immediacy.
There was danger here.
She stared for a moment at the barn, then turned, walked out of the bedroom. She headed downstairs, uncertain of what to expect.
'Laurie?'
At the bottom of the stairway, she saw her mother beckoning from the sitting room. It was unsettling and disorienting, being treated like a child when she was an adult, but she forced herself to smile and walked into the room.
Her parents, all four of them, were seated on the couch. The sight nearly took her breath away. It wasn't all that shocking, really. But the emotional impact was far greater than she could have ever imagined. She remained standing in the doorway, staring, trying to hold back the tears that were welling up in her eyes as she looked upon the living faces of dead loved ones she'd never expected to see again.
Sitting between their parents, she saw Josh, a cute alert-eyed little boy with the hair of a little girl, and she wanted to rush over and grab him, hug him, hold him, but like his mother and father, he stared at her with only mild open friendliness. None of them, obviously, had any idea who she was.
'Ken?' her biological mother said. 'Lisa? This is our daughter Laurie.'
It broke her heart to see the impartial distance of the unacquainted on faces she loved and knew so well, so intimately.
She sat with her biological parents, pretending she was a child listening politely while the grown-ups talked.
Though she was obviously an adult and taller than her mother, no one acted as though it were anything out of the ordinary. She found herself looking at Josh, studying him, but he offered no clue as to what was going on.
Why was she here? Had she been sent back in time?
Had the past been sent up to her? Were these people real? It was impossible to tell, and she decided to just let everything play out and see what happened.
Her parents talked about nothing: the weather, gardening, her adoptive parents' trip up here. There was no subtext to the conversation. It was what it was: an ordinary, everyday discussion between casual acquaintances.
When her mother excused herself to make lunch, Laurie followed her into the kitchen. Another full-fledged blast from the past. She recognized a salad bowl she'd forgotten about, remembered the pattern on the sandwich plates and iced tea glasses.
'Can I help?' she asked.
'Just stay out of the way.'
Laurie took a deep breath. 'I'm going to go outside.'
Her mother looked at her. 'Don't go too far. We'll be eating in a few minutes.'
Laurie's heart was thumping with excitement. It was the first time she'd been out of the House in three days, and whether this world held or disappeared when she walked through that door, she was intoxicated with the thought that she could once again go outside.
She'd taken only one step when a goat appeared in the center of the kitchen, directly behind her mother.
The air was suddenly filled with the smell of fresh daisies.
Smoothly, easily, almost without thought, her mother grabbed a long knife from the counter, turned, and in one quick movement skillfully slit the goat's throat. She picked up the spasming animal and, kicking open the screen door, tossed it into the yard. Without pausing, she unrolled a sizable length of paper towel, ran a portion of the perforated sheet through sink water, and began wiping up the blood on the floor. She looked up at Laurie as she scrubbed. 'If you're going to go outside, go. It's almost time to eat.'
She was tempted to ask her mother ifBillington would be joining them for lunch, but more than anything she wanted outside, wanted to leave the House, and she walked over to the screen door, pushed it open.
And was out.
The air was fresh, clean, glorious. She'd smelled it from the window, but that wasn't the same as being in it, of it, surrounded by it, engulfed by it. At the bottom of the steps was the broken body of the goat, so Laurie walked instead along the wraparound porch, toward the front of the House.
Billington was nowhere to be seen, but Dawn was waiting for her around the corner of the House, playing with a nasty-looking doll made from dried weeds and twigs.
Laurie stopped in her tracks, stared at the dirty figure in the girl's hand.
She thought of Daniel, shivered.
'About time,' Dawn said, standing, brushing dust off her shift. She dropped the doll, picked up a tin cup from the porch next to her, walked over to Laurie. 'I've been waiting out here for ages.'
Laurie looked through the window to her right, into the sitting room. Josh and their parents and her biological father were still seated, still talking over mundane matters, and she understood that she would not learn anything from her brother or either set of parents. For all she knew, they were the psychic equivalent of tape loops; unchanging and unalterable reflections of what had once occurred, endlessly repeating.
But Dawn was different. Dawn was definitely real, of her time, of her House, and Laurie vowed that she would find out what she could from the girl.
'What are you drinking?' she asked politely.
Grinning, Dawn held out her cup. 'I like wood chips in my water.'
Sure enough, the water in the cup was dirty, filled with dead floating leaves, splintered wood, and oversized pieces of sawdust. The girl pressed the cup to her lips, tilted it, drank the remaining contents. She smiled at Laurie, flakes of sawdust caught between her teeth, and that smile put Laurie on guard. There was lust in it, lust and some other emotion she didn't recognize, and she had to remind herself that this was not really a little girl, this was not merely a manifestation of the House, a puppet.
This was . . . something else.
'Do you want to play?' Dawn asked.
Laurie nodded. She realized that there was import beyond the immediate in the question, but the time had come to jump in, to sink or swim.
Dawn giggled. 'Let's do it in the woods.'
Laurie took a deep breath, looked into the window again, then turned toward the girl. 'All right,' she said.
'Let's do it in the woods.'
Stormy Stormy walked slowly downstairs, past the banister where Norton had disappeared, past the first landing.
Already he could sense that things were different. The House looked the same as far as he could tell, but there was a new vibe to it, a sense of instability, a feeling he recognized from the past.
His mother was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.
She was not bald but looked exactly as she had when he was a child, only she was wearing one of his father's old suits, the legs of the pants and the arms of the jacket raggedly cut to fit her form.
He stopped several steps above her. There was an expression of almost manic excitement on her face, and she was staring at him in a way that he found disconcerting.
She looked quickly around--behind her, to the left, to the right--in order to make sure they were alone.
'Stormy!' she said in a loud whisper. 'Get down here!
There's something I have to show you!'
He remained in place. 'What is it?'
She frowned, her brow furrowing in an exaggerated manner that looked like either bad acting or emotional disturbance. 'Get down here now!'
'What is it?' he asked again.
'I found the monster.'
