The House

The bathroom was empty.

There were no whiskers or hairs or spider legs or creatures near the toilet or the sink or the counter or the towel rack. The door was closed and locked.

He still felt dirty, still wanted to take a shower, but he was shaking and afraid, and he quickly shut off the water, pulled his pants back on, and, grabbing the rest of his clothes, ran back down the hall to his room.

He sat on his bed, breathing heavily.

What would happen in the middle of the night if he had to take a leak?

He'd hang his dick out the window and piss in the open air.

There was no way in hell he was going back into that bathroom.

He closed his eyes, saw again those twitching hairs, and shivered. He longed for the benign manifestations he'd seen before, for ghosts or burnt toast.

But he changed his mind about that.

Ghosts did come.

Later.

And he longed for the benign manifestation of hairs in the bathtub.

Daniel Billingsly looked different in the morning. Better, healthier, as though he were suddenly well again after a long illness.

He himself looked like hell.

He'd had a bad night.

Daniel had been almost asleep when the doll had come to visit. He was tired from driving and from stress, and he'd lain down on the bed, intending only to close his eyes and rest for a moment before attempting to find an escape route out of this loony bin, but when he felt himself drifting off, he figured he might as well pack it in for the night and wait for morning, when he'd have a clear mind and refreshed body and his chances would be better. He took off his clothes, crawled under the covers, closed his eyes.

And heard something scuttling in the corner.

He jerked up in bed, eyes wide open, heart pounding.

He recognized that sound, and he glanced immediately toward the corner of the room from which the noise had come, but it was too dark for him to see anything.

He flipped on the nightstand lamp, then rushed over to the door and turned on the overhead light.

There it was, between a wastepaper basket and his toy chest.

The doll.

It stared at him with feather eyes, its head a mass of dust and hair strands, its open mouth an empty hole crisscrossed by broken toothpicks. It was not quite the doll he remembered from the past, not quite the figure Tony had been making, but some unwholesome hybrid.

He stayed by the door, hand still on the light switch, afraid to move. Fully dressed and wearing protective combat gear, he still would have felt unprepared to face the small figure; barefoot and naked, he felt completely vulnerable. It stared at him from its corner with an intensity and malevolence he had never seen before, and the thought occurred to him that it knew he had destroyed its brethren, Tony's creations.

And it wanted revenge.

That was stupid, he told himself.

But he could not make himself believe it.

The horrid figure shifted against the toy chest, its feather eyes never once leaving his. What had the doll been planning? To kill him the way his mother had been killed, to stuff itself down his throat as he slept? Daniel trembled as he thought of how close he had come to that fate. He was so dead tired tonight that if he had fallen fully asleep, nothing could have awakened him.

By the time he was roused, it would have been too late.

He glanced around for a weapon, saw the handle of his old baseball bat peeking out from beneath the bed.

Did he dare try for it? It was a good five steps away.

He'd have to rush halfway across the room, duck down and grab it. What would the doll be able to do in that time?

It didn't matter. Unless he wanted to run out into the hallway naked and let the doll escape to boot, the bat was his only hope.

The good thing was that the bat was sticking out from under the foot of the bed, the part nearest the door. It would be difficult to grab, but not impossible, and even if the doll ran for the door while he was grabbing the weapon, it would not have time to open the door and he would be able to whale on it and destroy it before it could escape.

What if it attacked him instead?

He did not even want to think about that.

Daniel shot one more glance at the dark shifting figure, then moved quickly, dashing across the carpet. He bent down, acutely aware of the vulnerability of his dangling genitals, and braced himself for an attack as he reached under the bed and hurriedly grasped the familiar tape-covered handle.

The door clicked open behind him, and he whirled around to see the doll running out of the bedroom, laughing in a whispery sibilant way that reminded him of the sound of broom bristles on hardwood floor.

He followed it into the hall. He was still naked, but embarrassment was the least of his concerns, and, grunting, he swung the bat low, as hard as he could, hoping the doll had not gotten too far away and that he'd be able to hit it.

No such luck.

Still laughing, the figure hurried down the dark hallway, blending in with the shadows against the sideboard, disappearing into the gloom.

"Damn!" he said.

He looked up, and on the far wall, in a dim half circle of what appeared to be reflected moonlight, he thought he saw a shadow.

The shadow of a girl.

Doneen.

Beckoning him.

He'd gone back into his room after that, locking his door, and although he dozed off eventually, he tried to stay awake all night, and what little sleep he did get was troubled and intermittent. He was as tired when he woke up as he had been the night before.

Daniel walked into the dining room.Billingsly smiled cheerfully at him and, lifting a silver pot, said, "Coffee?"

The butler had laid out an elaborate breakfast on the oversized banquet table, and Daniel sat down at its foot, nodding his acknowledgment.

He felt like shit. Billingsly , by contrast, was in peak condition. If yesterday he had accentuated the spookiness of the House with his pale, cadaverous appearance, today he complemented it with his visible robustness.

He was no less creepy for his newfound vigor, however, and improved health only served to emphasize those things that were so disturbing about him in the first place.

Daniel looked from the rejuvenated Billingsly to his own enervated reflection in a mirror above the sideboard.

The dichotomy was too striking not to notice.

Maybe Billingsly was a vampire. Maybe the butler was feeding off him, sucking the life out of him for his own nourishment.

No. More likely, the butler's health was connected with that of the House. And now that the House was getting charged back up, oldBillingsly was receiving a power boost as well.

Billingsly smirked at him as he poured his coffee. "I trust you had a pleasant evening?"

Daniel smiled sweetly up at him. "Couldn't have been better." He sipped the hot drink. It tasted wonderful.

"So why didn't you recruit new people to live in the House? I assume that's what you did before. I know my family didn't live here for generations."

"No, they didn't. But they knew why they were here, they knew what they were doing. They were recruited by the previous occupants, specifically selected to maintain the barrier, and they did so, following all of the rules and rituals bequeathed them by their predecessors." His expression hardened suddenly, and the change in expression was so quick and complete that Daniel nearly spilled his coffee. "As you remember, Danny boy, breakfast is promptly at six. No later. You will be allowed to slide today, but tomorrow ..." His voice trailed off, an implied threat.

Daniel's heart was pounding, but he feigned nonchalance, tried to keep the tremble out of his hand. "Your daughter," he found himself saying. "She predicted my mother's death. And she was somehow involved with it." His eyes metBillingsly's . "I thought you were, too."

The butler shook his head. "No."

"Then why did you force us to stay, me and my dad?"

"As I told you, the House needed occupants."

"But you knew she died?"

"I did not know how."

"A doll, a doll made out of dust and lint and gum wrappers, shoved itself down her throat and strangled her."

The butler's voice remained even. "I did not know that."

"You didn't know that I was making one of those dolls, too? You don't know that my son saw her and she taught him how to make them, as well?"

"She was obviously trying to keep you from the House, trying to remind you of what had happened and scare you away."

"And you? Tony said he saw you, too."

"I was trying to entice you back."

"And you knew nothing about her? This is all news to you?"

Billingsly nodded.

Daniel angrily grabbed a bagel, dug into the eggs and sausage on his plate. Billingsly moved unobtrusively around the table, refilling Daniel's coffee cup, taking dishes back to the kitchen, and it was only after Daniel had finished his breakfast that the butler finally asked a question: "Have you had sex with this . . . being?"

"No." Daniel was firm. "She wanted me to, but I refused.

Like I said, that's why I left."

Billingsly nodded. "I don't know who or what this child is, but I assure you that I have never seen her, and until now I've been entirely unaware of her existence."

It was true, Daniel thought. He had never seen the two of them together. He'd just assumed Doneen was Billingsly's daughter.

Or perhaps she'd told him that.

"Apparently, she was successful in her efforts to drive you away from the House," Billingsly said. "And, indeed, that weakened the barrier. I assume that was her goal, to open the border." The butler smiled reassuringly.

"But if she was here, she is gone now--at least in that guise. You have come back, the House is once again returning to its intended state, and all attempts to thwart the House in its intended purpose have failed."

"My son saw her," Daniel reminded him. "I think I've seen her, too. And I thought I saw one of those . . .

dolls in the window when I drove up. I'm pretty sure she's still around."

Billingsly smiled again, and this time there was some thing predatory in the gesture, an intensity and cold unnatural fierceness completely unlike any human expression.

For the first time, Daniel thought, he was seeing the real butler, and he could not look upon the sight, he had to turn away.

Billingslyplaced his coffeepot back on its tray and surveyed the table. "Are we all finished with breakfast?"

he asked innocently.

He was acting as though nothing was wrong, as though nothing unusual had occurred or been discussed, and Daniel wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

"I think so," he said.

"Very well. Dinner is at six sharp. You may eat lunch or not, as is your wont, but you must appear for dinner."

His eyes were hard. "On time."

"What am I supposed to do all day? Can I leave, go shopping?"

Billingsly laughed, and for the first time there seemed to be real humor in it. "I'm afraid not."

"What then?"

The butler began walking around the table. "Whatever you want. This is your home now, explore it. Get to know it."

"I do know it," Daniel said. "I spent half my fucking life here."

Billingsly smiled. "I think you'll be surprised."

There was nothing threatening in either Billingsly's words or his tone of voice but Daniel still felt chilled.

"I don't want to be surprised," he said softly.

But the butler had walked into the kitchen and did not hear him.

Stormy Stormy strode out of the dining room into the sitting room. He was determined not to simply fall into line and do whatever Billingham told him to do. That snotty servant had rubbed him the wrong way even as a child, and while he'd always been afraid of and intimidated by him, he'd always resented it. He wasn't about to capitulate now, to give in and give up and blindly follow orders.

If anything, he was more determined than ever to stand up to the butler and the House.

Butchery.

He kept thinking of the movie.

He kept thinking about a lot of movies. Now that he knew the world wasn't going to end, he was anxious to get the hell out of here and get back to work. He didn't know how long he'd been here--with the wacky time that seemed to affect this place, who could tell?--but even if it had just been a day or two, he needed to get back. He had things to do. He had the Taos festival to prepare for.

Had he been reported missing? he wondered. Were people looking for him? Would anybody be able to find him?

Doubtful. He didn't know where he was himself. To paraphrase Dorothy, he had the feeling he wasn't in Chicago anymore.

He wondered if the dead who had come back to life were still hanging around the reservation. Or if his return home and the fact that the House was once again occupied had put a stop to that. Had they disappeared, the living dead? Had they simply fallen in their tracks?

Had they rotted away and turned to dust like Dracula?

He hoped Rodman had been out there with his camera, documenting it. It would make a hell of a film.

He had to get out of here. He had to escape.

But what if the butler was right? What if he was the only thing protecting the world, the universe, from demons and monsters, from this "Other Side." Didn't he owe it to ... to humanity to do everything he could to--how did Billingham put it--"maintain the barrier"?

No.

There were bound to be people willing to give up their lives for this, to devote all of their time for the greater good. The same people who joined the Peace Corps and spent all of their free time helping the homeless.

But he was not one of them.

He knew it was selfish, but he had things he wanted to do, too. He had his own life to live. Let Billingham find someone else to staff his fucking House. From what Stormy could tell, all that was needed was a warm body.

Anyone would do. It didn't have to be him. He wasn't bringing any special skills or abilities to the table.

Stormy glanced back toward the dining room. The first question he had to ask himself was: Did he believe Billingham about the House?

Yes.

He didn't know why--he'd seen no evidence to support the butler's wild claims--but he supposed it was because he'd experienced his own examples of that other world bleeding into this one. And Billingham offered an easy one-stop explanation.

Time for the next question: Who was Billingham ? What was he?

That one was a little harder.

Maybe he was God.

God was his family's servant? He found that hard to believe.

But it worked from an objective, interpretive standpoint.

If this was a film, the girl would obviously represent the devil, evil, temptation. You didn't have to be Antonioni to figure that out.

And that would make Billingham God.

No, Stormy thought. He didn't buy it. The butler clearly didn't know about the girl.

But maybe he wasn't the final word here. Maybe he was a good guy, but the power didn't rest with him.

Maybe he and the girl were both puppets.

With the House pulling the strings.

Stormy took a deep breath. The first thing he had to determine was what he wanted to do. Obviously, Billingham was not very forthcoming on these subjects. He didn't think he was going to get a whole lot more out of him than what he'd gotten already. So should he confront the butler or go around him? Should he accept fate and do as he was told--or try to escape?

Stormy picked up a lamp off the small table next to the love seat and yanked out its extension cord.

He voted for escape.

He threw the lamp at the front window as hard as he could. He expected it to either break the glass or bounce back, but instead it disappeared into the window, as though it were sinking in a pool of water --and instantly appeared back on the table.

He glanced wildly around the room, found a marble cameo box in the center of the long coffee table, picked it up, and heaved it with all of his might at the window.

Same result.

Fuck it. Billingham had told him to explore, and he was going to explore, goddamn it. And he'd find another way out of here if it killed him.

He remembered what the butler had said: / think you'll be surprised.

A chill passed through him.

He ignored it, pushed all reservations to the back of his mind. Where should he start?

The doors. He'd tried to get out through the front door almost immediately after he'd arrived, but he hadn't tried it since. And if he remembered right, there was a side door off the kitchen and a door leading from the den to the back porch.

If that didn't work, he'd start with the basement and work his way up.

He walked out of the sitting room into the entryway.

The front door was still locked. Not just locked. Frozen.

The latch on the handle did not rattle, and there was not even the slightest give as he tried to yank the door open.

Billinghamwas in the kitchen, humming to himself, some song that nagged onStormy's brain with its familiarity but which he could not quite place, so he left that one for later and went into the den.

It had been a long time since he'd been in this room, but he remembered it perfectly: its look, its smell, the way sunlight seemed to die somewhere along the way from the windows to the dark wood walls. Even the books on the shelves were exactly as he remembered them--he recognized the titles.

The den windows had looked out onto the extensive gardens in the backyard, but the windows now looked out on nothing. Light came through them, clear bright light obviously generated by the sun, but it appeared to be either smoggy or foggy behind the glass and there was only white and only light and no detail of the world beyond could be made out.

He increased the speed of his step as he approached the back door. He reached for the knob, and it turned in his hand. It was unlocked.

He opened the door.

And stepped over the threshold to the Other Side.

It was not at all what he'd expected. There were no ghosts or animated corpses, no black sky or barren landscape, no skeletons or witches or drooling befanged demons. Instead, he was in a house structurally identical to the one he had just left, but with all of its insides scooped out. There were no rooms or staircases or hallways or interior walls, just a giant, single three-story room that took up the entire building. Its unadorned interior was a color that had no counterpart in the known universe, an entirely new hue that bore no relation to red, yellow, blue, black, white, or any of the colors of the spectrum. High above, clouds floated near the top of the three gables, the whitish wisps floating back and forth just beneath the ceiling, as if searching for a way out.

It was a compelling sight, beautiful in its way, but his attention was captured by a figure against the far wall:

a bald woman, naked, sitting in a huge straw nest atop an egg the size of a medicine ball.

His mother.

Stormy stood rooted in place, staring, unable to move.

His mother waved at him, smiled broadly. "Stormy!"

There were tears in his eyes, and part of him wanted to run over to her and throw his arms around her and hug her so hard that she could never get away from him.

But another part of him, a more rational part, was not sure that it would be such a good idea. The egg and the nest and the baldness threw him off, and while he had no doubt that this really was his mother, something kept him from wholeheartedly embracing her.

"Stormy!" she called again.

Was this what it would be like if the border was down? Conversing with the dead, maintaining a relationship with someone even after they passed away?

And was that so bad?

He didn't think so. Death was responsible for most of the sadness in the world, and if loved ones were still around after they died, if ghosts weren't considered frighteningly unnatural, weren't demonized by myth and religions but were accepted as merely another form of being, all of that grieving and mourning and anguish and depression would be immediately eliminated.

But were the living and the dead supposed to mix?

They had at one time. Before the House.

According to Billingham , though, if they'd continued to do so, his world would have long since been engulfed and would no longer exist.

Was this heaven? he wondered.

Or hell?

Maybe it was both.

Through the windows, he could see other houses of the same unknown color, an endless line of them, like repeating images in a hall of mirrors, stretching endlessly to either side.

In front was whiteness.

In back was black.

Was this the afterlife? Was this where people went when they died? It seemed kind of small and limiting, kind of barren. He had never really given much thought to what would happen to him after death, and if pressed he probably would have said that his brain would stop and that would be it, he would cease to exist. He had never really believed in a heaven or hell.

But clearly, the soul, the spirit, the essence of a person, did live on after death.

Only . . .

Only he found it kind of depressing. If he had imagined a hereafter, it would have been more expansive than this, more luxurious, more along the lines of traditional conceptions. But if his mother died only to become a bald lady sitting on a nest in an empty house . . .

Well, simply having his brain stop and ceasing to exist didn't seem quite so bad.

But that feeling disappeared as he gathered his courage and began walking toward her. She called his name again, and waved to him, but as he drew closer she seemed to fade and grow insubstantial. Her form became slim and wavery , and as he reached the nest, she floated upward, joining the clouds at the top of the house. Only they weren't clouds, he saw now. They were spirits. The wisps had faces, faint traces of eyes and mouths that shifted and changed as they moved.

As one, all of the clouds, all of the spirits, flew out of the window of the center gable, into the whiteness, where they became a rainbow and then were gone.

Stormy was filled with an almost joyous sense of wonder, and the realization that the afterlife was not limited to this row of houses, that it encompassed a world far beyond what he could see or understand, cheered him up immensely. He looked around the empty house with awe.

The egg and the nest still remained, and he patted the egg a few times. It felt warm, leathery, and he wondered what was in it.

But he was not sure he really wanted to know.

He walked carefully around the nest, examining it, touching it, then looked about him. There were no doors aside from the one he'd come through, and after walking slowly around the perimeter of the open oversized room, he found himself back at the entrance to the den. He returned through it, closing the door behind him.

Apparently Billingham had been telling the truth. The House was definitely on the border, and it probably did keep that border sealed.

But was that good? What he'd seen wasn't horrible or awful. Maybe some of the things in that world would turn out to be so, but it was clear that it was not all evil.

Maybe the House shouldn't be manned, he thought.

Maybe its occupancy had been allowed to lapse for a reason. Maybe it was time for the borders to come down.

He'd only thought that the Other Side was bad because he'd been told it was bad, he'd been told it was wrong.

Yes, it was scary to imagine coexisting with the dead, with shapeshifters and ghosts and God knew what else, but that was only because he'd been conditioned to think that way. Maybe this was how things were supposed to be. Maybe this was the natural way of things. Maybe keeping the two worlds apart was what was wrong, and it was the House that was unnatural.

