Stormy felt increasingly cold as he watched the film, filled with a growing sense of dread.

He knew this house.

He knew this story.

It was his parents’ place in Chicago, and the unnamed boy was himself as a child, navigating the treacherous waters of the unstable household, trying to maintain for himself a normal existence despite the continuous undefined threats of the strange insular world around him. He’d forgotten a lot of this, forgotten the butler, forgotten the intimidating house, forgotten the feeling of being always off balance, always nervous, always floundering, but it came back to him now as he watched the movie, and when the boy was seduced by the butler’s sly daughter, posing as a homeless street urchin, Stormy mouthed the girl’s name.

“Donielle.”

If the film fell into any genre, it would be psychological horror, but that limiting label did not begin to convey the scope of the work. Russ was right. The film was amazingly accomplished. As good as the Hopi kid’s flick. It created an unsettling universe of its own, and despite the rather slow pace of the movie, it drew the viewer in, and it made one care deeply about the fate of its protagonist.

It was not the film’s artistic merit, however, but the personal connection, the references to himself, to his own life, to his childhood, that gripped Stormy, that left him staring at the snow-filled screen for several minutes after the movie had ended.

It meant something, he knew, but again he didn’t know what.

He thought of what he’d seen in the theater, and the connection was made.

Theater.

Film.

There was a thread linking his childhood in that horrible frightening house to the disappearing figure, the fruit salad in the toilet, the rose in the cheese in the sink drain. It was a connective tissue so fine as to be almost nonexistent, but it was there, and it was extant, and he was suddenly possessed by the need to meet the person who had made this movie.

There was a feeling of urgency about it, an imperative sense that, like a house of cards, it all might fall apart and whatever tentative connections had been established would disappear.

He burst out of his office. Joan, at her desk, jumped. “Where’s Russ?” he demanded.

“Duping room.”

Stormy strode down the hall to the technical facilities and held up the videocassette. “Where did you get this film?” he demanded.

Russ looked up from the equipment, startled. “A, uh, friend of mine gave it to me. He got it from P.P. Rodman, the guy who made it.”

“Where is this Rodman?”

“Do you want to buy the distribution rights?”

“I want to meet the person who made this film.”

“He lives on the reservation.”

The reservation.