It’s Daphne.

Practical Emily knows this for a fact.

“Emily?”

Because Emily isn’t moving. Her eyes are wider than Jan’s ever seen them. Even as a little kid, Emily wasn’t afraid of the same things other kids were. She didn’t mind the dark. Didn’t mind the basement. Didn’t mind ghost stories.

What scares her now?

“Emily?”

Jan thinks to drive, but there’s a sense, a feeling, that her daughter is somehow rooted to this spot. Like someone has a gun trained on her and if Jan moves this car an inch, Emily will die.

“Daphne…” Emily says.

And she sounds practical, even now. The realism Jan is so proud to have instilled in her daughter.

Jan does not ask what Emily means. She only asks:

“Where?”

Yes, she’s asking Emily where the Samhattan myth is standing. Where exactly is this legend so she, Jan, can stop her.

And when’s the last time Jan Holt heard that name? It feels like it’s been shot out of the past, her past, the city’s past too.

Emily doesn’t move, she can’t, but she looks hard to the right, far as she is able.

Then the right side of her face caves in. Like papier-mâché. An aluminum can crushed in an unseen fist. Nothing there to make it happen. No pressure, no vise. As if Jan is watching Emily removing her helmet on Mars.

“Emily!”

Jan reaches for her daughter just as the left side caves in, symmetrical now. But not really. And now Emily doesn’t look like Emily anymore. Her eyes long ovals, ugly shapes, her nose the width of a hand.

Jan can’t move. Can’t take her eyes off her daughter.

And sees nobody beside her.

It’s like balling up a piece of paper from there. As Emily’s head shrinks in size, crushed into garbage, as Jan screams and the woman in the street cries out (and runs; somewhere in this nightmare Jan hears footsteps racing away from this scene).

Jan floors it.

But this doesn’t stop what’s happening. As she drives fast, as she cries out, Emily’s right shoulder caves in. Her left. Like her daughter’s made of cardboard. Crushed in the recycle truck. She sees (and hears) it all. Sees Emily’s fingers compressed, her chest go suddenly concave, her thighs flattened to the seat.

Jan doesn’t know when she started screaming but she hasn’t stopped. And she’s driving too fast. Too sharp a turn, so that she’s no longer traveling toward the highway but rather toward the brick façade of one of the gray Samhattan warehouses, this concrete valley before the highway, the way out, the way they were heading, she, Jan, having made the right choice, dammit, the decision to leave this city, the people here not having been this scared since Randy Scotts, since a city worker went home to home, removing the lips from unsuspecting Samhattanites; the way out, this was supposed to be the practical thing to do.

She looks to the passenger seat just before the Blazer smashes against the side of the warehouse. Emily has been reduced to a crushed pile of features, and in that mess, an approximation of a face she knows so well, a face she loves, looking back at her, an expression, formed haphazardly by what remains, a look that says: