A Cosmology of Monsters E-Book

Shaun Hamill

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 516

Beschreibung

"I loved it, and think you will, too." --Stephen KingStephen King's It meets Stranger Things in a tender and terrifying coming-of-age tale of haunted houses and the monster at the door.Noah Turner's family are haunted by monsters that are all too real, strange creatures that visit them all: His bookish mother Margaret; Lovecraft-obsessed father Harry; eldest sister Sydney, born for the spotlight; the brilliant but awkward Eunice, a gifted writer and storyteller – the Turners each face their demons alone.When his terminally-ill father becomes obsessed with the construction of an elaborate haunted house – the Wandering Dark – the family grant his last wish, creating themselves a legacy, and a new family business in their grief. But families don't talk about the important things, and they try to shield baby Noah from horrors, both staged and real.As the family falls apart, fighting demons of poverty, loss and sickness, the real monsters grow ever closer. Unbeknownst to them, Noah is being visited by a wolfish beast with glowing orange eyes. Noah is not the first of the Turners to meet the monster, but he is the first to let it into his room…

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for A Cosmology Of Monsters

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Part One The Picture In The House

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Part Two The Tomb

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

Part Three The Thing On The Doorstep

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Part Four The Whisperer In Darkness

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Part Five The Nameless City

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Part Six The Shunned House

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Part Seven The Haunter Of The Dark

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

Praise for

A COSMOLOGY OF MONSTERS

“Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters brilliantly combines the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft with a contemporary story of a family under threat of destruction from supernatural forces … If John Irving ever wrote a horror novel, it would be something like this. I loved it, and think you will, too.” STEPHEN KING

“A monster stalks a family across generations; a hidden city beckons from beyond perception; trauma and human frailty and loss bear their terrible fangs … A Cosmology of Monsters is as weird and compelling and ambitious a horror novel as you could possibly want.”

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of Her Body and Other Parties

“Sometimes you read a book and you know it’s special. A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill is just such a book …Unique and wonderful. You won’t read anything like it this year.”

C.J. TUDOR, author of The Chalk Man and The Hiding Place

“Shaun Hamill has crafted the best sort of horror story: one full of love and dread that will have you rethinking your definition of what a monster is.”

JENNIFER MCMAHON, New York Times bestselling author of The Winter People and The Invited

“A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill is beautiful, heartbreaking, offbeat horror. A terrific debut.”

ELLEN DATLOW, editor of The Best Horror of the Year

“[A] very scary coming-of-age tale that lives in the same space as Stranger Things, Stand By Me, and Stephen King’s It…An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.”

KIRKUS REVIEWS

“This is a gem: a gentle horror novel, a haunted ride with real heart. I liked it so much that it made me feel personally grateful to Shaun for writing it.”

FRANCESCO DIMITRI, author of The Book of Hidden Things

“Gorgeously written and with beautifully observed characterisation, this heartfelt, deeply human tale of monsters kept me reading into the small hours. I’m glad to have discovered Shaun Hamill!”

ALISON LITTLEWOOD, author of A Cold Season

A

COSMOLOGY

of

MONSTERS

Shaun Hamill

TITANBOOKS

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A Cosmology of Monsters

Print edition ISBN: 9781789094114

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094121

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition June 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2019 Shaun Hamill. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

This book is for my mother, Patrice Hamill; my mentor, Laura Kopchick; and my wife, Rebekah H. Hamill.

He was someone who acted out our psyches. He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them onscreen. The history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that’s grotesque, that the world will turn away from.

—RAY BRADBURY

Upon retiring, he had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn.”

—H.P. LOVECRAFT, “THE CALL OF CTHULHU”

Part One

The

PICTURE

in the

HOUSE

1

I started collecting my older sister Eunice’s suicide notes when I was seven years old. I still keep them all in my bottom desk drawer, held together with a black binder clip. They were among the only things I was allowed to bring with me, and I’ve read through them often the last few months, searching for comfort, wisdom, or even just a hint that I’ve made the right choices for all of us.

Eunice eventually discovered that I was saving her missives and began addressing them to me. In one of my favorites, she writes, “Noah, there is no such thing as a happy ending. There are only good stopping places.”

My family is spectacularly bad at endings. We never handle them with grace. But we’re not great with beginnings, either. For example, I didn’t know the first quarter of this story until recently, and spent the better part of my youth and young adulthood lingering like Jervas Dudley around the sealed tombs of our family’s history. It’s exactly that sort of heartache I want to prevent for you, whoever you are. For that to happen, I have to start at the outermost edges of the shadow over my family, with my mother, tall, fair-skinned, and redheaded Margaret Byrne, in the fall of 1968.

2

Like me, my mother was born somewhat late into her parents’ marriage. Unlike me, however, she reaped the benefits of being born to financially successful parents. Her father, Christopher Byrne, was a women’s clothing buyer for Dillard’s department stores, and had a close personal relationship with William T. Dillard himself.

Margaret didn’t know her father well; she thought of him as a handsome stranger who smelled of cigarettes and who always brought home gifts from trips to New York—mostly original cast recordings of the Broadway musicals he saw while away—but she never wanted for anything. She grew up in a big house in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee, and always had a generous allowance, nice clothes, cars, and, when the time came, tuition at her parents’ alma mater: Tilden University, a small conservative Christian school in Searcy, Arkansas.

You’ll never have to worry about money, Margaret’s mother told her, and in 1965 that seemed true. My grandfather had been so successful at Dillard’s that in 1966, as my mother matriculated for her freshman year of college, he left the company to open his own store. However, by the winter of 1967, the store was off to a slow start, and in the summer of 1968, while Margaret was home for summer break, her mother broke the news: the store was failing. The Byrnes would pay Margaret’s tuition for another year, but would have to take away her car, her monthly allowance, and the dorms.

When Margaret reminded her parents that she would need at least two more years to finish her bachelor’s in English, never mind her master’s in library science, her mother said, “I’d suggest you speed up work on your M-R-S before you worry about your B.A.”

Only somewhat daunted, Margaret did her best with a near-impossible situation. When she returned to Searcy in the fall, she’d secured a job at Bartleby’s, the town’s only bookstore, and rented a room from the owner, Rita Johnson, a widow whose only religion was the written word, and whose politics were more Betty Friedan than Richard Nixon. Mrs. Johnson lived in a cozy two-story house near campus, charged a pittance for rent, and laid down almost no rules. She didn’t care what hours Margaret kept as long as she didn’t bring boys to the second floor of the house, and Margaret could use the TV and the record player as much as she wanted as long as she kept the volume low.

All of this new freedom was an abrupt, almost startling change from the stringent rules of the old residence hall. Margaret had never wanted to come to Tilden, with its mandatory signed morality pledges and heavily enforced attendance at Sunday morning worship services. She’d enrolled because it was the only school her father would pay for. She’d suffered through all the religious ritual in the hopes of a college degree, a career, and a life of her own. And now, living with Mrs. Johnson, she got her first taste of what that life might look like.

Margaret loved her new quarters, her new freedom, and, best of all, she loved the dim lighting and narrow aisles of Bartleby’s. She loved stocking the new arrivals, setting up themed displays, and helping her customers, kindred spirits on the hunt for stories. The only burr in her work life was a young man named Harry, who came in maybe twice a week and asked her questions to which she suspected he already knew the answers: Who wrote Great Expectations? Where do you keep your biographies? He always thanked Margaret for the information, but regardless of what he claimed to be interested in, he would inevitably camp out on the floor in the science fiction section, where he read books without ever buying anything.

He looked young, about Margaret’s age, and she assumed he must go to Tilden as well. She wondered how he found time to read so much and go to school. Also, if he went to Tilden, he could probably afford books. Why loiter? It got on her nerves, but whenever she confronted him about it, he replaced the unpurchased merchandise on the shelf, apologized, and left.

For a while, she worked thirty-two hours a week at the store, attended class, and studied in the downtime, but this routine proved more difficult than she’d anticipated. Work—even relatively easy work, in the tranquility of Bartleby’s—was draining. After a full shift, her feet ached and her brain felt like a wrung-out sponge. All she wanted to do was lie down on Mrs. Johnson’s couch and watch TV. On the nights she did force herself to study, she found it a slow, repetitive, laborious process. She had trouble focusing, and had to read paragraphs (or single sentences) over and over again to glean any approximation of meaning. She felt tired all the time, overslept, missed classes, and turned in assignments late or not at all. By late September her grades were worse than ever.

Her safety net, sewn by her mother’s phantom, taunting voice, came in the form of Pierce Lombard, a boy from her Western Civ class. Tall and skinny with close-cropped hair ten years out of fashion and heavy-lidded eyes underscored by dark bags, he looked perpetually sleepy and about a decade older than his actual age (twenty), but he asked Margaret on at least one date a week and he came from a wealthy family of chicken tycoons. If you did your shopping at grocery stores in the southern United States in the mid–twentieth century, chances were you’d purchased at least one Lombard chicken. Pierce sometimes tried to explain the business to Margaret, but every time he did, her attention wandered.

They didn’t go to the movies often, because Pierce disapproved of most films (he was conservative and devout even by Tilden standards), but when they did go, he sat at attention, and never smiled or laughed. Sometimes, in the dark, Margaret watched him instead of the film. He looked thirty now. What would he look like in another ten years, or twenty, when the pressures of chicken entrepreneurship began to wear on him?

He was polite, always opened doors for her and said “Please” and “Thank you.” When they took his Mercedes someplace to neck, his kisses seemed mathematically calculated to ride the line between passion and good manners, his hands on her waist, stomach, or face. Margaret, a “good girl” and still a virgin, imagined that real love ought to be a full-contact sport, intense and dangerous, the kind of thing that happened on railroad tracks or forest floors, two bodies struggling to express purity of spirit. She wondered if Pierce, a “good boy” himself, was waiting for her to show a spiritual kinship before demonstrating that kind of passion, so one night in early October, she reached into his lap and squeezed his groin. He startled, pushed her away, and retreated to the far corner of the driver’s seat.

“Why did you do that?” he said.

“Because I wanted to,” she said.

“That’s not the point,” he said. “We shouldn’t.”

He took her home after that and didn’t kiss her good night.

She’d always assumed that religion was something you did in polite company, not in private. Surely nobody actually believed any of the stuff they agreed to on Sundays. Pierce was a boy. Shouldn’t he push for more, trying to see what he could get away with? Did anyone think Jesus Christ gave a damn how they used their private parts? Pierce should be overjoyed that she’d shown some interest in his penis, shouldn’t he?

Pierce stopped calling after Margaret groped him, and sat far away from her in class and worship services. Her newfound free time didn’t help her grades; she failed three tests in a row. When her Algebra professor handed back her midterm with a big F− on the front page, he murmured, “Get it together, Miss Byrne.”

She felt a growing directionless fury at the unfairness of it all. Why was it her problem her father was a bad businessman? Why was it her responsibility to convince some sleepy-faced pinhead to enjoy her body? How was anyone supposed to succeed in these circumstances?

The day she got the Algebra exam back, she carried her anger to her shift at Bartleby’s. Mrs. Johnson read the emotional weather and left her alone to restock the science fiction section, which would have been fine, but Harry was blocking the aisle with his back to the shelves, a hardcover book open in his lap, a Please Don’t Read the Books sign hanging directly over his head.

She crossed her arms and glared at him. The sun came through the window behind her, and her shadow stretched forward down the aisle, shading him.

“Hi, Margaret,” he said. He smiled at her. “I’ve been meaning to ask—do you have anything by Philip Roth?” When she didn’t return the smile, he said, “What’s the matter?”

“Can you read?” she said. “Do you understand the words on the pages you’re turning? Or do you sit here because you want to look smart for passersby?”

“I can read,” he said.

“Then why don’t you—” She tore the Please Don’t Read the Books sign from the shelf over his head and tried to pitch it at him. The flimsy paper fluttered through the air between them like a fallen leaf, making its lackadaisical way to the floor. Harry watched it land before looking up at her.

“Why don’t I what?” he said.

“Why don’t you—you—you read it, you bought it!” She grabbed him by the shoulder. “Get up.”

Perhaps surprised by the force of her anger, Harry did as commanded, and allowed Margaret to march him to Mrs. Johnson at the front counter, book still open in his hands.

“Harry’s ready to check out now,” Margaret said. She pushed him toward the register.

He gave her a plaintive look but put the book on the counter. It was a big glossy hardcover, something you might find on someone’s coffee table.

Mrs. Johnson took the book and checked the price on the front flap. “Are you sure, Harry?”

He grunted an affirmative. Mrs. Johnson rang up the total. He grimaced when she read it off, but pulled out his faded, cracked wallet and paid. Mrs. Johnson put the book in a bag for him. He mumbled his thanks and left.

She watched him go before speaking to Margaret. “What was that about?”

“Nothing,” Margaret said.

“Actually nothing, or you-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it nothing?”

“Take your pick, Mrs. Johnson.”

“Watch your tongue, young lady.”

Margaret returned to work stocking the shelves. As her shift wore on, her anger ebbed away until it disappeared altogether and left her mystified by the strength and force of her outburst. Certain details kept presenting themselves to her, things she’d never noticed about Harry before: the ragged sleeve on his button-down shirt, the fabric rough from too many washings; the faded knees of his jeans; some vague, greasy smell she couldn’t place, inescapable when in his proximity.

By the time her shift ended that evening, she felt a dull shame, which only intensified when she found Harry waiting in the parking lot. He sat cross-legged on the hood of an old, beat-up Chevy, hands in his lap. She almost never saw cars that old on campus. Maybe he was a scholarship kid? Or, like her, trying to work his way through school? Face hot, she forced herself to approach.

“That was an expensive book,” he said.

“You can return it. If you have the receipt you can get cash.”

He made a face. “I couldn’t do that to Mrs. Johnson. She’s always nice to me.”

“Can I pay you back?” she said. She dug for her wallet in her purse.

He moved his head from side to side as though arguing with himself. “I was going to go to the movies tonight. I guess if you really want to set things right, you could buy the tickets.”

“You want me to go to the movies with you?”

“I’ll drive,” he said. “You pony up for admission.”

“What do you want to go see?”

“Rosemary’s Baby just opened in Little Rock,” he said.

Margaret had heard of the film. The preacher had denounced it in chapel last week, with broad, exciting terms: blasphemous, profane, hideous. Any student caught attending the film (or reading the Ira Levin novel on which it was based) would be expelled. But nowhere in Dr. Landon’s warning (or the memo posted all over campus) was the film described in any detail. What made it profane? What made it blasphemous?

If Margaret had still lived in the dorms, she wouldn’t have even considered the idea. But Mrs. Johnson wouldn’t rat her out; the proprietor of Bartleby’s thought all stories ought to be accessible to everyone, regardless of inherent morality. She’d be proud of Margaret for making up her own mind.

However, Little Rock was a fifty-mile drive from Searcy, and Margaret still had unfinished Chemistry homework, which she told Harry.

“I’ll drive fast all the way there and back,” he said.

She looked down at her plain sweater and the skirt she’d worn to class that morning. Not exactly a prime first date ensemble, but this was about reparations, not romance. The clothes would help set his expectations accordingly.

“Let’s go then,” she said.

3

It was a horror picture starring that girl from Peyton Place, about a young married couple that moves into a new apartment and ends up ensnared by the elderly, doting Satanists next door. Margaret bought the tickets, and Harry paid for the popcorn and soda. Their fingers touched in the popcorn bucket a few times during the movie, but Harry didn’t try to hold her hand or put an arm around her. He stared at the screen, engrossed.

The movie wasn’t jump-out-and-scare-you terrifying, but unsettling on a deeper, more primal level. Margaret found herself identifying with the title character as Rosemary was bullied and isolated by her husband and neighbors, raped by the devil, and helpless to do anything in the end but be a mother to the spawn of that unholy union. As Rosemary rocked her baby in its black bassinet and the credits began to roll, Margaret sat back in her seat, stunned. Were movies allowed to end this way? With the devil triumphant, and the heroine defeated?

The film’s spell lasted until Harry broke the silence in the parking lot. “If we speed, I can have you home by ten thirty.”

Margaret let him open her car door and studied his face. He had a long nose over a small mouth and pointed chin, and brown eyes capped with thick, dark eyebrows. She wouldn’t have noticed him across the room at a party, but his face was pleasant, genial. She felt the haze of the movie dissipating.

“Are you hungry?” she said. “I’m starving.”

“I could eat,” he said.

He took her to a McDonald’s a few blocks away, probably the only open place in town. As they climbed from the car, Margaret grabbed the Bartleby’s bag from the seat between them.

“I want to see what cost me so much study time tonight,” she said.

“You might want to wait until you’re finished eating before you dive in,” Harry said. “It’s kind of gross.”

He asked her to go find a seat while he ordered. She took a booth by a window, pulled the book from the bag, and laid it flat on the table: Visions of Cthulhu: Illustrations Inspired by the Work of H. P. Lovecraft. The cover featured a painting of a great, hideous beast, roughly human in shape, with thick, muscular green arms and legs, its hands and feet ending in talons rather than fingers and toes. It had the head of a nightmarish squid, bulbous and many-eyed, ending in a mass of tentacles, which hung down over the creature’s chest and giant, round belly. A pair of sharp but somehow fragile-looking wings sprouted from the creature’s back, and Margaret wondered how such an obese creature could possibly take flight.

“I hope you’re still hungry for this stuff.” Harry stood next to her with a tray of burgers, fries, and sodas.

Margaret tapped the cover of the book. “Is this Cthulhu?” She pronounced it kit-hooloo, and knew from his smirk that she’d said it incorrectly.

“One artist’s rendition, yes,” he said. “And it’s pronounced kuh-thoo-loo.”

She pulled the book toward herself, making room for him to set down the food. “He doesn’t look scary. Just sort of gross, like the monster version of a fat Buddha from a Chinese restaurant.”

