I can’t really see inside the windows—they’re too dirty and dark, the sun’s too bright out here—but I don’t get the sense that anybody’s watching me. I look at the back porch. The door to the summer kitchen hangs ajar so it’d be easy to go in, but I circle around to the front instead.

I want to know right away if the body’s still lying there at the bottom of the stairs. I want to just push the front door open, look inside, and know. I don’t want to have to go creeping in from the back of the house to find out.

Except when I get to the front of the house I now have this urge to go back to the rear again—just to put off the moment. But I know I’m just being stupid, like I’ve turned into Anxiety Girl, and that’s so not my style. I’m a doer, not a worrier.

So holding my breath, I step up on the porch. I wince when a board creaks underfoot, but cross to the door and push it open.

It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dimmer light, and then I let out that breath I’ve been holding.

The body’s still there. Del lying in a pool of blood. Flies buzzing around him.

I give a nervous look into the open door of the parlour, down the hall to the kitchen, up the stairs to the second floor. Nothing. It’s just me and the body.

So I step inside.

I approach the body and study it. The open eyes, staring at nothing. The awkward angle of the neck. The torn flesh between his chin and chest where Honey ripped out his throat. The blood, coagulated and thick with the flies.

I’m repulsed and fascinated at the same time. And truth to tell, half-expecting the corpse to sit up.

Because this isn’t the real world. Nothing here plays by the laws of physics the way I know them. Here a man can be turned into a changeling of twigs and leaves. Women can be turned into children. Their mouths can be erased. Here anything can happen.

So I am half-expecting it to sit up, but when it does, I still give a shriek and jump backwards.

It doesn’t lumber to its feet like a George Romero zombie. Instead, it’s like watching a movie playing backwards. The blood runs back into the body, then the body goes bouncing back up the stairs, banging back and forth between the banisters and the wall, sucking the smears of blood into himself, until there he is, at the top of the stairs once more.

Del.

Unhurt.

Holding that shotgun, just like he had been before I pushed him.

Looking down at me with a grin.

“Gotcha!” he says.