“Quirky,” Stormy insisted.

Not susceptible to my charms, Kristen said, “Roberta! Are there other keys anywhere?”

Roberta felt her pockets, looked surprised, “Maybe these,” she said, producing a ring of ten or twelve keys.

The pulses of energy that Kurt emitted grew brighter, concentric ripples issuing from him faster, faster.

The bedroom door crashed shut before anyone could move toward it. Roberta dropped the new set of keys, hurried across the room, and wrenched the knob back and forth.

I scooped up the keys and tossed them to Stormy.

When the door wouldn’t relent, Roberta returned to us, shivering and shaking her right hand as if the doorknob had been freezing.

“There!” Stormy declared, having found the right key to unlock the manacle.

Freed, Kristen sprang at once off the bed, as though it were saturated with some pestilence infinitely more horrific than the black plague. Although Roberta had saved her life, she shied from the woman, too, as if not convinced that everything was as it seemed to be. Stormy and I excited her suspicion, as well. She ran to the door, but she had no more success with it than had Roberta.

Nightstand drawers opened of their own accord, slammed shut, slid open, shut, and now the dresser drawers, whispering on their slides, banging shut, banging, banging. A mahogany highboy spat out its drawers entirely, spilling their contents as they clattered to the floor.

Roberta’s stew of emotions—sorrow, anger, frantic gladness—had boiled down to a thick reduction of fear. She stood awestruck, turning this way and that, arguing against the clear evidence of her senses—“This ain’t happenin’, no way, no, no”—and raising her already bruised arms to ward off whatever missiles might come her way.

The six-foot length of chain fixed to the ringbolt on the bed frame rattled up from the mattress, weaving in the air as if it were a charmed serpent, the manacle like a cobra’s head poised to bite.

A ginger-jar nightstand lamp levitated, its cord taut. The plug pulled from the wall socket. The lamp flew past my head, shattering against a wall, showering Kristen with ceramic shards.

In spite of all their violent thrashing and vindictive wrath, poltergeists cannot control the malevolent energy that issues from them, cannot target anyone or aim with precision. They are able to harm us only by indirection, by ricochet, by the luckiest of lucky blows. If, however, a flung fireplace poker spears through your eye, through your brain, and out the back of your head, the fact that it found you by sheerest chance will not be much consolation.

Roberta began to scream and Kristen joined her, which seemed to inspire the late, unlamented Kurt to new heights of supernatural ire. The mattress flipped off the bed, and the coils of steel in the box springs sang as though something with a thousand claws plucked and strummed them. Emptied of all its drawers, the highboy lurched away from the wall, rocked to its left, rocked to its right, as if it were the Frankenstein’s monster of furniture, lumbering this way and that in search of a victim, before it suddenly rocketed to the ceiling with such force that it broke apart and brought down with it a hail of shattered plaster.