He laughed and angled his head for a better look. “Yeah, I guess he kind of does.”

“Is he supposed to be scary?”

He sat down across from her. “In the story he’s scary. But maybe it’s one of those things you can’t translate without losing some essential piece. Like, it only works in the imagination.”

She opened the book, flipped to a random page, and found a painting of another monster—this one more indefinite and amorphous, a single mass of flesh with four black eyes; a glowing, vulva-shaped mouth lined with sharp teeth; and a mass of tentacles waving from its back. It floated among the stars, dwarfing a small planet in the foreground.

“And this fellow?” she said.

“Azathoth.” He picked up a cheeseburger and unwrapped it.

Margaret closed the book with some reluctance and laid it on the seat next to her. She plucked a fry from one of the greasy little sacks on the tray. “So, every picture in the book is based on a story by this Lovecraft guy.”

Harry nodded, chewing his food.

“It’s a thick book,” she said. “He must have created a lot of monsters.”

Harry covered his mouth with one hand and spoke around his food. “A bunch. And they’re all connected, too.”

“What, like they’re related to each other, like family?”

He swallowed and took a drink of his soda. “Some of them are, yeah. But I meant that they all exist in a shared world. Sort of like those movies where Dracula meets Frankenstein’s monster, you know?”

She shrugged. “I saw the one where Abbott and Costello met the Wolfman.”

“Same basic idea. They’re all out there, sharing space, breathing the same air. Like how so many of William Faulkner’s books take place in the same county.”

“You ever make that comparison in an English classroom?”

“Not for a while now,” he said. “I learned my lesson.”

“Professors don’t care for it?” she said.

He started to say something, then stopped and shoved a fry into his mouth.

4

They arrived back at Mrs. Johnson’s a little before midnight and sat in the car trying to figure out what to say to each other.

“Well,” Harry said, at last. “Thanks for the movie.”

“Thanks for buying an expensive book,” Margaret said. “We appreciate your business.” She laughed at her own joke, the sound shrill and too loud.

He stared straight ahead, mouth piled up on the left side of his face. “I guess I’ll see you at the store.”

“Good night, Harry.” She slid across the seat and kissed his cheek. It was rough with new stubble.

She got out of the car and walked up the drive, trying to decide if she was relieved or happy he hadn’t tried anything. This train of thought quickly collided with homework stress—her American Lit paper still unstarted, her Chemistry equations in math limbo.

“Hey!”

She turned to see Harry running toward her, something clutched in one hand. He stopped about a foot away and extended a small paperback with a cracked spine: The Tomb and Other Tales by H. P. Lovecraft. The cover was black with white type and featured a picture of a man’s forehead split down the middle, red bugs pouring from the place where his brain ought to be.

“So you can try him out,” Harry said. “My mom gave me this book for my thirteenth birthday.”

Margaret took the book. “Okay, sounds good—” she started to say, but he cut her sentence short, closing the distance between them, grabbing the sides of her face, and kissing her. It ended before Margaret had a chance to think about what was happening. He jogged back to his car and left her to wander, dazed, up the stairs to the house, fumbling with her keys and wishing she’d asked for a burger without onions.

5

Margaret stayed up all night to finish The Tomb, as though the book’s cast of geniuses, madmen, and near-indescribable horrors held the key to deciphering the strange young loiterer with whom she’d shared a brief, oniony kiss.

The book didn’t help. Harry didn’t seem like a madman, a monster, or, no offense, a genius. All she learned about him was that he had a taste for the macabre, and an extraordinary patience for dry, overwrought prose. She found Lovecraft almost unreadable. The stories had characters inasmuch as there were named people who existed on the page, but they never grew or changed or engaged in any meaningful human interactions. Whenever they spoke, they sounded like anthropomorphized textbooks from alternate dimensions. Most of the stories seemed to be about a single survivor relating the tale of an exploration of some ancient ruin and going mad as he realized that the ruin had been built (and was sometimes still inhabited) by some primordial horror. It was all florid, adjectival language, with nothing approaching the awesome horror and dread of the paintings in Visions of Cthulhu.

On the other hand, many of the tales had a compelling sense of dark revelation, the gradual realization by the narrator that the comforting “real world” humans inhabited was in fact nothing but weak gauze ready to be pulled aside to reveal an abyss of terrors underneath. It was sort of the opposite of Moses and the burning bush, or Paul on the road to Damascus. The same basic concept as religion—the world is not the world—but twisted.

She was still wrestling with this idea when she staggered into Western Civ the next morning, and didn’t notice Pierce approach until he sat down beside her.

“You’re talking to me again?” she said.

He sighed, and his nostrils flared. “I admit maybe I overreacted. But what you did—”

She leaned back in her chair, eyebrows raised. This ought to be good.

He put a hand to his brow. “I’m trying to apologize.” His forehead creased, and it looked familiar somehow.

“You’re amazing at it. Spectacular.”

“Can I take you out tonight? And have a real, adult conversation? Please?”

For the first time in almost a week, Margaret felt the uncomfortable tug of her mother’s voice at the base of her skull. The letters M-R-S burned in her mind’s eye like a brand. She was too tired to say no.

He took her to Searcy’s most expensive restaurant, a surf and turf place named Captain Bill’s with old fishing nets and harpoons hung from the walls and ceilings. He encouraged her to get whatever she wanted and ordered the lobster to prove his point. Margaret ordered a salad. She’d never eaten lobster. When she watched her parents do so, she found the whole messy business— the bibs, the excess of fluid, the cracked shells with paltry meat inside—revolting. Her mother and father might as well have eaten giant red bugs. The thought put her in mind of the cover of The Tomb and made her glad for her salad all over again.

She finished her food before Pierce finished cracking and digging and dipping and chomping. His forehead shone even in the low restaurant light, and she tried to decide if he was already going bald. Also, had he worked up a sweat over lobster? That couldn’t be good, right?

When the waiter brought the check, Pierce set it down in the middle of the table as he pulled his wallet from his jacket. She looked from the bill to Pierce and caught him watching her, making sure she’d seen the total. He pretended not to have seen, threw down several bills, and told the waiter to keep the change.

