He doesn’t feel it—until it is too late.

Is this a message?

(Is it too late?)

As I stare at the pathetic, maltreated frog, splatted there on the white octagonal tile, I know that I am being watched. I turn, a shiver racing up my spine to the back of my neck.

But there is no one.

Nothing around me for miles.

Yet the feeling persists.

A feeling of something impossible that cannot be happening.

The certainty that that thing is absolutely happening.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what the hell to do.

No, wait.

I have to get rid of this thing. I have to pick it up and hurl it away and show whatever did this that it is not too late, and I am not afraid.

A shovel. I can get a shovel from the back and scoop this up.

I can dump it in the hole that always stays, the hole that never gets deeper or filled.

Or no, the field!

I look outside.

I will grab the shovel and walk this frog out to the other end of this godforsaken place, and I will leave him.

The owl or any of the other night predators will come along, see the thing, and make a feast of it. All gone.

I will be rid of it.

I march out to the backyard and grab the shovel, bringing it into the kitchen with a clank. I try, without looking, to steer the shovel under the dead frog, again, without looking.

Finally, I succeed. I gently carry the frog in the shovel with the steadiness of a tightrope walker. I walk it gently out the back, over the field, until the house is a tiny doll’s house in the distance.

And here I lay it.

Poor, sweet thing.

This is a kind of declaration of war from . . . an unknown source. A sinister source.

The same source who rearranged all the furniture into balancing puzzle pieces on the back wall and then put them back.

A foe.

An unseen foe.

Undetectable.

But malicious.

A kind of malevolent force.

One that takes glee in my terror.

Chapter 45

That night, the sky decides to rain again, and I find myself in the professor’s fancy bedroom now, trying not to think the unthinkable thought.

But it’s no use. The sound of the rain is there, and it reminds me. The raindrops running in rivulets down the windowpane remind me. I look through them, there behind the velvet curtains, and it could almost be like I am looking through the windshield that night.

I begged him not to drive.

I told him we could wait. Just wait out the storm.

But there was something about him that night, some kind of engine driving him to act in ways he had never acted before.

He was unreasonable. Even surly.

And I told him we should stay.

All we would’ve had to do was stay and none of it would have happened.