He was wearing the same flight suit and sheepskin-lined leather jacket he’d taken off in a week ago. They were stiff with water damage and crusted with salt. The thin, fair beginnings of a beard stubbled his filthy face. His eyes were unchanged, clear, bright hazel with a touch of madness in them.

“Hello, Louisa,” he rasped, and I held the front door open for him.

I was too shocked to touch him. I didn’t dare. I didn’t—he’d suffered something I didn’t understand, and it scared me like nothing had ever scared me before. What if it was my fault? Had I helped send him into that hell?

I couldn’t do anything but follow him into the house.

He limped to the bar.

Nancy Campbell looked up and dropped a glass. It smashed into a thousand pieces on the cold stone floor.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” she sobbed.

“Jamie Stuart,” Ellen whispered. “God be thanked.”

He didn’t look at any of us. He raised his head and scanned the oak beam above the bar, all shiny with shillings and sixpences and threepenny bits. He reached up and twitched out one coin.

“Silver promised to buy me a pint,” he said hoarsely. His voice grated as if he hadn’t used it since the last time we saw him.

The thin sixpence clinked on the brass top of the bar as Jamie slapped it down. For a few seconds he held his hand spread out there over the coin, staring at his fingers in fascination and disgust. Ellen and Phyllis and Jane were all sitting and couldn’t see his hand. But Mrs. Campbell could see it from where she faced him over the bar, and I was standing just one step behind him and I saw it too.

His little finger and ring finger were black as tar, black as bitumen, as if he had dipped them in ink to the second knuckles. The skin faded through gray and blue and green and purple back to where his fingers joined his hand. The rest of the hand was pale and filthy and covered with angry red blisters. But it was alive. The black fingers were dead.

Mrs. Campbell let out another sob. “What—?”

Jamie shook his head. “The others are the same,” he said. He laid his left hand on the bar lined up with his right hand, all ten fingers spread flat. The last two fingers of his left hand were mostly as blackened and dead as the ones on the right.