He’s trying, she scolded herself.

After dinner (and a handful of complimentary mints), they drove out to the parking lot by the city park. It was a clear night with lots of stars. The constellations put Margaret in mind of Azathoth from Visions of Cthulhu, the vagina monster propelled through the heavens by tentacles. She sleepily wondered what Harry was doing right now, and wished she could have napped before the date.

She’d almost drifted off when Pierce said, “You don’t have to sit so far away.” She started as he patted the space next to him.

She scooted closer. He put an arm around her, and she made herself lean into his body. It wasn’t so unpleasant. There was something comforting about it. Human.

“Are you still angry at me?” he said.

“No.”

“I understand if you are. I acted like a real dingbat.”

“It’s fine.” She patted his chest. Honestly, she realized, she didn’t care.

He took a deep breath. “The truth is, it scared me when you—did what you did. We haven’t been seeing each other for very long, and it happened so soon. I didn’t handle myself like a man. Instead, I ran away like a little boy, and hid from you. I asked God, ‘Why would she do this? She’s a good girl.’ And finally, He answered me: She did it because she loves you.”

Margaret’s body went rigid. “You talk to God a lot?” She never prayed outside of church or meals with other Christians, and even then she only bowed her head, closed her eyes, and said Amen when appropriate. Her mind wandered during prayer. She assumed everyone’s did, although you weren’t supposed to say so.

“All day, every day,” he said. “Anyway, my point is, God told me that you love me, and furthermore, that the reason I ran away was that I love you, too, and I wasn’t ready to admit it.” He shifted in his seat and peered down at her, his forehead nearly blinding in the moonlight. A vein stood out near his scalp. Was it pulsing? Was he okay? “I love you, Margaret. I know it’s fast, but my parents say that when you know, you know. If you’re ready to get serious, then so am I. I want you to come home with me during the Thanksgiving holiday. I want you to meet my family.”

Margaret sat up. Pierce smiled at her with a sort of benevolence—an expression she associated with her father’s face on Christmas morning, the look of a man bestowing a great gift.

“That’s—that’s a big step,” she said.

“I love you, Margaret,” he said. He leaned down and kissed her. She let him push her down on the seat and crawl atop her. She accepted his kisses and clumsy hands. As he bit her ears and neck, she caught something out of the corner of her eye—something at Pierce’s window. When she moved for a better look, though, it was gone. She tried to settle back into the rhythm of necking, put her hands on his face, kissed him, let him push his tongue into her mouth like a fat, slimy worm. She opened her eyes, and this time the vein on his forehead really was pulsing as he worked himself into a passion on her mostly passive body. She looked up, away from him, and saw something else outside, this time on her side of the car—a large shape with wide, hunched shoulders, and two eyes that glinted orange through the glass.

She made a muffled sound of panic, put her hands on Pierce’s shoulders to try to push him off, to get his tongue out of her mouth so she could warn him, but he only moaned and fumbled at her harder. The vein on his forehead had stretched across his brow, dividing it into two separate planes of sweaty, pale skin. She wriggled, trying to get free. Something moved beneath the skin of his forehead. The vein pulsed twice and then burst.

Pierce’s head cracked open, and hundreds of tiny red insects came spilling out onto her face, into her hair, down the cracks between her dress and her flesh, thousands of tiny legs wriggling in a bid for freedom. She kicked Pierce off of her, screamed, and scrambled backward, swiping at herself. She had to get them off, she had to get out of the car, she was going to die in here if she didn’t get out—

She grabbed the door handle behind her and pulled. The door popped open and dumped her on the ground outside. Pierce came crawling across the seat toward her, and she tried to get up and move, to get away before she had to see his face, to see spiders digging into his eyes, flooding his nostrils, and pouring into his mouth to eat him from the inside out—but she was too tired from her all-night reading marathon, too winded from screaming, and moved too slowly. When his face emerged into the moonlight, she couldn’t help but look.

He was a little sweaty and flustered, his face flush with interrupted arousal (and possibly alarm), but otherwise okay. The vein had vanished, leaving his waxy forehead plain and flat.

“What’s wrong?” he said. He got out and knelt in front of her.

She blinked a few times, breathing hard. “I’m fine,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “I’m okay.”

6

She explained that she hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, and might have had some sort of waking nightmare. He played the part of the concerned boyfriend and didn’t ask too many questions. She did find herself hungry again, however, and, eager to avoid any further necking, asked Pierce if they could get drive-through.

And so she found herself at a McDonald’s for the second night in a row, staring out the window of Pierce’s car while he ordered fries and a milk shake for her at the drive-through. Her face felt raw, as though she’d been nuzzling sandpaper. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to think. She only wanted to stare out the window and drift. Let Pierce deal with the disembodied voice at the drive-through speaker. Still, even this innocuous conversation, an exchange of less than fifty words, made her uneasy. What was it? Why the vague panic in her chest? She turned in her seat and surveyed the car, trying to discern the source of her discomfort. It wasn’t until they pulled up to the window that she understood. Harry opened the folding glass to take their money.

His eyes met Margaret’s across the car, and his mouth opened in apparent surprise.

“You sure you want this?” he said, smiling a little as he offered the shake. “It might have tannis root in it.”

“I’m sorry?” Pierce said.

Margaret shook her head a little. Harry looked from her back to Pierce.

“Nothing, sorry,” Harry said.

“How much was it, again?” Pierce said.

Harry told him, and they made the exchange. Harry counted the money and shut the window, and Pierce drove away. On the ride to Mrs. Johnson’s, Margaret held the milk shake with two hands, but she couldn’t bring herself to take a sip. When she got back to the house, she took it to the kitchen and dumped it into the sink before heading upstairs. Tannis root indeed.

She fell asleep almost at once. She dreamt about baying sounds, as if some wolf or hound was in great pain nearby.

7

Margaret’s mother cheered when Margaret called to tell her the news about Thanksgiving. She was so loud Margaret had to hold the phone away from her ear.

“That’s my good girl,” Mrs. Byrne said.

