A few evenings later, his father was cutting his hair, and the idea that he should save the cut hair occurred to him. He did not know why, did not know where this notion had come from, but almost as soon as it had flashed into his mind, it had solidified into a necessity, a priority, and after his father finished trimming his bangs and tossed away the newspapers that had been spread on the floor underneath his chair, Daniel snuck into the kitchen, took the crumpled paper with its cache of cut hair, and brought everything back up into his room.

Over the next week, he collected other things: used Kleenex, discarded toothpicks, peach pits, chicken bones, an apple core. It became almost an obsession, this search for specific objects, and while he never knew exactly what he was looking for, he always recognized it when he found it.

He understood that he was supposed to take all of the elements and combine them, make them into a cohesive whole, construct a figure that would serve as a talisman against… Against what?

He did not know, but he worked on the figure nonetheless, adding his newest acquisitions to it at night before he went to bed, reshaping them in the morning when he awoke.

He destroyed the figure as soon as he finished it. He had not noticed until the very end, until every element was in place, exactly what he’d been making, but when he saw the expression he’d created on the figure’s face, saw the threatening stance and intimidating structure of the object, he realized instantly that he had not created a talisman to ward against something but had made a figure designed to attract something.

Something bad.

This was just what Doneen and her father and the house had wanted him to do, and he tore it up immediately, stomping and flattening the pieces, throwing them in a paper bag and taking the sack out to the backyard and burning it.

He heard whispers that night. And his father came into his room and told him in a worried voice not to get out of bed, not even if he had to go to the bathroom, until the sun came out the next morning.

He wet his bed for the first time since kindergarten, but he wasn’t embarrassed and didn’t get in trouble for it, and when he walked into the dining room for breakfast, he heard a portion of a conversation that ended instantly the second he walked through the door:

“What are we going to do?” Mother.

“Nothing we can do. They’re back.” Father.

That night, again, he was told not to get out of bed, but something made him disobey those orders, and he crept silently across the floor of his room and slowly opened the door, peeking out.