The light radiated from two small orbs the size and hue of fresh embers. Jon watched them as they bobbed before the main floor window. The sensation that overcame him as he studied the orbs was something Jon could not identify. Though the lights dazzled him, he felt no joy. While their sheer strangeness frightened him, he would not have called this feeling terror.

The lights began to waver, brightening and fading in turn.

It was crucial that he fully see them, that he bask in their presence as intimately and for as long as possible. He mustn’t let them vanish. Even the act of closing the door behind him felt like an interminable delay.

Jon took the stairs two at a time, but by the time his feet hit the foyer, the glowing orbs were gone.

Disappointment weighted him like a millstone. He imagined himself as the figure in some Expressionist painting—all shadow and low-hanging head, stewing in his own ennui.

“Is she taking care of you?”

Jon spun around and saw that he was not the sole figure in this grim setting. Teddy was seated at the dining table. The bottle of scotch before him was visibly emptier than it had been at dinner. Judging by the slur of his speech, much of it had gone down Teddy’s throat.

“Did you see them,” Jon asked, “the lights?”

“I’m sure she is,” Teddy continued. “Paige takes care of all her men. For a while. That’s the way it goes…Paige’s father took care of her, then we took care of him… That long final year…we took care…we just had to add a little bit in his food…just a touch…meal after meal after meal…even the coroner couldn’t tell…Paige saw to everything… And then the windfall was all hers…she told me it’d be ours…but it was hers…or hers and yours now maybe…”

“What are you saying?”

Teddy refilled his glass. The silence that hung between the two men was made even more tedious by the grandfather clock whose ticking emphasized the interminable length of this pause.

“I don’t like this place.” Teddy’s voice had now assumed the grating whine of the self-pitying drunk. “Don’t like it at all…too close to last year’s…we should have gone farther away…you should have gone farther, too…”

The light returned. Or perhaps this was the emergence of a different light altogether, for its colour and its intensity were different. No longer the scarlet orbs, this new light was bluish and painfully bright. It pressed in on the entire front of the house, brightening the foyer like some close, ferocious moon. Jon hurried to the living room’s picture window.

Without, the entire property was awash in the livid shimmer. All shadow had been purged.