No one seemed to notice the unwavering line of burnt bread, and he gathered his courage, took a deep breath, and followed it up the walk and into the open house.

Inside, the rooms were devoid of furniture. The toast trail ended at the porch steps, but there were piles of what looked like strawberry jam in the entryway, the front room, the hall, and the kitchen. Those were all the rooms he could see from the doorway, and he assumed the pattern continued through the bedroom and bathrooms.

He stepped slowly over the threshold, looking around. There was no movement, no sign of people or ghosts or beings of any sort, but the atmosphere was charged with tension and he had the feeling that he could be jumped at any time. The smart thing to do would be to turn back, leave, retreat, but he had to know why he’d been led here and he pressed on.

The girl was waiting for him in the empty back bedroom.

She could not have been more than ten or eleven, and she was wearing a dirty white shift that hung loosely on her thin frame and threatened with every movement to slip off her shoulders. Her filthy hair hung over her forehead in a way that seemed sensuous; not a parody of the posturing of an older girl, but a casually unforced naturalness that was sexy despite her age.

She was standing in front of a window, with the light from the house next door behind her, and he was aware that he could see her legs, backlit through the thin material of the shift, and his eyes were drawn to the meeting place of her thighs.

What the hell was wrong with him? This girl was young enough to be his granddaughter.

Granddaughter?

Great-granddaughter.

The girl smiled at him, and there was something so evil in that smile, something so unnatural and corrupt, that he turned without thinking and ran. It was an instinctive animal reaction. He was absolutely terrified, utterly panic-stricken, and he sped out of the room, down the hall, running faster than he ever had in his life.

In the hall, in the front room, in the entryway, he saw bugs working their way out of the strawberry jam as he leaped over or hurriedly skirted the piles, hundreds of black bodies squirming in the thick red substance, trying to escape.

He jumped off the steps, landing on the cement walkway and scattering the squares of burnt toast. His heart was pounding so furiously and painfully that he thought he might be having a heart attack, but he kept running and did not stop until he was two houses away and almost completely out of breath.