, back to the house. The answer was there.

The answer to what?

He didn't know.

He dropped Ken off at the County building, drove back to his own offices. Russ returned to the duping room and the tapes on which he'd been working, and Stormy had Joan make reservations for him on a flight to Chicago tomorrow.

He locked his office and watched Butchery once again.

The flight was booked for noon, with an open-ended return ticket, and he stayed late, instructing his employees on what they were to work on in case he was gone for more than a few days, going over the agreements and contracts that needed his immediate signature. It was nearly nine when he finally arrived home, and he turned on all the lights in the house before collapsing into a chair.

Even his house seemed creepy.

He was not sure that his old home in Chicago was still standing, but he assumed that it was and he wondered what it would be like as he absently sorted through his mail. In his mind, it looked just like the house in Butchery, a dark forbidding mansion, but it must have been repainted and remodeled since his childhood.

At least he hoped it had.

He stopped shuffling the envelopes in his hand, not breathing, certain that he had heard something, a knock from the back of the house, but it was not repeated and when he walked carefully through the rooms he saw nothing unusual.

Most of his mail was either bills or ads, but one envelope was postmarked Brentwood, California, and the name on the return address was Phillip Emmons. Phillip was an old writer friend from L.A., and Stormy opened the envelope, curious. It contained a cryptic yet tantalizing note stating that Phillip had been writing narration for a PBS documentary on Benjamin Franklin and had run across something in his research that he thought Stormy might be interested in.

"It's an entry from Thomas Jefferson's diary," Phillip wrote, "and it concerns some sort of haunted doll.

Thought you might like to see it."

Haunted doll?

That was the weird thing about Phillip. He always seemed to have his finger on the pulse of his friends'

lives and psyches, always seemed to provide just the object or scrap of knowledge needed. He was one of those people who, by accident or design, were always in the right place at the right time. Phillip's fiction ran toward hard-edged serial killer stories or sex-and-blood horror, and to Stormy's way of thinking, his real life seemed to dovetail with like subjects far more often than should have been the case.

He'd always liked Phillip, but he had to admit, he'd always been a little afraid of him.

He looked down at the enclosed Xerox, started reading:

From Thomas Jefferson's Diary: April

I am Awake again well before Dawn because of that Infernal Dream engendered by the Figure Shown to Me by Franklin. It is the Fifth Time I have Had the Dream. Did I not Know Franklin so well, I would Believe Him a Practitioner of Witchcraft and the Black Arts.

The Doll, if Doll it Be, Appeared to be Made from Twigs and Straw and Pieces of Human Hair and Toenail.

The Totality was Glued together by what seemed an Unsavory Substance that Franklin and I Took to be Dried Seed from the Male Sex.

Franklin Claims that He has Seen a Similar Figure in his Travels although He Cannot Remember Where.

For My Part, I would Never have Forgotten such an Object or Whence I first Discovered It, as I Will Not Forget It Now.

Against My Wishes and Advice, Franklin has Taken the Doll into his House. He Intends to Keep It in his Study so that He may Perform some of his Experiments upon It. I Bade Him Leave it in the Spirit House in which He Discovered It, but Franklin is not a Man who Takes Readily to Suggestion.

I am Frightened for Franklin and, indeed, for All of Us.

At the bottom of the diary entry was a detailed piece of artwork in Jefferson's own hand. A detailed rendering that was clearly identifiable and instantly recognizable.

It was a drawing of the house.

His plane landed at O'Hare just after noon, and Stormy immediately picked up his rental car and drove home.

He could not remember the last time he'd been to the old neighborhood or seen the old house, but it had obviously been a while. The street had changed completely.

Redevelopment had obliterated an entire block, replacing old tenements with newer tenements. The tough Polish gang members who used to hang out on the street corners in front of the liquor stores had been replaced by tough black gang members who hung out on the street corners in front of the liquor stores. A lot of the buildings he remembered were either condemned or gone.

The house, though, had stayed exactly the same. It was as if it were enclosed within a force field or clear protective barrier. The detritus of the street did not reach it. There was no graffiti on its walls, no garbage thrown on its lawn. The handful of homes remaining around it had deteriorated tremendously and were now as dilapidated as the surrounding apartment buildings, but the house remained unchanged.

There was something spooky about that.

Butchery.

He realized that he had never asked the kid why he had called his film Butchery. Sitting there in his rental car, in the middle of the slummy neighborhood, staring at his unchanged home, that suddenly seemed important.

The early afternoon sun was blocked by buildings, but its light shone through the broken windows of an empty fire-gutted structure across the street, casting bizarre shadows on the face of the house, shadows that were too abstract to resemble anything real but that nonetheless jogged some recess of his memory.

