SCOTT TORE THROUGH THE front door of the house without hesitation, down the foyer and through the hallway, the clatter of his own footsteps chasing him back to the dining room. On the floor in front of the air mattress, he saw an old book and read the title: By Dark Hands, by H. G. Mast. Glancing it at now, he felt no sense of surprise or revelation. Mast the elder had been passionate about more than murder. He had heard the call of the arts, and Robert Carver’s curse had taken the form it had because of his ancestor’s passion not just for murder but for the creative act, a shadow that had fallen forward across the decades to envelop the entire family. Scott saw it all now. His run through the woods had been bracing, clearing his mind.

It’s pointless. You know it is. You said so yourself. There is no end.

Yes, that was so.

So what possible difference could any of this make?

He didn’t have an answer to that. At the moment, he didn’t need one. Already he could feel the noxious cloud of energy gathering in the house around him, the ozone in the air growing stronger and more potent until it culminated in an explosion that would blow the roof off the entire world. Something in here smelled of blood. In the corner of the dining room, he ducked into the hole he’d smashed through the wall, wedging his shoulders deeper, crawling into … not blackness, not anymore, but a strange, creeping orange light.

He thought of the stove.

Something had lit it.

No, not just something.

It.

Carver.

He walked down the black hallway, the narrow wing stretching out before him in an endless offer of soulless oblivion. He kept moving. He thought of the title of the old book: By Dark Hands. And Helping Hands. And his own damaged hands. What was a hand but another kind of wing, reaching forward to embrace, to grasp, strangle, and choke? He had been through all of this before, as had his father and grandfather and great-grandfather; there would be a time and place when he would trade it all in and probably get nothing back. It was pointless to worry now about how it all might have been if he’d never found his father’s attempt to complete the story—if the things he’d aroused by undertaking the project had been allowed to lie dormant. It made no difference now. The light of his laptop had awakened the Carvers again, and all those hours of energy that he’d thought he’d poured into the story had actually been poured into them, nourishing them with his own lifeblood until they could stand up and take nourishment on their own.

Coming around the corner, he saw what was there and stopped in his tracks.

In front of him, wearing a shabby blue dress like a slave’s frock, Colette McGuire crouched over the small, prone body of Henry Mast. Scott’s first thought—that she had already killed the boy—was obliterated a moment later when a larger, immeasurably darker form rose towering in front of her. It was garbed in the stained leather apron that Scott had seen hanging by the stove the last time he’d been back here. The thing was unarmed except for the sharp scythe that hung in front of its face, which he realized, with a kind of jolt, was really its grin.

The scythe-faced thing came forward to put its hands on the boy.

“No,” Scott said.

Colette’s head jerked up—showing the pale face of Rosemary Carver. “Scott?” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have come.”

The shape of Robert Carver grew brighter in the stove’s light. At the same moment, he unbuckled the leather apron, allowing it to slide from his torso, allowing Scott to see through the gelid skin for what it was—not one body but dozens of smaller ones knit together in a kind of tapestry of corpses. Carver’s physical incarnation was made up of all the victims who had died here, tortured women and children who had suffered at the hands of Scott’s great-great-grandfather. They clutched at one another, coiled like serpents beneath his skin, their bruised skulls forming Carver’s shoulders, multitudes of bony, broken limbs entwined to give shape to the bulbous arms and legs.

As one, the victims of H. G. Mast bent forward and reached for Henry. The boy stared up at the creature in wonder, paralyzed but fully lucid, his expression a crosscut slash of terror.

Scott started forward with the intention of doing anything he could to separate his nephew from the thing, but the moment had come and gone. He’d wasted it on astonishment. Carver swung his arm, and Scott felt the strands of women’s greasy, matted hair, tied together to bind the other bodies, acting as a kind of net, a snare that caught and flung him aside. Scott whipped free. Voices shrieked at him through Carver’s mouth, bellowed, brayed. With an offhand gesture, the thing batted him sideways, and Scott slammed into Colette, both of them sprawling across the packed dirt floor.

He felt his mind trying to grapple with all that he was witnessing, but there was no room for it. This, then, had been when his father had snapped—bolted from here, headed out to his car and the stretch of road that would ultimately kill him. On the floor beside him, Colette glanced over to read the unspoken question in his face, meeting it with broken hopeless grief. She was only a vessel for Rosemary’s father’s undying rage, just as Scott was its target—no escape for either of them, now or ever.

The corpses that made up Carver’s body were bending forward, and Scott saw them hefting the wooden trapdoor that he had lifted earlier, starting to stuff the boy inside.

The pipe, Scott thought, the one that runs down underground and out to the pond—

At last, Henry seemed to shake himself from his terror enough to struggle against what was happening; he snapped and grappled with the thing, but the hands slithered from within its woven pattern to shove him along. Henry screamed, a rising squeak; Carver roared back at the boy with all the force of the avenged dead. The boy burst into tears. Colette ran toward him and Scott followed; Carver swung one great corpse-woven arm—

Something flashed in the orange light, and the arm dropped to the floor.

Scott stared.

It was Owen.