This stairwell opened onto another hallway and he was already sprinting down it when he noticed movement somewhere in front of him.

He stopped in his tracks, heart pounding.

There was a small figure standing alone at the darkened end of the hall, pale white against the deep red and brown of the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Billings’ daughter.

The girl was supposed to have been retarded. She did not live with her father in the house but slept on a cot next to the incubation room because she liked to be near the baby chicks. Billings never talked about her, and their parents had warned him and Kristen many times that they were not to speak of her in front of the assistant. Mark had not seen her in some time, had, in fact, almost forgotten about her, and he did not think he had ever seen her inside the house, but the girl still looked the same. She was at least as old as Kristen—she’d been around ever since he could remember—but she looked younger. Ten or eleven at the most.

Something about that did not sit well with him.

He stood in place, staring down the hallway at her, wondering how she’d gotten inside.

“Mark.”

He had never heard her speak before, and the sound of her voice chilled him. She did not sound retarded at all. Her voice instead was clear, soft, feminine. It was not loud, but it carried clearly in the silent hallway, and there seemed something unnatural about it. She was wearing only a thin white shift, and though there was no light behind her, he could tell that she wore nothing underneath it.

The girl beckoned to him, one pale arm motioning for him to approach, and his chill intensified. There was a cold breeze blowing through the hall, even though the air conditioner was off and all of the windows in the house were closed. The only sound was the slight flapping of the girl’s shift against her bare legs and the overloud pumping of his heart.

“Mark.” She spoke again, smiling slightly, beckoning, and he began walking toward her, not wanting to admit his fear, not wanting to acknowledge his apprehension. He prayed desperately that his parents would come home right now, that Billings would enter the house looking for his daughter. He did not know why, but he did not want to be alone with this girl, and while even an hour ago he would have laughed had someone suggested that he would be trembling nervously at the sight of the assistant’s retarded daughter, he was not laughing now.

His hands were sweaty, and he wiped them on his pants, stopping maybe ten feet in front of the girl. Behind her was a chair, a dark mahogany chair that matched perfectly the adjacent wall but that he could not remember having ever seen before.