Stormy got out of the car. He felt like a flea standing before a tidal wave. If whatever was happening encompassed this house in Chicago, the theater in Albuquerque, the reservation, and God knew what else, he was a dust speck in the face of it. It made no sense for him to even be here. The thought that he could do something, that he could make a difference, that he could possibly have an influence over anything was ludicrous. He'd been drawn here, called perhaps, summoned, but he understood now that for him to try to intervene was pointless.

Still, he opened the small gate and walked through the well-tended yard to the porch.

It was a warm afternoon, but the air was cold in the shadow of the house, and he remembered that from before.

He felt like a kid again, powerless, at the mercy of things he didn't understand. He knew his grandmother and parents were dead, understood it intellectually, but emotionally it felt to him as though they were inside, waiting for him, waiting to criticize him, waiting to punish him, and he wiped his sweaty palms on his pants.

He had no key, but the front door was unlocked, and he opened it, walked inside. He was wrong: the house had changed. Not the building itself, not the walls or the floors or the ceilings or the furnishings. Those were exactly as they had been thirty years before. Almost eerily so. But the mood of the house seemed different, the air of regal formality that had reigned previously, that had so permeated every inch of this place, was gone, replaced with a graceless foreboding. He walked forward, turned right. The long hallway in which he had played as a child now seemed grim and intimidating, its opposite end fading into a gloomy darkness that for some reason frightened him.

There was no way he'd be able to muster the bravery to even attempt to go upstairs.

He turned around, walked back through the entryway, saw movement in the sitting room. It was afternoon outside, but little daylight penetrated into the house, and, nervously, his hand fumbled for a light switch. He found it, flipped it on.

The butler was standing just inside the doorway.

"Billingham," Stormy said, not entirely surprised.

The butler smiled at him, bowed. "Stormy."

Daniel The summer stretched before them, new, ripe with the possibility of adventure, its inevitable end so far in the future that it was almost inconceivable. The days were long and hot, and he and his friends filled the hours with projects. Making sand candles: melting real candles they'd stolen from Jim's house, letting the wax drip around slices of string into holes they'd dug in the dirt of the backyard.

Selling Kool-Aid: using Paul's dad's folding card table, having Jim's sister draw them a sign, sitting for hours in the burning sun, adding more and more ice to the pitcher until the Kool-Aid was so watered down even they couldn't drink it. Egging mailboxes: stealing two eggs from each of their refrigerators, playing paper-scissors rock to determine who would rush up to their neighbors'

mailboxes and slam the eggs in.

It was a perfect existence. Nothing had to be planned, nothing had to be completed, they did what they wanted when they wanted, following their whims through the free and open days.

But something was wrong at home. Daniel could feel it. His parents didn't say anything, but he sensed a subtle difference in their relationship, perceived the loss of something he hadn't even known existed. At night, at the dinner table, there was anger beneath his father's surface pleasantry, sadness underlying his mother's cheerfulness, and he was glad it was summer and he could stay out late and he didn't have to spend as much time with his family as he ordinarily would.

As the days passed, however, as the memory of school receded and the rhythms of summer became less tentative, more reliable, he came to believe--no, to know--that it was neither his mother's fault nor his father's fault that things were falling apart between them. They were victims.

They were like him, able to see what was happening but unable to do anything about it, forced to watch as it occurred.

It was the fault of their servant, Billingsly .

And his dirty little daughter.

Daniel did not know what made him think that, but he knew it was true, and while he'd never really given it much thought before, he realized that those two scared him. He was not sure why; Billingsly had always been polite and deferential to him--too polite and too deferential –while Doneen had always been shy and elusive and seemed to have a crush on him. But he was afraid of them, he realized, and he began making a concerted effort to stay out of their way, to not come into contact with them, to avoid them whenever possible.

His parents, he noticed, did the same.

What was going on here? Why didn't his father just fire Billingsly?

Because it wasn't only the servant and his daughter. It was the house as well. Something about their home seemed threatening and confining and unnatural, as if. . .

As if it was haunted.

That was it exactly. It was as if the building itself were alive, controlling everything within its borders--who slept where, what time they ate their meals, where they could go and what they could do--and they were merely its pawns. It was a strange thought, he knew, but it was the way he felt, and it explained why his father, who had always been lord of the manor, the king of his castle, walked around these days like a beaten man, a guest in his own home.

No, not a guest.

A prisoner.

If he'd been braver, if he'd been older, he would have talked to his parents about it, would have asked what was wrong and why and whether they could do anything about the situation, but that was not the way the dynamics of their family worked. They did not talk out problems, did not confront them directly, but hinted around about them, trying to get their individual points across with oblique references and small suggestions, hoping the other members of the family would understand what they meant without having to come out and explain.

So he stayed out as much as possible, played with his friends, concentrated on summer and fun and tried not to think about the changes at home. He and Jim and Paul andMadson built a clubhouse in the woods behind Paul's backyard. They made a go-can that they took turns racing down State Street. They panned for gold in the creek.

