“Now, however, the House is failing. Elements of the other world are breaking through to this world, the material world, and elements of your world are breaking into it.”

Mark desperately wanted a drink. “How long have you been here?” he asked. “In the House?”

“I have always been here.”

He didn’t like that answer.

“What about your daughter?”

The assistant frowned. “What?”

“Is she still here?” He saw in his mind the child’s sly corrupt face, and he shivered even as he acknowledged the faint sensual stirring within him.

Billings blinked, puzzled, and an expression closely related to fear crossed his features.

“I have no daughter,” he said.

TWO

Norton

For the first time since he’d arrived, for the first time in his memory, Billingson appeared to be rattled, and Norton felt a small twinge of satisfaction. It was petty, he knew, and should have been beneath him, but the hired hand’s discomfort made him feel good.

At the same time, he was terrified.

He didn’t know what he’d expected to find here when he returned. A haunted house? Yes. Ghosts from his past? Yes. But not this wide-ranging, elaborate, epic situation.

Did he believe it?

There was no doubt in his mind that the hired hand spoke the truth. Nothing else made sense. But the story was so all-inclusive as to be completely overwhelming. A demon possessed a peasant in Bangladesh, or a hiker in the Himalayas caught a glimpse of the abominable snowman, and it was because he didn’t live in the Oakdale house anymore? Such a causal connection seemed on the face of it impossible, but Billingson’s simple explanation tied it all together in a way that seemed to him entirely believable.

And what about the girl?

As happy as he was to see Billingson so shaken, it frightened him to realize that the hired hand knew nothing about the child who was supposed to have been his daughter.

Donna.

He felt a stirring in his groin just thinking about her. But the fact that Billingson, who seemed to know everything, who seemed to be at the center of all that was going on, was completely unaware of the girl’s existence disturbed him in a way he could not explain. As terrifying as the House was, there seemed to be a logic to it, a coherent theory or controlling power behind it. But the girl existed outside of that. She was a wild card, and her existence threw everything off balance, darkening and complicating an already dark and complex picture.

The conversation, the lecture, had been derailed by the revelation that he had seen Billingson’s daughter, but the hired hand, while clearly shaken, faced Norton calmly, once again perfectly composed, and said, “It’s getting late. I think we should finish this discussion in the morning.”