“It’s time for him to move on, and you have been chosen to assist him.” She pressed the knife into his hand. It felt heavy, good. “It’s an opportunity for you.”

She led him back through the furniture to the marble table, and he looked at Billings, strapped down and unable to move. Norton shook his head. He could not go through with this. He understood that death was not the end, but he still could not bring himself to kill someone, to murder in cold blood.

Donna must have sensed his hesitancy because she rubbed against him, placed a hand between his legs. “It’s his time,” she said. “He wants to go.”

Billings did not look like he wanted to go. Norton glanced down at the defiant face and turned quickly away.

Donna faced him. Her legs were slightly spread, the thin material of her dirty shift stretched tight, and he found himself wishing she’d bend over again, wishing she’d let him between her thighs.

One of the wispy ghosts had been pinned to the wall behind the table and was weakly fluttering, its blue-gray essence seeping slowly out from a slit in the fabric of its being and floating into the girl’s mouth even as she spoke, even as she whispered the words he wanted to hear.

“I’ll drink your sperm and drink your piss and drink your blood. I’ll take everything you give me and do anything you want me to. All you have to do is take care of Mr. Billings.”

Norton nodded. He didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing, but he held out the knife, walked up to the marble table.

“Do it,” Donna said.

He did.

Even as Billings screamed, as he inserted the knife in the assistant’s groin and jerked upward, Norton understood that he was the reason Billings had disappeared. Wherever he was—whenever he was—it was after he had met Daniel and Laurie and Stormy and Mark but before the Houses had split apart. He had not known it then because his own life unfolded sequentially, no matter what happened, but the Houses did not follow such a conventional timetable, were not so circumscribed, and he had been wrenched back and forth, forced to be at the Houses’ beck and call, to respond to whatever they put in front of him.

Donna was right. It was the Houses that were evil.

But he realized the fallacy of that reasoning even as it occurred to him. Billings’ screams were now silent, his mouth frozen wide open, his eyes bulging with agony, and Norton knew with a certainty that could not be denied that he’d been right the first time, that his initial instincts had been correct. The girl was the evil one.

“Yes,” Donna said, egging him on. And there was hunger in her eyes. “Gut the fucker!”