Maybe the House was evil.

He looked back at the closed door. The House had not been exactly saintly, he had to admit. His family had been torn apart. He'd been lied to and was now being held prisoner against his will. And for what? So the House could maintain its power? He shook his head.

The end did not justify the means. Evil acts could not be performed for the greater good.

And from where he stood, all of the horrifying, terrible things that had happened so far had been the work of the House.

No, that was not true.

They were the work of Donielle .

The girl was evil.

It was true. Moral relativism might be a safe intellectual refuge when confronted with something like the afterlife, but the girl, in either world, was indeed evil. He didn't know how he knew, but he did, and all of a sudden he felt the need to get out of the den, to get back to the sitting room or the dining room or someplace close to Billingham.

A chime rang through the House, a light musical sound that had no specific point of origin but seemed to come from everywhere.

The den door opened, and Billingham , in the hallway, poked his head into the room. "Wash up," he said. "It's time for dinner." He smiled. "We have guests."

Laurie There were other people at the dining-room table.

Laurie stopped short and stood in the doorway, staring.

Four men were seated around the table, empty seats between each, as though they all wanted their own space or were wary of getting too close.

They looked . . . normal. She did not get the impression that they were denizens of the House, that they were manifestations or ghosts or Billington's peers. They seemed more like her, and there was an almost uniform wariness in their expressions that led her to believe they were prisoners of the House as well.

She experienced a sudden exhilarating rush of energy.

Ever since she'd arrived here, ever since Billington's little speech, ever since she'd known she'd been lured back to stay and was not going to be allowed to leave, she'd felt uncharacteristically powerless. Both demoralized and dispirited. She'd tried her damnedest to find a way out of the House, to somehow contact the outside world.

She'd even attempted one of Josh's silly astral projection exercises in a vain effort to contact her brother. But nothing had worked, nothing had come of any of it, and she'd just about given up, resigning herself to the fact that the House was more powerful than she was.

But with five of them . . .

Five heads were better than one, as the saying went, and between them, they might be able to come up with an escape plan. She felt a renewed sense of hope as she looked at the men in front of her.

With a theatrical flourish, Billington introduced them, moving clockwise around the table. "This is Daniel Anderson, this is Norton Johnson, this is Stormy Salinger, and this is Mark McKinney."

They all smiled at Laurie awkwardly, acknowledging her nodded greeting.

Billington bowed in her direction. "This, everyone, is Laurie Mitchell."

Nods again.

The assistant looked happily around the dining room, and his smile broadened in a way that she found extremely unnerving. "We're all together at last." He bowed again. "I will prepare tonight's repast and leave you kiddies alone to get acquainted."

He retreated through the swinging doors into the kitchen, and the second he was out of the room, the five of them started talking. None of them were under the impression that they had really been left alone, that they were not being watched and spied upon, but that took a backseat to their more immediate and pressing concerns.

It was Stormy who was the first to articulate the question at the forefront of all of their minds: "What the fuck is going on here?"

They all began talking at once, and after several loud confusing minutes Laurie raised her hands and said, "Quiet! One at a time, please!"

The others shut up, looked at her, and with that she was thrust into the role of de facto leader. She didn't mind--if there was one thing she'd learned in business it was that if anything was ever going to get done there had to be only one person in charge--but she felt just as lost as the rest of them and singularly unqualified to take control of their efforts to ... what? Escape? Find out what was at the heart of the House? She was not sure what the others wanted.

Still, she could preside over the discussion, she could maintain some semblance of order and bring some organizational skills to the table, and she looked from one face to another. "All right," she said. "Who wants to go first?"

They'd all, it seemed, known Billington or Billingsly or Billings or whoever the hell he was when they were children. As Stormy described his experiences in New Mexico, there were nods of recognition all around.

While the specifics of his story might have been different from hers, the underlying thread of it was not, and Laurie knew exactly what he had gone through.

The same was true for Mark, hitching throughout the West; Norton, in Iowa; and Daniel, in Pennsylvania.

Then she told her story.

And everyone understood.

She felt an immediate kinship with the others. It wasn't quite as if they were siblings separated at birth who had suddenly found family, but it was along those lines and there was a definite connection between them.

Only Mark stood apart. He was younger than the rest of them and although that could have accounted for it, she didn't think so. He seemed . . . different somehow, more unfazed by it all, as though he accepted, even, on some level, understood what was happening. None of this seemed to be as alien to him as it was to the rest of them, and while she did not doubt his loyalties, while she knew he was as much a victim as the rest of them, he was the only one whose story she did not entirely believe. She did not think he was lying, but she had the feeling he was keeping something back, not telling the whole truth.

And that kept him at arm's length.

They were no closer to knowing what was going on after they'd spilled their guts than they had been before.

They could empathize with each other, they could sympathize, but understanding eluded them. Their stories might all be similar in tone, but on the most basic level, the narrative level, they were contradictory and did not mesh.

In addition to the obvious disparities of location, there were the times of arrival. Daniel had been the first to pick up on that, and after Mark had finished his story, he asked, "How long have you been here?"

Mark shrugged. "Since yesterday."

"What day was that?" Daniel pressed him.

"What are you talking about?"

"What day did you arrive here?"

"Saturday."

"It's Friday," Daniel said quietly.

"What's the date?" Stormy asked. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a plane ticket. "To me, it's Thursday. I flew into Chicago yesterday.

September ninth."

"It's Friday the eighteenth," Daniel told him.

"Oh, shit." Mark sat down hard on the couch.

"You think you've only been here for a day, but by my watch it's been over a week."

Laurie's head hurt. No matter how much they talked, they were still in the dark. They could not pull their stories together, could not create coherence out of the chaos.

"So where are we?" she said quietly. "When are we?"

The door to the kitchen swung open and Billington ?

Billingson? Billings? Billingsly? Billingham ? walked in, carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres.

Daniel turned toward him. "What is this?" he demanded.

The other man chuckled.

"And what's your name?" Norton asked. "We seem to have conflicting reports."

"We'll just call him Mr. Bill," Stormy said.

Laurie felt a little bit better. Humor leavened the seriousness of the situation, made it not seem so scary, so solemn, so grave.

Grave.

"You can call me Mr. Billings," the assistant said in a voice that brooked no argument. "That is the name by which I am currently known." He put the tray down on the table.

"What's going on?" Daniel asked.

"You want to know what's happening? You want to know why you entered a House in Dry River, Arizona"

--he nodded at Mark--"and you entered a House in Chicago, Illinois"--Stormy--"and yet you're both here? Along with everyone else?"

"It had crossed our minds," Stormy said dryly.

"It's because the Houses are getting stronger. They are almost at full strength."

Laurie stared at the assistant. She had to keep reminding herself that he was five different men, a different person to each of them, and that was a hard thing to fully comprehend. There were similarities, obviously, but there were differences as well: different dynamics in their relationships with him, different memories and histories, different names. It was, she supposed, like looking at the individual facets of a giant diamond from five angles. Or like the old blind-men and the-elephant story.

"I didn't know there were other Houses," Daniel said.

Billings smiled. "Perhaps I forgot to mention that."

Stormy snorted. "I guess each House is a post of your electrified fence, huh?"

"Not a bad analogy, Stormy boy." His expression darkened. "But lose the sarcasm, and please refrain from speaking to me in that manner. I am less than happy with that attitude."

Stormy shut up.

"So where are we?" Laurie asked. "Whose House are we in?"

"All of them."

"That doesn't make any sense."

He smiled at her. "It doesn't have to."

Laurie thought about what she'd seen on the Other Side, in that empty hollowed House through the den door, and the conversation she'd had with her mother-- her adoptive mother, she amended, although that coldly matter-of-fact description did not in any way do justice to their relationship. They'd talked about family things, about her father and Josh, and although they had not had time to discuss the House before her mother had flown away, she'd told Laurie that she had come to visit "while you were here," and Laurie put the most positive spin on that statement and took it to mean that there was a possibility of escape.

But nothing made sense, nothing fit together in any sort of logical manner. She'd been thrilled to see her mother again, emotionally overwhelmed, but her mother's physical appearance had been truly bizarre, and the conversation they'd had had been filled with disconcerting non sequiturs.

"So we don't need to understand anything," Daniel said. "We just need to live here and charge up the batteries."

The assistant grinned. "Bingo."

"What about when they're fully charged again?" Norton asked. "Can we leave then? Will our jobs be done?"

"Oh, no. You can never leave."

"Why not?"

"The Houses don't want you to."

"So we're supposed to just--"

"Make the best of it."

Laurie listened silently to this exchange. She was still not sure how she felt aboutBillington --Billings--and that was one thing she wanted to talk to the others about. He was clearly not affiliated with Dawn--he hadn't even been aware of the girl's existence until she'd told him about her--but even though the girl was evil, did that automatically make Billings good? She wasn't sure. He didn't seem . . . bad, exactly. But he was not a knight in shining armor, either. And the fact that he was keeping them here against their will, or was aiding the House in doing so, suggested that his motives were not all that pure.

Billings pointed toward the tray of hors d'oeuvres.

"Eat up," he said. "There's plenty more where that came from." He smiled at them, headed toward the kitchen. "You can talk behind my back for a few minutes.

I'll return in a moment with your meals."

They did not talk behind his back, though. They were afraid to. And when he returned soon after with a tray of roast beef, they were eating in silence.

Norton After serving dinner and clearing off their plates, Billings disappeared, and the rest of them quickly tried the kitchen door and the cellar door to see if either of them offered a way to get out of the House, but it was to no avail. Outside each of the windows, the world was dark, pitch-black, and Norton found himself wondering if the windows looked out onto the other world or were simply facing the blankness of the border in between.

Neither thought was particularly comforting.

They spent some time comparing notes, comparing theories, hashing over some of their concerns, but they did not seem to be making much headway, and when Norton's wristwatch had--correctly or incorrectly--informed him that it was ten o'clock, he said he was tired, excused himself, and went upstairs to his bedroom. As he climbed the stairs, he heard Stormy complain loudly about not having a television or radio, and Norton had to admit that he himself would appreciate having something to read. If they were going to be stuck in here with only each other for company and no entertainment or intellectual stimulation of any sort, nerves were going to get awfully frayed awfully fast. They were already starting to grate on each other. They had the Houses in common, yes, and their current predicament, but they were also five separate people from five different walks of life, and even under the best of circumstances that was not always a recipe for harmony.

And these were far from the best of circumstances.

He lay in his bed, unable to sleep, staring upward at the ceiling. He'd lied. He wasn't tired. He'd just wanted some time alone, some time to think. Even if everything the butler said was true, there were still gaps, still things he didn't understand, and he wanted to be able to sort through it all and see if he couldn't somehow make sense of it.

A half hour passed. An hour. He heard Mark walk down the hallway to his room. Another hour passed.

Two. He tried to go to sleep. Couldn't. Tossing and turning, he closed his eyes, lying first on his back, then on his stomach, then on his side, but sleep would not come.

Sighing, he turned his head on the pillow, looked toward the window. He saw the moon outside, stars. A typical night sky.

A typical night sky?

His heart pounding, excited but afraid to get his hopes up, he sat up in bed, threw off the covers. He stood, walked over to the window, and looked out.

Lights.

The lights of Oakdale.

He could make out the blinking red light atop the water tower, assorted streetlights, the glowing orange ball of the 76 station.

Was it over? Were they free? Norton quickly pulled on his pants and shirt, unlocked his bedroom door. He hurried out into the hall. It was long after midnight and he would have expected there to be only quiet, but the House was far from silent. He heard low whispers at the far end of the shadowed hall, occasional thumping from somewhere downstairs. Above, in the attic perhaps, there was a noise that sounded like a child's laugh, a high continuous chuckle that did not pause for breath but went on nonstop.

The typical sounds of a haunted house.

There were goose bumps on his arms, but he resisted his instinctive impulse to turn back and flee into the safety of his room. This was too important, and he might not get another chance like it. This burst of reality might be only temporary. Hell, it might even be only a joke, something to tempt him.

No matter what it was, he had to act on it, had to assume that it was real, and he ignored the slithery whispers around him as he sped down the hall to Mark's room and knocked quietly. "Mark!" he whispered.

"Mark!"

No response.

He knocked a little louder, raised his voice. "Mark!"

No answer.

"Mark!" he yelled.

Nothing.

There were several possibilities. Mark could be sound asleep, he might not be able to hear through the thick door, he could have left the room and gone downstairs he could be dead ---or this could all be a dream.

He didn't have time to find out, though. Time was a wasting. Norton turned away from the closed door.

And something rushed by him in the hall. A small dark figure that did not even come up to his knee but traveled on two feet like a man.

A doll.

He did not want to think about it, and he kept his attention focused on what he'd seen out the window as he hurried down the hall toward the stairway, ignoring the unidentifiable noises that dogged him through the semidarkness.

There were footsteps other than his own on the stairs as he took the steps two at a time, but he ignored them as well.

Of course the front door was locked, but he'd known that would be the case, and after a quick cursory try he headed down the dark corridor that led past the dining room, kitchen, pantry to the den. The air was cold but he was sweating, perspiring more from nervous tension than fear. If he'd known where Daniel and Stormy and Laurie were sleeping, where their bedrooms were, he would've tried to rouse them, but he didn't feel he had time to hunt them down. The House was too big and this was too good an opportunity to waste.

He could come back for them later, rescue them.

Rescue them?

Who was he kidding? That was a crock and he knew it. He was running now on pure coward's energy, and despite all of his moral superiority, his lofty talk about sacrificing individual desires for the greater good, when push came to shove he was just like anyone else. A good Nazi. Willing to save his own ass at the expense of others.

Hell, at any cost.

He walked faster.

He'd been the one playing devil's advocate, taking Billings' side, defending the purpose of the Houses, suggesting that they be content with their lot, that they accept the roles fate selected for them because they had been chosen to do important work, to not only save the free world but to protect the structural integrity of the entire universe. Had it all been rationalization, merely his own way of attempting to make the best of a bad situation? He didn't think so. He had believed it--at least some of it. But he also had to admit that the prospect of escaping, of actually being able to get away from this prison filled him with a joy and hope he had not experienced in ... years.

If ever.

Freedom became so much more precious when it was taken away.

He stopped in front of the den. The door was open and through the windows of the room he could see the lights of the next farm over.

It was as if a great weight had been lifted from his chest.

He walked quickly into the den, not bothering to turn on the light. The door he'd gone through before was locked, but he could still see farmland through the windows, hay bales lit blue by the moon. He remembered what Stormy had told them about trying to break a window, and though it hadn't worked for Stormy, Norton figured it was worth another try. He glanced around the den, looking for something he could use to smash the glass. His gaze alighted on a small three-legged table next to a high-backed leather smoking chair. There was a heavy ashtray atop the table, and he tried that first, cocking his arm back and throwing the ashtray as hard as he could at one of the windows.

It sank into the glass, reappeared on top of the table.

He picked up the table itself, letting the ashtray fall to the floor. Using both hands to grasp two of the table's legs, he stationed himself to the left of the window, pulled back, and swung the table as hard as he could into the glass. He did not let go of the legs, and there was a strangeliquidy tremor as the tabletop hit the window, a wobbling transmitted by the wooden legs that he could feel throughout his entire body.

A portion of the table reappeared next to the chair.

He stared at the window. He could still see farmland, hay bales, the Iowa sky, but everything was blurry, indistinct, as though the glass had been soaped over or smeared with Vaseline. The legs of the table and one corner of its top were still visible on this side of the window, but they had no counterpart beyond it, and he released his grip, let the legs go. The rest of the table was immediately sucked into the window and the entire piece of furniture returned to its normal location in the room.

His spirits sank. It was a mirage, an illusion. There was no Iowa outside. There was no way he could escape from the House into that farmland and make his way back to Oakdale.

He turned. There were new shadows in the den now, shadows that had not been there before, sleek, furtive swaths of darkness that had no distinct features but that he knew were watching him. One on top of a bookcase.

One in the fireplace. One beneath the pool table. They moved, switched positions, changed shape.

Something passed by him, brushed him.

He felt tickling hairs, whiskers.

He instinctively backed up, not screaming only through a sheer effort of will.

The light was switched on.

Billings was standing in the doorway.

The butler was smiling at him, and something in that smile made Norton take a step back. His heart was pounding painfully and he wondered if he was having a heart attack.

It would serve him right if he did.

"Is the door locked?" Billings asked.

Norton stared at him.

"It's not supposed to be. Not at this hour."

The butler strode across the room, removing a full key chain from his pocket. Sorting through keys, he found the one he was looking for and placed it in the small keyhole beneath the doorknob, turning it.

He pocketed the key chain. "It's open," he said, gesturing toward the door.

Norton remained unmoving. This was a trick. It had to be.

Billings smiled at him.

Norton swiveled around, reached out, grasped the knob. It turned in his hand.

He yanked open the door, felt the coolness of night on his face, smelled the fertile scent of a newly plowed field.

There was a jolt like a small earthquake, a tremor that passed through the house, swinging the chandelier, knocking a bust of Plato to the floor. It was accompanied by an electronic hum, a low sustained tone that hurt his ears and made his stomach feel queasy.

Billings smiled. "The House is ready," he said, and his skin appeared suddenly tanned. His eyes were sparkling.

"It has finally regained its full strength."

He bowed toward Norton. "Thank you."

It was then that the doors and windows were sealed shut.

Daniel They met in the entryway.

They'd all been awakened by the shaking of the House, by the earthquake or whatever it was, and they'd rushed downstairs, panicked and frightened. A veteran of several major California quakes, Laurie appeared to be a little less rattled than the rest of them, but the fact that the shaking had occurred here, in the House, had obviously put her on guard as well.

Norton was already downstairs. They were staring at where the front door had been when he emerge'! from the den, walking down the hall toward them. His face was white, his hands shaking, and he explained what had happened, describing his first view of Oakdale through the bedroom window, his attempt to wake up Mark, his experience in the den.

Daniel looked around the entryway as Norton talked.

Where window had been was only wall. The door had become a decorative piece of solid oak, an extension of the wainscoting.

"So the doors and windows were just . . . sealed up?"

Laurie asked. "The walls came down over them?"

"Yeah. Basically."

"But what caused it to happen? Did Billings say something or do something?"

"I told you. I ... I just opened the door. And I guess that triggered it."

Laurie shook her head. "But that doesn't make sense."

"Like he said, it doesn't have to make sense." Mark's voice was low. "Magic isn't logical. It follows its own logic."

