There were dolls surrounding her. Dozens of them. She’d been making them out of lint and fiber, thread and dust, and they covered the floor, the hope chest, the bed. Each was unique, with eyes and mouths of different materials, but there was an underlying uniformity to them all, a bedrock constant that marked them as her creations.

They were all staring at him.

And smiling.

“You know how I like it,” she said.

In answer, he kicked the nearest doll. He kicked it as hard as he could, but there was no weight to it, no heft, no bulk, and instead of flying across the room, the figure flopped to the floor less than a foot away.

The girl shook her head, and she no longer looked like his sister. “Good-bye,” she said.

She smiled at him, disappeared, but reappeared instantly, struggling against the binding arms of… Daniel?

It was him, but he was like Kristen, glowing and translucent, a Hollywood special effect, and Mark realized at that instant that Daniel was dead. The girl screamed, spit, tried to bite the glowing arm holding her. She must have fled to the Other Side, and Daniel had been there to capture her and bring her back. Once again Mark thought that there was no coincidence in all of this, that everything had been mapped out and planned ahead of time.

By who or what he didn’t know, but he didn’t have time to speculate on it. The dolls were coming after him, moving quickly. Daniel and the girl still struggled atop the bed, and Mark faced the scurrying, crawling, leaping creatures, bracing himself for the onslaught.

The first doll reached him, clambering up his leg. He tried to grab it, but there was nothing to grab, no skeleton or solid center. His fingers closed around a soft wispy mass of hair and met his palm on the other side. He felt the sharp prick of a needle on the skin of his forearm and saw that the doll was bending over to bite him. He grabbed the feet of the creature with his right hand, its head with his left, and pulled, ripping it apart. The individual elements devolved into their original components, separating, whatever power or force that held them together dissipating and disappearing.

He pulled the needle out of his skin, and saw that the doll no longer even had a shape, was just a tangled, elongated mass of hair and lint and trash.

The second doll reached him, and he tore it apart as well, his hands working crazily, arms flailing. He ripped it into pieces before it could even get a hold on him.