He sat down on the side of the bed and stared at the screen. He didn’t know what he was watching, but it definitely had a documentary feel, a gritty unstaged look that gave it the appearance of reality, a verisimilitude only reinforced by the generic synthesized music that accompanied the montage of pan shots. It was film, not video, a travel show or nature show or Indian show, and it had obviously been shot in New Mexico—he recognized the familiar blue sky and massive clouds as well as the adobe ruins of Bandelier. He’d heard no voice-over since turning on the television, but he knew from the rhythm of the piece that narration would kick in at any second, and he lay down on his side and piled both pillows beneath his head to watch.

The program did not play out the way he expected, however. There was no narration, and the panoramic vistas and beautifully shot ruins gave way to uninspired and routinely lensed footage of high-desert brush along the side of a flat dirt road. The music disappeared, and the camera panned down to a low, heavily eroded ditch by the side of the road, where a dead body lay twisted against the exposed roots of a palo verde.

Roberta.

Stormy sat up at the sight of his wife, all of the air in his body seeming to escape in one violently exhaled breath. She was wearing only torn panties and a dirty bra. Her right arm, bloody, a section of skin torn off and blackened with dried blood, lay twisted behind her back at an impossible angle.

In her hand was a piece of cheddar cheese with a rose embedded in it.

The camera panned up her body, and Stormy saw that there was a trail of black dots stretched across her forehead and her wildly staring eyes that looked like—

burned ants.

He stood, intending to get Norton and bring him back here, to find out why their lives and experiences were crossing all of a sudden, but he could not leave before the program ended, and he yelled “Norton! Norton!” at the top of his lungs as he stared at the screen and watched a lingering shot of what looked like a rotting full-sized marlin lying in the ditch next to her.

The House started to shake.

It was not merely a rumble or single jolt this time but a full-scale quake that rocked the foundations of the House and tilted the floor as though it were the deck of a storm-tossed ship. The television winked off instantly, but the lights in the room remained operational, and he could at least see what was happening as he was knocked off his feet by the force of the temblor and sent flying into the wall beneath where the window used to be.

Stormy scurried across the floor, half crawling. The door had been thrown open, and he scrambled into the hallway.