They watched game shows on Jim's family's color TV

set. They camped out in the park.

Outside the walls of the house, it was a great summer.

But inside . . .

It started one night after he and his friends had spent the day downtown at the movie theater, sitting twice through a double feature of two Disney movies: Snowball Express and $1,000,000 Duck. They'd emerged tired and gorged with candy, and they'd gone home to their respective houses. His parents had been waiting for him--they always ate dinner together, that was a family rule--and he'd eaten and then gone upstairs to take a bath.

He'd been successfully avoiding Billingsly and his daughter for several weeks, had only seen the servant at dinner and had not seen Doneen at all, but he was still taking no chances and he made sure that the servant was still in the kitchen and carefully checked the hallways for his daughter before grabbing pajamas from his bedroom and locking himself in the bathroom.

She walked in while he was washing himself in the tub.

"Hey!" he said.

He had locked the door, he was sure of it, and the fact that the girl had still been able to get in frightened him.

She slipped off her dirty nightgown, got into the water.

He jumped up, splashing water on the floor, frantically calling for his mom, his dad, as he grabbed the towel and scrambled away from the tub, trying not to slip on the tile.

Doneen giggled at him.

"Get out of here!" he screamed at her.

"You don't really want me to leave." Still giggling, she pointed at his penis, and he quickly covered it with the towel, embarrassed. He couldn't help it; he had an erection.

It was exciting to see a naked girl, but it was even more frightening, and he backed against the door, reaching for the knob and trying to turn it.

It was locked.

He didn't want to turn his back on Doneen , was not sure what she could or would do, but he had no choice and he turned, unlocking the door.

"Your mother can't live," the girl said behind him.

He whirled around. "What?"

"She's going to have to die."

There was something about the matter-of-fact tone in the girl's voice that scared the shit out of him, and he ran out of the bathroom and down the long hallway. He wanted to go into his bedroom, get his clothes, get dressed, but he was afraid to do so, afraid she might be able to sneak in there as easily as she'd entered the bathroom, so he ran downstairs, still covering himself with the towel. His parents had remained at the dinner table, and when his mother looked up in surprise and he saw the mingled expression of concern, worry, and fear cross her face, he burst into tears. He had not cried in a long time--crying was for babies-- but he was crying now, and she stood up and allowed him to hug her, and he kept repeating, "I don't want you to die!"

"I'm not going to die," she told him. But her voice was not as reassuring as it should have been, and it only made him cry harder.

Afterward, he was embarrassed. He should not have been--there were more important things at stake here than embarrassment--but that was the way he felt, and although he told his parents he'd been scared upstairs, in the bathroom, he did not tell them why or what had really happened. Still, he made them accompany him back up, hoping that Doneen would still be there, and made his father search his bedroom closets and the other rooms off the hallway before putting on his pajamas and telling them to go downstairs, he was all right.

It was the crying that had embarrassed him the most, and he thought that if he had not burst into tears like a little girl, he might have been able to broach the subject of the servant's daughter and what she'd said. But he'd been naked and crying into his mother's blouse, and he could not bring himself to compound that humiliation with the admission of what must seem like a lunatic fear-- no matter how serious the consequences might be.

He would just have to stay alert, keep an eye on his mother, make sure nothing happened.

He stopped playing outside, stopped going places with his friends. He told them that he was grounded, that his parents would not let him go out. He told his mother that Jim's and Paul's families had gone on vacation and that Madson was grounded.

And he stayed in the house.

Stayed near his mother.

He still avoided Billingsly as much as possible, but he did not have to make an effort to stay away from Doneen .

Either her father or his parents had talked to her, or she had decided on her own to keep her distance, and he saw only occasional glimpses of her in hallways or rooms or outside in the yard, and that was fine by him.

A few evenings later, his father was cutting his hair, and the idea that he should save the cut hair occurred to him. He did not know why, did not know where this notion had come from, but almost as soon as it had flashed into his mind, it had solidified into a necessity, a priority, and after his father finished trimming his bangs and tossed away the newspapers that had been spread on the floor underneath his chair, Daniel snuck into the kitchen, took the crumpled paper with its cache of cut hair, and brought everything back up into his room.

Over the next week, he collected other things: used Kleenex, discarded toothpicks, peach pits, chicken bones, an apple core. It became almost an obsession, this search for specific objects, and while he never knew exactly what he was looking for, he always recognized it when he found it.

He understood that he was supposed to take all of the elements and combine them, make them into a cohesive whole, construct a figure that would serve as a talisman against. . . Against what?

He did not know, but he worked on the figure nonetheless, adding his newest acquisitions to it at night before he went to bed, reshaping them in the morning when he awoke.

He destroyed the figure as soon as he finished it. He had not noticed until the very end, until every element was in place, exactly what he'd been making, but when he saw the expression he'd created on the figure's face, saw the threatening stance and intimidating structure of the object, he realized instantly that he had not created a talisman to ward against something but had made a figure designed to attract something.

