Norton glanced around the sitting room. Until this point, his time in the House had been spent in the sitting room, like a variation of No Exit, and his first thought was that he was going to have to sleep here—on the couch or the love seat or the chairs or the floor—and was never going to be able to leave the room.

But when he asked, “Where am I going to sleep?” Billingson replied, “Your room is waiting for you.”

Indeed, his bedroom was exactly where it had always been: halfway down the third-story hall. There were numerous doors lining both sides of the dark corridor and Norton realized that even as a child he had never known what was in most of those other rooms. Their doors had always been closed or locked, and he had never even wondered what was inside them.

There are other dimensions besides space and time.

It was what Billingson had said when quizzed about the exact placement of the House vis-a-vis the “Other Side,” and though Norton had said nothing at the time, the statement had frightened him and stuck with him.

He was way out of his depth here, and he wished to God he had never come. It was the coward’s response, he knew, but he had no problem answering to that description. He would rather have put up with a million monstrous manifestations on the streets of Finley than be trapped here in this House. Those were intrusions of horror into the normal everyday world. Here, horror was the normal everyday occurrence.

Billingson led him to his bedroom door, opened it for him, and smiled. “Sweet dreams, Nort,” he said before bowing theatrically and heading down the hall.

It was what his father used to say to him each night before tucking him into bed.

Norton took a deep breath, walked into the bedroom.

Everything looked precisely as it had half a century ago.

It was not exactly a surprise, but the extent of his immersion into the past was still staggering. There was the low bed with the red-checkered bedspread, the small corner desk covered with finished and half-finished airplane models, the photos of Buck and Roy Rogers tacked to the wall, the cigar box on the nightstand that he’d used to store his valuables. He looked up. Above the door was the upside-down horseshoe he’d nailed there for good luck.

Good luck.

He smiled wryly. That was a joke. He’d never had anything remotely approaching good luck in this House.

He was bigger and the room and its contents were smaller, but there was none of the awkwardness usually associated with revisiting scenes from childhood. Instead, he felt perfectly at home here. He sat down on the bed, and his body’s memory kicked in, remembering the contours of the mattress and the texture of the bedspread, snuggling into a physical familiarity with the room.