I wonder what would happen if this house were connected to the internet. Could we digitally download its memories? Could it travel through the cloud and bring in a host of memories from elsewhere, all the history of the world uploaded from the internet into this one unnatural space, a mansion out of time? Would it break the fabric of space-time? Perhaps it is best if we keep things as they are, as they have always been.

On his way out the door to go find a place to get some work done, Don leans into Elizabeth, pressing his rough stubbled face against hers. She dutifully kisses him back, but her body is leaning away from him even as he leans into her.

When she notices me looking, she puts on a smile and holds it until the door is closed behind him.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” I say. “Having Donovan back, one happy family?”

“Oh.” She pauses as if thinking it over. “Yes, of course. It’s exactly what I wanted.”

But I see her smile fade as she walks away.

I am in a dream.

In the dream, I wander the house like a stranger in a place as unfamiliar as a distant eldritch castle in Europe, growing and stretching and spreading cancerously across a naked landscape, sprouting warrens of crooked corridors and secret rooms that bloom here and there like fireworks out of an abyss. I go about wide-eyed in this oppressively vast arrangement of rooms and hallways, while a heavy dread sits low in my chest.

Everything seems backward, as if I have stepped through the reflection in a mirror. Perhaps I have. Oh God, I think, I forgot—I had intended to smash the mirrors, hadn’t I?

A hallway extends from me, dark and muted, and I cannot for the life of me think of where it goes. From down its unknown length comes a faint bubbling sound, like the frantic percolations of a coffeepot, but higher in pitch.

What is down this hallway?

Part of me wants to turn around and go back the way I’ve come, but I cannot remember any longer what lies behind me either, and so I am trapped between a mystery that was and a mystery that has yet to be, terrorized by the unknown on either side. The longer I stand there, torn between dark worlds, the more familiar the boiling sound becomes, until I recognize it as the phantom giggling of a child.

I strain to see in the dark, wishing I had brought with me a candle or a flashlight on this nighttime dream-jaunt.

Deep in the darkness at the far end of the hallway, if indeed the hallway has an end at all, a silhouette appears by the minutest of degrees, as if from nothing, blooming out of the Never into our own dimension to take a peek.

I am reminded of the phantom I used to see as a child, the Nothing Man. The shadowed shape with nothing inside but a seething, sucking darkness, as if it were sucking in the light around it. As if there were nothing there at all, which is what Elizabeth used to tell me when I complained of seeing him standing at the top of the stairs, blocking my way.