The bathroom is old white tile, mapped with cracks. A buzzing neon light hangs overhead, filled with the corpses of moths and flies. She puts blankets and pillows in the bathtub. Safest place in an earthquake, as her father used to say. Anyway, she doesn’t have a bed. Dee lays the claw-hammer down beside her on the cold tile. She closes her eyes and practices reaching for it, reinforcing the muscle memory, imagining herself just woken from sleep, imagining a dark figure looming over her.

She pictures Lulu’s face, the way expressions chased across it, clouds over the sun.

She reads Wuthering Heights. She is only a couple of pages from the end. When she finishes, she opens the book at random in the middle and continues reading. Dee only ever reads this one book. She likes to read, but you never know what books are going to do to you and she can’t afford to be taken off guard. At least the people in Wuthering Heights understand that life is a terrible choice, which you must make each day. Let me in, Catherine pleads. Let me in.

When she turns out the light the dark is rich and complete. The house breathes about her like a person, boards groaning, releasing the stored heat of the day. Stars peer through the window. The house isn’t really in the city at all—it is almost in the forest. She is so close to where it happened. The air holds the memory of the event, somehow. The particles of it are carried on the wind, lie in the earth, the old trees and dripping moss.

Her dreams are filled with burning sun and the fear of loss. Her parents walk through the desert, hand in hand, under a sky filled with stars. Dee watches as long as she can, but then the red birds take flight and the sky goes white, and the sound of their wings is a soft feathery scratching. She sits upright in the dark, heart pounding. Sweat trickles down her back and between her breasts. The sound has followed her out of the dream. From downstairs it comes again. Dee hears that it is not wings, but a scratch, like a long nail on wood.

Her palm is slippery on the rubber handle of the claw-hammer. She creeps downstairs. Each board cracks like a shot beneath her feet. The scratching continues, sharp claws or fingernails raking the wood. Dee understands that there has been some critical slippage between worlds. Let me in—let me in. Faint silver pours in through the uncurtained living room windows. The scratching is faster now, insistent. Dee thinks she hears another sound behind the scrabbling—it is high, broken. Sobbing, perhaps. The bookcase trembles, as if the force behind it were growing in fury and in strength.