She turned, started toward the hall, and Stormy hurried after her. He didn’t know what she was talking about, what was going on here, whether he was in the present or the past or some House-bred amalgam of the two, but he figured the best idea was probably just to roll with it.

His mother stopped halfway down the hall and opened a door. She let him catch up with her, and the two of them walked through the doorway into another, narrower hall. This one had no flocked wallpaper, no expensive wainscoting. There was only unadorned bare wood walls and a single exposed bulb in the center of the ceiling. At the opposite end was another door, and his mother took a key from her raggedly cut suit, unlocked the door and opened it.

“It’s a bone monster,” she said, whispered. Her eyes looked bright, feverish.

He hadn’t remembered this, and he looked into the closet at his grandfather’s skeleton in the wheelchair. The bones were clean save for a patch of dried skin and hair on the left side of the skull, and something about that rang a bell, seemed vaguely familiar. Had this actually happened? Had he dreamed this?

Butchery.

Had it been in the movie?

No. The film had been more subtle. There’s been nothing this overt, nothing this traditionally horrific.

Maybe he did remember it from childhood.

Stormy looked over at his mother. “A bone monster,” she said, staring at her father’s skeleton, talking more to herself than him.

It was amazing how much he’d blocked out. Even the film didn’t come close to capturing the craziness of the household, the unsettling irrationality of its workings. It was coming back to him now, what it had been like living here. Not just the broad brush strokes but the details, not just the events that had occurred but the feelings they generated within him.

He realized now why he had hated living here so much.

And why the one family vacation they’d taken, their trip to New Mexico, had been so important to him, had made such a big impression.

His mother grasped his shoulder, pointed at the skeleton. “That’s the monster,” she said. “It’s a bone monster.”

“Yeah.” He pulled away from her, started back down the narrow hidden hallway to the House proper.

He could already hear his father bellowing from the study, and Stormy made his way over there, pushing apart the sliding wooden doors that opened onto the hallway.

“Billingham!” his father ordered. “I want a knife and a sack of cotton balls—” He paused, frowned, looked at Stormy. “I didn’t call for you. I called for Billingham.”

“Sorry,” Stormy said.

“Billingham!” his father yelled. He paused, waited. “Billingham!”

The butler did not come.