Lilly clomps into the obscurity at the far end of the room, where darkness has collected like smoke. I can see her seat herself on a low stool and roll up alongside an enormous object nearly filling the space in that half of the room. Lilly is looking down at something on one side of this object and I can make out her pale hands manipulating what look like organ stops. A granulated light gathers around the base of the object which I now see is a four-poster bed with a beyond-elaborate sculpted frame. Lilly has a pair of earphones clapped to her head, connected to the bed with a length of heavy coiled wire in an embroidered sleeve. She is turning cherub’s-head knobs the size of tomatoes, and sliding gilded wooden flowers, cherries, leaves, and grapes expertly back and forth, peering with bunched eyebrows at the results. Every few moments she flicks her eyes up at a deep curving groove, notched like a ruler, cut into the headboard, where a burnished copper needle sails back and forth along the notches as she turns a heavy cherub bulb with her left hand. Through the window, I can see high black clouds rolling up from the horizon and passing over the house; some of them slip in through the window and slither up the wall and along the ceiling. The big doily begins to flip end over end in place, apparently passing through the substance of the table, faster and faster with a sound like a thick rope being spun in the air. Jil Punkinflake’s death’s-head moth is sprouting long licorice-like tendrils with a liquid crackling sound; they loop and twine along his lapels and up his shoulder.

I can see a figure on the bed now, a large pale man all shining, wearing what seems to be a rough white linen suit. His hands and feet are wrapped in gauze, as is his fleshy throat up to the heavy chin densely stubbled with white. The high-browed head is pasty and his heavy lids sag over glittering dark eyes.

The door adjacent the base of the stairs stands blackly open directly before me and a round white head is bowed there, rising and coalescing like a ball of smoke. A leg swings out at the knee and a foot of solid darkness comes down across the threshold—the flesh of half my body is tugged aside in gooseflesh withering in my chest and Jil Punkinflake slams the door shut in my face. “Don’t look in the hall,” he tells me sternly, and then scans the others with vehemence in his eyes, leaving me weakly to drag my seat to the circle again. My back to the door feels alive with creeping cold fire.