He regretted blowing on the row of books once the dust mushroomed up, flinging grit into his eyes and choking him. When the cloud settled Sam squinted his runny eyes at the spines: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, De Vermis Mysteriis, The Trail of the Many-Footed One. Leaning against these clothbound books was what looked to be a photo album or scrapbook. Sam carefully shifted this volume to face him and pulled back its plain brown leather cover.

Photographs that looked to have been torn from entomology textbooks were sloppily pasted next to Egyptian papyri that, if the ugly handwritten footnotes were to be trusted, all dealt with an Egyptian funerary god named Sepa. There were also sepia-toned photographs of tiny churchyards. Some of the graves appeared upset. Misspelled margin notes repeatedly praised the Guardian of the Larvae of the Dead. Upon one of the pages was a poem in faded pencil scrawling:

Arise O Lord of the Larvae of the Dead!

Burrow! Squirm! Appear!

Your tendrils drip with dew from the caverns of Hades,

the jewelled filth from Catacombs of Ptolemais,

& the great silent dark that holds fast between the worlds.

Glut on the meat of the temporal realm so that I

may gain yet one more day of life above the tombs!

Sam closed the cover and wiped his fingers on his jacket. His attempt to return the scrapbook to its perch was made sloppy by his unsteady hand. Something fell from the shelf and landed on the table with a clunk. Not wanting to touch anything else in the room, Sam tugged his jacket sleeve down to protect his hand while he lifted the Mason jar from the tabletop. Whatever the brownish substance was inside, it certainly had heft. Sam rotated the jar slowly, trying to discern its contents despite not truly wanting the answer. He took a step toward the window. Through the boards he could see the capped well, looking much like an ugly coin lying within the weedy lawn.

Holding the jar up to the light, Sam saw enough to suggest that what it held was indeed a wad of centipedes preserved in some sludgy liquid. His stomach heaved, and he quickly returned the jar to the shelf. Next to it Sam noticed what looked to be a wooden phallus. But this sexual aid was spiked with a number of toothpick legs. He did not bother to count them.

Shock was the only force that retarded Sam. Had his brain not registered the sight of the closet door opening, had his eyes not caught the suggestion of the shape in the darkened alcove, he would have run wildly, been out of this house, been racing through the sunlit woods, his car keys in his fist.