They all turned toward him. He'd been so quiet until now, had spoken so rarely, that it was something of an event when he talked, and Daniel wondered if that wasn't on purpose.

A passive-aggressive attention-grabber.

Then he looked into the young man's face, saw the anguish there, and immediately felt guilty for harboring such a thought. They were all going through enough without ascribing petty motives to each other's words and actions. More than anything else, they needed to stick together.

"Where did Billings go?" Daniel asked.

Norton shrugged. "I don't know. One minute he was there and the next minute he was gone."

Stormy snickered. "Was he wearing his PJs ?"

"I don't think he sleeps," Norton said. "He was wearing his uniform. As always." He paused. "Only ... he looked different. Tan. Happy."

"He's been looking better ever since I got here," Daniel said.

Stormy smiled. "I guess we've been charging his battery too, huh?"

Daniel grinned at him. "Speak for yourself, nancy boy."

There was another low rumble, more sound than movement this time. Lights in the House began switching on and off: the candle-shaped bulbs on the wall of the landing above them extinguishing, the swinging chandelier in the sitting room flicking on, the globe light in the hallway winking off, a light in the dining room flaring brightly.

It should not have been that scary. They'd all been through much worse, and the fact that they were together should have offered some reassurance and comfort.

But Daniel's pulse was racing, and more than at any time since he'd walked through the front door into the House, he wished he were out of here. The rapidly flickering lights had the effect of a strobe used in a Halloween haunted house, darkening everything around them, making the building--particularly the upstairs-- seem much bigger and more vast than it was.

Noises accompanied the sudden light shifts.

Whispers from the shadows.

High-pitched laughter from above.

There was another low rumble, and as quickly as it had started, everything stopped. The lights that were on stayed on, the lights that were off stayed off, and there was no more noise. The House was silent.

"Come on," Laurie said, taking charge. "Let's check out the den."

She started down the hall, lit now by only a brief sliver of yellow that spilled out from the partially open pantry door. Daniel quickly fell into step behind her, the others following.

The den door was closed. Laurie tried to open it, Daniel tried, Stormy tried, Mark tried, even Norton tried, but it was locked and nothing they did could get it open.

Stormy attempted to kick the door, warning everyone to stay back in typical movie fashion, but his cowboy boot had absolutely no effect and even the sound of contact was flat, muffled, and ineffectual.

"Billings!" Norton called, pounding on the door with his fists.

Stormy took up the cry: "Billings!"

A door opened slowly at the far end of the hallway.

Daniel stared, trying to ignore the feeling of fear that filled him as he watched the slowly opening door. He racked his brain, trying to remember what was in that room, but he had no childhood memory of it, he had not made it to that end of the hall in his earlier explorations, and he could not for the life of him figure out what was in there.

The door was now open all the way, and through the rectangular entrance dark tangled shadows were visible against pale bluish light.

This time, he was the one who took the lead.

He realized what lay behind the door even before they reached it.

It was a solarium.

Or a lunarium .

For the plants in it were obviously night-blooming.

Daniel entered the room and stopped just inside the door. They were on the west side of the building, though he could not recall ever seeing anything like a greenhouse in that location before. The ceiling, a skylight, was two stories above their heads, the wall of windows opposite them frosted, translucent, letting in light but not offering a view. The plants, on rows of shelves and oversized pots, were all impossibly exotic, comprised of shapes and colors that did not match.

He found himself wondering where they had come from.

And who tended them.

Slowly, the five of them began spreading out, drawn by their individual eyes and interests to particular flowers or shrubs. Daniel stood by a sort of cactus that looked like a headless human skeleton covered with yellowish skin and spiny needles.

Stormy had walked over to the wall of windows and was gingerly touching the glass. "Feels solid," he said, looking back. He knocked on the glass, and Daniel heard a recognizable clink-clink-clink sound. "Might as well try." Stormy glanced around him, picked up a decent-sized potted plant, and threw it at the window.

It disappeared.

Reappeared.

"What would happen if someone kicked one of those windowpanes?" Daniel wondered, walking over. "Would his foot get caught in that . . . whatever it is, and then show up again in here?"

"You want to try it?" Stormy asked.

Daniel held up his hands. "Not me. I'm just wondering."

"I guess you'll keep on wondering. I'm not trying it either."

"Hey, guys!"

Both of them turned to see Norton standing before a peculiarly sparse bush with unusually large dark leaves.

They walked over and saw as they drew closer that even though there was no wind in the greenhouse, no air conditioning, no breeze, the leaves of the bush were moving, twitching, twisting in the air.

There seemed something obscene about the plant's movements, an unnatural and aggressive sexuality to the motions that reminded Daniel of Doneen He looked over at Norton, Stormy, and saw the same look of recognition in both of their eyes. Laurie and Mark were heading over as well, and he could tell from the expression on their faces that they had the same reaction to the plant.

A branch reached for him, drew back, reached again, drew back, its strange leaves curving in on themselves invitingly. At the tip of the branch was a small round berry.

Eve and the apple.

That's what it reminded him of, and for the first time, he thought that perhaps their earlier talk of God and the devil wasn't that far off.

"What's the point of this?" Laurie asked. "Why were we led here?"

Daniel shrugged. "You got me."

Behind Laurie, another plant was moving, a series of skinny stalks topped by orchidlike flowers. Following his gaze, she turned. The red engorged stamen of the closest flower wiggled at her, lengthened to its quivering full extension, a drop of dew dripping from its tip.

"Let's get out of here," she said disgustedly.

"Fine by me."

"Let's hit it," Stormy agreed.

All five of them moved back out the open doorway the way they'd come, Daniel bringing up the rear, keeping his eyes peeled for anything unusual, but nothing happened, even the plants had stopped moving, and when they were all back in the hallway the door slammed shut.

"What was that all about?" Stormy asked. "Obviously we were supposed to go in there. Obviously we were supposed to see something. But what?"

No one had an answer.

It was still the dead of night--two o'clock according to one watch, three-thirty according to another--and they were all pretty tired, so after a short discussion in which they vowed to confront Billings in the morning and demand to know what had happened tonight, why the House had been sealed off, they returned to their rooms.

"Anything unusual," Laurie said as they walked up the stairs, "call for help. Don't try to take on anything alone."

"Anything unusual!" Stormy asked.

Laurie smiled. "Anything more unusual than usual."

Mark and Norton headed up to the third floor. Stormy stopped off at his room, and Daniel accompanied Laurie to her door before walking down to his own bedroom and locking the door behind him.

He stripped off his clothes, hit the sheets, and fell asleep almost immediately.

He dreamed of Doneen .

He awoke, by the Batman clock on his dresser, at six.

He heard the chime calling them to breakfast, sounding from its unspecific source somewhere nearby. There was no light other than the small desk lamp he'd turned on before sleeping because flat wood now covered the spot where his window used to be, and he realized that they were now living in a world without natural light.

Maybe that's why they'd been shown the greenhouse --because it was the only room left that had windows.

The chime sounded once again.

Daniel remained in bed. Fuck Billings. He was going back to sleep. If punctual communal meals assisted the Houses in their regeneration of power, then he wasn't going to do anything to help. Besides, he was still tired and didn't want to wake up. And they'd have all day-- hell, all year--to interrogate the butler.

There was a knock on his door. "Daniel?"

Laurie.

"Just a minute." Sighing, he got out of bed, pulled on his pants, and opened the door.

She stood in the hall, dressed, hair combed, and he unconsciously ran a hand through his own hair. "May I

come in?" she asked.

He nodded, stepped back. She closed the door behind her, and his first thought was that he ought to remind her that he was married. But she seemed oblivious to that potential in the situation and pulled his small chair away from the desk, sitting down.

"I know we haven't had a chance to talk one-on-one," she said. "None of us have. But I've been doing some thinking and . . .

well . . ." She met his eyes. "What do you think of Mark?"

"Mark? I ... I don't know. Why?"

"Come on. Cut the crap. There's no reason to be diplomatic here. What are your feelings about Mark? Your gut reaction."

"No reason to be diplomatic?" He smiled. "The way I see it, we may be stuck with each other for the rest of our lives. And beyond. I should try to get along with as many people as I can."

"I'm being serious," Laurie said.

He nodded, sitting down on the side of the unmade bed. "I know. What are you getting at?"

"There's something . . . not right about him."

"Well, he's not a real talkative guy, but--"

"Not that." She sighed. "What if he's a spy?"

"What?"

"Just hear me out."

"That's crazy."

"Is it? I don't think he's been totally honest with us--"

"Come on! Everyone has secrets. You think I'd completely spill my guts to a bunch of strangers? You think I told you guys everything about me?"

"No, but I think you were honest enough to tell us everything that you thought pertained to this situation.

I'm not so sure Mark did. I think he's keeping something from us."

"And that makes him--what?--a House agent?"

"I don't know. I'm not saying he's monitoring our conversations and reporting back to Billings or whoever.

I'm just saying that I don't entirely trust him."

"Why did you come to me? Why are you telling me this?"

"You seem ... I feel like we maybe have more in common than some of the others. I don't want your ego to get too swollen, but you seem smart. Confident.

Straightforward. And I guess the bottom line is that I

trust you the most."

Daniel couldn't help smiling. "I'm flattered."

"Look. Just think about it. Just keep your eyes open.

That's all I'm saying." She stood up. "It's getting late.

We'd better go down to breakfast."

"I'm not hungry," Daniel said.

"But--"

"But what? Our faithful servant will get mad at me?

Let him."

Laurie nodded, understanding dawning in her eyes.

"Maybe these rituals give the Houses power."

"It's a possibility."

"I'll tell the others."

"You going to skip breakfast too?"

"Starting tomorrow." She smiled embarrassedly. "I'm hungry."

Daniel laughed. "Go on, then. I'll see you guys later."

But he couldn't fall back asleep, and after a fruitless forty-five minutes tossing and turning restlessly, he put on his clothes and headed downstairs to the dining room.

The table was set, but there was no food on it and no one was eating. Whatever conversation there had been had died, and Laurie, Mark, Norton, and Stormy sat in separate sections of the long table, playing with their silverware or staring into space.

"Where's Billings?" Daniel asked, sitting down.

Stormy shrugged. "That's the big question."

"Has anyone tried to look for him?"

"I did," Laurie said. "No sign of him. On this floor at least."

"So . . . what? We're going to starve?"

Stormy stood. "I'll make the damn breakfast." He looked around the table. "But we're switching off. This is not my regular gig."

"I'll take dinner," Laurie said.

"And we can each make our own lunch." Daniel smiled. "I know the schedule."

"You'd better like scrambled eggs," Stormy said. "It's all I can make." He disappeared into the kitchen and emerged a moment later, looking perplexed, carrying a tray of bacon and a pitcher of orange juice.

"It's ready," he said.

"What?"

"Our breakfast is in there. It's all cooked and ready."

"It wasn't there before," Laurie said. "I checked."

"Somebody want to come in here and give me a hand?"

They all stood, followed him into the kitchen, picked up assorted dishes. There were pancakes and bagels, muffins and fresh fruit. Neither the stove nor the oven appeared to have been used, and there were no dirty knives or cooking utensils on the counters or in the sink.

It was as if the food had just . . . appeared.

Daniel picked up the coffeepot and a plate of sausage and headed back to the dining room. He couldn't put his finger on it, but there seemed something different about the kitchen. It seemed larger than he remembered, the positioning of its elements changed slightly. He wondered if the room was a composite of all of their old kitchens and if a modification or remodeling on the part of one of the families had thrown it off a little bit. Until now, everything in the House looked exactly the same as it had in Matty Groves.

Maybe that was knowledge that could be used to their advantage.

They ate, for the most part, in silence, occasional mini conversations breaking out and then dying. He did find himself watching Mark, paying attention to what the young man did and the few things he said, and he was angry with Laurie for planting the seeds of doubt in his mind.

But he couldn't be too angry with her. He really was flattered that she trusted him, that she respected his honesty and intelligence, and had chosen him to confide in.

He smiled to himself. Anyone with perceptions that astute couldn't be completely wrong.

But it was a bad precedent. They'd only been together for, what? Twelve hours, House time? What would it be like in a week? A month?

Hopefully, they wouldn't be here by then. Hopefully, they would have found a way out by that time.

But if they hadn't?

They'd probably be at each other's throats, like that old Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," where a group of aliens shut off water and power and watched the residents of a neighborhood scapegoat each other, blame each other, distrust each other, finally kill each other.

He glanced over at Laurie. She gave him a wan smile.

They had to get out of here.

They spent the day exploring the House: the basement to the attic, and the three floors in between. He would have thought that sealing off the windows, removing all trace of the world--or worlds--outside the House would make it seem more claustrophobic, smaller, but that was not the case. Instead, it seemed even bigger, its corridors more labyrinthine, the number of rooms greater.

Except he knew that wasn't true. He knew where all of the room doors were, knew what was behind most of them, and there were no more than there had been when he'd lived here as a child.

So why did the interior of the House seem to be expanding?

He did not know and he did not want to know, and after the maddening frustration of their fruitless day, he was grateful when he was finally able to retire to his room.

He took off his clothes. Were they really going to be trapped inside this damn House for the rest of their lives?

Margot and Tony had never been far from his mind, but seeing Laurie in his room this morning had reminded him even more acutely how much he missed his wife and how desperately he needed to get back to her. The thought that he might never see her again stabbed at his heart.

He folded his pants and shirt, hanging them over a chair, thinking that he was going to have to wash them soon, that if he did not do so they'd be so encrusted with filth he wouldn't be able to fold them at all.

But his mind returned to Margot as he slipped under the covers, and he thought of how she looked while she was sleeping, the cute sound of her little half snore, the comforting feel of her warm body snuggling next to his in the middle of the cold night. He missed her, he wanted her, he needed her, and for the first time since he'd been a child in the House, he cried himself to sleep.

Mark Mark lay on his bed staring up at the ceiling. He was exhausted and drenched with sweat, having tried in vain for the past half hour to once again access The Power, to focus his mind and concentrate completely on reviving the abilities he'd possessed and, until recently, taken for granted.

He wiped the perspiration from his forehead, felt a small rivulet trickle down the side of his face into his ear. What was he doing here? What did he have in common with these residents of other Houses? He felt closer to Billings than he did to Norton or Laurie--and the servant scared the living shit out of him.

Was he even supposed to be here or was it all some fluke of bad timing? Because the fact remained that although Billings had obviously been expecting him when he arrived, he was the only one who hadn't been specifically summoned.

He was the only one who hadn't had a recent encounter with the girl.

That was at the root of his concern, and he found himself wondering if maybe some other force had led him back here, had compelled him to return home.

No, it was Kristen's death. There was no higher power pushing him. No overall design. He'd come back simply because his sister had died and he wanted to find out what had happened to her.

Whatever the reason, though, he was here, a prisoner like the rest of them, and he felt that it was his responsibility to get them out of this. He had not mentioned The Power to anyone, and while he knew he should have come clean instantly, that time was past. It would be too awkward now, would raise too many questions. None of them seemed to have ever possessed any sort of extrasensory abilities or to suspect that he had.

Did Billings even know?

He wasn't sure.

That might give him an advantage.

He decided to try again. If anything was going to help him get them out of here and escape, it would be The Power. If he could just get an opportunity to read Billings, to scan the House . . .

He took a deep breath.

Concentrated hard.

Nothing.

His head hurt, the blood pounding in his temples, and his muscles were starting to ache from the strain as his body grew rigid and relaxed, rigid and relaxed. He wiped the sweat from his face, looked upward once again, and pushed until it felt as though his eyes were going to pop from his head.

And a figure flickered into existence at the foot of his bed.

He saw the form at the bottom of his peripheral vision, and he sat up instantly, facing it full on.

Kristen.

She was older, the way she must have looked when she died, but he recognized her instantly. She was not solid, not flesh, but she was not transparent either. Instead, she seemed to be sort of... glowing. And translucent. Like a computer-generated specter in a big-budget movie.

He was suspicious of that at first, not believing that reality would hew so closely to the middle-of the-road imaginations of anonymous film craftsmen, but then she turned her head, craned her neck, looking around as if uncertain for a second where she was, and her eyes alighted on Mark.

She smiled, her entire face lighting up.

And he knew it was her.

"We've still got it," she said to him, and there was a playfulness to the smile on her lips. Her hand reached out to touch his foot and he felt not pressure but a pleasant warmth, as though a ray of sunlight had been concentrated on that section of his skin. "How are you, Mark?"

He nodded, not knowing what to say.

"It's not your fault," she said. "About me dying, I

mean."

"I never--"

"Yes you did." She laughed, a sound that reminded him of tinkling chimes, the wind in the trees. "I know you, Mark."

"I should've come back for you. I should've been there."

"You made your choices. I made mine."

He swung his legs off the bed, stood up, and walked over to where she stood. Reaching out to touch her face, his fingers passed through her form and he felt only that pleasant warmth.

He took a deep breath. "How did you die?" he asked.

It was why he had come here. It was what he most wanted to know.

A frown crossed her features. "I can't talk about that."

"Kristen!"

"That's not why I'm here. That's not why I came back."

"Did I bring you back?"

She smiled again. "You helped."

"How did you die?"

"I told you--"

"I need to know!" His eyes did not leave hers, and he saw a struggle there.

"I'm not supposed to talk to you about that."

"Kristen . . ."

She glanced furtively around, as if checking to make sure no one was eavesdropping. "You know how," she said and looked at him meaningfully.

Her warmth was replaced by a wave of cold that came entirely from within him. "The girl?" he said.

She nodded.

"I knew it! What happened?"

"I can't--"

"Kristen ..."

Another furtive look around. "She sat on my face.

And smothered me."

"Jesus!"

"She was always wanting to have sex with me. And I always refused. And I guess, finally, she took the initiative. I was sleeping and when I woke up she was sitting on my face and I couldn't breathe. I tried to push her off me, but even though she's still a child, she weighed as much as a sumo wrestler. I couldn't get her off. I

tried to hit her, tried to buck her off, tried to roll over, but she just sat there on top of me, and finally I passed out. And I died."

"I should've been there," Mark said. "I should've come back after Dad died."

"There's nothing you could've done."

"I could've protected you."

"Not unless you slept with me every night. And I

don't think even you're that weird." She smiled teasingly, and he had to smile back.

"I miss you," he said.

"I miss you."

"Did you ever try to get her out of the House? Her or Billings?"

Kristen shook her head. "They're part of the House."

"But did you ever try?"

"I didn't know how. I just avoided them. Like we used to."

"And now we're both trapped here."