“My grades are in bad shape,” Margaret said. “I’m behind in all my classes.”

“You only have to hang on long enough to seal the deal,” Mrs. Byrne said. “You can do this, princess.”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t feel.”

“It doesn’t feel what?” Mrs. Byrne said.

It doesn’t feel right, Margaret thought. What she said instead was “It doesn’t feel real yet.”

“It will,” Mrs. Byrne said, as though reading the subtext in her daughter’s voice. “Just practice being in love and wait it out.”

As she got ready for school in the mornings, Margaret repeated the mantra again and again. We are in love. We are in love. As she brushed her teeth, she tried to picture Pierce next to her, the two of them taking turns spitting into the sink. As she fixed her hair and got dressed, she tried to miss Pierce, to wonder where he was, what he was doing. She tried to pine, to look forward to Western Civ. She ran along with the kite of their relationship held over her head, trying to get it aloft on its own. It always seemed to need a little extra help.

Harry stopped coming into the store. She could understand why he would stay away—he’d withheld the fact of his job from her, and not only had she found him out, but she’d done so on a date with another man. A man who drove a Mercedes. Margaret would have stayed away, too. Poor Harry. But still she had his copy of The Tomb, which had been a gift from his mother. He would want it back, and Margaret was eager to get rid of it. Even two weeks after her freak-out in Pierce’s car, she continued to have nightmares about lurking figures and distant howls. She was almost positive that it was the book’s fault. The Tomb contained a story entitled “The Hound,” about a pair of grave robbers who dig up a centuries-old dead wizard only to find something inhuman in the coffin, “with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound…I merely screamed and ran away…”

She borrowed a bicycle from Mrs. Johnson’s garage and rode across town to the McDonald’s. She arrived during the lunch rush and found Harry at the register, working his way through a long line of customers. He didn’t notice her when she joined the line; all his attention was focused on whoever stood right in front of him. He looked happy, as though each customer were precisely the person he was hoping to see. The look lasted until Margaret reached the front of the line, at which point he appeared to become fascinated by the cash register.

“How can I help you?” he said.

“I want to give you back your book.”

“So give me back my book.”

“When’s your break?” she said.

“I already had it.”

“When is your shift over?”

He sighed. “I’m off at three.”

She checked her watch. It was 1:45 now. “I will take”—she opened her purse and examined its meager contents—”your smallest order of fries. For here.”

He rang her up, then handed her a tiny sack of fries on a tray. She took them to a table in the corner, sat down, and ate as slowly as possible—so slowly that the final fries were cold and soggy before she was done. It still took only fifteen minutes. Her attention wandered to the window, to the bright blue sky outside, and to Harry taking orders at the register. How could anyone be so consistently cheerful?

Finally, at five past three, Harry shambled over and collapsed on the other side of her booth with a groan. As he sat, a wave of cooking oil smell rolled off him, and Margaret’s stomach growled. He fiddled with his little white McDonald’s hat while they spoke.

“What can I do for you, Margaret?” he said.

She pushed The Tomb across the table. “I wanted to make sure you got your book back.”

“I appreciate it, but you didn’t have to.”

“But your mother gave it to you. It was a birthday gift.”

He rubbed his face and squinted at the ceiling. “Oh yeah. That.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Just—if you check the publication date, it’s only two years ago. The math doesn’t add up. Unless you think I’m fifteen.”

Margaret snatched the book back and checked the copyright page. “Why lie about it?”

“I thought it would improve my chances at a second date.” He appraised her. “But that’s not why you’re here.”

She shifted in the booth and tried to decide how to answer this.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I get it. I saw your boyfriend’s clothes and his car. It’s an easy choice to make—the college boy, or the townie who runs a register for a living?”

“I didn’t realize you didn’t go to Tilden,” she said. “I thought you were like me—broke and working your way through.”

“I guess I could have clarified that,” he said. “But again— second date.”

“So you’re not in school? Then why aren’t you in Vietnam?”

“My dad’s dead and my mom is a paranoid schizophrenic,” he said. “I have a deferment.” He spun his hat around one index finger. Margaret moved her mouth around, but no words emerged, and he said, “It’s really okay. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”

“Can we be friends?”

The hat spun off his finger and landed on the floor. He bent to pick it up. “How would Captain Mercedes feel about that?”

“His name is Pierce,” she said. “He’s a good person. A good Christian.”

“Is that important to you?”

“I go to a Christian school,” she said. “Don’t you believe in God?”

He dropped his hat on the table. “Never met the guy.”

She made a scoffing noise.

“So your family’s rich enough for Tilden, but not rich enough for you to not have a job,” he said.

“Daddy always said we were well-to-do, but not rich.” She regretted the words at once, hated the way they sounded.

He shrugged. “I guess there’s rich and then there’s rich. From down here it all looks the same.”

She shrugged back. “If you say so. Anyway, we don’t have any money anymore. That’s why I had to get a job.”

“I’ve had a job since I was fourteen,” he said. “I worked through high school.”

“Try doing it in college,” she said.

“College? You mean when you’re only in class twelve hours a week?”

“There’s more to it than that,” she said. “Homework. Papers. Essay midterms and finals.”

“What are you studying?”

“Marketing,” she said, surprised by the spontaneity of the lie.

He rolled his eyes. “Do you and the good Christian boy both plan to get marketing jobs after you’re married? Do you see all your hard work paying big dividends in the next ten years, when you’re a housewife with three kids?”

Her face felt hot. “His name is Pierce,” she repeated.

“Good for him.”

“So.” She drummed her fingers on the book. “You’re a grown man who still reads ghost and monster stories.”

“You already knew that about me,” he said.

“I guess I didn’t think about it until now,” she said. “You don’t feel sort of ridiculous? Like maybe you should be reading books for grown-ups?”

“I think horror is the most important fiction in the world,” he said.

She almost told him about the thing outside Pierce’s window, the red bugs, the weeks of nightmares. She almost yelled at him for encouraging the night terrors into her head with the stupid book. Instead, she took a turn laughing at him. “That?” She pointed at the book. “It’s self-important, unreadable junk.”

