He stood in the foyer, unmoving. What had he accomplished? Nothing. He’d tried his damnedest and confronted his parents, put it all on the line, and they had remained unmovable, entrenched, fatalistically resigned to things as they were. Everything was exactly the same as it was before.

He sighed. You really couldn’t go home again.

Still, he felt better for having talked to his parents, for having confronted them, for having at least tried to stop their abandonment of Billingham and the House, to change their increasing reliance on Donielle.

If he had it to do over again, he would not run away from home. He would stay in the House with his parents, and try to work things out with them.

There was no sign of his grandmother on the stairs, he could not hear the tapping of her cane, so he walked up the steps to make sure she was all right. She was not in the second- or third-floor hallways, and he knocked on the door of her bedroom. “Grandma?”

No answer.

He tried to open the door, but it was locked.

He knocked on the door of her bathroom, but again there was no answer, and he put his ear to the wood, listening for sound.

Nothing.

Could she have gone somewhere else? He started toward the stairs again, but his eye was caught by the open door to his bedroom. Had it been open before? He didn’t think so.

“Hello?” he called out tentatively. He poked his head into the room, and there was a sudden shift of atmosphere and air pressure, a lightening of mood. He saw earthquake debris strewn across the floor of the bedroom, and against the opposite wall, a broken television.

He was back.

THIRTEEN

Norton

Norton understood the change immediately.

After the shaking stopped, he let go of the banister and stood, glancing around. The restrained House in which he’d spent the last several days, the House he’d shared with Laurie and Daniel and Stormy and Mark, was gone. This was the House of old, the wildly unpredictable House in which he’d grown up, and the sudden electric silence, the thick heavy air, the undefinable undercurrent that ran like a river of sludge beneath the surface reality around him, all told him that he was home.

Just to make sure, he walked down the hall to the room in which Stormy had been staying. The door was open, but there was no sign of Stormy or anyone else. The room was what it had been in his childhood: a sewing room for his mother.

With an almost audible snap, the wall of silence was broken, and from farther down the hall he heard sound, noise. Low conversation. Laughter.