He walked slowly forward, rippling heat waves creating a mirage puddle on the drive ahead and filtering the bottom of the house through a wavy mirror. In back of the house and to the side were the chicken coops, but Mark could see even from this far away, even through the heat waves, that they’d fallen into a state of disrepair and were no longer used. More proof that Billings was not here.

Why was he so concerned about the assistant?

Because Billings frightened him. He did not know why, and it had never been the case when he’d lived here, but he was terrified of running into the assistant again. In his mind, Mark saw the man looking exactly the same as he had all those years ago, and that, more than anything else, engendered a feeling of dread within him. The assistant’s kindness and bland passivity now seemed to him to be masking an unnatural patience and an unfathomable intent. He could imagine Billings waiting, biding his time, picking off the family one by one until there was only Mark left and he was drawn back to the house.

God, he wished The Power hadn’t deserted him.

Even more frightening was the prospect of running into Billings’ daughter, of seeing the girl again. He remembered how she hadn’t aged before, and he could easily imagine her unchanged, bending over a chair in that dark endless hallway and flipping up her shift.

“I like it hard. Fuck me hard.”

He should’ve gone to the mortuary first, the cemetery, the sheriff’s office. It was a mistake to have come here unprepared and all alone. What the hell could he have been thinking?

Still, he continued forward, down the dual-rutted drive with its ever-retreating mirage water, past the sandstone boulders that lined the ragged, shallow, irregularly shaped hole his father had intended to be a pond. The sweat was dripping down the sides of his face, and he had to keep wiping his forehead with his sleeve, but inside he was cold, and the ice within him kept the goose bumps alive on his arms.

He reached the house, walked up the deep porch steps, aware suddenly of how quiet it was. There were no whirs, hums, or other mechanical sounds, none of the noises of civilization. That was to be expected. The ranch was far from town, and the house was empty, everything shut off. But even nature was silent, and that he found more than a little creepy. In this heat, there should have been cicada buzzes, snake rattles, hawk cries.

But there was nothing.

Only the sound of his own feet on the porch boards and the wheeze of his overheated breath.