The house’s wooden doors stood open. Waiting inside, scowling up from an old and rickety-looking wheelchair, was a man with silver hair and a stern, square face. Clad in a heavy wool cardigan, he sat with a tartan blanket covering his legs. One glowering eye was ringed by a fresh, purple-black bruise. An old scar that ran through it stood out vivid white. The hand resting on his lap clutched a revolver.

Without a word, he used the gun to nervily wave them across a hallway with a checkerboard floor into a large, wood-paneled room. The windows had been boarded up. A massive chandelier hung from a high ceiling, dousing the place in dusty light. The seven dogs swept in to take positions along the walls, sitting like sentries to watch whatever the humans did next.

The room looked as though it had once served as a hall for banquets and dancing, black ties and bright ball gowns. Now it stood bare, with just a few melancholy pieces of furniture: a wall lined with bookcases that were three-quarters empty, save for more dust; two drab sofas angled shabbily around an ancient TV; several hard, ornately carved wooden dining chairs pushed against the far wall, looking bereft without the table they must once have accompanied.

A plain table bearing two more shotguns, seemingly abandoned while being cleaned in preparation for imminent use, did little to brighten the atmosphere. A long, thin, padded case with a shoulder strap lay beside the guns. Alex felt he recognized it, but couldn’t place it.

In a corner stood a well-stocked drinks trolley, toward which Alex’s grandfather was now striding with genuine interest. After scrutinizing it, he turned. The old man’s face betrayed nothing, but Alex caught a momentary signal from his eyes, flashing briefly upward above his right shoulder.

Glancing that way, Alex noticed that the wall above the bar cart was patterned with faint rectangular patches where framed pictures had once hung. Amid all the empty spaces, one last painting remained: a depiction in oils of the same house they stood in, wreathed in mist on a moonlit night, trees bending in the wind. Staring at it, Alex had a woozy sensation of being simultaneously trapped inside the ghostly house in the image and outside of it looking in. He pulled his eyes away and tried to look blank.

He was still desperately trying to think his way toward the tablet in the old robot in his coat, but panic was getting in the way, and he realized he had grown used to holding the toy as part of his ritual. He had a hunch the people with the guns wouldn’t react well to him reaching into his pocket.

“How about,” his grandfather said, gesturing toward the drinks cart, “we all have a little glass of something, toast our new acquaintance?”