He sounded depleted. “I can’t answer that, Jimmy. But I’ll be home later. I didn’t want you to worry. There’s some meals in the freezer you can heat up. I think there’s a cheesy garlic lasagna. Maybe a broccoli and beef. You like those. Go ahead and eat. It’s just been a challenging day and there’s still a few things I need to think about before I come home and…I don’t even know what happens then.”

“Things are weird right now,” I said. “I know that. But we can deal with it. You haven’t even met the others yet. All right, I admit, that’s going to be pretty weird, too. But if we just all get in the same room, we can explain the whole thing to you, okay? Just as soon as the sun goes down.”

“Sun’s already down,” Dad said. “I’ll be home eventually. Take care.”

The call went dead. For a moment I was unsettled by his detachment, but that was replaced by the information he’d passed along: it was indeed dark out. I leaned over the kitchen sink and ducked beneath the steel shutters. The floodlights were flickering with moths, a sure sign that they’d been on for some time. The hours had slipped away. I laughed to myself. Math had never been so diverting.

Claire screamed.

It was a guttural noise, as if she were trying to break away from an unwanted embrace. Something wooden exploded, followed by the gonging of stricken metal. Then came the sound of running, way too many feet, followed by a horrible series of sounds: a musical snap like the tearing of guitar strings, the muffled ripping of several thick layers of fabric, and the splinter of lumber being chomped between teeth.

“Claire!” I called.

The name still reverberating from my kissed lips, I sprinted into the dining room, pausing only long enough to note each disaster: Claire gone with no trace but her beret; her chair rolling across the floor in a dozen pieces; a massive dent in the corner of the table where something huge had kneed it on its way out; and the white birds of our math problems making slow, doomed descents. Her pink backpack was missing—she’d managed to grab it, though what good it might do her was beyond me.

In my bedroom I blundered into a snowstorm of mattress guts. A mouthlike hole had been burrowed straight through the center of my bed—the mattress, the springs, everything. I leapt to the edge of the hole and saw the last few motions of the floorboards as the secret staircase locked itself away.

Claire’s screams echoed from below, caught in the phantom space of the hardwood floor, the concrete foundation, the clay, and on and on, deeper and deeper, world upon world and fear upon fear.