He ran back down the front stairs. He picked up the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed 911. It rang once before a recording played, asking him to hold. He hung up and dialed again. One ring and the same recording.

He dropped the phone from his ear when he heard a thump in the basement beneath him. He threw open the door, about to call down into the darkness—but something made him stop. He listened, and heard…something.

Shuffling footsteps. More than one set, coming up the stairs, approaching the halfway point where the steps hooked ninety degrees and turned toward him.

“Joan?” he said. “Keene? Audrey?”

But he was already backpedaling. Falling backward, striking the door frame, then scrambling back through the kitchen, past the gunk on the walls and into the mudroom. His only thought was to get out of there.

He slammed through the storm door and out into the driveway, running to the street, yelling at the driver sitting behind the wheel, who didn’t understand English. Roger opened the back door and jumped inside.

“Lock the doors! Lock the doors!”

The driver turned his head. “Yes. Eight dollar and thirty.”

“Lock the goddamn doors!”

Roger looked back at the driveway. Three strangers, two women and one man, exited his mudroom and started across his lawn.

“Go! Go! Drive!”

The driver tapped the pay slot in the partition between the front and back seats. “You pay, I go.”

Four of them now. Roger stared, stupefied, as a familiar-looking man wearing a ripped shirt knocked the others aside to get to the taxi first. It was Franco, their gardener. He looked through the passenger-door window at Roger, his staring eyes pale in the center but red around the rims, like a corona of bloodred crazy. He opened his mouth as though to roar at Roger—and then this thing came out, punched the window with a solid whack, right at Roger’s face, then retracted.

Roger stared. What the hell did I just see?

It happened again. Roger understood—on a pebble level, deep beneath many mattresses of fear, panic, mania—that Franco, or this thing that was Franco, didn’t know or had forgotten or misjudged the properties of glass. He appeared confused by the transparency of this solid.

“Drive!” screamed Roger. “Drive!”

Two of them stood close, in front of the taxi now. A man and a woman, headlights brightening their waists. There were seven or eight in total, all around them, others coming out of the neighbors’ houses.

The driver yelled something in his own language, leaning on the horn.

“Drive!” screamed Roger.

The driver reached for something on the floor instead. He pulled up a small bag the size of a toiletry case and ran back the zipper, spilling out a few Zagnut bars before getting his hand on a tiny silver revolver. He waved the weapon at the windshield and hollered in fear.