ROUND HOUSE WAS COLD.

On his first night, Scott put two sweaters on and wandered the first floor, stomping his feet and hugging himself while he explored the various doorways and slanting side halls, searching for the source of cold air. He almost expected to find a window wide open or a hole in the wall. Some of the doors were locked, but the only key he had was for the front door. Walking from the kitchen through an oval antechamber into the extremely old sitting room with a hearth and mantel, he found a window. It didn’t open to the outside but onto another room, perhaps ten by twelve, with two rocking chairs, shelves, and a wooden cradle in the rounded corner. The air here felt particularly still, as if it hadn’t moved in decades, and was as glacial as a deep freeze. Scott looked at the cradle, too small for anything but a child’s doll. Who had lived here, and when?

Did Dad come out here and write? he wondered, and then: Did Mom know?

He followed the flight of stairs to the second floor. Here was the sinuous hallway that ran the entire length of the house, with closed doors that had stared blankly at one another like frozen corpses for the last hundred and forty years.

Frozen corpses? Where did that come from? The writing room that Sonia had shown him stood at one end of the corridor, the door open just as he’d left it. They hadn’t needed a key to get inside the house, but many of the upstairs doors were locked.

SCOTT WENT BACK DOWN TO THE KITCHEN. He had picked up a few supplies—deli meat, peanut butter, multigrain bread, instant coffee, and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. He busied himself with putting away the rest of the food, found a dusty glass in the cupboard and rinsed it out, added ice and some gin and an olive. He’d never been much of a drinker—he’d bought the gin only because he thought Sonia might come by for a nightcap—and it felt particularly strange to be sitting here under the cold kitchen lights, shivering like an arctic explorer, drinking alone. Regardless, he took a sip, gasped, shuddered, and took a bigger gulp, letting it warm him slowly from the inside.

At length, he returned to the dining room.

For some reason, he’d set up camp here rather than in one of the upstairs rooms. Moving his belongings upstairs felt too permanent, and he liked the feeling that he was here only temporarily, until he came to his senses and realized the absurdity of this whole enterprise. So this was where he had put his suitcase and his laptop bag, along with an inflatable air mattress borrowed from Owen, a sleeping bag, and a pillow. He opened the suitcase and took out the stack of pages that comprised his father’s manuscript. Lacking a table or desk, he took the pages and his laptop to the settee and sat down, immediately uncomfortable. He was going to have to get some real furniture in here, even if he had to rent it. Temporary or not, four weeks was more than enough time to earn yourself a sore ass.

He turned to the last page of the manuscript. The text went all the way to the bottom of the page, but it ended with a paragraph break. The last thing that his father had typed was:

Faircloth heard the door swing open and stopped his ministrations with the pistol to look up. What he saw standing in the entryway made him suck in his breath and then fall absolutely still.

The thing in the doorway grinned back at him. At once, with the clarity of absolute terror, he understood everything that had happened up till now–and he grasped what had occurred here, in this place, and what it meant for him, forever after.

Okay, Scott thought, but what?

Knowing he was only going to make himself miserable, he turned on the laptop, already feeling awkward about the writing process. Greeting card copy was so short, usually fifty words or fewer, that he always wrote it by hand, often on Post-it notes stuck on corkboards he kept hanging around the office. One of the things he always liked about it was that with the right background music and atmosphere, he could usually bang out the whole thing in one night—from inspiration to execution. Sometimes there was even an element of self-hypnosis to it. If he had to write a Christmas card in July, he’d turn the air-conditioning down to sixty, put on a sweater, and mull some cider. No need for that now. He slugged gin and shivered.

Reading the last paragraph of his father’s story over again, he opened a new document and looked at the blank screen, the blinking cursor.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what the book cover might look like. The Black Wing, by Frank Mast and Scott Mast. And a picture of a dark, spooky, slightly curved hallway leading into darkness. Or maybe the oak door in the corner of the dining room, halfway open.

