But he could not drag Hal into this. As grateful as he was for his friend’s advice and support, for his willingness to share the burdens to be borne, he knew deep down that the responsibility was his own. This was something he had to do himself. He could not risk endangering Hal.

He walked into the bedroom, threw the blanket and the toast atop it to the floor, and got his suitcase out of the closet, throwing it onto the mattress. He began packing underwear and socks, shirts and pants.

No, he decided. He would not pick up Hal. He would leave his friend behind.

He would go back to the house alone.

There were signs along the way.

It was remarkable how quickly and completely his thinking, his mindset, his outlook had changed. He who had always been so literal and logical and concrete, who had never entertained the possibility that anything outside the material world existed, was now reading import into roadside occurrences, seeing omens in passing phenomena glimpsed through the windshield of his car. It was egocentric, this thinking, this belief that supernatural forces were creating portents out of landscapes and natural objects just for his sake.

But he knew that’s what was happening.

Over the town of Magruder, he saw a black rainbow. No clouds, no rain, only the black-banded arch, stretching across the clear blue sky.

It began in a pasture this side of the town.

Its end appeared to be somewhere in the vicinity of Oakdale.

There were other signs as well. In Shaw: bodies of dead squirrels piled into a pyramid on the empty front island of an abandoned gas station. In Edison: a sycamore that had been carved into the shape of a girl bearing an eerie resemblance to a thin and stretched-out Donna. In Haytown: a bearded wild-haired hitchhiker by the side of the road, holding a homemade sign that read: “Return.”

He almost chickened out. Driving into Oakdale from the east side of town, he could see the weather vane on the roof of the house’s central gable, visible even above the bank building. He passed through the downtown, grown from two blocks to five in the intervening years and now populated with fast-food restaurants and gas stations, and emerged into open farmland. Ahead, off the road, was the house, its dark bulk contrasting sharply with the low white buildings of the other farms.

The black rainbow ended at the foot of the drive.

It disappeared almost instantly, and his first instinct was to make a U-turn and head back to Finley.

But then he thought of Carole’s ghost and the trail of toast and the dirty girl in the empty house and he knew he had to go forward.

Return.

He drove down the road, up the drive, to the house.

There was a plucked chicken waiting for him.