Once he could have opened a door all the way back to Middleton. He could have folded space and stepped through, as if he were walking across the street.

But it’s been years since he pulled that trick. He doesn’t know where he’d arrive if he tried it; he might appear halfway into a wall if someone has built a house where there used to be empty space.

Instead, he takes two connections from Vegas on a discount airline, and each plane seems a little older and crappier than the one before. On the last leg of the trip, his armrest is broken and he’s pretty sure he can hear the wings creaking.

It gets him home. Or the place he used to think of as home, anyway.

He has a few hours before he meets the others. Eric rents a car — his already overstressed Visa card practically groaning under the weight of the charge — and drives around, getting the feel of the town again, looking at the old, familiar sights. It doesn’t take long. He makes a quick pass by his old house. It has a fresh coat of paint, kids’ bikes discarded on the lawn, and a new basketball hoop in the driveway.

He doesn’t know what he expected to find. Eric’s father left them when Eric was twelve. His mother sold the house not long after Eric took off for college. She and her current husband are living in Santa Fe now. (They showed up at one of his performances last year; she told him, “My therapist says I’m ready to forgive you,” so that’s how that went.)

He looks at the bikes and the hoop. He wonders what it would be like, to be raised by people who actually liked you.

He sits there long enough to worry that someone will call the cops on him. Eric knows he can’t put it off any longer. He drives out of town, toward the woods.

Middleton has expanded in this direction, construction encroaching on what used to be nothing but forest. There is a small billboard, an advertisement for a planned community, ready by next fall. NEW HOMES COMING SOON FROM BIXBY DEVELOPMENTS, it reads.

Eric wonders what kind of nightmares the kids in those houses will have, if they will feel the things that once walked on the ground under their beds. He hopes not.

It takes him a little while to find the glade. He pulls off the road and parks, then walks to the center of the clearing, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING signs.

It has been desecrated. That’s the only word that comes to mind.