He got up and walked over to the door. Was his story somewhere behind it, waiting inside? He touched the cold doorknob, so cold it could’ve been hot, turned it, and opened the door, looking at the empty closet. Why, of all the doors and hallways in the house, had his father chosen this particular one to imagine the hidden wing behind? Scott looked at the scratch marks inside the door and touched them, running his fingers into the random, reckless grooves.

It was late. He blew into the air mattress until he was light-headed, but it still wasn’t firm. There was a leak somewhere. He unrolled his sleeping bag and lay down on it anyway, suddenly too tired even to brush his teeth, and switched off the flashlight. His first breath in the dark tasted of metal shavings, a slightly toxic flavor. In the silence there was the faint hiss of the mattress softening beneath him. The sea was lapping up, rising to engulf him, and he sank down beneath the waves.

SCOTT AWOKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT with a start, his heart pounding. It was as if there had been a loud noise somewhere in the house, a thump or a crash that had startled him from his slumber, that had ended just as he’d come awake. It was completely dark. Why hadn’t he left a light on?

I did. I know I did.

He sat up in the sleeping bag on top of the completely deflated mattress and waited, counting the seconds, but it was resolutely silent. The house was freezing, and he had to pee. The feeling of urgency versus the cold air reminded him of going camping as a child.

Groping for the flashlight, he climbed out of the bag, still fully dressed, mouth thick and gummy from the gin, and walked out of the dining room and down the hall that led to the entryway. The house had several bathrooms on the first floor, but he still wasn’t sure where all of them were; the closest was under the stairway ahead of him. He went in, emptied his bladder, splashed water on his face, and drank from his cupped hands. Now the water tasted slightly rusty. Wasn’t it supposed to get better, the longer you used it? The pipes shook and rattled deep in the walls. He glanced at his watch: It was three in the morning. No more sleep for him.

The insomnia had been a parting gift from his mother. When he was a child, his nights had been filled with the reassuring sounds that emanated from her sewing room, the steady whir of the Singer machine and the occasional creak of her footsteps as she got up to get something, a piece of fabric or a cup of tea. In the master bedroom, his father snored thunderously, gnashing his teeth and fighting the Vietcong in his sleep, while his mother sat sewing, tapping the Singer’s foot pedal, a woman driving nowhere. In the mornings, she had looked harried and run-down, burning toast, spilling juice, touching the corner of her lip as if trying to remember something from the drawn-out hours of the night. When Scott and Owen came home from school, she would be normal again, smiling, but Scott had found himself wondering what that thing was that she’d wanted to tell him after a sleepless night. After her death, he was struck by the fact that his relationship with her had been an unfinished conversation. In death, she had become much more articulate. At the funeral, he remembered Owen looking at him out of the corner of his eye, and Scott had gone back to the house afterward, up to the sewing room, and slammed his head into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Right away it had made him feel better. Ten years later: therapy. White pills. The crack in the wall was still there.

A sharp electric jolt ran up the right side of his neck. He winced, not moving, waiting to see if it would happen again. It didn’t.

He walked out of the cold bathroom, wiping his hands on his jeans, and went back to the dining room, searching his suitcase for his medication. He had the vague memory of leaving the pills at his father’s house—Owen’s house now, he reminded himself, home of the cracked wall. He could visualize it so clearly. Was that part of not taking the meds? He conjured up a memory of his mother’s pale face, standing in the kitchen with burned toast in her hands, crying about something. It made him wonder what other memories might be lying dormant in the corners of his mind, waiting for the lights to come on.

In the hallway, something rattled, and Scott felt his blood jump. He stopped in his tracks and held his breath. The radiator clattered a second time, the noise fading into a sustained gastrointestinal gargle. All around him, the subtle irregularity of the house made its minor incidental noises. Scott thought about the locked rooms upstairs. It would be good to explore them by daylight with Sonia, if he could ever get the right set of keys.

He crawled back into his sleeping bag on the flattened mattress and lay staring blankly at the ceiling, waiting for morning to come. Time passed in the funny way it did in the middle of the night, somehow quicker and more slowly, in fits and starts; every time he looked at the clock on his cell phone another twenty minutes had passed while he’d lain there listening to the house, thinking of nothing.

When day came, it was raining.