"Maybe," she said.

"Come on. Billings won't let us leave."

"First of all, I'm not really here. I'm . . . visiting."

"Then he's trapped me here."

"You're trapped," she told him, "but Billings hasn't done it to you. He's not keeping you here. Any of you.

You're keeping yourselves here. As long as you remain tied to your homes, as long as you have unresolved issues with those on the Other Side, you will remain on the border. It is the only hold the Houses have over you, this connection to the past, to the dead."

"Unresolved issues?"

Kristen nodded.

Bentley Little "With you?"

She shook her head, smiled. "We always understood one another," she said. She touched his cheek, and he felt the warmth of sunshine. "We still do."

"Who, then?"

She paused. "Mother. Father."

Mark grew silent.

"That is why you can't leave."

"Because I never came back and made it up with Mom and Dad?"

She nodded.

"I can't believe this."

"The House keeps them tied the same way. Those threads that bind you to the House and to the Other Side bind them to the House as well."

"What if those threads are broken?"

"It is complicated."

"What happens?"

She shook her head.

"Will the barrier be ... weakened?"

"Possibly."

"Is that good or bad?" he asked.

Her luminescent face grew grave. "It is bad," she said.

"The two sides must not mix."

Mark smiled. "You'd be able to visit more often,"

he said.

Kristen laughed, that tinkling musical sound that wasn't quite human. "Mark," she said fondly. "I really do miss you."

"I know," he said, and he felt the tears welling up as he looked at her face. She was as beautiful as he'd known she'd be, and she'd grown from a gawky teenager into a confident self-assured woman. God, if she'd only been allowed to live . . .

He wiped his eyes. "So that's it. I'm stuck here. We're all stuck here. We're screwed."

"No, that's not it," Kristen said.

"What, then?"

"The Houses do need people," she admitted. "But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be you. It could be anyone. And if you guys leave, someone will come to take your place. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum."

She paused. "But when someone else comes, it will be voluntary. It will be their decision. They won't be coerced or forced or held prisoner against their will.

They'll be like I was."

"But how can we leave?"

"Resolve your problems."

"And how do we do that?"

"It will come of its own."

"What will?"

"You'll see."

"What? Can't you say?"

"No. But you will have that chance. Be prepared for it when it happens."

He didn't like the vagueness of her answer, and every opportunity that he could come up with for reconciling with his parents filled him full of dread.

He did not want to see his dead mother or father.

"There's one other thing you have to do, though,"

Kristen said.

"What's that?"

"Kill her." And there was a look of uncharacteristic fierceness on her face. "Kill the bitch. She's the one who's doing this, who's perverted the Houses for her own purposes, who's tried to bring down the barrier.

Once she's out of the way, everything will return to normal and will be back the way it should, with voluntary border guards and the Other Side safely separated."

"She's evil," Mark said.

Kristen nodded, and for the first time she looked afraid. "Yes," she said. "She's evil."

"I'll do it," Mark told her.

There was a slight gasp, and an expression of pain crossed Kristen's face. She hugged him, but she was already fading quickly, her warmth cooling into nothingness.

"I love you," she whispered, her voice barely audible.

"I love you too," he said.

But before he reached the word "love," she was gone.

Stormy So where was Billings?

They hadn't seen the butler all day yesterday, and now he was missing again this morning. It was pretty obvious that something had happened to him, and they were at a loss as to what to do about it. None of them liked the butler, and they all seemed to be afraid of him, but he was their link to the House, the translator between themselves and the horrific impersonality of the events that occurred here.

Maybe he'd served his purpose, Norton suggested.

Maybe he was only needed to lure them here and to keep them imprisoned until the House was charged up again. It sounded plausible, but Stormy didn't quite buy it. Nothing logical happened here, and even the most benign and minor events inevitably had ominous implications.

He figured the butler had been captured by the girl.

Or killed.

Or both.

Stormy sipped his coffee. Once again, breakfast had been made for them. Just as dinner had been last night.

They'd had to serve themselves, but someone--or something --else had cooked and prepared the food. Laurie suggested that one of them stake out the kitchen this afternoon, an hour or so before dinner, to try and find out who or what was making their meals, and Mark volunteered for a tour of duty.

They'd finished eating for the most part, but they remained in the dining room, sipping juice and coffee, nibbling on muffin crumbs, bored, having run out of things to do and having a difficult time thinking of things to say. He'd felt an instinctive camaraderie with the others the instant he met them, but that feeling had been fading ever since. These weren't really people with whom he'd choose to spend his time if he had a choice.

God, he wished he could watch a morning show or listen to Howard Stern or ... something.

"What's happening outside this House?" Stormy said.

"In the real world? That's what I'd like to know. Why can't we have a TV or a radio in this fucking place?"

He pushed his chair away from the table, stood, and began pacing. "I'm getting tired of this shit."

"Who isn't?" Norton said.

"Can't we at least have a newspaper delivered with our breakfast?"

"The Ghostly Gazette?" Daniel suggested.

"Very funny."

Laurie stood. "We'd better stop here before we really start getting on each other's nerves. Let's clear the table.

I'll wash the dishes."

"I'll dry," Daniel offered.

"Where's that leave the rest of us?" Stormy asked.

Daniel grinned. "Free to do as you choose."

"Great," he muttered.

There was nothing they had planned, nothing they had to do. They'd searched the entire House yesterday, and today loomed before them, a huge monolith of time.

Stormy carried his cup and plate into the kitchen. Last night, he'd begun a sort of journal--notes for a possible movie, actually--with pen and paper he'd found in his room. He had some other ideas he wanted to write down, so rather than plop his ass on a seat in the sitting room and stare at the damn wall, he got himself some ice cubes and a big old glass of water and, excusing himself, went back upstairs.

Where there was a TV in his room.

A TV!

Excitedly, he ran over, flipped it on. Channel 2 was static and snow. The same with channels 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. The only channel that came in was 13, and it was showing some type of documentary; but he didn't care.

Any audiovisual contact with the outside world was like a crust of bread to a starving man at this point, and he was even grateful for the simple physical presence of the television in his room. He'd never realized before how completely and utterly dependent he was on mass communications and he promised himself that if he ever started thinking about chucking it all, moving to a cabin in Montana and living off the land, as he periodically did when business was down and the pressure was up, he'd kick his own ass.

He sat down on the side of the bed and stared at the screen. He didn't know what he was watching, but it definitely had a documentary feel, a grittyunstaged look that gave it the appearance of reality, a verisimilitude only reinforced by the generic synthesized music that accompanied the montage of pan shots. It was film, not video, a travel show or nature show or Indian show, and it had obviously been shot in New Mexico--he recognized the familiar blue sky and massive clouds as well as the adobe ruins of Bandelier. He'd heard no voiceover since turning on the television, but he knew from the rhythm of the piece that narration would kick in at any second, and he lay down on his side and piled both pillows beneath his head to watch.

The program did not play out the way he expected, however. There was no narration, and the panoramic vistas and beautifully shot ruins gave way to uninspired and routinelylensed footage of high-desert brush along the side of a flat dirt road. The music disappeared, and the camera panned down to a low, heavily eroded ditch by the side of the road, where a dead body lay twisted against the exposed roots of a paloverde.

Roberta.

Stormy sat up at the sight of his wife, all of the air in his body seeming to escape in one violently exhaled breath. She was wearing only torn panties and a dirty bra. Her right arm, bloody, a section of skin torn off and blackened with dried blood, lay twisted behind her back at an impossible angle.

In her hand was a piece of cheddar cheese with a rose embedded in it.

The camera panned up her body, and Stormy saw that there was a trail of black dots stretched across her forehead and her wildly staring eyes that looked like burned ants.

He stood, intending to get Norton and bring him back here, to find out why their lives and experiences were crossing all of a sudden, but he could not leave before the program ended, and he yelled "Norton! Norton!" at the top of his lungs as he stared at the screen and watched a lingering shot of what looked like a rotting full-sized marlin lying in the ditch next to her.

The House started to shake.

It was not merely a rumble or single jolt this time but a full-scale quake that rocked the foundations of the House and tilted the floor as though it were the deck of a storm-tossed ship. The television winked off instantly, but the lights in the room remained operational, and he could at least see what was happening as he was knocked off his feet by the force of the temblor and sent flying into the wall beneath where the window used to be.

Stormy scurried across the floor, half crawling. The door had been thrown open, and he scrambled into the hallway.

It looked like a low-budget earthquake scene from a bad direct-to-video flick, the camera shaking, blurring, and doubling everything in the scene.

Except that there was no camera. And the blurring and doubling were not due to some optical trick but to the fact that the walls and floor and ceiling actually seemed to be physically separating, splitting like cells into identical twins of themselves.

There was a cry from off to his left, and Stormy turned his head to look down the hall. Norton had obviously heeded his call and was at the top of the stairs, holding tightly to the banister to keep from falling onto the landing below.

Stormy stood, bracing himself in the doorway.

"What's happening?" he yelled.

"I think the Houses are separating!"

Why hadn't he seen that? Around him, that strange mitosis was continuing. He was still recognizably situated in a tangible, material House, but the transparent out lines of other Houses could be seen emerging from it.

The doorway in which he was standing was quadrupled, and seeing four ghostly doorways surrounded by four ghostly walls receding into the solid reality of his corporeal House was not only disorienting but dizzying. He turned toward Norton again, and the old man looked transparent as well.

Holy shit. He was going to be left alone here again.

They were all going to be alone. It was bad enough being trapped in one House together. But trapped in separate Houses . . .

And without Billings?

He didn't think he could survive that.

The adrenaline that had been revving up his heart on account of the shaking kicked into overdrive, and he scrambled desperately toward the staircase at the end of the hall, crying with fear and frustration. He wanted to grab Norton, to hold on to him so they wouldn't be separated, but the old man's figure was fading into the wainscoting.

"No!" he screamed.

But the transparent Norton couldn't hear him.

And then the earthquake was over and the other Houses were gone.

Daniel Where was he? In what House? In what time period?

Everything was confused, and Daniel shook his head as if to clear it. He stood alone in what had been the entryway, staring down the hall. The dark corridor was endless. There seemed to be literally hundreds of doors stretching out as far as he could see, with no discernible end. This was not the House he remembered, not any House he had ever seen, and he wondered exactly what had happened. He and Laurie had been in the kitchen, starting the dishes, when the shaking started. Following her lead, he'd stood in the doorway, and then . . .

What?

His recollection of what happened next was hazy. He seemed to recall seeing Marie duck under the dining- room table. But then there were two dining-room tables.

And two dining rooms.

And then three. Four. Five.

He'd remained in place, anchored to this House, while Mark and Laurie broke off into different directions and faded away with their respective dwellings.

Had they been real at all, he wondered, or were they just manifestations of the House? Had he been alone all along, only thinking there were others here with him?

Was this some sort of head trip the House was playing with him, some way of getting information from him or testing his reactions?

He didn't think so. It was possible, but his gut reaction was that the others were real, that what Billings had told them was the truth, and that now that the Houses were back at full power, they had the strength to merge and separate at will.

So was his House the true House? He was pretty sure it was. He was the one who had remained in place, who had remained here in the House they'd all shared, while Laurie and Mark--and, presumably, Norton and Stormy--had spun off elsewhere.

Except he hadn't really remained in place, had he?

Because this House had changed, too. Gone were any pretexts that this was the exact same home he and his father had fled all those years ago. There were similarities, of course, but there were differences as well, and he stared down the endless hallway wondering exactly where he was now, trying to gather the courage to try some of the doors before him, to explore the House alone.

The sound of whispering from the sitting room behind him and a partial glimpse of a small dark figure a doll --ducking behind the love seat spurred him into action, and he moved forward, started down the hall.

He was about to try and open the first door on the right, when he saw, a hundred yards or so down the corridor, an unmoving lump in the center of the floor.

There were no bright fluorescent lights, only dim flame shaped yellow bulbs on silver fixtures spaced far apart on opposite walls, and he took a few steps forward, squinting, trying to make out what it was.

It looked like a dead body.

He thought he saw the black-on-white of a formal butler's uniform.

Daniel ran down the hallway. Even running at full speed, it took him a minute or so to reach the body, and the end of the hallway was still nowhere in sight. Breathing heavily, he stared down at the form on the floor.

It was Billings. The butler was lyingfaceup , and while there were no visible signs of violence and the white shirt remained unsoiled, the hardwood floor around the body was soaked with drying blood.Billings's eyes were wide open, as was his mouth. There was a small lipstick kiss on his white forehead.

God is dead, Daniel thought crazily. God is dead.

Satan lives.

Where was the girl? Where wasDoneen ? He looked anxiously around, expecting to see her jump out at any moment, to leap from behind one of the doors or come running up from the murk shrouding the far end of the hall. But there was no sign of her, and he dropped to one knee and picked up the butler's cold right hand to feel for a pulse.

Nothing.

Had there ever been a pulse? Daniel didn't know.

Billings claimed to have been here as long as the House had, and all five of them had remembered him from their childhoods and he had not changed one bit. Perhaps he had never been alive. He was certainly not human.

What could kill him?

That was something he didn't even want to think about, and with a last look at thepuddled blood on the floor, Daniel stood. He was about to start walking back up the hall when something caught his eye. A dark spot in the blood by Billings' left foot.

Daniel bent down, looked closely.

Hair and lint.

In the shape of a small footprint.

From somewhere in the House came an echo of high laughter.

He had to get out of here. Whether that meant finding a legitimate exit or exorcisingDoneen or taking apart this fucking House board by board, he had to escape.

He had to extricate himself from this situation and get his butt back to Margot and Tony.

There had to be an answer or a clue or a hint or something behind one of these doors, and he walked over to the closest one, grabbed the handle, and yanked it open.

A mirror stared back at him, reflecting his own anguished face.

He strode down to the next door, pulled it open.

A linen closet. ''

The next: a library/.

He crossed the hall, pulled open a door on the opposite side.

And therewa & his mother's Victorian bedroom.

She was lying in bed, next to his father, and they were both alive, both young, younger than he was right now.

His father whispered something, and his mother laughed.

He had not heard her laugh since he was in grammar school, and the sound brought back an entire world to him. Chills passed through his body, chills not of fear but of pure raw emotion: love, longing, recognition, remembrance, discovery.

"Hey, Daniel." His father waved him over. "Come in.

Shut the door."

His mother smiled at him, and he smiled back.

He wanted to go in, wanted to jump on the bed the way he had as a child and snuggle between the two of them, but he was acutely aware of the fact that he was an adult, older than they were, and that they were probably naked under the heavy blankets.

Besides, what was this? A time tunnel? A vision? A

joke? His gut told him that these were his real parents and they were calling to him, but his mind could not quite buy it. He thought it was probably a trick of the House. They weren't seriously altered, the way Laurie and Stormy said their mothers had been in the House on the Other Side, and they didn't have the insubstantial forms of ghosts. They looked exactly the way they had thirty years ago, and that made Daniel suspicious.

His mother held out her arms. "Danny."

He closed the door on them.

He had the sense that he was doing something wrong, that he should be in there, talking to them, that taking this tack would not lead him where he wanted to go, but he had nothing he really wanted to say to his parents--if those figures were his parents--and he ignored that section of his mind and the nagging doubt lapsed into silence.

He moved on to the next door. Behind it was a small anteroom and yet another door. He walked in, opened the second door and was home, in Pennsylvania, in Tyler, in his kitchen. Tony was sitting at the dinner table doing his homework and Margot was stirring a pot on the stove.

He could smell the delicious aroma of beef stew, could feel the warmth from the stove. Outside it was raining, and the windows were fogged with condensation.

There was no doubt here, no suspicion in his mind.

This seemed completely real to him, on all levels, and he tried to rush over to Margot and hug her, but was stopped by what felt like a Plexiglas wall. He moved toward Tony, was stopped again.

He began pounding on the invisible barrier. "Margot!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. He started jumping up and down, waving his arms wildly. "Margot!

Tony!"

They couldn't see him or hear him.

Maybe he was a ghost.

Maybe they were the ghosts.

The thought sent a chill through his heart.

No. Most likely, the House had not transported him back home but was simply allowing him to see, to smell, to hear, to experience what was happening there.

But why?

He folded his arms, stood in place, watched, listened.

Tony looked up from his homework. "When's Dad coming back?" he asked.

He saw the look of worried concern that crossed Margot's face, and his heart ached for her. "I

don't know,"

she said.

"He didn't . . . leave us, did he?"

Margot turned around. "What made you think that?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

"Of course not. I told you, your father's visiting his old house in Maine for a few days."

"How come he didn't take us?"

"Because I have to work and you have school."

"How come he doesn't call?"

"I don't know," Margot admitted.

"Maybe something happened to him."

"Don't even joke about something like that."

"I'm not joking."

Margot turned down the heat on the stove, her mouth tightening. "Put your books away," she told him. "And wash up. It's time to eat."

Tony folded his homework, put it in his history text book, picked up his pen and pencil, and carried everything back to his room. He returned a moment later, helped his mother set the table, poured himself a glass of milk, and the two of them sat down to eat.

Daniel walked around the table, periodically reaching out and trying to touch either his wife or his son, but the barrier was always there. Margot and Tony ate dinner in silence, the only noise the occasional clink of silverware against plate and the quiet sounds of chewing and swallowing.

The unspoken emotion between them was heartrending.

Tired, frustrated, Daniel sat down on the floor of the kitchen. He felt almost like crying, and it was only the fact that he had to keep his wits about him and remain sharp, ready for anything, that kept him from doing so.

Immediately after finishing his meal, Tony excused himself and went out to the living room to watch TV.

Margot sighed, stared down into her nearly empty bowl, pushed a piece of carrot around with her spoon.

Daniel concentrated hard. "Margot," he said, thought.

No response.

He kept trying as she cleared the table, washed the dishes, but there was no contact and he only ended up with a headache.

He walked out with her to the living room, and together he, his wife, and his son watched an old Humphrey Bogart movie.

Almost like a real family.

This time he did cry. He couldn't help it. Maybe that's what the House wanted, maybe he was falling right into the trap that had been set for him, but he didn't give a shit. He sat on the floor, next to the couch, and let the tears flow.

After the movie, both Margot and Tony went to bed.

It was early for Margot, past Tony's bedtime, but these obviously weren't ordinary circumstances, and Daniel walked with them, standing next to Margot as she watched Tony brush his teeth and then kissed him good night.

He followed her into the bedroom, watched her take off her clothes and then climb into bed, forgoing her usual shower. She pulled the covers up to her neck, clasped her hands.

Prayed.

