The house, though, had stayed exactly the same. It was as if it were enclosed within a force field or clear protective barrier. The detritus of the street did not reach it. There was no graffiti on its walls, no garbage thrown on its lawn. The handful of homes remaining around it had deteriorated tremendously and were now as dilapidated as the surrounding apartment buildings, but the house remained unchanged.

There was something spooky about that.

Butchery.

He realized that he had never asked the kid why he had called his film Butchery. Sitting there in his rental car, in the middle of the slummy neighborhood, staring at his unchanged home, that suddenly seemed important.

The early afternoon sun was blocked by buildings, but its light shone through the broken windows of an empty fire-gutted structure across the street, casting bizarre shadows on the face of the house, shadows that were too abstract to resemble anything real but that nonetheless jogged some recess of his memory.

Stormy got out of the car. He felt like a flea standing before a tidal wave. If whatever was happening encompassed this house in Chicago, the theater in Albuquerque, the reservation, and God knew what else, he was a dust speck in the face of it. It made no sense for him to even be here. The thought that he could do something, that he could make a difference, that he could possibly have an influence over anything was ludicrous. He’d been drawn here, called perhaps, summoned, but he understood now that for him to try to intervene was pointless.

Still, he opened the small gate and walked through the well-tended yard to the porch.

It was a warm afternoon, but the air was cold in the shadow of the house, and he remembered that from before. He felt like a kid again, powerless, at the mercy of things he didn’t understand. He knew his grandmother and parents were dead, understood it intellectually, but emotionally it felt to him as though they were inside, waiting for him, waiting to criticize him, waiting to punish him, and he wiped his sweaty palms on his pants.

He had no key, but the front door was unlocked, and he opened it, walked inside. He was wrong: the house had changed. Not the building itself, not the walls or the floors or the ceilings or the furnishings. Those were exactly as they had been thirty years before. Almost eerily so. But the mood of the house seemed different, the air of regal formality that had reigned previously, that had so permeated every inch of this place, was gone, replaced with a graceless foreboding. He walked forward, turned right. The long hallway in which he had played as a child now seemed grim and intimidating, its opposite end fading into a gloomy darkness that for some reason frightened him.

There was no way he’d be able to muster the bravery to even attempt to go upstairs.