She shook her head.

My frustration renewed, I took another step, more of her crayons cracking under the heel of my black riding boot. Stopping short, I bent to retrieve my mangled work.

“Your drawings. Shall I assume they are all of me?” I asked, and, this time, she nodded.

In response, I tore the papers into shreds and flung the scraps toward the room.

“There,” I growled as I swung to face her again. “Now do you understand?”

Charlie scurried to put the piano bench between us.

“You’re a bad man!” She gripped the bench, the fury in her voice scarcely contained.

“Yes,” I hissed back at her. “I am.”

Her body shaking, she actually chucked the two halves of her broken crayon my way.

The pieces bounced off me and tapped against the floor. I threw my cloak back, causing her to yelp and, like a frightened mouse, take refuge beneath the piano’s drop cloth.

The toe of one shoe still poked out from beneath, though, its smallness inciting me to once again check myself. For her terror did not serve my purpose. Not so much as her influence did. And, at this juncture, I needed more of the latter than I did the former.

“I suppose you do understand,” I muttered, more to myself. “In your own way.”

“I’m not scared of you.”

I curled one hand tight enough to cause the leather of my glove to creak. Then I released the clench, tucked my hands behind my back, and resolved to begin again. Why terrify Charlie outright when she herself could not bring about my goal of an empty house?

Things were not going as planned, though. Nearly a week had passed and no matter what proof her younger sister supplied, Stephanie refused to buy into even the possibility of my existence.

“I don’t need you to be frightened of me,” I told her.

“Good!” Again, this came from behind the cloth. “ ’Cause I’m not.”

“Then you won’t be averse to helping me.”

“Stephanie’s going to make you get lost.”

“That I am lost already is the issue at hand,” I said, pacing while I addressed the piano.

“Are you going to hurt us?”

I frowned, the question burning through the lingering scraps of my anger.

“It is not my wish to,” I admitted. “And that is why you, your father, and your sister must go.”

Charlie lifted the fabric, one eye peering out at me. “How did you get torn up?”

How to answer her? How to make a child understand when I still, even after all this time, did not fully grasp the particulars myself?

“Is your face torn up, too?” she pressed. “Is that why you wear a mask?”

The lights flickered, the bulb of a nearby work lamp dying with a soft pop. I sneered behind the mask that obscured the whole of my countenance, papery lips peeling back.

“Yesterday,” I said in an effort to steer both of us back on course, “you accompanied your father into the basement. You are not to go down there again. By yourself or otherwise. Do I make myself clear?”