Rook

meticulous rows. Even the bathroom had four people crouched in position, their faces ringed by fuzzy cuticles of moss. Myfanwy put a cautious foot inside and moved slowly toward the figures. She ignored Shantay’s whispered warnings and crouched down in front of the closest chanter.
    It was a boy, a teenager. He had a little pudge hanging off his cheekbones and a little smudgy mustache, one that suggested he was trying to pass for eighteen but failing miserably. His eyes were focused on something that wasn’t there, and his pupils were like pinpoints.
    “Shantay, this kid isn’t more than fourteen. Christ, his voice is breaking even as he’s chanting!” She stood up in disgust and looked at the others. “None of the people in this room are old enough to have a checking account.”
    “Well, they’re certainly old enough to be possessed,” remarked Shantay. Myfanwy reached out toward the boy’s face, took a deep slow breath, then placed her index finger softly between his eyes.
    She was suspended in an ocean of sensation—the sum of the boy’s self. But where she would have expected a complex torrent of sights, tastes, and sounds, everything was muted. Delicate currents drifted about, wafting a vague acknowledgment of the temperature in the bathroom, the distant sound of Shantay tapping her boot, and the smell of Myfanwy’s deodorant. But all that, everything that was the world, barely registered.
    Instead, there was the overwhelming presence of the chant, echoing and booming above and below and all around, like thunder. It sucked everything toward it. Through it, she could feel the separate pulses of the people around them. Every person in the house who was chanting was connected to the rest. The pressure of the invocation was surrounding her, pressing on her, trying to pull her in. Myfanwy tensed and wrenched herself out.
    “Damn it!” she spat out, lying flat on her back. Shantay was kneeling down beside her, wiping Myfanwy’s face with the sleeve of her shirt. “What the hell happened?” Myfanwy asked.
    “You zoned out for about twenty minutes, and I developed amassive new phobia of mushrooms, checked your pulse seven times, and took a phone call from Poppat. Then the chanting got a little ragged and you hurled yourself back on the floor,” said Shantay, ticking each development off on her fingers.
    “What did Poppat have to say?” Myfanwy asked weakly.
    “Just checking in. In an ill-advised bout of honesty, I told him you were in a trance and then I spent five minutes convincing him not to immolate this place with us in it. And I explained about the people chanting and said that you’d call him back.”
    “Oh, great,” said Myfanwy without enthusiasm.
    “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, but there’s some weird stuff going on in this kid’s nervous system. Probably all of them are going through the same thing. Help me up, and let’s find out who’s pulling the strings. If we survive, then I’ll call Poppat.”
    Shantay heaved her to her feet, and they dusted each other off. There were only a few doors left, but they approached them cautiously, knowing that there was inevitably going to be some sort of unpleasant surprise behind them.
    It happened sooner than Myfanwy expected. Common practice and the laws of nightmarish manifestations dictated that it would be the last door along the hallway and that there would be a moment of stark horror. And so as they walked down the corridor, Myfanwy got more and more tense, her gaze focused on that final entrance.
    Thus, they almost walked right by the second-to-last room and only just noticed the frantic man inside. A pair of double takes ensued, and then they were standing in the doorway. The man was dressed in a suit that had clearly seen better days, but the house’s fungal activities had taken their toll on both his clothes and his face. Dirt, sweat, and spores had created a mottled cover all over him, and he reeked like a mossy log with BO. He was moving rapidly from chanter to chanter, stooping to whisper something to each of them as he passed. What effect all this industry was supposed to have, Myfanwy couldn’t tell, but he kept it up, even after he became aware of their presence.
    Although he never took his eyes off the fungus-clad people on the floor, the man took advantage of the pauses between each whisper to shout something in the general direction of the door, so Myfanwy and Shantay received his message as a series of short