She gives my arm a playful squeeze. As we approach, I can see a shadow emerge from the high grass to one side of the house and pull itself instantly up through one of the windows. It’s a brick house, with acute gables at either end like a cat’s head. The windows are large panes of glass in scalloped stone frames, and as we bunch up to follow the stingy path through high weeds dried to wheezing husks I glance up in time to see a candlelit face recede from one of the sills upstairs. Are they coming in through the roof?

The veranda is deep but not broad; the steps and planks groan at our every move. Dusty opens the door, which chitters as it swings back. The house closes around me, and I am aware of a vibrant stillness, produced by tensions in something below or behind me. We are pushing back the invisible, ponderous fabric of presence inside the walls; the moulding on the walls shivers, and the doorknobs seem to cringe back into the shadows. A hand takes mine, and I am led a few steps down the hall, with the stairway barely discernible to my left, and through a wide single door of darkly reflective polished wood, into a parlour. I can make out many figures in the gloom, and Jil Punkinflake is already making the rounds with his cheroot in his hand, lighting the gas mantles.

A single round table in the center of the room, oilskin cloth and a big doily in the middle, tables all round. Dim light from the hollowly breathing mantles, tiled fireplace, mirror above it, fronded wallpaper and ponderous carved ornaments everywhere. The ceiling is bunched and wrinkled in a funereally heavy floral pattern, and a ghoulish rosette in the center. I am directed to a seat at the table with the door not far behind me; Nectar sits on my left and Dusty on my right, Jil Punkinflake beside her and Keen sits opposite me with his back to the window, the curtains nearly brushing his shoulders. I hear the boxed-in ticking of the clock for the first time as Jil Punkinflake says, “Lilly, it’s time to bring him in.”