Something bad.

This was just what Doneen and her father and the house had wanted him to do, and he tore it up immediately, stomping and flattening the pieces, throwing them in a paper bag and taking the sack out to the backyard and burning it.

He heard whispers that night. And his father came into his room and told him in a worried voice not to get out of bed, not even if he had to go to the bathroom, until the sun came out the next morning.

He wet his bed for the first time since kindergarten, but he wasn't embarrassed and didn't get in trouble for it, and when he walked into the dining room for breakfast, he heard a portion of a conversation that ended instantly the second he walked through the door:

"What are we going to do?" Mother.

"Nothing we can do. They're back." Father.

That night, again, he was told not to get out of bed, but something made him disobey those orders, and he crept silently across the floor of his room and slowly opened the door, peeking out.

It emerged from the shadows, a small squat figure of dust and hair, paper clip and tape, bread crumb and lint.

Gathered material from the rug underneath the furniture.

A living counterpart to the static figure he had created and destroyed.

Daniel stood in the doorway of his room, frozen, unable to even suck in a breath, watching as the horrible creature moved away from him, down the hall.

To his parents' room.

Their bedroom door opened. Closed.

"No!" he screamed.

"Daniel?" his father called from downstairs.

His parents had not come up yet! They were safe from that . . . whatever it was.

A relief so powerful that it seemed to weaken his muscles flooded over him, through him. He started left, toward the stairwell, when he heard the sound of a crash from his parents' room. The sound of something falling.

And a partial yelp.

"Mother!" he screamed, running.

"Daniel!" his father bellowed from downstairs.

He heard his father's heavy elephant tread from somewhere on the floor below, but he didn't, couldn't wait, and he rushed down the hall to his parents' bedroom and threw open the door.

The creature was on the bed.

His mother, naked, thrashed about, bucking wildly, as the figure forced itself into her open mouth. Daniel was screaming for his father, screaming at the top of his lungs, but he could not take his eyes off the bed, where his mother tried to first yank the figure from her mouth, then began beating herself violently in the face, trying to dislodge it. He knew he should do something, but he didn't know what, had no idea how he could help, and a moment later, before he could spur himself into action, his father was thundering down the hall and rushing through the open door and running up to the bed.

The figure's feet disappeared down his mother's throat.

"Help me!" his father ordered. He picked her up, began pounding her on the back. "Help me!"

Daniel didn't know what to do, didn't know how to help, but he rushed over and his father had him grab his mother's arms and hold them up while he attempted to stick his fingers down her throat and pull out the creature.

Her face was already turning blue, and the weak wheezy gasps that had been issuing from her mouth had silenced. Her too-wide eyes stared blankly straight ahead, and only the open-close-open-close fish motion of her lips indicated that she was still alive.

Screaming crazily, a primal bellow of rage and pain, his father grabbed his mother around the waist, turned her upside down, and, holding her ankles, thumped his knee against her back in an effort to dislodge the dust creature.

It was to no avail. His mother died in front of their eyes, not professing her love for them, not reassuring them with last words, but gasping silently like a fish out of water, jerking and twitching spasmodically.

The next week was a blur. There were doctors and police and morticians and other men in uniforms and suits who came in and out of the house. An autopsy was performed on his mother's body and he wanted, to ask if they found the dust monster within her, but he was told that the cause of death was heart failure, and he figured that the creature had either gotten out or had simply dissipated and come apart within her system.

He knew, though. And his father knew. And the two of them started packing up their belongings, planning to leave.

"Where are we going?" Daniel asked.

"Anywhere," his father said in the defeated monotone that had become his normal voice.

But they were only in the very earliest stages of packing when they were confronted by Billingsly . The servant knocked on the frame of the open doorway as usual and stood deferentially outside the room, and Daniel was immediately filled with a deep cold fear at the sight of him.

He glanced over at his father and saw that his father appeared frightened as well. He'd put down the jewelry box he'd been holding and stood staring at the servant.

"You can't go," Billingsly said quietly.

Daniel's father said nothing.

"You have a responsibility to uphold."

For the first time since his mother's death, Daniel saw tears in his father's eyes. The sight made him uncomfortable and, on some level, frightened, but though he wanted to look away, he did not.

"I can't," his father said.

"You must," Billingsly insisted. He looked at them.

"You both have to stay."

They did stay. For several more years. Until Daniel entered high school. They remained in the house, battered and victimized by the same unseen forces that had killed his mother, each of them maintaining three bedrooms, never sure when one bed might be overrun by colored worms or stained with black water, or when the furniture might decide to shift shape or a room disappear altogether.

They never talked about it--any of it--this was simply the way they lived, and his mother's death became by unspoken agreement a secret memory, not discussed or referenced or even alluded to, part of an alternate history that did not conform to the lie they lived.

