The Ones Who Went Before.

For the first time since Billings had spoken that terrifying name to him, Stormy thought about the builders of the Houses. What did they look like? Did they have a definite shape and form? He would never know and was not sure that he wanted to know.

What about the Houses themselves? If they had been around as long as Billings had intimated, they could not have always looked like this. What had been here before them? Teepees? Caves?

It was a creepy line of thought, and Stormy forced himself to back away from it. There would be time for that later. There were more immediate concerns at present. He needed to find out where he was, when he was, where the others were, and how they were going to escape from here.

Crackers were stuck between his teeth, and he poured himself another glass of water and rinsed his mouth out in the sink before embarking on a floor-by-floor search of the House.

He went through every room on the first floor, then wandered upstairs, looking for one of the others, looking for… something. He saw nothing unusual until he reached the third story. There, across the hall from his bedroom, was a door that had not been there before, a door he did not remember. He felt suddenly nervous and was not sure he wanted to look inside, especially not alone, but he forced himself to be brave, opened the door, and peeked into the room.

“Oh, Jesus,” he breathed.

Butchery.

This deserved the title. The black room before him was the site of almost unbelievable carnage. Faces hung from hooks on the wall like hats, the drooping, sagging skin contorting their former shapes into stretched mockeries of human forms. Bones and skulls and pieces of flesh lay strewn across the blood-spattered floor next to a pile of discarded gossamer that looked like the empty bodies of the cloudlike ghosts he’d seen on the Other Side. Metal instruments that could only be tools of torture were scattered about the room.

On the top of a marble table was Billings.

The butler had been stabbed. No, not just stabbed. Slit open. His mouth was frozen in a rictus of agony, and his eyes were wide, staring. The red imprint of a kiss—lipstick? blood?—could be seen on his white forehead.

Stormy remained in the doorway, afraid to enter the room. He didn’t know what this meant, where it fit into anything, but it scared the hell out of him, and the confirmation that Billings was dead hit him much harder than expected.

What were they going to do now? Their guiding light was gone.

What was he going to do now? That was the big question. Because the others weren’t anywhere to be found. For all he knew, they had been killed as well and their bloody corpses awaited him in some other room of the House.