The breeze blew against his face, caressed his hair. He tried to pretend as though nothing was wrong. “Hey,” he said, “where’s your dad?”

“Mark,” the girl repeated.

Maybe it was the only word she knew, he thought. Maybe it was the only word she could say.

But her voice still didn’t sound retarded, and this time there’d seemed something… sensual in it.

She moved slightly to her left, repositioned the chair, and bent slowly over its seat, smiling at him, her shift hiking up to expose the creamy whiteness of bare buttocks. “Fuck me,” she said softly. “Fuck me in the ass.”

Shocked, he backed up, shaking his head. “No…”

“I like it hard. Fuck me hard.”

There was something wrong here, something fundamentally awry, something that went far deeper than an overexperienced underage girl and her frighteningly unnatural nymphomania. He could feel it, sense it, a palpable presence in the hallway, a malevolence in the setting and the situation that included Billings’ daughter but was not limited to her. Whatever he had feared in this house, whatever subliminal danger he had felt, it was here, now, and Mark knew that he had to get out and get away as quickly as possible before something horrible happened.

He continued backing up, keeping his eyes on the girl.

“I want it,” she said. “I want it now.”

“No.”

“I want you to fuck my ass.”

“No!” he said more firmly.

“Your father does it.” She smiled at him over her shoulder and there was evil in that smile, a corruption that went far beyond mere sex, a deeply depraved immorality of which this was only the simplest and most obvious manifestation. “He makes it hurt.”

Mark ran. He turned tail and ran back upstairs to his room, and he heard behind him the girl’s mocking laughter, the soft sounds echoing and amplifying in the dark hall and stairwell.

He had not come out until his family had returned home and Kristen had knocked on his door to tell him that he had to help unload groceries from the car.

It was after that that he had been able to tap into The Power. It had always been there, he supposed, and he attributed the dread and apprehension he felt about the house to its low-level influence, but the encounter with Billings’ daughter had somehow jump-started it, kicked it into gear. It truly was like a sixth sense to him, and he didn’t have to think about it or concentrate on using it. Like seeing or hearing or smelling or touching or tasting, it was a physical response to people and places and things that he experienced, a natural part of him that provided sensory input which his brain accepted and sorted.