And then, one day, they left. They packed nothing, took nothing with them. Daniel just received a call slip from the office on the first day of his freshman year in high school, and when he walked over, his father was waiting for him.

The two of them got in the car and left.

To Pennsylvania.

They found an apartment, his father found a job, and although Daniel wanted to ask his father what had happened, how they had been able to escape, he was afraid to do so.

His father died several years later, when he was a sophomore in college. They'd never mentioned or discussed the house after they'd left it, and by that time the memory of his other life had been completely buried and repressed.

As amazing as it seemed, he'd forgotten all about Billingsly and Doneen and what had happened to his mother, and when he thought about his mother, which was rarely, his mind skipped over her death. If pressed, he would have had to admit that he did not know exactly how she'd died.

It seemed strange even to him, and while most of the circumstances of his childhood had been buried in his memory over the years, not all of them had been completely forgotten. He had, for example, been dimly aware on some level that they'd had a servant in their house. It had never occurred to him to wonder how his family had been able to afford a servant, however, and even now the specifics of that arrangement eluded him.

Probably the same way the Brady Bunch could afford their maid.

No. It was nothing so benign as that.

AndBillingsly had been much more than just a servant.

Daniel stood before his wife, adamant but ashamed, dead set on the course of action he'd chosen but embarrassed by the melodrama of its origin, the potboiler nature of its cause.

"I have to go," he said.

Margot simply stared at him.

"I know it sounds irrational. I know it sounds crazy, but trust me, that's what happened, and . . . whatever it was, it's starting again. And it's trying to involve Tony."

She was silent for a moment. "I believe you," she said finally. "That's the scary part."

He looked at her, stunned. "You do?"

"Well, not completely maybe. But enough so that I

trust your instincts." She paused. "Don't forget, I saw that doll, too. I know something's going on. And if you can somehow . . . exorcise this whatever-it-is and keep it away from Tony, well then I'm all for it."

Daniel stared at his wife. It wasn't supposed to work this way, it wasn't supposed to be this easy. In books and movies, things worked out like this, but in real life it was supposed to be tougher. No one believed in ghosts and demons and the supernatural, and they didn't just accept someone's word on something like that. He tried to imagine what he would do, how he would react if Margot came to him with some wild story about seeing a UFO or something. He wasn't sure he'd buy into it or even if he'd automatically be on her side. He'd probably agree with her for love's sake, but he'd figure out some way to test her--or some way for her to get help. He doubted that he would completely change his worldview and suddenly believe in things he had never believed in before merely on the word of someone else.

Even if that other person was Margot.

He understood for the first time how truly lucky he was to have this woman for his wife.

"It's in Maine," he said. "The town's called Matty Groves and I'm not even sure exactly where it is, but I know it's probably a day's drive from here. I know I shouldn't--"

She put a firm arm on his, looked into his eyes.

"Go," she told him.

It was indeed almost a day's drive, and Daniel reached MattyGroves just as the sun was setting. He should've left earlier--he'd set the alarm for five this morning-- but he hadn't wanted to part from Margot and Tony, and he'd ended up staying through breakfast.

He was filled with the absurd conviction that this was the last time he'd ever see them.

Although maybe, he thought as he approached the house, the idea wasn't so absurd.

Against its cheerful forested backdrop, the three storied building looked even gloomier and more gothic, like a stereotypical haunted mansion. Its slatted wooden walls were a dark gray; the trim, door, and shutters black. Even the glass in the windows seemed dusky, although that may just have been a trick of the dying light.

It was an imposing structure, with some of the same off putting air of impenetrability as a medieval fortress or cathedral, and Daniel stood in front of it, goose bumps on his arms. He had not seen the house since he and his father had fled, and had managed until now to block out all memory of it entirely, but once again he was here, and it was as though the house had been waiting for his return.

So it could punish him.

That was ridiculous.

Was it? Whatever it was, whatever lived here, whatever made this house its home, had found him, over distance, over time, and it had reached out to his son, to Tony, had introduced the boy to Billingsly and Doneen, had taught the boy how to make the doll.

It was crazy. All of it.

But there was nothing there he doubted.

He got out of the car, stared up at the dark building, taking it all in. The twin chimneys. The gables. The high window of his mother's corner bedroom. The wrap around porch where he and his friends had so often played, remaining always in the front because they were afraid of the sides and back of the house.

Where were his friends? he wondered. What had happened to them? What did they remember?

Something caught his eye. Movement in one of the lower windows. A dark face?

A dust doll?

He wanted to leave, wanted to turn tail and run, and if it had not been for Margot and Tony, he would have done exactly that. But he was not here only for himself.

He was here to find out what was infiltrating his life and put a stop to it, to intercept and end the supernatural harassment of his family.

