He’d remained in place, anchored to this House, while Mark and Laurie broke off into different directions and faded away with their respective dwellings.

Had they been real at all, he wondered, or were they just manifestations of the House? Had he been alone all along, only thinking there were others here with him? Was this some sort of head trip the House was playing with him, some way of getting information from him or testing his reactions?

He didn’t think so. It was possible, but his gut reaction was that the others were real, that what Billings had told them was the truth, and that now that the Houses were back at full power, they had the strength to merge and separate at will.

So was his House the true House? He was pretty sure it was. He was the one who had remained in place, who had remained here in the House they’d all shared, while Laurie and Mark—and, presumably, Norton and Stormy—had spun off elsewhere.

Except he hadn’t really remained in place, had he? Because this House had changed, too. Gone were any pretexts that this was the exact same home he and his father had fled all those years ago. There were similarities, of course, but there were differences as well, and he stared down the endless hallway wondering exactly where he was now, trying to gather the courage to try some of the doors before him, to explore the House alone.

The sound of whispering from the sitting room behind him and a partial glimpse of a small dark figure—

a doll

—ducking behind the love seat spurred him into action, and he moved forward, started down the hall.

He was about to try and open the first door on the right, when he saw, a hundred yards or so down the corridor, an unmoving lump in the center of the floor. There were no bright fluorescent lights, only dim flame-shaped yellow bulbs on silver fixtures spaced far apart on opposite walls, and he took a few steps forward, squinting, trying to make out what it was.

It looked like a dead body.

He thought he saw the black-on-white of a formal butler’s uniform.

Daniel ran down the hallway. Even running at full speed, it took him a minute or so to reach the body, and the end of the hallway was still nowhere in sight. Breathing heavily, he stared down at the form on the floor.

It was Billings. The butler was lying faceup, and while there were no visible signs of violence and the white shirt remained unsoiled, the hardwood floor around the body was soaked with drying blood. Billings’s eyes were wide open, as was his mouth. There was a small lipstick kiss on his white forehead.

God is dead, Daniel thought crazily. God is dead.

Satan lives.