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Graeme vehemently shook his head “No. He—it—didn’t have any gun. It was just—walking. But not walking like a normal man. Along the drive there, and into the grass—in that direction. Like it knew where it was going, it wasn’t in any hurry. A thing-without-a-face.”

“How could it be without a face?” Stephen asked skeptically. “Anything in nature, any living thing, has to have a face. You must have been asleep and dreaming.”

“I wasn’t dreaming!” Graeme said agitatedly. “I know what’s real, and the thing-without-a-face was real.”

Stephen laughed nervously, derisively. He’d begun to back off, pushing the air with the palms of his hands in a dismissive gesture; the thin scratch on his forehead glistened with blood. “How could mere be a thing-without-a-face! You dreamt it.”

Rosalind said suddenly, stricken, “No. I dreamt it. I saw it—him—too. A man, a thing like a man, without a face—standing over my bed.” She covered her eyes with her fingers, remembering, as her brothers stared at her in horror.

Over my bed, in the night; in the moonlight; the shape of a man, a man’s head, yet where the face would be—raw blank featureless skin.

4. Other People

Our days at Cross Hill were tense and unpredictable as the sky over Contracoeur. Because of the mountains and the incessant winds that blew across chilly Lake Noir, the sky was forever changing: one minute a clear, pellucid blue like washed glass, the next mottled and roiling with clouds the color of bruised plums. Before an electrical storm, depending upon the direction and velocity of the wind, the temperature could drop as much as twenty-five degrees within a few minutes. Sometimes—this particularly disoriented the younger children—twilight began abruptly at midday, the sun buried in tattered clouds. There were thunderstorms so powerful the earth and sky seemed locked in convulsions; lightning raked the sky, revealed its depths cavernous and sinister as the cellar of Cross Hill (which was officially off-limits for exploration). The moss-rotted roofs and ill-fitting windows of the old house leaked; puddles formed on the once-elegant marble and parquet floors; Mother wept, and cursed our father’s enemies—“How can they be so cruel, so vindictive? If only they knew how unhappy we are!” Mother persisted in believing that, if Father’s enemies, some of whom were his ex-colleagues and friends, knew how miserable we were in this terrible place, they would take pity on us and exonerate Roderick Matheson completely, and welcome him back to the capital, where he belonged. If only they knew.

Father kept to himself, hidden away most of the time in his private quarters on the third floor of the house. On even the hottest, most humid and oppressive midsummer days, Father continued to work; it was said by Mother that he worked never less than twelve hours a day; he would not relent until he was vindicated. We might catch a glimpse of him at a safe distance—tramping through the tall grass, for instance, one of us sometimes glanced up and saw the flash of white of Father’s customary shirt at a third-floor window; never did we wave, for Father might misinterpret such a gesture as frivolity, or worse yet, mockery. It was at dinner we saw him, when we saw him at all. When he might appear in our midst, seated at the head of the table before we were called into the dining room by Mother, smiling and hopeful as a convalescent. He ate slowly, with forced appetite, and spoke little, as if to conserve his voice; he didn’t like to hear us chatter, but he didn’t like us to be absolutely silent, either—“Like mourners.” (Though Father seemed tired, he was capable of his old, cutting sarcasm, and outbursts of temper, directed especially at Stephen, whose awkward attempts to appear cheerful were misread by Father as “impertinence.”) There were many evenings, however, when Father ate alone upstairs, his food prepared for him by a woman from Contracoeur, Mrs. Dulne, whom Mother had hired as a part-time cook and cleaning