Supernatural He hadn't thought of it in precisely those terms before, but that was exactly what was going on.

He supposed, on some level, he'd always been subtly aware that despite his comfortably normal mainstream existence, there was more to the universe than the material, physical world, that despite the life he had made for himself, there was something else that was somehow . . .

influencing him, guiding him. He'd repressed all memory of his childhood and had never seen any overt example or evidence of the supernatural, but all along there'd been small instances of deja vu, coincidences and coordinations that did not make any kind of logical sense but nonetheless bespoke Truth. It was as if he were a cog in a great machine and every once in a while he was allowed to glance over and see nearly identical cogs performing nearly identical functions. There were connections he could not understand but knew existed, and he knew now that it was all tied to whatever existed inside that house.

Another small dark face at another low window.

His entire body seemed to be covered with gooseflesh and his heart was pounding harder than he'd known it could, but Daniel steeled himself and pressed forward.

Night appeared to be falling quicker than usual, sundown and dusk fairly speeding by, and if he had learned that this was a phenomenon which only happened here, that the power within the house somehow had the ability to influence the sun, he would not have been surprised.

He walked up the porch steps, knocked on the heavy oak door.

It was opened instantly.

By Billingsly .

Daniel sucked in his breath at the sight of the man.

He was no longer a child and the servant an adult--they were both grown men of approximately the same size-- but the balance of power had not shifted in all these years, and Daniel instinctively stepped back. Billingsly was still a frighteningly intimidating figure, alien and unknowable in his proper attire, the blankness in his eyes impossible to read. He bowed, smiling enigmatically.

"You are the last."

"What?" Daniel said.

"I trust you had a pleasant trip?" The servant stepped aside, motioning him in.

Daniel stepped over the threshold, acutely aware of the symbolism of that simple act.

The door shut immediately behind him.

Mark He was scared shitless, but he tried not to let it show.

It was not merely the circumstances of his arrival c the air of menace that overhung the house which le:

him feeling so terrified, but the fact that he wasn't exactly a guest, wasn't exactly a prisoner, but seemed t be somewhere in-between--and he had no idea what t do about it.

Mark glanced nervously around the sitting room.

was strange being back, seeing the high-vaulted ceiling and the patterned hardwood floors, all of the familiar furniture in all of the familiar places, mileposts of his childhood that were indelibly ingrained in his memory It was the smell of the house that affected him most strongly, though, the familiar odors of old flowers am fireplace smoke and dust; scents of his past that lingered in the room and remained behind, present but invisible like ghosts.

Mark stared at Billings. What was he? Ghost"

Demon? Monster? None of them seemed to hit the mark, but they were all close, they were all within the ballpark.

Feigning a bravery he did not feel, he turned his back on the assistant and walked across the sitting room, pulling open the drapes covering the window. He tried peering out, but it was night outside and he could see nothing.

"I should be able to see the lights of Dry River,"

he said.

"Curious, isn't it?"

Mark dropped the drapes. "What's going on here?" he demanded.

Billings chuckled.

"Who are you?"

"You know who I am, Marky boy."

Mark felt cold. "All right, then. What are you?"

"I'm the assistant."

"What do you want from me?"

"Me? Nothing. It's the House that called you back."

"Called me back?"

"You are to live here again."

Mark shook his head. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but I came back here because Kris ten died and I wanted to find out what happened to her.

And for your information, I came back for a visit, not to stay."

"But stay you shall. The House needs occupants."

"For what?"

"Why, to maintain the border, of course."

Mark didn't like the sound of that, and he tried not to let his fear show.

"The House," Billings continued, "was built as a barrier, to maintain the border between this world, the material world, and the other world, the Other Side."

Mark's mouth felt dry. "The 'Other Side'?"

Billings's eyes were flat, unreadable. "The hereafter, the world of the dead, the world of magic and the supernatural, the world of spirits. It is the opposite of this world, your world, and it is a horrific place, a world of terrors and abominations the likes of which you have never seen nor ever dreamed. The House was built to keep the two separate, and it is the only reason your people, your world, are still here. Otherwise, you would have been overrun long ago."

Mark said nothing.

"The House is like an electrified fence or, more precisely, like a battery supplying power to that fence. And it is charged by people living within it. That is why you were called back. For the first time, the House is empty.

There is no one living here, and the barriers are coming down. On both sides." He looked at Mark. "Ever since Kristen passed on."

Mark turned away, didn't respond. His heart was pumping crazily, and his body was drenched with a sheen of fear sweat.

"The border is asemipervious membrane. It is not a solid wall, and without a strong barrier to separate the two worlds, they will inevitably collide. And that," he said, "would be catastrophic."

"So I'm here to recharge the battery?"

"If you will."

"What happens if I refuse?"

"You have not refused. You have come."

"What if I leave?"

"You can't leave."