He took the book back. “What do you want from me, Margaret?”

“Nothing. I only wanted to give your book—your book of lies, as it turns out—back.”

He laughed again, but it didn’t sound mean this time, only surprised.

“What?” she said.

He held up both hands in surrender. “Nothing. I like the way you phrase things when you’re mad. I can see why you want to study marketing.”

“I actually lied about that,” she admitted. “I’m studying English.”

He leaned forward, put his face in his hands, and laughed harder.

“You don’t have to make fun of me,” she said. “I’m already embarrassed.”

He wiped tears from his cheeks, trying to regain control. “Why are we so desperate to impress each other? Listen, I’m sorry for what I said about you being a housewife with three kids and no job. I was raised by a single mother working two jobs. She taught me better than that.” He checked his watch and grimaced. “Speaking of, I need to get home and check on her.”

They both stood. Margaret glanced at Mrs. Johnson’s bicycle, chained to the railing outside, then at Harry. “Can I get a ride?”

8

When they arrived at Mrs. Johnson’s, Harry got out to help Margaret unload the bike from the trunk.

“So you and the good Christian are pretty serious then,” he said.

She punched his arm. “Stop it. And yes. I’m going to meet his family for Thanksgiving.”

“It’s not even Halloween yet,” he said. “Thanksgiving is a long way off.”

“So what?” she said.

He shut the trunk and leaned back on it, arms crossed. “My mom never stopped dating until she and my father were married. She went on a date the night before her wedding.”

“No she didn’t,” Margaret said.

“My hand to God—”

“Whom you don’t believe in—”

“She said she wanted to be sure.”

“What’s your point, Harry?”

“You’re not married yet. It’s not even Thanksgiving. Maybe we could see each other a few more times before then.”

She made a face. “I don’t think Pierce would like that.”

“Then I’m glad I’m not asking him,” Harry said. “Who cares what he wants? What do you want?” When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “Let’s at least try one more time.”

“You’re not going to change my mind,” she said.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “But I’m not ready to give you up yet, either.”

We are in love, Margaret repeated to herself, trying to picture Pierce in her head. We are in love.

9

On their second date, Harry took Margaret out of Searcy and again followed all the signs for Little Rock. Once in the city, he pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and read from it as he navigated the downtown area. They entered a run-down residential neighborhood lined with old houses in various states of decomposition—broken windows, sunken porches, dangling rain gutters. They’d probably been beautiful once, but Margaret wondered who could live here anymore.

They stopped at the corner of one of these streets, in the shadow of a turreted two-story house with a sign planted in the yard: SPOOKY HOUSE! A line of people started at the base of the porch and stretched down the sidewalk.

“What is this place?” Margaret said.

In 1968, a year before the Haunted Mansion opened at Disneyland, and well before the proliferation of copycat attractions around the country, Harry didn’t have the easily understood cultural shorthand haunted house available to him, and had to reach for the closest available equivalent.

“It’s supposed to be like a fun house at a carnival, or a ghost train ride,” he said, as he circled the block and hunted for a parking spot. “But it’s a real house. So this is what it would actually be like to go into a haunted place.” He leaned past her, opened the glove compartment, and removed a folded-up newspaper. Margaret caught a headline (LOCAL BOY MISSING) before he flipped it over and handed it to her and pointed to a small ad in one corner.

Margaret angled the paper so she could read by the streetlight as he backed into an open spot across the street from the attraction. The ad was a small square of black featuring a generic, cartoonish ghost with bold white print beneath: “Come to Spooky House— AND EXPERIENCE A TRUE-LIFE NIGHTMARE!”

“This sounds like fun to you?” she said.

“If you don’t want to go, that’s okay,” he said. “We can see a movie, or I can take you home.” She heard the strain in his voice. He wanted this bad, but also wanted to be a good sport.

“No, let’s do it,” she said. “How often do I get a chance to live out a true-life nightmare?”

They joined the line and shuffled closer to the door every twenty minutes or so, as groups of laughing people emerged through the fence around the side of the house. Finally they stood before the ticket taker, an older, heavyset woman with limp gray hair and a cigarette wedged in one corner of her mouth. Harry paid. The woman made change, and then pointed inside.

“Should we—How does it work?” Harry said.

“Go in. You’ll see,” the woman said, her voice the sound of stones scraped together.

The front door stood open, but dangling orange streamers obscured the view. Margaret and Harry pushed through into a dimly lit entryway with a flickering bulb overhead and orange fairy lights strung around the banister, twisting up into the darkness of the second floor. Margaret leaned forward and peered up the stairs. Something moved, a shape distinguishing itself against the darkness, retreating from view. Margaret stepped back and bumped into Harry.

“You okay?” he said.

“Fine,” she mumbled. Maybe this had been a bad idea.

A group of four teenagers came in after them, two couples giggling and leaning into one another, their energy palpable and reassuring. Harry and Margaret moved aside to let the kids take the lead. They followed them down the hall, which opened on the right side into the living room. Four people sat on a severe, uncomfortable-looking couch, wearing weird (but not exactly scary) costumes. They appeared to be family—the father dressed in a suit and sporting a thick black mustache; the mother with long, straight black hair and a tight, form-fitting gown; a chubby boy in a striped T-shirt with a chili bowl haircut; and a little girl in a black dress, dark hair braided on either side of her grumpy, dour little face. They stared at a television screen covered in static.

“Welcome!” the father said, with a wave. “We’re watching the weather report on TV.”

“Looks like snow again, Gomez,” the mother said to the father.

Gomez? How did Margaret know that name?

“It always looks like snow,” the little girl said.

“You know, Wednesday, that’s an excellent point,” Gomez conceded.

Wednesday? Gomez?

“Oh, it’s like that TV show,” one of the teenage girls said. “The uh—what was it called?”

“The Addams Family,” Harry said, so quiet only Margaret heard. She caught his eye and he made an apologetic face. She studied the Addams impersonators. She saw it now, sure—but wasn’t The Addams Family a sitcom that made fun of monsters? Wasn’t it a comedy of errors, not horror? The ad in the paper hadn’t seemed to be advertising funny.