That surprised him. To his knowledge, his wife had never been a religious woman, and he did not think he had ever seen her pray in all their years of marriage.

Had she always done so, hiding it from him, doing it when he was asleep or out of the room? Or had she only started recently, after his abrupt departure? Either way, he was oddly touched by her actions. He wished he could kiss her, even if it was just a simple peck on the forehead, but the barrier was still in place.

Margot had closed the bedroom door, and he walked over to see if he could open it. He could not, but it was as if the door were not there for him and he passed right through it. Could he walk through walls too? He tried it, got a bump on the head for his attempt.

His headache even worse now, he walked down the short hallway, passed through Tony's door.

His son was making another doll.

Daniel stared in horror as he watched the boy open the closet door, glance furtively around, and pull out a new doll. This one had a body made from a McDonald's sack tied with rubber bands. Its arms and legs were twigs, its head a scruffy and nearly bald tennis ball with carefully pasted string segments positioned into crudely simplistic facial features.

Tony carried the figure to the bed, placed it on his pillow. He withdrew from his pocket a folded Baggie filled with what looked like dead spiders. Smiling to himself, he reached into the plastic sandwich bag, tore off the legs of a dead daddy longlegs, and placed them on a strip of exposed tape atop the doll's head.

He was making hair.

"Tony!" Daniel screamed. "Goddamn it, Tony!"

The boy's concentration was focused completely on the doll. Daniel looked back at the door, saw that it was locked. He hurried outside, back to Margot, hoping that she'd be awakened by Tony's movements or at least alerted on some psychic level to what was going on in the next room, but she was sound asleep, a mild frown furrowing her brow.

Daniel sped back to Tony's bedroom. The overhead light was off, the only illumination anorangish circle emanating from the small desk lamp, and it looked like a spotlight was being trained on the boy and the doll.

"Tony!" he screamed again.

The boy did not even hesitate, kept applying spider legs to the doll head.

There was a loud creak from somewhere else in the house, settling engendered by temperature and humidity and the contrast between the wet rainy world outside and the dry warm world inside. Tony froze, not even daring to breathe, his eyes staring at the closed bedroom door as he waited to see whether his mother was on her way.

Daniel caught a hint of movement out of the corner of his eye and adjusted his focus. He found himself staring at the doll.

The figure turned its head, looked at him, grinned, the corners of its string mouth turning up.

Daniel grabbed for the doll, but again it, like everything in the room, was behind Plexiglas. His hand hit an invisible border and pain flared up his arm, across his shoulders.

He wiggled his fingers weakly, felt searing flashes of agony that corresponded precisely to the movements, and realized that he'd broken or sprained at least three of his fingers.

Tony was already back at work on the hair, not noticing the new tilt of the figure's head, the new expression on its face, and Daniel wanted to scream with rage.

What the hell was going on here? Tony couldn't see him but that thing could? What was that all about?

Maybe he was a ghost.

"No!" he said aloud.

"I can help you."

At the sound of the voice, Daniel jerked his head to the right.

Doneenwas sitting on Tony's desk chair. She was seated like a man, flat-footed, leg spread, and even in the dimorangish light he could see up her dirty ragged shift to the nearly hairless cleft between her thighs. He knew what she wanted You don't really want me to leave --and although he found himself, against his will and as sick as it was, tempted, he suppressed those thoughts and faced the girl. She was smiling at him, that same mocking derisive smile she'd had for him when he'd leaped out of the bathtub as a child, and anger helped hold the fear at bay. "Get out of here," he ordered.

She stood, walked slowly toward him. Tony, oblivious to both of them, placed the last two spider legs on the strip of tape. "I can take this away from him," she said softly. "He'll never see me again or make another doll."

"Get out of here," Daniel repeated.

Doneengiggled. "He'll never see Mr. Billings again.

So that part of your nightmare's taken care of." She reached him, rubbed a hand between his legs.

Daniel pulled back.

"There's only me to contend with now, and I can put your lives back to normal just like"--she snapped her fingers--"that."

He grimaced distastefully. "What do you want?"

"What do you want?"

He shook his head. "I'm not playing this."

"You do something for me, and I'll do something for you."

"What?"

"Lick me." She bent over, pulled up her shift. "Lick me clean."

"No," he said.

She looked over her shoulder at him, smiled. "We never finished what we started."

"And we never will."

She remained bent over, trailed a languorous finger over the smooth skin of her buttocks, let it slide down her crack. "It would be a shame if Tony woke up to find his doll shoving its way down his mommy's throat."

"You little bitch!" He reached for her, found that he could grab her; there was no barrier between them. His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her arm.

She flinched, moaned. "Rape me," she whispered.

"Take me any way you want."

He let go, pushed her away. She laughed. "What's the matter? Not man enough?"

"I'm not going to do it, and I'm not going to let you goad me into it."

She stood, suddenly serious, smoothing down her dirty shift. "Fine."

"And if anything happens to them ..."

"There is another way," she said matter-offactly .

"What?"

"There's no sex involved."

"What is it?"

"The only thing is: you're going to have to do something you might not like."

"What's that?"

She smiled, and a cold shiver ran down his spine.

"Trust me," she said.

Laurie When Laurie came to, she was lying on the bed. She'd been in the doorway of the kitchen when the Houses separated, and she must have gotten hit on the head or fainted or something because she could remember no further than that. Someone had obviously carried her up to her bedroom, though, and for that she was grateful.

She sat up warily. Her head hurt, but when she felt around, there were no bumps or blood. She didn't know what was going on and she was about to search the House, see if any of the others had remained with her, find out who had brought her to her room, when her question was answered.

"Laurie! Come down here!"

It was her mother.

Her biological mother.

She recognized the voice though she hadn't heard it since early childhood. Her recent remembrances had rendered everything from that time period as sharp and immediate as if they had happened yesterday, and her mother's voice brought the feelings back as well. She was suddenly anxious to obey, filled with an almost Pavloviancompulsion to respond. She still wasn't sure if she was here as an observer or a participant, if her mother was yelling at her or at a younger version of her that was also around somewhere, but when her mother called "Laurie!" once again and there was no answer, she hollered back "Coming!"

That response seemed to satisfy. There were no more shouted demands, and Laurie rolled out of bed, trying to ignore the pounding in her head. She suddenly realized that her room had a window again, and she walked over to it. Outside, she was not surprised to see the garage, the barn.

It was daytime. She breathed deeply, smelled mist and mulch, redwood and grass. This was not the House in which she had been trapped for the past few days. This was the House in which she'd been born, the House of her childhood. She was herself, she was an adult, but all traces of her contemporary life had been erased and she was thrust back completely into the past.

Her past.

The feelings of childhood were back as well. The fears she'd been experiencing recently had been merely echoes of the originals, but now she was once again in the thick of it, her feelings sharp with the edge of immediacy.

There was danger here.

She stared for a moment at the barn, then turned, walked out of the bedroom. She headed downstairs, uncertain of what to expect.

"Laurie?"

At the bottom of the stairway, she saw her mother beckoning from the sitting room. It was unsettling and disorienting, being treated like a child when she was an adult, but she forced herself to smile and walked into the room.

Her parents, all four of them, were seated on the couch. The sight nearly took her breath away. It wasn't all that shocking, really. But the emotional impact was far greater than she could have ever imagined. She remained standing in the doorway, staring, trying to hold back the tears that were welling up in her eyes as she looked upon the living faces of dead loved ones she'd never expected to see again.

Sitting between their parents, she saw Josh, a cute alert-eyed little boy with the hair of a little girl, and she wanted to rush over and grab him, hug him, hold him, but like his mother and father, he stared at her with only mild open friendliness. None of them, obviously, had any idea who she was.

"Ken?" her biological mother said. "Lisa? This is our daughter Laurie."

It broke her heart to see the impartial distance of the unacquainted on faces she loved and knew so well, so intimately.

She sat with her biological parents, pretending she was a child listening politely while the grown-ups talked.

Though she was obviously an adult and taller than her mother, no one acted as though it were anything out of the ordinary. She found herself looking at Josh, studying him, but he offered no clue as to what was going on.

Why was she here? Had she been sent back in time?

Had the past been sent up to her? Were these people real? It was impossible to tell, and she decided to just let everything play out and see what happened.

Her parents talked about nothing: the weather, gardening, her adoptive parents' trip up here. There was no subtext to the conversation. It was what it was: an ordinary, everyday discussion between casual acquaintances.

When her mother excused herself to make lunch, Laurie followed her into the kitchen. Another full-fledged blast from the past. She recognized a salad bowl she'd forgotten about, remembered the pattern on the sandwich plates and iced tea glasses.

"Can I help?" she asked.

"Just stay out of the way."

Laurie took a deep breath. "I'm going to go outside."

Her mother looked at her. "Don't go too far. We'll be eating in a few minutes."

Laurie's heart was thumping with excitement. It was the first time she'd been out of the House in three days, and whether this world held or disappeared when she walked through that door, she was intoxicated with the thought that she could once again go outside.

She'd taken only one step when a goat appeared in the center of the kitchen, directly behind her mother.

The air was suddenly filled with the smell of fresh daisies.

Smoothly, easily, almost without thought, her mother grabbed a long knife from the counter, turned, and in one quick movement skillfully slit the goat's throat. She picked up the spasming animal and, kicking open the screen door, tossed it into the yard. Without pausing, she unrolled a sizable length of paper towel, ran a portion of the perforated sheet through sink water, and began wiping up the blood on the floor. She looked up at Laurie as she scrubbed. "If you're going to go outside, go. It's almost time to eat."

She was tempted to ask her mother ifBillington would be joining them for lunch, but more than anything she wanted outside, wanted to leave the House, and she walked over to the screen door, pushed it open.

And was out.

The air was fresh, clean, glorious. She'd smelled it from the window, but that wasn't the same as being in it, of it, surrounded by it, engulfed by it. At the bottom of the steps was the broken body of the goat, so Laurie walked instead along the wraparound porch, toward the front of the House.

Billington was nowhere to be seen, but Dawn was waiting for her around the corner of the House, playing with a nasty-looking doll made from dried weeds and twigs.

Laurie stopped in her tracks, stared at the dirty figure in the girl's hand.

She thought of Daniel, shivered.

"About time," Dawn said, standing, brushing dust off her shift. She dropped the doll, picked up a tin cup from the porch next to her, walked over to Laurie. "I've been waiting out here for ages."

Laurie looked through the window to her right, into the sitting room. Josh and their parents and her biological father were still seated, still talking over mundane matters, and she understood that she would not learn anything from her brother or either set of parents. For all she knew, they were the psychic equivalent of tape loops; unchanging and unalterable reflections of what had once occurred, endlessly repeating.

But Dawn was different. Dawn was definitely real, of her time, of her House, and Laurie vowed that she would find out what she could from the girl.

"What are you drinking?" she asked politely.

Grinning, Dawn held out her cup. "I like wood chips in my water."

Sure enough, the water in the cup was dirty, filled with dead floating leaves, splintered wood, and oversized pieces of sawdust. The girl pressed the cup to her lips, tilted it, drank the remaining contents. She smiled at Laurie, flakes of sawdust caught between her teeth, and that smile put Laurie on guard. There was lust in it, lust and some other emotion she didn't recognize, and she had to remind herself that this was not really a little girl, this was not merely a manifestation of the House, a puppet.

This was . . . something else.

"Do you want to play?" Dawn asked.

Laurie nodded. She realized that there was import beyond the immediate in the question, but the time had come to jump in, to sink or swim.

Dawn giggled. "Let's do it in the woods."

Laurie took a deep breath, looked into the window again, then turned toward the girl. "All right," she said.

"Let's do it in the woods."

Stormy Stormy walked slowly downstairs, past the banister where Norton had disappeared, past the first landing.

Already he could sense that things were different. The House looked the same as far as he could tell, but there was a new vibe to it, a sense of instability, a feeling he recognized from the past.

His mother was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.

She was not bald but looked exactly as she had when he was a child, only she was wearing one of his father's old suits, the legs of the pants and the arms of the jacket raggedly cut to fit her form.

He stopped several steps above her. There was an expression of almost manic excitement on her face, and she was staring at him in a way that he found disconcerting.

She looked quickly around--behind her, to the left, to the right--in order to make sure they were alone.

"Stormy!" she said in a loud whisper. "Get down here!

There's something I have to show you!"

He remained in place. "What is it?"

She frowned, her brow furrowing in an exaggerated manner that looked like either bad acting or emotional disturbance. "Get down here now!"

"What is it?" he asked again.

"I found the monster."

She turned, started toward the hall, and Stormy hurried after her. He didn't know what she was talking about, what was going on here, whether he was in the present or the past or some House-bred amalgam of the two, but he figured the best idea was probably just to roll with it.

His mother stopped halfway down the hall and opened a door. She let him catch up with her, and the two of them walked through the doorway into another, narrower hall. This one had no flocked wallpaper, no expensive wainscoting. There was only unadorned bare wood walls and a single exposed bulb in the center of the ceiling. At the opposite end was another door, and his mother took a key from her raggedly cut suit, unlocked the door and opened it.

"It's a bone monster," she said, whispered. Her eyes looked bright, feverish.

He hadn't remembered this, and he looked into the closet at his grandfather's skeleton in the wheelchair.

The bones were clean save for a patch of dried skin and hair on the left side of the skull, and something about that rang a bell, seemed vaguely familiar. Had this actually happened? Had he dreamed this?

Butchery.

Had it been in the movie?

No. The film had been more subtle. There's been nothing this overt, nothing this traditionally horrific.

Maybe he did remember it from childhood.

Stormy looked over at his mother. "A bone monster,"

she said, staring at her father's skeleton, talking more to herself than him.

It was amazing how much he'd blocked out. Even the film didn't come close to capturing the craziness of the household, the unsettling irrationality of its workings. It was coming back to him now, what it had been like living here. Not just the broad brush strokes but the details, not just the events that had occurred but the feelings they generated within him.

He realized now why he had hated living here so much.

And why the one family vacation they'd taken, their trip to New Mexico, had been so important to him, had made such a big impression.

His mother grasped his shoulder, pointed at the skeleton.

"That's the monster," she said. "It's a bone monster."

"Yeah." He pulled away from her, started back down the narrow hidden hallway to the House proper.

He could already hear his father bellowing from the study, and Stormy made his way over there, pushing apart the sliding wooden doors that opened onto the hallway.

"Billingham!" his father ordered. "I want a knife and a sack of cotton balls--" He paused, frowned, looked at Stormy. "I didn't call for you. I called forBillingham ."

"Sorry," Stormy said.

"Billingham!" his father yelled. He paused, waited.

"Billingham!"

The butler did not come.

Stormy looked behind him, saw only empty hallway.

Billinghamhad never, to his knowledge, failed to come on his father's order, had never had to be called more than once, and Stormy saw here the present intruding on the past. Whatever had happened to the butler in the House he'd shared with Norton and Mark and Daniel and Laurie, whatever had caused his absence for the past two days, was affecting life in this House, too.

It was a pretty good indication that the butler was dead.

That worried him. Like the others, he had originally ,, believed that the butler and the girl were allies, working *

together. But though both were intimately and inexorably connected with the Houses, he now saw them as antagonists, opposing forces, and the idea that the butler was dead, that the girl was now free to do as she chose, with no one to stop her, frightened him to the core.

A door opened in the hallway behind him, and Stormy turned to look, hoping and praying for it to beBillingham , but it was his grandmother who emerged from one of the bathrooms, hobbling out with the assistance of a bone-handled cane.

"Hi, Grandma," he said, but the old lady ignored him, turned the other direction, walked away.

"Billingham!" his father bellowed again.

Facing forward, Stormy glanced around the study. He had seldom been asked in here as a child, and he had always been too afraid of his father to take the initiative and enter on his own, so his memories of the room were hazy. One whole wall, he saw now, was covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A big picture window on the opposite wall looked out onto the back garden.

There was a desk and a pair of identical leather chairs.

Two dark wood filing cabinets. A potted palm.

And a doll.

Stormy'sbreath caught in his throat. It was lying on the floor directly behind his father, as though his father had dropped it there. The face was upside down, but the wide white eyes seemed to be staring into his, the disturbing inverted smile trained directly on him. He didn't know why he hadn't seen the figure immediately, and the thought occurred to him that his father had been holding it behind his back, hiding it.

He met his father's eyes, and the old man looked quickly and guiltily away.

Stormy knew now what had happened in this House, though he had not understood it as a child. They'd been corrupted in their purpose, his parents. His entire family.

They'd been seduced by Donielle and had neglected their duties, their responsibilities, defecting under the watchful but naive and uncomprehending eyes of Billingham. It had affected their relationship with him, their own son, had erected the barrier between them that had stood for the rest of their lives, and the fact that they'd allowed themselves to be drawn in by the girl, that they had so easily been manipulated by her, had led him to disassociate himself from them. He might not have been able to articulate it at the time, but subliminally, subconsciously, he'd been able to read the signs even then, and it was why he'd never really had any respect for his parents. He'd been afraid of them, intimidated by them, but he hadn't respected them.

And it was why he had eventually left and moved west.

He had changed, though. He had grown over the years, and he was no longer the hesitant, easily cowed, easily intimidated child he had been. He'd come back to the House, to his family, a new person, an adult, a successful businessman and entrepreneur, and he would no longer be bullied into submission by his father's words, by his mother's demands.

Maybe he'd been given the opportunity to right the wrongs of the past. Maybe he'd been sent back here to stop the girl early, before she was able to do any major damage. To head her off at the pass, as it were.

Whatever the reason, whatever the motive, he felt he had the chance to change things, to do things differently, and it was not a chance he was going to waste. He walked across the study, bent down, and picked up the doll. "What's this?" he asked.

His father snatched the figure from him. "Don't you dare touch that!"

Behind him, he heard his mother enter the room.

Good. Both of them needed to hear this.

He faced his father. "Why are we here?" he asked.

"In this House?"

"This is our home!"

"We're here for a reason," Stormy said patiently.

"And it's not to fuck that little urchin girl."

"Oh!" his mother gasped.

His father glared at him. "I will not be spoken to that way by my own son!"

"Why don't you want me to see her, then? Why can't I seeDonielle ?"

His father hesitated. "Because . . . because she's a bad influence on you."

"And she's a bad influence on you, too. She's a bad influence on all of us." He met his parents' eyes. Both of them looked away, embarrassed.

"Does Billingham know about Donielle ?"

"Billingham?" His parents exchanged a quick look.

"What does Billingham have to do with this?"

"You know."

