That surprised him. To his knowledge, his wife had never been a religious woman, and he did not think he had ever seen her pray in all their years of marriage. Had she always done so, hiding it from him, doing it when he was asleep or out of the room? Or had she only started recently, after his abrupt departure? Either way, he was oddly touched by her actions. He wished he could kiss her, even if it was just a simple peck on the forehead, but the barrier was still in place.

Margot had closed the bedroom door, and he walked over to see if he could open it. He could not, but it was as if the door were not there for him and he passed right through it. Could he walk through walls too? He tried it, got a bump on the head for his attempt.

His headache even worse now, he walked down the short hallway, passed through Tony’s door.

His son was making another doll.

Daniel stared in horror as he watched the boy open the closet door, glance furtively around, and pull out a new doll. This one had a body made from a McDonald’s sack tied with rubber bands. Its arms and legs were twigs, its head a scruffy and nearly bald tennis ball with carefully pasted string segments positioned into crudely simplistic facial features.

Tony carried the figure to the bed, placed it on his pillow. He withdrew from his pocket a folded Baggie filled with what looked like dead spiders. Smiling to himself, he reached into the plastic sandwich bag, tore off the legs of a dead daddy longlegs, and placed them on a strip of exposed tape atop the doll’s head.

He was making hair.

“Tony!” Daniel screamed. “Goddamn it, Tony!”

The boy’s concentration was focused completely on the doll. Daniel looked back at the door, saw that it was locked. He hurried outside, back to Margot, hoping that she’d be awakened by Tony’s movements or at least alerted on some psychic level to what was going on in the next room, but she was sound asleep, a mild frown furrowing her brow.

Daniel sped back to Tony’s bedroom. The overhead light was off, the only illumination an orangish circle emanating from the small desk lamp, and it looked like a spotlight was being trained on the boy and the doll.

“Tony!” he screamed again.

The boy did not even hesitate, kept applying spider legs to the doll head.

There was a loud creak from somewhere else in the house, settling engendered by temperature and humidity and the contrast between the wet rainy world outside and the dry warm world inside. Tony froze, not even daring to breathe, his eyes staring at the closed bedroom door as he waited to see whether his mother was on her way.