Then he was picked up, several strong arms lifting him into the air, and they started biting him.

He screamed as fangs tore into his forearm, as razor-teeth ripped the flesh of his cheeks. The pain was unbearable, unbelievable, and an artery in his leg started gushing as sharp teeth chewed through his thigh.

Doneen grinned at him as he was eaten alive. He saw her through the pain, through the faces, through the blood, and if he had one last wish that could be granted, it would be to see her killed.

But he was granted no last wish.

He felt his body die, felt the life within him stop as his heart ceased pumping and his brain functions ended, but beyond the shock and pain there was a lightening, a lessening of weight as his spirit pulled free of its heavy fleshy host and emerged unburdened into the open air. It was not a transformation, this transition from life to death; there were no disruptions in his thoughts, no change in his self. It was more like kicking off a pair of shoes and going barefoot. Or stripping off clothes and walking naked. The difference was all external, the loss one of accoutrements, not essence.

He saw his body beneath him, saw the jacketed creatures eating his remains, saw Doneen staring at him with victorious glee. She could still see him, and she waved mockingly as he felt a tug on his form, a power drawing him like a magnet. He thought of Margot and was immediately in her bedroom, in her bed, next to her. There was no longer a barrier between them, and for a brief fraction of a second, he smelled her skin, touched her face, felt the smoothness of her breasts.

And then he was yanked back, pulled into and through the House into a House on the Other Side.

It happened in an instant. There was no flight through space, no view of the Eastern Seaboard beneath him, no surrounding blackness through which he passed, simply a sensation of vacuumlike suction and what looked like a split-section transformation of their bedroom into the House, before he was flat on the floor on the Other Side.

He jumped up. The House in which he found himself was identical to the one he’d entered via the den door, the one in which he’d seen his mother. There were no walls or rooms, only that big open space in that color he did not recognize. Above him were the wispy spirits he had seen before, but though they now looked like individual beings to him rather than clouds, apparently he was not yet one of them. He could neither fly nor float, and he had to run across the floor to the corner, where his mother, still bald, was once again sitting on an egg in a nest.

She smiled at him as he approached.

“I’m dead!” he cried.

She nodded.