"Who's going to stop me if I break one of these windows and jump out and run away?"

Billings looked at him. "The House."

There was silence between them after that.

"Where did the house come from?" Mark asked finally.

"Who built it?"

"The Ones Who Went Before."

The name, with its ambiguity and intimations of tremendous age, frightened him, and he listened quietly as Mr. Billings described the early days, after the barrier was erected, the days of miracles, when gods and monsters roamed the earth, when seas were parted, when oracles foretold the future, when miraculous beings and the resurrected dead mingled with ordinary men. After the House became occupied, he explained, as it gained strength and became more efficient, more attuned to its purpose, those "leaks" were plugged, all access to the Other Side was sealed off.

"Nothing is perfect," the assistant said. "And, in the past, isolated spirits have made it through. But the House was built to maintain the laws of reason and rationality, and those exceptions had no influence or bearing upon that purpose. The Other Side was eventually forgotten about, passing into the realm of myth and fiction, and the occasionally sighted monster, the occasional haunted house, the occasional ghost became an aberration, entertainment, a story that was interesting but not to be believed.

"Now, however, the House is failing. Elements of the other world are breaking through to this world, the material world, and elements of your world are breaking into it."

Mark desperately wanted a drink. "How long have you been here?" he asked. "In the House?"

"I have always been here."

He didn't like that answer.

"What about your daughter?"

The assistant frowned. "What?"

"Is she still here?" He saw in his mind the child's sly corrupt face, and he shivered even as he acknowledged the faint sensual stirring within him.

Billings blinked, puzzled, and an expression closely related to fear crossed his features.

"I have no daughter," he said.

Norton For the first time since he'd arrived, for the first time in his memory,Billingson appeared to be rattled, and Norton felt a small twinge of satisfaction. It was petty, he knew, and should have been beneath him, but the hired hand's discomfort made him feel good.

At the same time, he was terrified.

He didn't know what he'd expected to find here when he returned. A haunted house? Yes. Ghosts from his past? Yes. But not this wide-ranging, elaborate, epic situation.

Did he believe it?

There was no doubt in his mind that the hired hand spoke the truth. Nothing else made sense. But the story was so all-inclusive as to be completely overwhelming.

A demon possessed a peasant in Bangladesh, or a hiker in the Himalayas caught a glimpse of the abominable snowman, and it was because he didn't live in the Oak dale house anymore? Such a causal connection seemed on the face of it impossible, butBillingson's simple explanation tied it all together in a way that seemed to him entirely believable.

And what about the girl?

As happy as he was to seeBillingson so shaken, it frightened him to realize that the hired hand knew nothing about the child who was supposed to have been his daughter.

Donna.

He felt a stirring in his groin just thinking about her.

But the fact thatBillingson , who seemed to know everything, who seemed to be at the center of all that was going on, was completely unaware of the girl's existence disturbed him in a way he could not explain. As terrifying as the House was, there seemed to be a logic to it, a coherent theory or controlling power behind it. But the girl existed outside of that. She was a wild card, and her existence threw everything off balance, darkening and complicating an already dark and complex picture.

The conversation, the lecture, had been derailed by the revelation that he had seenBillingson's daughter, but the hired hand, while clearly shaken, faced Norton calmly, once again perfectly composed, and said, "It's getting late. I think we should finish this discussion in the morning."

Norton glanced around the sitting room. Until this point, his time in the House had been spent in the sitting room, like a variation of No Exit, and his first thought was that he was going to have to sleep here--on the couch or the love seat or the chairs or the floor--and was never going to be able to leave the room.

But when he asked, "Where am I going to sleep?"

Billingsonreplied, "Your room is waiting for you."

Indeed, his bedroom was exactly where it had always been: halfway down the third-story hall. There were numerous doors lining both sides of the dark corridor and Norton realized that even as a child he had never known what was in most of those other rooms. Their doors had always been closed or locked, and he had never even wondered what was inside them.

There are other dimensions besides space and time.

It was whatBillingson had said when quizzed about the exact placement of the Housevis-a-vis the "Other Side," and though Norton had said nothing at the time, the statement had frightened him and stuck with him.

He was way out of his depth here, and he wished to God he had never come. It was the coward's response, he knew, but he had no problem answering to that description.

He would rather have put up with a million monstrous manifestations on the streets of Finley than be trapped here in this House. Those were intrusions of horror into the normal everyday world. Here, horror was the normal everyday occurrence.

Billingson led him to his bedroom door, opened it for him, and smiled. "Sweet dreams, Nort ," he said before bowing theatrically and heading down the hall.

It was what his father used to say to him each night before tucking him into bed.

Norton took a deep breath, walked into the bedroom.

Everything looked precisely as it had half a century ago.

