"Burn Abby, or the poppet?" I asked.

"Both."

"It is not a poppet," Abby said, flicking Rafe in the arm. "It's a late-Victorian doll, and Lexie will appreciate it, because she's not a Philistine."

"I'd appreciate it from a distance, if I were you," Justin told me. "I think it's possessed. Its eyes keep following me."

"So lie her down. Her eyes close."

"I'm not touching it. What if it bites me? I'll have to wander the outer darkness for all eternity, searching for my soul--"

"God, I've missed you," Abby told me. "I've been stuck with no one to talk to except this bunch of wusses. It's just an itsy-bitsy dolly, Justin."

"Poppet," Rafe said, through potatoes. "Seriously. It's made from a sacrificed goat."

"Mouth full, you," Abby told him. To me: "It's kidskin. With a bisque head. I found her in a hatbox in the room opposite me. Her clothes are in bits, and I finished the footstool, so I figured I might as well make her a new wardrobe. There are all these old scraps of material--"

"And then there's its hair," Justin said, pushing the vegetables across to me. "Don't forget the hair. It's horrible."

"It's wearing a dead person's hair," Rafe informed me. "If you stick a pin in the doll, you can hear screaming coming from the graveyard. Try it."

"See what I mean?" Abby said, to me. "Wusses. It's got real hair. Why he thinks it's from a dead person--"

"Because your poppet was made in about 1890 and I can do subtraction."

"And what graveyard? There's no graveyard."

"There is somewhere. Somewhere out there, every time you touch that doll, someone twitches in her grave."

"Until you get rid of the Head," Abby said with dignity, "you don't get to slag my doll for being creepy."

"That's not the same thing at all. The Head is a valuable scientific tool."

"I like the Head," said Daniel, glancing up, surprised. "What's wrong with it?"

"It looks like something Aleister Crowley would carry around, is what's wrong with it. Back me up here, Lex."

Frank and Sam hadn't told me, maybe they'd never seen, the most important thing about these four: just how close they were. The phone videos hadn't been able to catch the power of it, any more than they'd caught the house. It was like a shimmer in the air between them, like glittering web-fine threads tossed back and forth and in and out until every movement or word reverberated through the whole group: Rafe passing Abby her smokes almost before she glanced around for them, Daniel turning with his hands out ready to take the steak dish in the same second that Justin brought it through the door, sentences flicked onto each other like playing cards with never a fraction of a pause. Rob and I used to be like that: seamless.