"Stormy--"

"You know why the House must be maintained. You know what it does. And you know you're not supposed to do anything to jeopardize that." He pointed at the doll, still clutched in his father's fingers. "What's that, Dad?"

"It's none of your damn business."

"She gave it to you. It's hers. You're busy trying to keep me from going anywhere or doing anything with her, pretending that she's not good enough for our family, and you're seeing her behind my back. She's a child, Dad. A child."

His father shook his head. He looked suddenly old.

"She's no child," he said.

"And we're only trying to protect you," his mother said. "She is a bad influence."

"Then how come you keep seeing her yourselves?"

Neither of them answered.

"Don't you want it back the way it was? The way it used to be?"

"It can't go back," his father said.

"Why not?"

"Because it's gone too far."

"No," Stormy said. "Not yet it hasn't."

"You're wrong." His father looked down at the doll in his hand. "You don't understand."

"What don't I understand?"

"I fucked her, okay?" There was anger in his voice.

"I fucked her ass."

Stormy stared at him.

His voice dropped to a whisper. "Now I'm hers forever."

"No." Stormy grabbed the doll from his father, threw it onto the ground. He felt shaken, sickened. It was one thing to suspect something or to know it deductively, and it was quite another to be confronted with its specifics outright, but still he pressed on. "You have a choice, Dad. You always have a choice. Right now, you're just choosing to give up, choosing to give in. You can break free if you want to. There's nothing binding you to Donielle . Tell her to fuck off. Take control of your life, for God's sake."

"I can't," his father said weakly.

"Look at Mom." He motioned toward his mother, wearing the oversized cutoff suit. "Look what's happened to her, what she's become. And you know why!

You know what's done this to her! Don't you even care enough about her to put a stop to this?"

On the floor, the doll shifted, rolled onto its side.

Stormy was not sure whether it had moved of its own accord or it had simply landed on a precarious angle and was settling, but the motion frightened him anyway, and he kicked the doll as hard as he could, watching it slide across the hardwood floor and under the desk. There were goose bumps on his arms, and he saw that both of his parents were looking under the desk at the figure.

"Donielleasked me to marry her," Stormy said.

That brought them back.

His father's gaze snapped onto his, and there was anger on his face, confusion beneath the anger, fear beneath the confusion. His mother gasped, clapped a hand to her mouth.

"She knows you forbid me to talk to her, and she suggested we elope. She said she wants to take me away from the House"--he paused--"and away from you."

"She . . . she can't!" his father exclaimed.

His mother began quietly sobbing.

"She thinks she can," Stormy said, but he was suddenly uncertain as to whether his parents were upset because they didn't want to lose him--or didn't want to lose her.

He took a deep breath. "Is she more important to you than me?"

"No!" his mother said, shocked.

"Of course not, son."

"Then what if I told you that you had to choose?

What if I said it's either her or me?"

His father's face clouded over. "She's trying to break up the family."

"Who would you choose?"

"It's not that little slut who's causing all the problems,"

his mother announced.

Stormy turned to her. "Who is it, then?"

"It's the bone monster," she said, eyes widening.

His father stared at him silently, looking lost.

"Would you choose me, Dad?"

A tear rolled down his father's right cheek. "I would if I could."

Stormy smiled at them sadly. "I love you," he said.

"I love you both."

For a moment, his mother's gaze was lucid, his father's expression softened. "We love you, too," his mother told him, putting her arms around him. His father nodded.

A chime rang out, a deeply resonant almost churchy sound. The doorbell.

"Billingham!" his father bellowed.

His mother pulled away from him.

Another chime.

"Billingham!"

Stormy sighed. "I'll get it," he said.

He walked out of the den and down the hall to the foyer. The doorbell rang again, and he sped up, unlocking and opening the door.

A girl was standing on the porch in front of him.

Donielle.

He caught his breath at the sight of her. He was an adult now and she was a child, but the feelings she evoked within him were the same as those engendered all those years ago. His heart was racing, and there was a pleasant tingling in his groin. Despite everything he knew, despite everything that had happened, the attraction was still there, and his first impulse was to reach out and grab her hands and hold them in his. He wanted to touch her, but he held back, remained holding on to the door. "Yes?" he said coldly.

"Oh, Stormy!" She rushed forward, threw her arms around him, and against his will his body responded.

Beneath his jeans, his growing penis pressed against her midsection, and she held him tighter, rubbing herself against it.

Stormy grabbed her arms, pulled her away from him.

"What's the matter?" she said, looking up at him. Her eyes were full of hurt innocence.

He steeled himself. "You know what's the matter."

"I love you, Stormy."

He held on to her arms, looked away from her face.

"I don't love you."

"I don't like what you're trying to do."

"I'm on your side! I'm the one who told you you have to stand up for yourself, you can't let your family boss you around and make all your decisions!"

"I am standing up for myself."

"That's why your family hates me!"

"And I'm standing up for my family."

"I have nothing against them," she said, and tears welled up in her eyes. "They're the ones who don't like me! They don't like me because I'm poor. They don't like me because I love you more than they do and I

think about your feelings and what's good for you and not just what'll look good and save face for the family."

"They don't want me to see you anymore," he said.

"And I don't want to see you either."

"Fuck your family," Donielle told him.

"No," he said. "Fuck you."

The tears stopped flowing, her face hardened. "What did you say?"

"You heard me."

"That's the way you want it?"

"That's the way it's going to be. Get out of here. I

never want to see you again."

"What you want and what you'll get are two different things." With a flip of her hair, she turned and walked away, and he thought that from behind she didn't look like a child at all, she looked like a dwarf.

That lessened the attraction somewhat.

Lessened it.

But did not get rid of it.

He closed the door. Behind him he heard the click-tap of his grandmother's cane on the floor, and he turned to see her standing by the foot of the stairs.

"I can't find Billingham ," she said.

"I ... I think he's gone," Stormy told her.

There was a brief flash of lucidity, a quick second in which he saw panic and fear and incomprehension on her face. She knew the butler had been part of the House, and she knew that if he was gone, something was seriously amiss. Then her usual tight expression of stoic immobility settled into place, and she said, "You will have to serve in his place, then."

Stormy nodded. "Do you want me to help you up the stairs?"

"No," she told him. "I want you to draw my bath. I will bathe tonight in blood. Have my tub filled with goat's blood. Temperature tepid."

He nodded dumbly, watched her struggle up the steps.

From far down the first-floor hall, he heard his mother wailing, heard his father bellow, "Billingham!"

He stood in the foyer, unmoving. What had he accomplished?

Nothing. He'd tried his damnedest and confronted his parents, put it all on the line, and they had remained unmovable, entrenched, fatalistically resigned to things as they were. Everything was exactly the same as it was before.

He sighed. You really couldn't go home again.

Still, he felt better for having talked to his parents, for having confronted them, for having at least tried to stop their abandonment of Billingham and the House, to change their increasing reliance on Donielle.

If he had it to do over again, he would not run away from home. He would stay in the House with his parents, and try to work things out with them.

There was no sign of his grandmother on the stairs, he could not hear the tapping of her cane, so he walked up the steps to make sure she was all right. She was not in the second- or third-floor hallways, and he knocked on the door of her bedroom. "Grandma?"

No answer.

He tried to open the door, but it was locked.

He knocked on the door of her bathroom, but again there was no answer, and he put his ear to the wood, listening for sound.

Nothing.

Could she have gone somewhere else? He started toward the stairs again, but his eye was caught by the open door to his bedroom. Had it been open before?

He didn't think so.

"Hello?" he called out tentatively. He poked his head into the room, and there was a sudden shift of atmosphere and air pressure, a lightening of mood. He saw earthquake debris strewn across the floor of the bedroom, and against the opposite wall, a broken television.

He was back.

Norton Norton understood the change immediately.

After the shaking stopped, he let go of the banister and stood, glancing around. The restrained House in which he'd spent the last several days, the House he'd shared with Laurie and Daniel and Stormy and Mark, was gone. This was the House of old, the wildly unpredictable House in which he'd grown up, and the sudden electric silence, the thick heavy air, theundefinable undercurrent that ran like a river of sludge beneath the surface reality around him, all told him that he was home.

Just to make sure, he walked down the hall to the room in which Stormy had been staying. The door was open, but there was no sign of Stormy or anyone else.

The room was what it had been in his childhood: a sewing room for his mother.

With an almost audible snap, the wall of silence was broken, and from farther down the hall he heard sound, noise. Low conversation. Laughter.

It was coming from the library, and he moved quietly, carefully, down the corridor. The lights were low, the hallway dark, and while the shadows provided him with cover, they also added to the already spooky and intimidating atmosphere. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and tried not to breathe too loudly as he walked past Barren's room, past the bathroom, and to the library.

He stopped just before the door, poked his head around the edge of the door frame.

And saw his family.

He ducked quickly back, his heart pounding. It was suddenly hard to breathe; he felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach, and try as he might, he could not seem to suck enough air into his lungs. It was not a surprise, seeing his family. In fact, it was exactly what he'd expected. But somehow the reality of it carried an emotional weight no amount of imagining or intellectual preparation could anticipate.

They were playing Parcheesi, seated around the game table in the center of the room, and they looked the way they had when he was about twelve or so. His sisters were both wearing the calico party dresses their mother had made for them and which they'd worn, with a little letting-out, through most of their teens. Bella, the eldest, was feigning an air of disinterest in the game, as though family activities like this were juvenile and beneath her, but both his other sister Estelle and his brother Barren were laughing and joking with each other in an obviously competitive way. His parents, still in their early forties, sat across from each other, separating the sisters, smiling amusedly.

It was the type of evening they'd often spent at home together, after a hard day apart working and going to school, only there was something wrong this time, something out of place, and it took him a moment to realize what it was.

There were no books in the library.

How could he have not noticed something so obvious?

The floor-to-ceiling shelves were all empty. The dark wood wall behind the blank shelves lent the room the same air of formality it had possessed with the books, but it was as though they were playing Parcheesi in an empty house, an abandoned house, and the effect was creepy.

What had happened to the books? he wondered.

Where had they gone? All of his father's books had been in place downstairs, in the den.

But that had been back at the other House, the current House.

He was confused. Was he on the Other Side now?

Was the House allowing him to visit the ghosts, the souls, the spirits of his murdered family? Or, with the bizarre concept of time that seemed to exist in the House, were all time periods still extant? Could the House pop him in and out of different eras at will?

Either way, he could not face his family now, could not meet them. He would do so later, when he felt stronger, but for now he needed to be alone, to think, to sort things out.

One thing he'd always tried to impart to his students was the effect of the past on the present, the extent to which actions had reactions and events had repercussions that rippled forward into the future. Perhaps that was at the root of what was happening to him now.

Maybe the House was giving him an opportunity to discover the source of the ripples that had spread outward to resurrect Carole and affect the lives of Daniel and Stormy and Laurie and Mark.

Maybe it was giving him a chance to change it.

The thought was at once exciting and terrifying, but both emotions were small and intensely personal. If what Billingson--Billings--said was true, if the House--the Houses--really did maintain a barrier protecting the physical material world from the intrusion of the Other Side, then this was as big as ... no, bigger than . . .

being granted the chance to go back into time and kill the pre-Nazi Hitler.

But emotionally it didn't feel that way. He supposed it was because these were things he had just learned and the enormity of Nazi Germany and World War II had been validated by society, by the world, and had been drilled into him for over half a century, but the fact remained that this seemed much smaller in scope, much more personal and localized.

Considering the consequences, he supposed that was a good thing.

Norton moved away from the doorway, back down the hall, careful not to make a sound. Even after all these years, he remembered the location of the creaky spots in the floor, and he made a concerted effort to avoid them.

Once again, he found himself at the top of the stairs.

He started down, but when he glanced up from the steps, he saw graffiti on the wall of the stairwell ahead of him, a huge blue chalk drawing of a face, a simplistic rendering that looked as though it had been done by a not particularly talented five-year-old.

The chalk figure winked at him.

Smiled.

There was only one tooth in its poorly drawn mouth and that should have made it look goofy, comical, but instead it lent the face an air of wildness, and Norton was afraid to continue down the steps, afraid to pass beneath the gaze of the face. It was a strange facet of human nature, but horror was much more frightening on a small scale than a large one. More than all of the talk of the Other Side and the afterlife, more than the possibility of dire epic consequences, it was the intimate simplicity of this chalk drawing that spoke directly to his fear center, that dried up the saliva in his mouth and made his heart pound wildly, his blood run cold.

The round face tilted to the left, to the right, its single toothed mouth opening and closing.

It was laughing.

Norton ran. He did it without thinking, without planning, without pausing to consider his options and weigh the outcomes. At that second, he wanted only to get away from that horrible drawing and its terrifying movements, and he bolted back up the few steps he'd descended and took off down the hallway as fast as his old legs would carry him. He considered stopping before reaching the library, not wanting to see his family or let them know he was here, but he could still visualize in his mind the rocking movement of the laughing face, the opening and closing mouth, and in his imagination it was making a horrible clicking noise, like a school film projector, the individual sounds synchronized precisely with the drawing's movements, and that made him run all the faster.

He sped by the library door, hoping no one saw him but not pausing to check. His plan was to go down the back stairs, but here, finally, he stopped, afraid he'd see another graffiti drawing on this back wall. There was nothing there, though. At least nothing he could see in the dim light. He took a deep breath, gathered his courage, and ran downstairs.

He reached the bottom of the steps without incident, and immediately moved away from the stairwell. His heart was still thumping in his chest so hard that he felt as if he would go into cardiac arrest any second, but already he was ashamed of himself for running, and even as he backed away from the staircase, he swore that he would not give in to fear again. He'd panicked, acted on instinct, and he was determined that next time he would stand his ground, would think before he acted.

Next time?

Yes. There would be a next time.

Norton looked around. He'd lived in this House until he was eighteen, had spent the last few days in it (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), but right now he could not say precisely where in the House he was. The intersecting corridors and closed doors did not look familiar to him, and his sense of direction seemed to be off. He could not get his bearings. If he remembered right, the back stairs ended near the laundry and storage rooms.

This certainly didn't look like the laundry area, but he walked over to the closed door opposite him and pulled it open.

The room before him was huge, twice the size of the library, as big as the sitting room and the dining room combined. No pictures hung on its bare walls. There was no furniture.

The room was completely empty except for the books.

Still holding on to the doorknob, Norton stared.

Books, hundreds of them, had been placed on end and stood next to each other like dominoes, making a trail that snaked through an elaborate design covering almost the entire floor of the massive space, twisting and curving, circling around, making sudden sharp turns at sharp angles.

He didn't know whether it was what he was supposed to do or not supposed to do, but it was what he wanted to do, and he kicked over the first book, the one closest to the door, and watched as the rest of them all went down sequentially, the room suddenly echoing with a series of rapid-fire slaps and muffled thuds, dust jacket hitting dust jacket, cover smacking cover, everything hitting the floor.

It took a good two minutes for all of the books to go down, for the wave to pass through the room, and he stood there unmoving, his eyes following the falling books as the pattern wound around the opposite side of the room and then finally returned to the area near the door.

Now that the books were flat, he could see the design they had been arranged to make.

The same face as the chalk drawing.

The single-toothed mouth grinned crazily upward at the ceiling.

Norton backed away. Again, his first instinct was to run, but he checked that impulse and instead breathed deeply, forcing himself to remain in place. This face did not move, did not wink, did not laugh, showed no sign of animation. He thought for a moment, then walked into the room, kicking books to the right and to the left, destroying the carefully wrought pattern. He strode all the way to the opposite wall and all the way back, and when he was through it looked as though the books had simply been dumped into this room haphazardly, without any thought to their placement, and he closed the door behind him and started off down the hall toward where he thought the front of the House should be.

He ended up in another junction of two corridors. He turned left, and now he recognized where he was. This hallway led to the foyer and the front of the House.

A snake slithered across the floor in front of him--a green snake with a pale, barely visible underbelly--and he thought of Laurie. Where were the others now? He wondered. In their own childhood Houses? Going through their own tests and trials and tribulations?

He watched the snake flatten, slide through the thin space under the bathroom door.

It was amazing how quickly he'd fallen back into the rhythm of the House. He was scared--he couldn't claim to be unaffected by the manifestations thrown at him-- but they did not really surprise him, and he did not question them. He accepted their existence, considered them as much a part of the House as the wallpaper and light fixtures.

Just as he had all those decades ago.

He knew now that it was because the House was on the border, that it was the mixing of the material world and the . . . other world which created these surreal shifts in reality, but this understanding was on a purely intellectual level. As a child, long before he'd been made aware of the purpose of the House, he had adjusted to its wild displays and bizarre juxtapositions, and acceptance had been achieved long before understanding.

There was a noise behind him, a tapping. He turned And it was Carole.

Seeing her ghost was almost like seeing an old friend.

In life, they hadn't gotten along particularly well. At least not for the past half decade or so. And after her death, seeing her ghost around their home and last night, especially, had been frightening and disturbing. But his life had taken a 180-degree turn, and here, in this House, he was glad to see her ghost. It was comforting, a pleasant surprise, and he looked at her naked form and found himself smiling. "Carole," he said.

She did not smile back. "Your family is waiting for you."

He shook his head as though he had not heard correctly.

"What?"

"You need to talk to your family. Your parents. Your brother. Your sisters."

There was no expression on her face, only a dispassionate blankness, and his own smile had completely disappeared.

The last thing he wanted to do was talk to his family. "Why?" he asked.

"That is why you are here."

"To meet with them?"

The ghost nodded.

"I will," he said. "Eventually."

"No you won't."

He met her eyes. "Maybe I won't."

"You can't keep avoiding them," Carole said.

"Watch me."

The two of them faced each other, and he realized suddenly that the reason he was so apprehensive about meeting his family again was because he felt responsible for their deaths. It was his fault they had been killed. If he had not stopped seeing Donna, if he had not dumped her, she would not have taken this revenge on him. Hell, if he hadn't gotten involved with her in the first place, if he had not stoned seeing her, he would not have had to stop seeing her. No matter which way he sliced it, it was his fault that his parents, his brother, and his sisters had been murdered, and that was why he had been unwilling to talk to them, to meet them, why he had been so uncomfortable even seeing them again. He didn't know if this version of his family knew what had happened to them or what would happen to them, but he was afraid that they'd confront him about it, that they'd blame him, and while he could handle supernatural snakes and recurring ghosts and book-faces, he did not think he would be able to handle that.

"Talk to them," Carole urged.

Norton cleared his throat, and though all of those years, all of those decades had gone by, he felt like a little boy again, nervous and afraid. "I can't," he said.

"You have to."

"I can't."

