It was to no avail. His mother died in front of their eyes, not professing her love for them, not reassuring them with last words, but gasping silently like a fish out of water, jerking and twitching spasmodically.

The next week was a blur. There were doctors and police and morticians and other men in uniforms and suits who came in and out of the house. An autopsy was performed on his mother’s body and he wanted to ask if they found the dust monster within her, but he was told that the cause of death was heart failure, and he figured that the creature had either gotten out or had simply dissipated and come apart within her system.

He knew, though. And his father knew. And the two of them started packing up their belongings, planning to leave.

“Where are we going?” Daniel asked.

“Anywhere,” his father said in the defeated monotone that had become his normal voice.

But they were only in the very earliest stages of packing when they were confronted by Billingsly. The servant knocked on the frame of the open doorway as usual and stood deferentially outside the room, and Daniel was immediately filled with a deep cold fear at the sight of him. He glanced over at his father and saw that his father appeared frightened as well. He’d put down the jewelry box he’d been holding and stood staring at the servant.

“You can’t go,” Billingsly said quietly.

Daniel’s father said nothing.

“You have a responsibility to uphold.”

For the first time since his mother’s death, Daniel saw tears in his father’s eyes. The sight made him uncomfortable and, on some level, frightened, but though he wanted to look away, he did not.

“I can’t,” his father said.

“You must,” Billingsly insisted. He looked at them. “You both have to stay.”

They did stay. For several more years. Until Daniel entered high school. They remained in the house, battered and victimized by the same unseen forces that had killed his mother, each of them maintaining three bedrooms, never sure when one bed might be overrun by colored worms or stained with black water, or when the furniture might decide to shift shape or a room disappear altogether. They never talked about it—any of it—this was simply the way they lived, and his mother’s death became by unspoken agreement a secret memory, not discussed or referenced or even alluded to, part of an alternate history that did not conform to the lie they lived.

And then, one day, they left. They packed nothing, took nothing with them. Daniel just received a call slip from the office on the first day of his freshman year in high school, and when he walked over, his father was waiting for him.

The two of them got in the car and left.

To Pennsylvania.