The sheriff frowned, his mouth starting to form a question, when Faircloth swung his cup down, smashing the man’s skull. The handle broke off and good old Dave Wood looked at him with a dazed expression. Did you just do that? the lawman’s expression asked. Did that just happen?

Faircloth was both surprised and gratified by the ferocity of his response. He grabbed the sheriff’s throat and squeezed until his thumbs popped through something just above the notch between Dave Wood’s collarbones. With a tiny gasp, the man dropped to his knees and then onto his side. A small trickle of blood ran from the corner of his lips. But Faircloth could still hear him breathing, or struggling to breathe.

For an instant, the sound startled him and he looked down, unable to believe his eyes. What had come over him? He had committed murder, but he wasn’t a murderer. He was just a normal man in an extreme situation. He had gone to war and come home to a hero’s welcome. He had gotten engaged and put money in the bank. Someday he hoped to go back to college and start his own business. Now all those plans lay smashed before him on the floor. What in God’s name had he done here?

The sheriff’s eyes gazed up at him, lips moving, trying to speak. Faircloth heard words, hoarse, whispered. “… not too late,” the sheriff was saying. “… help me … hospital …”

Faircloth bent down and lifted the cop’s hand, then paused at the rustle and creak of something in the corner of the dining room.

When he looked up, the girl in the blue dress was standing in the entryway to the black wing. She wasn’t alone. The tall man behind her wore a black suit. Her father.

Together they smiled, as one.

Faircloth smiled back. He understood.

“… doctor …,” the sheriff said in a mushy voice.

Still smiling, Faircloth picked up the coffee cup, now without its handle. He swung it down, smashing it into the sheriff’s face. Something shattered, but it wasn’t the cup. The sheriff made a squeak, hardly audible. Faircloth hit him again and again, beating the man’s face in with the cup until finally it broke in his hand. His arm was very tired and sore, but he felt good, as if he’d accomplished something worthwhile, the way a pile of wood warms you three times–once when you stack it, once when you chop it, and once when you burn it. Hard work is its own reward, as his father sometimes said. Faircloth had never truly understood what he meant until now.

He looked down at the palms of his hands and saw that they were dripping with

Scott stopped typing. He’d been working very quickly in an effort to get the words out fast enough. It wasn’t until he’d felt his fingertips sticking to the keys that he’d stopped, shaken from the spell that the story had cast, and looked down.

There were red blotches all over the keyboard.

Sticky scarlet whorls and dabs and smears were everywhere, spread across almost every key. It was as if a mouse, its feet dipped in red paint, had gone dancing across the horizontal surface of the laptop.

He took in a breath, held it for a five count, and let it out. Very deliberately, he told himself: This isn’t happening. I will turn my hands over and I will see that they are clean, and then I’ll look back at the keyboard and it will be clean too. Maybe I’ll get one last brain zap in the bargain.

But there wasn’t any brain zap.

He turned his hands over.

They were still covered in blood.

He sat motionless, staring at them patiently, waiting for the illusion to go away. That was how you dealt with tricks of the eye and mind, wasn’t it? You waited for them to go away, and eventually they always did. Because if they didn’t, then that meant—

They’re real. Or you’re crazy. Or both.

But the longer he stared at his hands, the more real the illusion—assuming it was an illusion—became. At this point, he realized that he could actually feel the blood drying in the webs between his fingers and becoming tacky in the lines on his palms. Worse, his joints and knuckles felt hot and sore, the tiredness spreading clear up to his arm—but only his right arm. The feeling of fatigue went all the way up to his shoulder and down the muscles on the right side of his back. He had done something vigorous and taxing with that arm, and recently. Like chopping wood, it warms you not once but—

“Scott? Are you all right?”

He looked up over his upraised hands at Sonia, and she stared back at him in confusion.

Scott put his hands over his eyes, scrunched them shut. In the self-imposed darkness, he heard her coming closer, felt her hand on his shoulder. The room tightened, sloping inward along a vortex of intensifying pressure. An eternity of time passed as he floated in a void and then heard her voice ask:

“What did you say?”

He took his hands down, opened his eyes, and looked at them. His palms and fingers were clean again. Of course they were. They had always been.

“You said, ‘I killed them all.’ ”

Scott opened his mouth and shut it again. He felt a sudden pressure in his throat. “He killed them,” he said. “He killed them all.” “Who?” “I don’t know.”

“Scott?” She touched his cheek. “Are you sick?”

Scott looked over at the boy on the air mattress. Henry’s sleeping shape gave him a measure of solace in a way he couldn’t describe. His pupils flicked toward the window at a shiver of activity off to the left, just a flicker, as if something inside the wall had shifted. “What’s that?”

“Snow,” Sonia said gently, walking out. “It’s snowing again.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just out to check my car. I’ll be right back.”

Following her toward the foyer, he caught himself running his fingers along the wall and through the sloping curves of the doorway, brought up short by how it was impossible to tell where the hallway began. The plaster walls flowed outward, unto themselves, without demarcation or boundary, in unspoken mimicry of living tissue. There was no question that it had become rounder since he’d arrived here.

He killed them all.