"Have you seen Billings?" she asked.

He shook his head. Where was the hired hand? he wondered.

"He's dead," she said, and he heard a tremor of fear in her voice. "She had him killed."

"She?"

"Donna."

Norton felt the cold wash over him.

"Talk to your parents," Carole said. "Talk to your family."

She left then, not floating away, not fading into nothingness, but somehow . . . dispersing, her form devolving into separate elements and components that were absorbed into the floor, the walls, the ceiling, changing color, changing shape, blending in and disappearing.

He looked around, then stared at the spot where she'd been. Was she real? Or was she a part of the House?

Or both?

He didn't know, and he supposed in the end it didn't really matter. He believed her, she'd spoken the truth, and the important thing was that her message had gotten across. As much as he dreaded the idea, as much as he didn't want to do it, he knew that he had to meet with his family, he had to talk to them. About what, he didn't know. But he supposed that would work itself out.

As if on cue, he heard the sound of voices coming from up ahead. He recognized Darren's laugh, Estelle's whine. He moved forward, walking slowly, wiping his sweaty hands on his pants and trying desperately to think of what he would say to them.

Light spilled into the hall from an open doorway up ahead, and taking a fortifying breath, he stepped into the light.

They were all in the family room now: his sisters and brother on the floor in their pajamas, gathered around the radio; his mother in her chair next to the unlit fireplace, crocheting; his father in his chair next to the light, reading a book. In his mind, he saw their heads in the oven, blackened, peeling, stuck together, and he closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply, trying to will the image away.

When he opened his eyes, they were all looking at him. His mother's crocheting had stopped in mid-weave;

his father had put down his book. He knew this couldn't be real--a few minutes ago, they'd all been upstairs playing Parcheesi in the empty library, and there was no way they could have gotten downstairs and changed their clothes and settled into these new positions that fast-- but it felt real, and he understood that even if the physical specifics weren't what they were supposed to be, the underlying emotional realities were. He looked from his father to his mother. "Hello," he said.

"Where've you been?" his father asked gruffly. He picked up his book, settled down to read.

"Fibber McGee's on," his mother said, motioning toward the radio.

He was thrown a little off balance. He'd been expecting something . . . different. But his parents were treating him as though he were still a child and this was an ordinary evening, and he'd simply shown up late to listen to his favorite radio show. He wasn't sure what he should do, how he should react. Should he play along, pretend as though he were a child and try to fit into this cozy little scene? Or should he break the spell, be who he really was, say what he wanted to say, ask what he wanted to ask?

He thought for a moment, then walked across the family room to the radio, turning it off. His brother and sisters looked up at him, annoyed, but he ignored them and turned to face his parents. "We need to talk," he said. "We need to talk about Donna."

Once again, his father put his book down. His mother let her crocheting fall into her lap.

"She's a bad girl," Norton said.

His father nodded.

"She's nasty," Bella piped up. "She likes to play sex games."

He expected his parents to shush his sister, chastise her, tell her not to talk about such obscenities, but they did not even flinch, and their serious gazes remained focused on his.

He swallowed hard. "She is nasty," he said. "She does like to play sex games."

His parents looked at each other.

He was an old man, older than his father had ever lived to be, but he felt as embarrassed saying this in front of his family as he would have at ten years of age.

He felt hot, flushed, and he knew his face was beet red.

"I know because I've done it with her," he said, not meeting their eyes. "But I ... I stopped. She didn't like that. Now she plans to--" He cleared his throat. "She plans to kill you. All of you."

"She likes to play blood games," Bella said.

He looked from his father, to his mother, to his brother and sisters. "Don't you understand what I'm saying here? You are in danger. If you don't do something, you'll end up dead, your heads chopped off."

"What do you expect me to do?" his father said calmly.

"I don't know!" Norton was growing increasingly exasperated.

"Hunt her down! Kill her!"

"Kill Donna? Your little Mend?Billingson's daughter?"

Norton pressed forward, finger pointed in the air in the classic lecturing position. "She's notBillingson's daughter," he said. "The two aren't even related."

For the first time, something like worry crossed his parents' faces.

"Of course she's his daughter," his mother said.

"Did he ever say that? Did he ever tell you that?

Have you ever seen the two of them together?"

"Well, no. But..." She trailed off, obviously thinking.

Now he had his father's attention. "How do you know this?"

"He told me.Billingson . Before he disappeared."

"Disappeared? He's--"

"He's gone. She killed him. Or had him killed." He knelt down on the floor in front of his father. "You know what this House is. You know what it does. You know why we're here--"

His father fixed his mother with a look of black rage.

"I told you not to--"

"She didn't say anything. I found out on my own."

He looked into his father's eyes. "She's the one who told you not to say anything. She's the one who told you not to tell us, right?"

His father nodded reluctantly.

"She's evil."

"I know that! This whole House is evil!"

"No, it's not."

Darren and Bella and Estelle had been quiet all this time, and Norton glanced over at them. They looked scared, but not exactly surprised, as though what they'd feared had turned out to be true.

"She likes to play blood games," Bella repeated softly.

Their father nodded. "Yes," he said tiredly. "She does."

They talked. For the first and only time, he and his parents and his brother and his sisters talked like families in movies and on TV talked--openly, honestly--and it was a liberating experience. He felt as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and he learned that Donna had approached all of them, had appealed to each of them, had offered herself to his mother and father, had presented herself as a friend to his sisters, a girlfriend to his brother.

He himself was the only one who had taken the bait, and while they'd all known about it, while she'd practically flaunted it in front of them, they had never mentioned it to him, never brought it up between themselves.

Such things just weren't talked about in that family in that time in that place, and it was the lack of communication as much as his own weakness and stupidity that had inflamed the situation and led to its inevitable end.

Was that end still inevitable?

He didn't know, but he thought not. He felt good, he felt free, he felt closer to his family than he ever had before, and while it might not be the case, he had the distinct impression that merely by talking, merely by hashing things out, they had changed the course of events, they had avoided a repeat of what had happened the first time.

It was several hours later that his mother yawned, placed her crocheting needles into her sewing basket, rolled up the afghan on which she was working, and said, "It's time for bed. I think we've had enough startling revelations for one night."

The kids, tired, nodded and stood, heading off unbidden to their respective bedrooms.

His father stood as well, and offered his hand to Norton, who took it and shook. He could not remember ever shaking his father's hand before, and the action made him feel more like a grown-up than anything else in his life ever had.

"We'll find her," he promised. "All of us. And then we'll decide what to do."

Norton nodded. He was feeling tired himself, and he walked out of the family room and, waving good night, went down the hall to the entryway and started up the stairs to his bedroom. The unfamiliar expansiveness he'd experienced earlier was gone, and the House seemed cozy and comfortable, not frightening or forbidding at all but . . . homey.

He wasn't quite brave enough to take a shower yet, but he did walk into the bathroom to wash his face. The water that came out of the sink faucet was red and thick, and no doubt he was supposed to believe it was blood, but it smelled like water, and it rolled off his hands, leaving no stain, and he bent down and splashed it onto his face, enjoying the cool refreshing wetness.

He fell asleep happy.

Mark Mark opened his eyes.

And was sitting on the porch.

It was night. To the north, a domed semicircle of orange--the lights of Dry River--shone like a beacon in the desert darkness. There were other lights, individual lights, spread across the plain to the south, east, and west: the ranches of their neighbors. Above, the sky was moonless, but he could make out familiar constellations in the star-crowded sky.

On the bench swing opposite his chair, his parents sat, heads together, rocking slowly back and forth. On the top porch step, to his right, sat Kristen.

The family was all together.

Unresolved issues.

He squinted through the darkness at his sister, but though the only illumination came from the pale square of sitting-room light shining from a window some ten feet down the porch, he could still see Kristen clearly, and he understood that this was her as a child, this was the Kristen he had known, not the Kristen he had only recently met.

She said something, obviously a reply to a question someone else had asked, and he realized that they were in the middle of a conversation, one of those slow languorous summer-night conversations where thoughts were mulled over before spoken and long lapses between question and answer were the rule rather than the exception. They'd had these conversations often when he was little, and it was when he had felt closest to his parents. This was the time after the day's chores and rituals had been completed, when there was nothing that had to be done and the requirements of the day were finished until tomorrow, and it was the only time when his parents seemed truly relaxed, not overworked or overburdened or under stress.

It was the only time that they weren't working for the House, the only time they'd been allowed to be themselves.

He hadn't known that then, but perhaps he'd sensed it. These porch sessions had been almost sacrosanct to him, set off in his mind from the daylight life of his family, from their life inside the House, and it was why he was now so reluctant to bring up Billings and the girl and everything else. He knew he had to talk to his parents about it, but he did not want to shatter the mood, and he decided to wait until he could naturally broach the subject within the context of the conversation.

The night air was cool, the day's heat dissipated, and above the ever-present odor of the chickens, he could smell mesquite and a whole host of night-blooming desert flowers.

He listened to his mom, listened to his dad, listened to Kristen, and it was so nice to be here with them again, alone with them. His parents told stories of the past, laid out plans for the future, and they were still talking when he drifted off to sleep.

When he awoke, it was morning.

He'd been left where he'd fallen asleep, in the chair, but someone had given him a blanket and he was wrapped up in it, curled like a shrimp. The sun was high in the sky, and he heard the sound of his father's truck clattering up the drive, so it was obviously past breakfast time, and he wondered why he hadn't been awakened and forced to eat his meal in the proper manner at the proper hour.

They'd never gotten around to discussing the girl.

They hadn't discussed Billings or the House, either. He roused himself, pushed off the blanket, stretched out, and stood up. His muscles were sore, and there was a hard crick in his neck. Yawning tiredly, he walked over to the front door and walked inside. He expected to smell breakfast, or at least the remnants of breakfast, but even as he walked through the dining room into the kitchen, there were no odors of food. The dishes in the sink were all from last night.

"Mom!" he called. "Kristen!"

"Mom went to town for groceries."

His sister was standing in the doorway, staring at him, and he had a quick flash ofdeja vu. He'd been here before, standing in this exact same spot, with Kristen standing in the exact same spot and saying exactly the same thing. He wondered if this whole experience at the House had been cobbled from preexisting events, edited together like a videotape or a CD-ROM game.

No. Kristen walked into the kitchen, took a sack of bread out of the refrigerator, and popped two slices into the toaster. He knew nothing like that had ever happened at their House; snacks had never been allowed and meals had always been eaten together.

This was really happening.

"Dad's outside," Kristen said. "I think he's unloading the feed. He probably wants you to help him."

Mark nodded dumbly, then walked outside, pushing open the kitchen door and stepping onto the side porch.

He thought of grabbing a bite to eat, but he really wasn't hungry. He'd eaten breakfast with Daniel and Laurie and Norton and Stormy, then found himself on the porch at night after the Houses split, and slept for a while, so even though it was morning here, it felt like lunchtime to his body. And he usually skipped lunch.

He stepped off the porch, walked across the dirt and around back. The already hot air was heavy with the muted sound of thousands of chickens, clucking and movingrustlingly in their cages. The four chicken coops, long low buildings of tin roofs and unpainted slat walls, stretched away from the House on a slight grade.

His father's pickup was parked next to the second coop, on this side of the metal silo, and Mark walked over, the gradual slope causing him to unintentionally increase the speed of his step.

He saw the retarded girl in the doorway of the chicken coop behind his father.

The old man was unloading pallets of feed, lifting them off the pickup and piling them on the ground next to the sagging slatted building. She would hide whenever he faced in her direction, retreating into the coop, but the second he turned his back on her, she would jump into the doorway and pull up her shift, exposing herself and thrusting her thin dirty hips out suggestively.

It was the first time Mark had seen her since he'd come back, and he felt the same rush of cold fear he'd experienced before. This was outside, in the sunlight and open air, with his father hard at work between them, but he felt the same way he had years ago, alone in the dark hallway.

Scared.

His father put down a pallet, reached into his back pocket, and grabbed a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He noticed Mark standing there and motioned him over. "I was wondering when you were going to wake up. Why don't you give me a hand here.

My back's killing me."

Mark nodded, moved forward. His attention was still on the girl in the doorway.

Your father does it.

He looked away from her, and tried to concentrate on the task at hand, he and his father each taking one end of the remaining pallets and stacking them on the ground, but he kept seeing her out of the corner of his eye, kept seeing her dirty shift flip up, and he wondered if the old man saw it too and was just pretending not to.

He makes it hurt.

Finally, they finished. His father wiped the sweat from his forehead once again. "I'm going into town to pick up another load and get your mother. Don't wander too far. I'm going to need your help when I get back."

Mark nodded as his father opened the driver's door of the pickup and climbed in. The engine rattled to life, and Mark stood there as the truck bounced up the slight slope to the drive.

He turned back toward the chicken coop.

The girl was still in the doorway, but now she was unmoving, staring at him. "Mark," she said, and he remembered that voice, remembered the way she'd said his name, and a chill surfed down his spine.

She moved slowly forward, away from the coop, toward him, and he took an involuntary step backward.

She stopped. And then she was on the dirt, on her hands and knees, shift flipped up, and just as before, she looked slyly over her shoulder. "I still like it best up the ass."

He had no desire to copulate with her in any shape, form, or manner, but he was seriously tempted to kick her as hard as he could. The thought of his boot connecting with her midsection, knocking her over, knocking that smile off her face, hurting her, making her pay for what she'd done, tempted him sorely, but he knew it would not really accomplish anything. She would not really be hurt--whatever she was--and he would only be snowing his hand, revealing his true emotions.

And that, he figured, was probably the most dangerous thing he could do.

So he remained in place, staring impassively at the girl, and she laughed obscenely, a dirty nasty sound that was at once seductive and derisive, dismissal and promise.

She thrust her buttocks out at him, and he turned away, began walking back toward the House, and the wild sound of her obscene laughter followed him all the way.

He was waiting for his parents in the kitchen when they returned.

Both his mother and father walked in, each of them carrying a sack of groceries.

He took a deep breath. "Mom. Dad. We need to talk."

His parents looked at each other, then looked at him.

It was his father who spoke. "What about, son?"

"About the House."

"I still have those pallets to unload. I thought you could help me--"

"About the girl."

Again, his parents looked at each other.

"Sit down," Mark said, motioning toward the seats he'd pulled out for them at the kitchen table.

They talked.

He did not press his father on the girl, but he described what had happened to him in the hallway, and made it clear that that was why he'd wanted to get out of the House, to run away. And that was exactly what she wanted, he explained. She wanted to weaken the House, wanted to break apart their family, wanted to get them out.

"But I'm not going to let her," he said. "I love you. I love you both."

"I love you, too," his mother said.

His father nodded, put a hand on his arm.

Mark started crying, and tears obscured his vision, and he closed his eyes and rubbed them, and when he opened them again he was alone in the kitchen. The windows had remained, but there was no porch outside, no chicken coops, only a white blanket of fog, and he understood that he had returned.

He felt warmth on the back of his neck, and he jumped up and turned around, but it was Kristen, standing there, smiling at him.

"You did good," Kristen said. "You did fine."

He smiled wryly. "Is everything resolved?"

"Do you still resent them?"

"No."

"Then I guess so." She hugged him, and he felt warm sunlight, but he thought he could hear, from somewhere in the whiteness outside, an echo of that wild, obscene laugh, and he was not sure that it was entirely in his head.

Kristen pulled back, looked at him.

"Only one more thing," she said.

He faced her. "What's that?"

"You have to find the bitch," she said. "And kill her."

Daniel Daniel followedDoneen out of the house into the rain.

There were no barriers keeping him from leaving the building, and once outside he could feel the chill, feel the wind, feel the water against his skin. The air even smelted like his street during a rainstorm, and it was these tactile sensations more than anything else that killed any idea he might have had that this was not really his house, that none of this was really happening.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"To see someone."

"Who?"

"I told you: you're going to have to trust me."

"And you'll leave Tony and Margot alone?"

"That's the deal."

He followed the girl through the small yard, through the gate, to the sidewalk. There was a gang of young toughs leaning against the wall, huddling together in the rain, too cool to use umbrellas but not too cool to wear heavy jackets. They seemed to be waiting for someone.

Daniel thought of Margot and Tony inside the house and wanted to tell these hoods to hit the road, find someplace else to hang out, but he knew they would not be able to hear him.

ThenDoneen skipped ahead, turned left on the sidewalk, stepped up to the gang of youths, and to Daniel's surprise, started talking to them. They gathered around her in a semicircle, leaning down to listen.

They could hear her!

The tallest one straightened, turned toward him, and Daniel's heart skipped a beat as he saw wild purple eyes beneath unnatural, impossibly thick hair. The creature smiled, and his overlarge mouth was filled with tiny sharpened teeth.

She'd tricked him, he realized. She'd set him up.

He turned and tried to run back toward the house, but was stopped halfway down the walk by another invisible barrier that split open his nose and lip and knocked him flat on the ground.

"Kill him!"Doneen yelled from the sidewalk. "Kill him!"

He was too stunned to even lurch back to his feet before the gang surrounded him. They were from the Other Side, he knew. He saw strange hair and strange faces and unbelievable colors in their eyes. He lashed out, tried to kick the closest one, but the creature avoided him easily, and then they were attacking him.

He was kicked and punched and clawed, but he was too busy trying to protect his face and stomach to clearly see what was going on.

Then he was picked up, several strong arms lifting him into the air, and they started biting him.

He screamed as fangs tore into his forearm, as razor teeth ripped the flesh of his cheeks. The pain was unbearable, unbelievable, and an artery in his leg started gushing as sharp teeth chewed through his thigh.

Doneengrinned at him as he was eaten alive. He saw her through the pain, through the faces, through the blood, and if he had one last wish that could be granted, it would be to see her killed.

But he was granted no last wish.

He felt his body die, felt the life within him stop as his heart ceased pumping and his brain functions ended, but beyond the shock and pain there was a lightening, a lessening of weight as his spirit pulled free of its heavy fleshy host and emerged unburdened into the open air.

It was not a transformation, this transition from life to death; there were no disruptions in his thoughts, no change in his self. It was more like kicking off a pair of shoes and going barefoot. Or stripping off clothes and walking naked. The difference was all external, the loss one of accoutrements, not essence.

He saw his body beneath him, saw the jacketed creatures eating his remains, sawDoneen staring at him with victorious glee. She could still see him, and she waved mockingly as he felt a tug on his form, a power drawing him like a magnet. He thought of Margot and was immediately in her bedroom, in her bed, next to her. There was no longer a barrier between them, and for a brief fraction of a second, he smelled her skin, touched her face, felt the smoothness of her breasts.

