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"Well, it was for the best."

"Honey, do you have any kids?" Maxine asks as Horace’s chair thumps down the final flight of steps.

"Um, yeah."

"Where are they?"

"Who gives a flying fuck? I abandoned them."

"Why’d you go and do that?"

"Cause I didn’t want to be a mother anymore. Anything else, Miss Nosy?"

Rufus raises his wineglass of sweet tea.

"I’d like to propose a toast," he says. "To Andy, Elizabeth, and Violet. May our time together not end in your death."

A scream resounds from the lower recesses of the house, but Rufus continues, unfazed.

"May you break your tablets. May you find your way into the darkness and out again. And may you learn true freedom. Freedom from values. Drink with me."

The threesome clumsily locate their glasses and the party drinks.

Then Rufus and Maxine help their guests to a room on the third floor and shoot them all full of Ativan.

Leaving the supper dishes until morning, they walk hand in hand downstairs to the first floor. Rufus unlocks the small door under the staircase and holds it open for his wife.

As they progress together down this last rickety flight of steps to join their son in the basement festivities, Maxine inquires, "What’s that smell, Sweet-Sweet?"

They reach the bottom of the staircase and stand on the dirt floor amid the dim labyrinth of stone rooms.

Rufus chuckles.

"That’s gasoline, Beautiful. Old Horace is gonna get his wish after all. It’s a Christmas miracle!"

# # #

Winter on Ocracoke Island is a season of desert beauty—the lonely beaches ravishing and ravaged by the cold belligerent sea. The village streets are empty, the tourists having long since fled, wanting no part of a truly wild place. Nor’easters blow through, one after another. There is only wind and rain and skies of slate and the ongoing defiance of these eroding ribbons of land called the Outer Banks, daring the great Atlantic to consume them.

In February, two men walk up the beach north of Ramp 72, amid driving rain and spindrift and the deafening crush of surf. No other soul has ventured out into this raw gray madness, and on such a morning this barrier island feels like more than just the fringe of eastern America.

The slower of the two men stops walking, stoops down, and pries an enormous conch shell out of the sand. He turns it over several times, finding it perfectly intact.

"Here." Rufus hands the shell to Luther. "We’ll take it back to Mom."

They continue on up the beach, the wind to their backs, whipping the sea oats, the old man musing on what it will be like after the Great Regression. Luther has heard it a thousand times, and what he once suspected, he now wholeheartedly yet secretly believes: his father is full of shit.

But Luther dutifully listens.

The wind reverses, now howling out of the north, spitting rain into their faces. They turn and walk back toward the access road.

"I love it like this," Rufus says. "Look at the chaos."

He points out into the rabid sea, pulverizing the beach.

"How’s your treatise coming?"

"It’s good, Pop," Luther lies.

"Can’t wait to read it. See what four years in those Manhattan libraries taught you."

Rufus playfully bumps shoulders with his son. Luther musters a dead smile.

They walk awhile without speaking, over kelp and driftwood and the footprints of sandpipers and myriad shells and all that the waves have flung ashore. Rufus puts his arm around Luther and grins against the knowledge that he’s losing his son.

# # #

They’ll have no linear memory of the winter they are spending in the belly of the house. Only slivers to haunt the people they become. Slivers of darkness and silence and faceless voices and hilarious violence. They won’t remember the space between injections and gas, when the fogginess lifted just enough to let the inhuman horror of it all sink in.

# # #

"Breath deep, young lady." Vi inhales the gas. The world floats down and sinks through her and woooooooooooow.

"Now I want you to watch this tape."

"Okey doke."

As Vi fixates on the home video, the television screen begins to pulsate. It’s