Laurie looked through the window to her right, into the sitting room. Josh and their parents and her biological father were still seated, still talking over mundane matters, and she understood that she would not learn anything from her brother or either set of parents. For all she knew, they were the psychic equivalent of tape loops; unchanging and unalterable reflections of what had once occurred, endlessly repeating.

But Dawn was different. Dawn was definitely real, of her time, of her House, and Laurie vowed that she would find out what she could from the girl.

“What are you drinking?” she asked politely.

Grinning, Dawn held out her cup. “I like wood chips in my water.”

Sure enough, the water in the cup was dirty, filled with dead floating leaves, splintered wood, and oversized pieces of sawdust. The girl pressed the cup to her lips, tilted it, drank the remaining contents. She smiled at Laurie, flakes of sawdust caught between her teeth, and that smile put Laurie on guard. There was lust in it, lust and some other emotion she didn’t recognize, and she had to remind herself that this was not really a little girl, this was not merely a manifestation of the House, a puppet. This was… something else.

“Do you want to play?” Dawn asked.

Laurie nodded. She realized that there was import beyond the immediate in the question, but the time had come to jump in, to sink or swim.

Dawn giggled. “Let’s do it in the woods.”

Laurie took a deep breath, looked into the window again, then turned toward the girl. “All right,” she said. “Let’s do it in the woods.”

TWELVE

Stormy

Stormy walked slowly downstairs, past the banister where Norton had disappeared, past the first landing. Already he could sense that things were different. The House looked the same as far as he could tell, but there was a new vibe to it, a sense of instability, a feeling he recognized from the past.

His mother was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.

She was not bald but looked exactly as she had when he was a child, only she was wearing one of his father’s old suits, the legs of the pants and the arms of the jacket raggedly cut to fit her form.

He stopped several steps above her. There was an expression of almost manic excitement on her face, and she was staring at him in a way that he found disconcerting. She looked quickly around—behind her, to the left, to the right—in order to make sure they were alone. “Stormy!” she said in a loud whisper. “Get down here! There’s something I have to show you!”

He remained in place. “What is it?”

She frowned, her brow furrowing in an exaggerated manner that looked like either bad acting or emotional disturbance. “Get down here now!”

“What is it?” he asked again.

“I found the monster.”