And then he was yanked back, pulled into and through the House into a House on the Other Side.

It happened in an instant. There was no flight through space, no view of the Eastern Seaboard beneath him, no surrounding blackness through which he passed, simply a sensation ofvacuumlike suction and what looked like a split-section transformation of their bedroom into the House, before he was flat on the floor on the Other Side.

He jumped up. The House in which he found himself was identical to the one he'd entered via the den door, the one in which he'd seen his mother. There were no walls or rooms, only that big open space in that color he did not recognize. Above him were the wispy spirits he had seen before, but though they now looked like individual beings to him rather than clouds, apparently he was not yet one of them. He could neither fly nor float, and he had to run across the floor to the corner, where his mother, still bald, was once again sitting on an egg in a nest.

She smiled at him as he approached.

"I'm dead!" he cried.

She nodded.

He fell into the nest, hugged her, and she felt solid to him, real, and there was something comforting in that.

"Margot's a widow! Tony has no father!"

"Time passes quickly here," his mother said. "They'll be with you soon enough."

The sticks of the nest were hard and uncomfortable against his side, but his mother's arms were soft and warm, her smile welcoming. There were a million questions swirling in his mind. He wanted to know where his father was, where the centuries' worth of other dead people were, whether there was a God or a heaven or a hell, whether he was going to be reincarnated or live here or move on to someplace else, but overpowering everything was the desire for revenge, the burning need to get back atDoneen and punish her, make her pay for what she'd done. He might be dead, but he had not lost his capacity for human emotions. He had not been filled with peace and love and a warm sense of contentment.

He hated the bitch.

He wanted her dead.

"Why am I here?" he asked his mother. "Is this where I'm supposed to spend my ... afterlife?"

She picked up a rose from somewhere in the nest to the right of her and chewed on it thoughtfully.

"You're still in the House," she said. "It doesn't seem to want to let you go."

"Is that good or bad?"

"It's . . . interesting."

"What happened to you?"

"After I was killed?"

He nodded.

"I was freed instantly."

"Did you go ... here?"

She shook her head, laughing, and her laugh was like music. "I am not here even now."

"Where are you?"

"I am on the Other Side."

"Where is this, then? I thought this was the Other Side."

"The border. The Other Side of the border, but the border nevertheless. Until you are fully on the Other Side, you can still go back. You may be dead, but you are not yet completely free from . . . that world. That's what makes it interesting."

"I thought the Houses were charged up again. I

thought the barrier was in place and you ... we ...

couldn't go back and forth."

"You're still part of the House." She looked at him.

"You're not bound by the border. Apparently, the House still needs you."

"But the barrier is up, right? Things aren't. .leakm out anymore, are they?"

"No." She stroked his hair.

"What about those . . . things thatkiliied me?"

"They must've been trapped out there when the border closed."

He blinked. "Jesus, Margot and Tony!"

She placed a calming hand on his. "Those creatures probably burnt themselves out fighting you. They're like fish out of water there. They don't last long. The worlds . . . aren't really compatible." She smiled at him.

"Good."

She nodded. "Yes."

"So where's Billings?"

His mother's face fell, and for the first time, she looked worried. "He's gone."

"I know he's dead. I mean, where's his ghost or his spirit or--"

"He's gone," she said. "There's nothing left of him."

"He--"

"They're not like us, the butler and the girl."

Understanding dawned on him. "Then if he can be killed, she can be killed."

His mother nodded.

"Is that why I'm still part of the House?"

"Perhaps," she mused. She thought for a moment.

"You can capture her, you know."

"Can I kill her?"

She shook her head. "No. Not anymore. You could have if you were alive. But dead you can only hold her, restrain her. You can still bring her back, though. You can return her to the House and keep her here, keep her away from your wife and son." She looked at him as though she'd just thought of it for the first time.

"Your son," she said wonderingly. "My grandson."

He smiled at her. "Tony."

"Tony."

"I think you'd like him, Mom."

"I'm sure I will."

The egg shook, rumbled, and Daniel leaped to his feet, tottering on the unstable branches of the nest. His mother moved off the egg, and helped him out of the nest.

It shook again, vibrated, jerked.

Suddenly the egg cracked open, and from it emerged ... nothing.

A beatific smile crossed his mother's face, and she started to fade. As she grew slowly insubstantial, her hair seemed to return, and she looked more like the mother he remembered. He reached out to her, but their hands passed through each other.

"I love you," his mother said. "We all love you."

"I love you, too."

"I'll see you in--" she began.

And she was gone.

The House darkened, the interior dimming as if a light had been switched off, the blank world outside growing indistinct. He felt panicky, didn't know what he was supposed to do, but he thought of Margot, thought of Tony and he was back home, in their bedroom, standing at If the foot of the bed and staring down at a sleeping Margot.

He felt lost, confused. He supposed, in the back of hisli mind, despite all of the surface layers of skepticism mod- fern life had heaped on him, he had assumed that all would be revealed after death, that the answers to the cosmic questions and metaphysical concerns that had bedeviled mankind since the beginning of history and provided the impetus for every religion would be instantly supplied to him and he would become some sort of wise, enlightened, loving being, far different and far superior to the ordinary average guy he'd been.

But he was the same person as before, no different, if no smarter, no more enlightened.

Just dead.

Piecing together what he knew and what he could infer, Doneen had driven out or killed all of the residents of all of the Houses, leaving the Houses empty, in an attempt to bring down the barrier and open the border, allowing the dead and various beings from the Other Side to invade the material, physical world. Billings, the attendant of the Houses, had doggedly kept on, plugging away as the Houses faded, the barrier weakened, entirely unaware of the girl's existence. Despite Doneen's best efforts to scare them and keep them away, Billings and the Houses had called them back, and once again the integrity of the border was restored, the two worlds separated. But the girl had killed Billings and was now systematically trying to destroy the rest of them. Why? What was the reason? What did she hope to gain? What were her ultimate goals? He didn't know, couldn't say.

He thought of what Mark had said: Magic isn't logical. The observation was wiser than he'd given it credit for being, and he had the feeling that there was no rational reason for what she was doing, that her object was not something he could ever hope to understand.

Whatever her purpose, though, he knew it was evil, knew it was wrong.

He wondered what had happened to Mark, to Stormy and Norton, to Laurie. Had they all been tricked into death as he had been? Had they all been murdered? His mother said that Doneen could not be killed by someone who was dead, that it would take a living human being to stop her, and he assumed that Doneen's immediate plan was to kill them all, to make sure they could not harm her. Why she hadn't murdered them outright, why she'd let them get this far, why she hadn't killed them before they even returned to their Houses, was a mystery.

Perhaps Billings had been protecting them. Perhaps the Houses had. Maybe her power to inflict harm did not extend beyond the Houses' walls.

He looked down at Margot, sleeping soundly, completely unaware of the fact that he was dead and would never return. He was filled with a deep profound sadness, and he felt like crying, but he was not sure if it was for her or himself. It was for both of them, he supposed, for the forced death of their relationship.

He could not cry, though. The emotion was there, but not the physical capability, and he stood there looking down at her, unable to express what he was experiencing.

He reached down to stroke her cheek. His hand did not pass through her, his fingers were stopped by her skin, but there was no sensation of feeling. He felt I

neither the warmth of her body nor the softness of her face. Her cheek was merely an impediment to him. But there was no more wall between them, and though he could no longer feel her the way he had in that split second before he'd been pulled back to the House, just the fact that he could be close to her made him feel better, made him feel good.

He bent down even farther to kiss her, and he realized that when he pressed his cheek to hers, he could hear her sleeping thoughts. She was dreaming about him, planning their reunion, thinking about their future life together, and he had to pull away; it was too painful, too raw. He wished he could talk to her, wished he could communicate, but when he tried to nudge her and wake her up, he found that he could not move her. He could touch her form but was unable to exert any pressure against it. He said her name. Softly first, then louder, but she did not awaken.

He straightened, turned toward the door. Tony was the real reason he'd returned, Tony and Doneen , and he took one last look at Margot's sleeping form, then § walked out of the bedroom. He could not only pass *

through the door now but through the wall, and he walked directly into Tony's room through the back of the closet.

Doneen was on the bed talking to Tony, sitting next to him. The boy could obviously see her, obviously hear her, and there was an expression on his son's face as he listened to the girl that made Daniel feel extremely uneasy.

It was a look he'd never seen before, an insidious, unwholesomely cunning look that seemed totally out of place on Tony and only served to accentuate the influence Doneen was exerting on him.

A doll lay between the two of them.

"Tony!" Daniel yelled.

The boy gave no indication that he could hear.

"Tony!"

Doneen's eyes flicked up at him for a brief second, but she continued talking to his son in a low, steady, even voice, not pausing, and the boy did not turn or even flinch when he screamed his name again.

"TONY!"

Daniel moved closer, grabbed his son's arm, but though his hand closed around the boy's wrist, he could not move the arm, no matter how hard he tried. He put all of his muscles, all of his weight into it, but it was like trying to lift a mountain, he was not able to pull his son even a fraction of an inch.

"Use your mother's teeth for the mouth next time,"

Doneenwas saying. She pointed to the figure's half finished face. "Knock them out while she's asleep and use as many of them as you can on the project."

For the first time since he'd come into the room, Daniel saw hesitancy in his son's face.

"No, Tony!" he yelled, though he knew his son could not hear him. "Don't listen to her!"

"I don't want to do that," Tony said.

"That's okay,"Doneen assured him quickly. "That's all right. Maybe the teeth of someone else. Someone you don't like. Someone at school, maybe."

"Maybe," he said, doubtfully.

She patted his hand, reached between his legs, and gave his crotch a small squeeze. "Just keep on doing what you're doing," she said. "It's a fine job."

"Okay."

Doneenlooked up at Daniel again. "You can work on the hands a bit," she told Tony. "I'll be back in a minute."

He nodded mechanically.

Doneenstood, walked over to the desk. Daniel let go of his son's arm and followed her.

She turned to face him. "I thought I had you killed,"

she said softly, and even though he was already dead, there was something about her tone of voice that frightened him. He could not be threatened with death or physical harm anymore, but in the core of his being he feared her, and he moved back a step.

"What do you think you can do to me? Why are you here?" She stared at him fiercely. "I eat ghosts like you for breakfast."

He kept his voice steady. "You lied. You said you'd leave him alone."

"Yes. I lied."

He reached out and slapped her. His hand connected with her cheek, and her head rocked back.

A look of doubt crossed her features, disappearing as quickly as it had come.

He stared at the red imprint of his hand across her cheek, and thought of what his mother had said.

He could bring her back to the House.

He wasn't exactly sure how to do that. He wasn't sure how he had come back here, for one thing. He'd simply thought about being home and . . . here he was. Was that all there was to it? Could he just think about the House and be returned there?

It was worth a try.

Doneen was scowling at him, and Daniel realized that he might have only one chance.

He'd better make it count.

"I'll kill--" she began.

And he lunged forward.

He grabbed her, tackled her. Concentrating hard, he cleared his mind and thought about where he wanted to go.

They were sucked out of the house and out of the world to the Other Side.

Laurie They walked together into the woods, holding hands.

Dawn's fingers and palm felt slimy in hers, greasy, and Laurie wanted to pull away, but she dared not. She wasn't sure exactly where they were going or what they were going to do, but she was smart enough to know that if she kept quiet, kept her mouth shut and her eyes and ears open, she just might learn something.

Around them, the trees and bushes grew thicker. The path on which they'd started walking had narrowed and dwindled until it was now less a clearly defined trail than a section of forest that was not quite as overgrown as the rest. They'd stopped talking several minutes before, and the only sounds were the crunching of their shoes on themulchy ground and the far-off calls of increasingly bizarre-sounding birds.

Laurie didn't like the woods. She kept thinking she saw movement in the bushes to the sides, shadows amid the ferns, figures that ducked behind tree trunks whenever she turned in their direction. It was unsettling being here, and she was sorry she'd come.

To her left, there was a face formed from the tangle of branches. She did not know if it was really there or if it was a trick of the leaf-filtered sunlight, but the small random shadows on the bare intertwined twigs highlighted a cruel, pointed-nosed face.

She glanced over at Dawn.

Who smiled.

They continued deeper into the woods, and her apprehension increased.

"We're almost there," Dawn said.

"Where?"

"You'll see."

Laurie stopped. "I don't want to see," she said. "I

want to go back. The fun's over."

Dawn's smile took on a strange secretive quality. "The fun hasn't even started yet."

"I'm out of here." Laurie turned, started back the way they'd come, but she immediately slipped on one of the slimy leaves, fell, and before she could get up, Dawn was crouching above her, squatting down. Laurie saw a pink-slittedvagina beneath the dirty tattered slip.

Screaming, she rolled away, jumped to her feet.

Dawn tapped the pull tab on her finger. "I'm your husband," she said.

What the hell was she supposed to do? How was she supposed to get out of here? Laurie glanced quickly around, saw only thick brush and unfamiliar forest.

Above, the sun was blocked by layers of tree leaves and branches.

"It's time to do your wifely duty." The girl lifted the hem of her tattered garment, revealing the split-V of her crotch. "Get on your knees," she said. "And lick it. Lick it clean."

Laurie took off.

She wasn't going to learn anything here, she wasn't going to find out anything that would help her. She was going to end up dead, and she ran as fast as she could away from the girl, through a copse of overgrown man zanita, the red branches scraping the skin of her arms, the small thin leaves slapping against her face. She turned, ran parallel to the path on which they'd come, but nothing looked familiar to her, and when she adjusted her course, running at an angle to intercept the path, she found nothing.

She stopped, breathing heavily, drenched with sweat from the humid air, and looked wildly about. Her sense of direction was completely screwed up, and she did not know which way was the House. Her heart leaped in her chest as she saw the figure of a man in a derby in her peripheral vision, but when she whirled to face the figure, she saw that it was only a skinny sapling with a bushy and irregularly shaped top. From somewhere behind her, Dawn called out her name in an amused, playful voice.

"Laurie!"

That's why her parents had forbid her to come here.

The woods were hers.

"Laurie!"

She started running again, heading in the direction in which she thought they'd come. There was still no sign of the path, but whatever direction she was traveling, she was getting farther away from Dawn, and at this point that was the most important thing.

Ahead was an indentation in the ground, what looked like a partially filled pit, and as she raced around it, Laurie glanced in and saw the bones of cats and rats and other small animals emerging from furry reddish brown mud. There was a partially eviscerated goat as well, lying lengthwise across the bones, and the stem of a red rose protruded from between its clenched teeth.

She continued on without slowing. She was horrendously out of shape, and not only did her lungs feel as though they were going to burst, but the muscles in her legs were cramping, and she knew she would not be able to go on much longer.

"Laurie!" Dawn yelled.

Her voice sounded closer.

She was almost ready to give up and give in, to try to fight it out with the girl if it came to that, but ahead she saw light through the trees, a thinning of brush, and what looked like the black bulk of the House against the sky. She increased her speed, utilizing her last remaining reserves of strength, and ran out from between the trees.

Both of her mothers and both of her fathers, standing on the ground next to the back steps of the porch, turned toward her as she dashed across the open space toward them. "Oh, there you are," her biological mother called out.

Laurie turned around to see Dawn standing at the edge of the trees, stomping her feet, gnashing her teeth.

And then she was gone.

Laurie stared at the place where the girl had been and saw only overgrown weeds. She did not stop, did not slow down, kept running toward the House, but she could not help wondering what had happened. Had Dawn gone back into the woods? Had she somehow transported herself someplace else, back, to the House perhaps? Laurie had the feeling that the disappearance was not intentional, that it had been forced or imposed upon the girl rather than instigated by her, and she hoped that was true.

She was almost to the back porch, and this close she could see that all four of the adults were frowning at her.

"What's wrong?" her biological father asked.

"Oh, Mother!" Laurie cried, but she ran into the arms of Josh's mom, not her own birth mother. She recognized the feel of the woman as she hugged her, the smell of her, and a whole host of memories flooded back, and whether it was that or the release of tension from her escape in the woods, she started crying. She sobbed into her mother's blouse, and the woman held her, patted her back, told her everything was all right.

"Are you okay?" Josh asked, and she remembered his baby voice, remembered when he had talked this way, and that instigated another flood of tears. She pulled away from her mother, wiped her eyes, smiled through her sobs, and dropped to one knee to hug her brother. Although he was obviously confused, he did not struggle against her and there was something that looked like understanding in his eyes. Neither he nor his parents broke character--they all pretended as though she were the daughter of the people they'd come to visit, a girl they liked and felt sorry for but didn't really know--but more was at work here than that, and beneath that surface level was an underlying complicity, an acknowledgment that something else was going on.

Her biological mother offered a grim smile. "We were looking for you. It's time for lunch."

"I'm starving!" Her father clapped his hands together.

"Let's eat!"

Laurie felt suddenly embarrassed, self-conscious, and she dropped back behind the rest of them as they walked up the steps to the porch.

"It's such a beautiful place you have," Josh's mother said, turning and looking around the property from over the railing.

Her father, her biological father, nodded proudly.

"We like it."

Lunch was already on the table, and they ate soup and salad and sandwiches, the adults engaging in polite conversation and completely ignoring what had just happened outside. Laurie and Josh ate in silence.

After they finished, her mother collected all the plates, refusing an offer of assistance from Josh's mom, and promised to return with glasses of homemade lemonade for everyone.

"You should taste her lemonade," her father said.

"Best in California."

Conversation started up again, the war this time, and she excused herself from the table and walked into the kitchen, where her mother was using an ice pick to chop ice on the sink counter.

She took a deep breath. "We have to talk," she said.

Her mother did not even look up. "About what?"

"You have to stop seeing that girl," she said. "Stop seeing Dawn."

A moment of silence.

"So you know," her mother said flatly.

Laurie nodded.

Her mother continued to chop ice. "I can't."

"What do you mean, 'you can't'?"

"I don't want to." Her mother faced her, not embarrassed but defiant, the expression giving her already too serious face an even grimmer cast.

"Jesus."

"She does for me what your father can't do anymore."

"The girl is evil," she told her mother.

Her mother looked away, continued chopping. "You don't think I know that?"

"Then why--"

"I am the mother here. You are the daughter. I do not want to talk about this with you."

Laurie pounded a fist on the counter. "We have to talk about it!"

Her mother looked up at her, surprised, apparently taken aback by the vehemence of her response.

"I don't know if you've noticed, Mother, but I'm not a child anymore. I'm an adult. Aren't you even a little curious why that is?"

Her mother said nothing.