“Since we’re snowed in, you’ll have to join us for dinner,” Gomez said. “Lurch!”

A slightly-taller-than-average figure shambled up the hallway toward the visitors. He wore a tuxedo and makeup that made him look like Frankenstein’s monster. He groaned in the tone of a question.

“Lurch, show our guests to the dining room, will you?” Gomez said.

The tuxedoed monster groaned again. Margaret, Harry, Gomez, and the teenagers followed him down the hall into a large, candlelit dining room, where a long table had been set for twelve. Lurch walked around the table and pulled out six chairs. When no one moved to accept the invitation, he leaned forward and removed the lid from a serving dish in the middle of the table. He gestured toward the contents, a mass of black that seemed to be writhing in the flickering light.

Still no one came forward. Lurch reached into the dish, grabbed a handful of whatever was inside, and pitched it at the guests. The mass broke apart in midair and Margaret had time to register spindly limbs, a plastic shine. The teenagers shouted as the black stuff hit them and bounced off, thumping to the floor. Margaret squinted at the shapes. Rubber spiders. Lurch was throwing rubber spiders at them. At least they weren’t red.

“Oh, brother,” Harry said.

“Lurch, what have I told you about playing with your food?” Gomez said. He stood much closer than Margaret would have liked, and his breath stank of cigarettes. “Now we have to clean our guests!” She was grateful when he pushed to the front of the group and led them to a door at the end of the hall. Smoke drifted out from the crack between the door and the floor.

They shuffled into a kitchen so full of fog Margaret couldn’t see the floor. A man in goggles and a white coat stood in the center of the room and stirred a smoking pot.

“It’s alive!” he wailed. “Alive!”

Harry’s shoulders slumped a little and his face dropped into his hands.

“How’s the soup, Henry?” Gomez said.

“It’s coming along swimmingly, Mr. Addams,” the man in the lab coat said. He used the metal spoon to beat at something in the pot, splashing water onto the stove.

“Glad to hear it!” Gomez said. “Do you by any chance have clean towels? We had a mishap in the dining room.”

“Nothing clean, sorry,” Henry said. “That is, unless—does bloody mean the same thing as dirty?” He held up a white towel soaked crimson. The teenagers moaned with disgust.

Gomez turned to address the visitors again. “I think we have some towels in the upstairs bathroom if you want to head that way.”

“We’re not dirty,” Harry said. “Can we go back out the way we came?”

“Nonsense,” Gomez said. “We recently remodeled the upstairs guest bedroom. You simply must see it. Lurch?”

Lurch reappeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Take our guests upstairs for some clean towels,” Gomez said.

Lurch grunted and gestured everyone back into the hall. Margaret went first, Harry right behind her.

“It’s a small house,” he whispered, close to her ear, hot breath on her neck. “There can’t be much more.” Then, a second later, “I’m sorry.”

Margaret led the trek up the stairs and moved aside at the landing to make room for the rest of the group. They stood in a narrow, dimly lit hall lined on both sides with closed doors. There was also, incongruously, a tall potted plant on the wall opposite the stairs. Margaret leaned over the railing and looked down at the first floor. She thought about the shape she’d seen staring down at her from this spot when she walked in. That part hadn’t felt hokey, or like it was part of a joke. It had felt real. She pushed away from the railing and faced the huddled group.

“Where now?” one of the teenagers said.

The door at the far end of the hall swung open. Lurch turned and went down the stairs, leaving them alone.

They walked forward. No ghouls or demons sprang out. The house sounded quieter than before. Empty.

The room at the end of the hall was doused in sickly-pink light, and had been dressed like an old woman’s bedroom. An old vanity stood on the left side of the room, and a twin-size bed sat in the opposite corner. The bed rested on a metal frame, head- and footboards so tall that it resembled a cradle for adults. A lump lay beneath the blankets, unmoving.

Old black-and-white photographs hung on the walls: small children smiling and laughing on a summer day at the beach; a portrait of a soldier in formal wear, hat cocked at what must have been considered a jaunty angle; a newly married couple running from a church, heads ducked and hands raised against an onslaught of rice; an accident photo, one car T-boned into the other, the passenger side of the first car crumpled and caved in, the rear bumper of the second dominated by a Just Married banner and a train of empty cans. A second accident photo hung next to the first, this one depicting a body beneath a sheet that was soaked through with blood on one side. A single hand hung free and visible, white lace stopping at the wrist, diamond wedding ring glinting in the sunlight. Margaret stared at this one a long time. Was it real? Was it staged?

“I don’t get it,” one of the girls said. “It’s creepy, sure, but what’s the gag?”

“And what does this have to do with The Addams Family?” Margaret said.

“I don’t know,” Harry said.

One of the girls pointed at the lump on the bed. “What’s that?”

“Go see,” said the other.

“No way.”

They argued for another moment before the taller, broader of the two boys volunteered to investigate. The smaller boy followed, a step or two behind, his torso bent away from the bottom half of his body as though restrained by its own good sense.

The tall boy stood over the lump on the bed, his back to the room. He shook the stiffness from his hands and reached for the covers. Margaret licked dry lips, thought of the shape watching her through Pierce’s car window. She reached for Harry and his hand caught hers.

The tall boy took hold of the covers and yanked them off. His friend shouted, the girls shrieked, and Margaret took a step toward the door. The tall boy stood unmoving, blanket in hand, gazing down. Margaret still couldn’t see what he was looking at.

“What is it?” Harry said. He let go of Margaret and stepped forward for a better look. The tall boy dropped the blanket and picked the lump up off the bed. He turned around and held it so everyone could see that it was a pillow with a childish drawing of Dracula on it. The girls laughed, and Harry returned to Margaret’s side.

“This place is officially the pits,” he said. “Want to leave?”

“Yes, please,” she said.

They exited the room, leaving the teenagers alone. When they returned to the potted plant on the second-floor landing, though, they found the way down blocked by a sliding metal gate.

“I didn’t notice that on the way up,” Harry said. He tugged on it. It rattled a little, but didn’t budge.

“Now what?” Margaret said.