Nothing.

He hurried back into his yard.

Were these things connected? The doll and the shadow? The inexplicable feelings of fear and discomposure he’d been experiencing? He had the sense that they were, but he could not imagine how and he could not begin to comprehend the meaning behind it.

He pushed the barbecue and carried the shovel back into the garage, then walked into the house and washed his hands in the kitchen sink before getting himself a Diet Coke from the fridge. He’d left the television on in the family room and, coincidentally enough, The Twilight Zone was on the Sci-Fi channel. It was the episode in which a girl disappeared into the wall of her house, the one he’d always assumed had been the inspiration for Poltergeist, and as he watched it for the fiftieth time, alarm bells began going off in his head once again. There was a connection here, something he knew he should be picking up on but just couldn’t quite figure out.

He stared at the television, watched the mother and the father kneel before the wall, calling to their little girl, and it came to him.

The House.

That was it. The House. The home in which he’d been born and where he’d spent the first eleven years of his life. He could remember very little about the House, only flashes of images, portions of events, but there was something about it that reminded him of the girl lost in the walls.

There’d been something scary about the House.

The fact that he could recall almost nothing at all about his childhood home disturbed him. He knew why, of course, and though it wasn’t really surprising, it was unsettling to realize just how easily he fit into that clichéd niche, that stereotypical pattern so often exploited by headline-grabbing doctors and the media during sweeps weeks.

He couldn’t remember because that was where his mom had died.

He was disappointed in himself that he was so predictable, so typical, and the thought occurred to him that everything else that seemed to be happening—his uneasiness, the shadow, the doll—could all be part of some psychological problem that could be traced back to this one event.

But that wasn’t be possible. He’d lived a perfectly normal life all these years. The normal, happy life of a well-adjusted man, a husband, a father. The House had not affected him at all.

Perhaps his long stretch of unemployment had put stress and pressures on him that he couldn’t recognize, wasn’t able to acknowledge.