Fortunately, the killer himself only appeared to be armed with the knife. And there were plenty of sharp things in the kitchen. Knives. Scissors.

Ruby's scissors, he thought. He hadn't thought of them in years, the silver shears she'd kept hidden in her sewing chest, tucked in amongst the bobbins and buttons and twists of multicolored thread. The ones she told him he mustn't ever touch.

"He won't let us live, you know," Sheila said.

"You don't say."

"So what are we gonna do? Serve up your mother on a platter?"

"She's not my mother."

They passed the bungalow where they'd seen the family playing board games on their first day in town, such a peculiar sight it stuck with him after all they'd been through since. The lights were out. Everyone asleep. Dreaming suburban middle-class dreams.

"Why couldn't I have had a normal family? Was that too much to ask?"

"Nobody has a normal family, Martin. It's a fantasy. Make-believe. And Ruby was a mother to you, once. She protected you from the other Midwives."

"Then she abandoned me. They almost burned the house down. I could have died."

"While Ruby was committed in a mental hospital."

"Right. You think trying to kill yourself isn't as bad as abandonment? Two hundred years old and suddenly she's a fucking emo kid with a death wish?"

"We can't possibly know what she was going through." Sheila gave him a sidelong look as they approached the house. "She must have felt guilty for what she'd been doing all those years."

"You're sympathizing with her? They ate children."

"Animals eat children in the wild. I'm not saying I condone it but context matters, Martin."

"Context," he sputtered.

They stopped at the foot of the walkway and looked back the way they'd come. The truck was still parked on the corner, the cab empty. Barclay and Clarabelle must have gone to find a better vantage point.

It was a little past six am and the sun was just beginning to appear above the trees, giving the street an eerie golden glow. Magic hour. Literally, if they weren't careful.

He wondered how many of their neighbors had been at the big show on King Street. It hadn't been the whole town. Couldn't have been. He'd only recognized a few of the faces among the crowd, mostly from the funeral and Sinjin's party. That said, he didn't exactly know who any of his neighbors were, not anymore. And judging by what they'd just been through, he likely never had.

Nothing he remembered of his childhood home was the same. It had all been lies. Corpse worms festering just below the cheerful façade.

He looked up at the house again, remembering the day they first arrived. How ready he'd been to tell Sheila to turn the car around and drive them to the closest airport. Leave the country on the first flight to anywhere. He wished now that he had. A moment of cowardice could have saved both of their lives. Or at least postponed the inevitable.