Breathless

fingernails, and a week later you found yourself chewing tobacco and buying bib overalls
because you liked them
.
    He must guard against an unconscious slide from sophistication into uncouth practices and boorish ideas.
    In the soap dish lay a small rectangular brush with medium-stiff bristles, clearly meant for scrubbing the stubborn grime of farm work out of knuckle creases and from under fingernails. Henry applied it vigorously to the disgusting scum under his nails.
    As he labored, he realized with dismay that he would no longer be able to avail himself of the services of a manicurist twice every month. Ensuring the health and attractiveness of his nails, of his cuticles, would henceforth be his responsibility and his alone.
    His hair. With a shiver of horror, he suddenly understood that he would have to cut his own hair.
    In the surrounding county, in this kingdom of rubes and hicks, barbers could no doubt be found, but he suspected that they learned to cut hair by shearing sheep and would do him up in full redneck style. Anyway, when anarchy swept the nation, venturing out to a barber would be as foolhardy as walking barefoot through a snakepit.
    The water was foul, lukewarm. He had cleaned four fingernails to his satisfaction. He drained the sink and filled it again.
    He scrubbed, scrubbed. He drained the sink once more and filled it a third time.
    When his hands were clean, he felt that he had washed away not only the filth but also every stubborn vestige of superstition. He believed that he would suffer no further from paranoid fantasies of the resurrected dead. Good-bye, Jim.
    With the shotgun in hand, Henry toured the house one more time.
    In the kitchen, he stared at the glow leaking under the braced cellar door. He was disturbed by the light pooling below, down there where only darkness ought to be—pooling, rising, insinuating.
    He stood there for so long, gripping the shotgun so fiercely, that eventually he became aware that his hands ached.
    He returned to the bedroom and stood staring at the faux sleeper under the bedclothes, the make-believe Henry composed of pillows and rolled blankets. The simulacrum was convincing.
    As his flashlight brightened in his hand, he doused the overhead light with the switch by the door. He left the door open. The hallway light was too dim to relieve the deep gloom in the bedroom.
    He retrieved his shotgun and took it into the empty half of the closet, from which he earlier removed Nora’s clothing. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall, leaving the riddled door open. He clicked off the flashlight.
    Outside, the tormentor would see the glow of the living-room lamp, the other rooms dark. He would most likely sense a trap and wait for Henry to step out of the house before making his move. Ifthe sonofabitch dared to use his key to come inside, Henry would be ready for him.
    The simulacrum under the bedclothes looked like someone sleeping.
    If the tormentor stepped into the room, switched on the lights, and opened fire on the fake Henry, the real Henry would return fire from the closet, killing him.
    Sitting in the dark, Henry recalled the shape on the bed, under the covers. He could see it clearly in memory.
    A real man lying on the bed would present exactly the same form as the pillow-and-rolled-blanket dummy. Exactly.
    He knew the sleeper was nothing but pillows and blankets because earlier he arranged them under the covers. He knew. Just pillows and blankets.
    Henry listened for a distant door to open. He listened for the stealthy footsteps of an intruder. He listened intently for the sound of the bedsprings adjusting to a shifting weight.
    Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Yet.

Twenty-eight

F or Cammy Rivers, the sudden recognition of the nature of the creatures’ hands was a wardrobe-to-Narnia, tornado-and-Toto moment, when the well-known land of a lifetime suddenly proved to be—to have always been—one door away, one wind away, from another reality.
    The creature with the plush yellow duck found the pressure point that made the toy speak:
Quack, quack
.
    At once, its companion answered with the purple bunny:
Squeak, squeak, squeak
.
    Panting in anticipation of play, Merlin stood poised to move whichever way the action might go, looking from one to the other of his new friends.
    Quack. Squeak, squeak. Quack, quack. Squeak
.
    Throughout most of her childhood, Cammy had wished desperately for a magic moment, for a wave of change to wash away the way things