Of course she isn’t in danger, he told himself: this isn’t her house. She can’t be in danger. She’ll find out Lewis isn’t here and then she’ll go back home. But it was too much like the other time, he looking in a window and waiting at a door while another person prowled within an empty house. She’ll just go home.

He touched the door, expecting it to be locked; but it swung open an inch.

This time he would not go in. He was afraid of too much—only part of it was the possibility of meeting his mother in the house and having to invent an explanation for his being there.

But he could do that. He could say that he wanted to talk to Lewis about—about anything. Cornell University. Fraternities.

He saw Jim Hardie’s crushed head sliding down a mottled wall.

Peter took his hand off the door and stepped down into the brick court. He took several steps backward, looking up at the rear of the house. It was a fantasy anyhow: his mother’s angry face had made it clear that she would not accept any fairytales about advice on fraternities.

He backed up further, the fortresslike back of Lewis’s house seeming for a moment almost to lean over and follow him. A curtain twitched, and Peter was unable to move further. Someone was behind the curtain, someone not his mother. He could see only white fingers holding back the fabric. Peter wanted to run, but his legs would not move.

The figure with white hands was lowering its face to the glass and grinning down at him. It was Jim Hardie.

Inside the house, his mother screamed.

Peter’s legs unlocked, and he ran across the court and through the back door.

He went rapidly through the kitchen and found himself in a dining room. Through a wide doorway he could see living-room furniture, light coming in through the front windows. “Mom!” He ran into the living room. Two leather couches flanked a fireplace, antique weapons hung on one wall. “Mom!”

Jim Hardie walked into the room, smiling. He showed the palms of his hands, demonstrating to Peter that his intentions were not violent. “Hi,” he said, but the voice was not Jim’s. It was not the voice of any human being.

“You’re dead,” Peter said.

“It’s funny about that,” the Hardie-thing replied. “You don’t really feel that way after it happens. You don’t even feel pain, Pete. It feels almost good. No, it definitely feels pretty good. And of course there’s nothing left to worry about. That’s a big plus.”

“What did you do to my mother?”

“Oh, she’s fine. He’s upstairs with her now. You can’t go up there. I’m supposed to talk to you. Hi!”

Peter looked wildly at the wall of spears and pikes, but it was too far away. “You don’t even exist,” he shouted, almost crying. “They killed you.” He pulled a lamp from a table beside one of the couches.

“It’s hard to say,” Jim said. “You can’t say I don’t exist, because here I am. Did I say Hi yet? I’m supposed to say that Let’s—”

Peter threw the lamp at the Hardie-thing’s chest as hard as he could.

It went on talking for the seconds the lamp was in the air.”—sit down and—”

The lamp exploded it into a shower of lights like sparks and crashed into the wall.

Peter ran down the length of the living room, almost sobbing with impatience. At the room’s other end he passed through an arch, and his feet skidded on black and white tiles. To his right was the massive front door, to his left a carpeted staircase. Peter ran up the stairs.

When he reached the first landing he stopped, seeing that the staircase continued. Down at the other end of the gallerylike hall, he could see the foot of another staircase, which evidently led to another area of the house. “Mom!”

Then he heard a whimpering noise, very near. He moved to Lewis’s monkeywood door and opened it— his mother made another strangled whimpering noise. Peter ran into the room.

And stopped. The man from Anna Mostyn’s house stood near a large bed that Peter knew must have been Lewis’s. Striped pajamas hung from a chair. The man wore the dark glasses and knit cap. His hands were around Christina Barnes’s neck. “Master Barnes,” he said. “How you young people get around. And how you poke your charming noses into other people’s business. You’ll be needing the ferule, I’m thinking.”

“Mom, they’re not real,” he said. “You can make them disappear.” His mother’s eyes protruded and her body moved convulsively. “You just can’t listen to what they say, they get inside your head and make you hypnotized.”

“Oh, we had no need to do that,” the man said.

Peter moved to the broad shelf beneath the windows and picked up a vase of flowers.

“Boy,” the man said.

Peter cocked his arm. His mother’s face was turning blue, and her tongue protruded. He made a frantic mewing sound in his throat and took aim at the man. Two cold small hands closed around his wrist. A wave of rotten air, the odor of an animal left dead for days in the sun, went over him.

“That’s a good boy,” the man said.