He didn’t think so. Death was responsible for most of the sadness in the world, and if loved ones were still around after they died, if ghosts weren’t considered frighteningly unnatural, weren’t demonized by myth and religions but were accepted as merely another form of being, all of that grieving and mourning and anguish and depression would be immediately eliminated.

But were the living and the dead supposed to mix?

They had at one time. Before the House.

According to Billingham, though, if they’d continued to do so, his world would have long since been engulfed and would no longer exist.

Was this heaven? he wondered.

Or hell?

Maybe it was both.

Through the windows, he could see other houses of the same unknown color, an endless line of them, like repeating images in a hall of mirrors, stretching endlessly to either side.

In front was whiteness.

In back was black.

Was this the afterlife? Was this where people went when they died? It seemed kind of small and limiting, kind of barren. He had never really given much thought to what would happen to him after death, and if pressed he probably would have said that his brain would stop and that would be it, he would cease to exist. He had never really believed in a heaven or hell.

But clearly, the soul, the spirit, the essence of a person, did live on after death.

Only…

Only he found it kind of depressing. If he had imagined a hereafter, it would have been more expansive than this, more luxurious, more along the lines of traditional conceptions. But if his mother died only to become a bald lady sitting on a nest in an empty house…

Well, simply having his brain stop and ceasing to exist didn’t seem quite so bad.

But that feeling disappeared as he gathered his courage and began walking toward her. She called his name again, and waved to him, but as he drew closer she seemed to fade and grow insubstantial. Her form became slim and wavery, and as he reached the nest, she floated upward, joining the clouds at the top of the house. Only they weren’t clouds, he saw now. They were spirits. The wisps had faces, faint traces of eyes and mouths that shifted and changed as they moved.

As one, all of the clouds, all of the spirits, flew out of the window of the center gable, into the whiteness, where they became a rainbow and then were gone.

Stormy was filled with an almost joyous sense of wonder, and the realization that the afterlife was not limited to this row of houses, that it encompassed a world far beyond what he could see or understand, cheered him up immensely. He looked around the empty house with awe.

The egg and the nest still remained, and he patted the egg a few times. It felt warm, leathery, and he wondered what was in it.