Over the cacophony, Stormy called to me: “Do something!”

“Do what?” I shouted.

“How would I know? I work in an ice-cream shop.”

“Do something!” Kristen demanded.

“I’m just a fry cook,” I lied. “I don’t know what’s happening here.”

The twanging steel coils in the box springs began to break free from their ties, unwinding as they tore loose, ripping through the covering fabric like baby snakes emerging from a nest, greeted by the manacle-and-chain serpent that still undulated like a cobra in the thrall of flute music.

Five

The ceiling joists creaked and shuddered. Cracks appeared in the plaster overhead, from which a powdery debris rained down upon us. Within the walls of the room, the studs groaned as though they might buckle under some tremendous weight, and underfoot the floor began to thrum, so that I thought the room might implode upon us.

Kurt’s angry spirit, a poltergeist of singular power unique in my experience, whirled like a tornado, careening around the debris-littered bedroom, vanishing into—and reappearing out of—the walls. He passed through the door, and when an instant later he rushed back into the bedroom, he split the door in two. The portion on hinges swung open, and the other half crashed to the floor.

None of us needed prompting. We rushed across the fallen half of the door, into the upstairs hallway, and sprinted toward the stairs. Retreating from a poltergeist is not cowardly any more than running with the bulls in Pamplona is courageous; the former is an act of reasoned prudence, and the latter is foolishness bordering on lunacy. I am pleased to report that, in my haste to escape Kurt’s wrathful spirit, I only considered muscling ahead of the three women, but in fact followed them through the door, down the stairs, and out of the house. Chivalry lives.

We departed by the front door and reached the yard in time to hear what sounded like second-floor windows exploding at the back of the house and a shower of glass raining upon the porch roof there. The thump-bang-rattle of Kurt’s postmortem temper tantrum continued in our absence, though I hoped that in spite of his singular power, he would be unable to follow us. Having initiated its frenzied destruction, the average poltergeist thrashes mindlessly until exhausted, whereupon it wanders off into whatever purgatorial zone serves as its retreat between our world and the next, perhaps for a while as confused as any living person with advanced dementia.

Roberta’s trembling right hand spidered across her face as if she expected to discover bleeding lacerations, and when she found nothing, she wrapped her pale bruised arms around herself, shivering as if the Mojave were as cold as the Alaskan tundra. “It’s him,” she said. “Ain’t no way it’s anythin’ else.”

“Him who?” Kristen asked. “What’re you talking about?”

“I chopped him with the cleaver, so he come back for revenge.”

“Came back from the dead?” Kristen said. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I believe in what I seen,” Roberta insisted.