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I appear to be uninjured In the , I’ll probably suffer fro seems to work

The driver’s door is buckled, won’t open The passenger door still functions As I get out of the vehicle, I draw the pistol froazine contains only seven rounds, not ten

The wreckage in the family room makes it difficult to know quite what the place must have been like before I arrived But there are cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, athat the spider never lived to taste the prey that was enchanted by its architecture, and everywhere is a layer of dust that couldn’t have settled over everything in this first minute after the Jeep broke the doors down

Pistol in a two-hand grip, I sweep the roo

North of here, the sirens of the fire trucks groan into silence The only sounds in the house are the ticks and creaks of the tortured Grand Cherokee cooling down, settling into ruin

Hiskott ht have expected me to attempt a break-in, but of a more conventional kind He won’t have anticipated this But he surely knows I’ quickly, before one of the fa frenzy

A glance at the s reveals that although the air is largely clear around this house and its neighbors on the flat ground below, the rest of Har clouds of soot and ash The hts of the fire trucks pulse and swivel deep within that seethingoff red-and-blue apparitions that chase one another through the scudding smoke

An archway connects the fae eat-in kitchen with an island Crumbs, stale crusts of bread, desiccated cheese rinds, dried spills of sauces, andwads of unidentifiable food litter the countertops Scores of ants crawl through the debris, but they don’t scurry busily in efficient lines of march as do most ordinary ants; instead, they wander desultorily across the counters, as though they have consumed a toxin that leaves them confused and without purpose

Piles of bones litter the filthy floor Ham bones, beef bones, chicken bones, and others Some have been broken as if to facilitate access to the marrow

One of the pair of cabinet doors under the double sink has been torn off its hinges and is nowhere to be seen From the space beyond spills a brittle drift of what appear to be dozens of rat skulls and skeletons, each sucked as clean as a turkey dru man Not a scrap of skin or fur reth of scaly tail has been discarded

The cooktop is encrusted with charred food and filth, less like a stove than like the unholy altar of sorisly sacrifices I doubt that the propane-fired burners have worked in two or three years The assu Dr Hiskott consu ti to Jolie and herhe dereat deal of food, which I believe they leave just inside the front door I doubt that they brought hi a hybrid of a man and an extraterrestrial that will be far advanced beyond the condition of a huht be strange beyond easy coue instead for devolution: if not a steep intellectual decline, at least a severe diminishment of Hiskott’s ability to hold fast to any cultural norms and to repress animal compulsions

A pantry door stands ajar, darkness beyond Pistol still in a two-hand grip, I toe the door open wide The inspill of pale light reveals that the shelves are bare Not one can of vegetables or jar of fruit, or box of pasta Sitting on the floor is a headless human skeleton The skull rests on a shelf separate from the other bones, and a detached arer extended, pointed toward me as if I am expected Neither the bones nor the floor under the flesh

This discovery necessitates a correction to the Harmony-family history of the past five years The skeleton is that of a child, perhaps a boy of about eight If rave in so ventured forth that very night to retrieve the corpse for his larder--or the dead boy was left with him, and Hiskott fashioned for the family false memories of an interment This final twist to the story of Maxy’s already-horrific death is so unthinkable that, should I live, it will be ation to keep it from them Neither Jolie nor anyone close to her must know, at least not until many years of freedom and peace have faded this part of their past as if it were a fever dream

In this house of secrets, I feel displaced in time and space, as if, by the power of the alien presence, this land exists in than here on Earth, as if I live now not less than two years after losing Stormy but dwell instead in the dark future, on the eve of the end-of-all event that will explain the history of the universe

The downstairs hallway is like a tunnel to the afterlife in a filth that telescopes toward a h the pro, but pallid, wintry, and uncertain A switch turns on three ceiling fixtures The bulbs are burned out in the second and third of theht, a door stands open on a landing, beyond which stairs lead down into an unrelenting darkness A stench rises froetation, urine, and other foulness unknown Soht be heavy horn-heeled feet knocking and scraping along a concrete floor, and a voice issues an eerie trilling sound

I try the switch on the landing wall, but it doesn’t suht I pull the door shut There is a deadbolt, which I engage If eventually I ht Before that, I need to clear the rooms on the first two floors, and hope to survive that inspection

I ht filtered by gauzy curtains that hang between open draperies, through a study where bevies of fat moths quail from thesheers and flutter to darker corners as if the shadoill save the toward the foyer and the front rooms

I am no less afraid, but my fear is tempered now by a healthy detestation and by a conviction thatthe Harmony family from this curse In some fundamental sense, I am here to perform an exorcism