It was not exactly a surprise, but the extent of his immersion into the past was still staggering. There was the low bed with the red-checkered bedspread, the small corner desk covered with finished and half-finished airplane models, the photos of Buck and Roy Rogers tacked to the wall, the cigar box on the nightstand that he'd used to store his valuables. He looked up. Above the door was the upside-down horseshoe he'd nailed there for good luck.

Good luck.

He smiled wryly. That was a joke. He'd never had anything remotely approaching good luck in this House.

He was bigger and the room and its contents were smaller, but there was none of the awkwardness usually associated with revisiting scenes from childhood. Instead, he felt perfectly at home here. He sat down on the bed, and his body's memory kicked in, remembering the contours of the mattress and the texture of the bedspread, snuggling into a physical familiarity with the room.

He sat for a few moments on the bed, looking around, taking it all in, then rummaged through the cigar box and the drawers of the desk, picking up and touching objects with which he was intimately familiar but had neither seen nor thought about for many decades.

It depressed him, being in this room again, made him sad. The fear was still there, constant beneath his other layers of feeling, but he also felt pensive and melancholic.

Being here reminded him of what he'd thought as a child, what he'd planned, and the realization that the future he'd been so eagerly awaiting had already passed left him somewhat heavy-hearted. For the first time in his life, he truly felt his age.

He walked to the window, looked out. It was still dark out, but it wasn't night. There were no stars, no moon, no town lights or road lights. It was as black as if the window glass had been painted, but the darkness had depth, and he knew there was a world outside the window.

He just wasn't sure he wanted to know what that world was.

Sighing, he turned away. He felt dirty, filthy from both the long trip and the cold-sweat stress of everything he'd experienced since, and although the bathroom, if he remembered correctly, was halfway down the hall, he decided to take a shower before bed. He'd brought no robe, though, no pajamas, and his extra clothes were still in the car. Strange. He'd always intended to stay overnight in Oakdale, maybe stay several nights, and he had no explanation for why he had not packed appropriately.

That was not like him.

He found it worrisome.

He decided to simply walk down the hall, take his shower, put his clothes back on afterward, and then sleep in his underwear and wear the clothes again tomorrow.

He considered calling for Billingson , asking for a towel and washcloth, but he didn't relish the idea of seeing the hired hand again, and he figured he'd check the bathroom first, see if he couldn't find what he needed on his own.

He took off his shoes and his belt, emptied the contents of his pockets on the nightstand. He heard no noise from any of the other rooms as he walked down the hall, but the silence was more unnerving than sound would have been, and he considered calling off the shower and retreating to his bedroom, hiding until morning.

The hallway was dark, the silence unnerving and oppressive, but he wasn't about to be intimidated by the House or anything in it. He might feel fear, but he wouldn't show it, and he purposely kept his gait as easy and natural as he could.

Unlike in the hallway and, to a lesser extent, his bedroom, the light in the bathroom was bright, modern, fluorescent. This was one room that had obviously been updated and remodeled since his day. He flipped on the switch and clear white light illuminated every corner of the small functional space.

The modern bathroom made him feel good, gave him hope. It was an island of normalcy in the surreal landscape of the House, and its matter-of-fact concreteness kept him grounded and tethered, kept him in touch with the ordinary everyday world.

There were indeed towels and washcloths and soap, and Norton closed and locked the door, taking off his clothes and placing them on the closed lid of the toilet.

There was not a separate shower and bathtub but a combined shower bath, and he pulled aside the beige plastic shower curtain and stepped into the tub, closing it behind him. Bending down to turn on the water, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He straightened, stood. Beneath the edge of the shower curtain, dark against the whiteness of the tub, were what looked like thousands of thin hairs--whiskers or spider legs--moving crazily, jerkily, and he flattened against the tiled wall and stared at the wildly twisting strands.

The fear that was triggered within him came from the very core of his being. There was no thought, no conscious determination of danger, only an instinctive terror of the thin hairs, an irrational alarm.

The water was on, and for that he was grateful.

He did not want to hear the noise the hairs were making.

He found himself thinking of the ants he'd burned with Donna. For some reason, the crinkling of their bodies, their spasms of death, reminded him on a subliminal level of the wildly whipping whiskers, and the thought occurred to him that this was some sort of retribution, some decades-delayed revenge for that long-ago act.

The hairs had been moving crazily, independently, but he saw now that they were moving together, swishing and sweeping back and forth, from side to side. They extended below the curtain for the entire length of the tub, there was no empty space, and his panicked racing mind tried to think of how he could possibly escape.

He didn't know whether the whiskers were independent entities or part of some larger creature, but either way he didn't want to open the curtain, didn't want to see any more than the few inches already visible against the wall of the tub.

He was about to scream for help when the hairs pulled up and were gone. They were visible for a second in the air above the shower rod, waving in that even swish above the plastic curtain, and then they disappeared completely. He waited for a moment, still flattened against the wall, then, detecting no movement, carefully pulled open one side of the curtain.