“If you have something to tell us—do it now, or we’re leaving. I may not know much, but I know that girl isn’t Charlie, or she is under some kind of influence.” He waited for a response, but none came. “She isn’t herself,” he added, sounding more desperate than before. Jen looked up at them: her rigid face had broken, tears were in her eyes.

A knock came from the front door, and even Jen startled. She looked to the door, then back to John and Jessica. Her face was grave. “That way,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper, pointing down a narrow hallway. “Close the door behind you.” The knock came again; John touched Jessica’s arm and nodded, and they got up from the table, careful not to let the chairs make noise as they dragged across the floor.

The hallway was dark, the only light coming from the room they had just left, and John kept a hand on the wall for balance. After a second his eyes adjusted, and he could see an open door at the end of the hall.

“John, come on,” Jessica whispered, grabbing his arm briefly as she brushed past him and hurried into the room.

“Yeah,” he said, and stopped moving as his fingers touched the frame of a door.

“John!” Jessica hissed. John tried the door. It opened easily; he peered in, and recoiled.

Someone’s in there!

“John!” Jessica whispered urgently as the knock at the door came again. John didn’t move.

It took only a second for him to register that the figure in the closet was not a person. It was about his height, with a roughly human shape, but it resembled nothing that had ever been alive. John stepped closer and took his keys from his pocket. He switched on the keyring penlight, and swept it up and down quickly. His heart stopped. It was a skeleton, metal and naked wires, encased in nothing. Its arms hung at its sides, and its head was bowed, exposing its open skull, the circuits silent and lightless. Its face was bare and metal.

“John!” Jessica was standing behind the door at the end of the hall, holding it open just a crack as she waited for him. John closed the closet door, blinded again in the darkness, and walked toward the sound of her voice like a beacon. His steps took ages, the air like molasses, as the thing in the closet echoed in his mind like a gunshot, drowning out everything else.

In a daze, John reached the end of the hall as Jessica beckoned frantically. She grabbed his arm and pulled him inside, carefully closing the door behind him.

“What’s wrong with you? John, what was in that closet?” she whispered, still holding on to his arm, her nails digging in, bringing him closer to reality.