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It shuts the way a good drawer shuts, and it shuts on the second creature, and the second creature stops.

Not dissolves. Not smokes. It stops, shoulders and head and one reaching arm on my side of the room, the rest of it somewhere else, hanging in my kitchen three feet off the floor with nothing holding it up. Its mouth is still open. Its eyes still track me when I move.

It’s not dead. I can feel it the way you feel a splinter under the skin.

Behind me, the first one hits the doorframe.

I turn around and I'm not frightened anymore, which frightens me more than any of it.

There's a line right there in the front of the creature's ribs where the rot smell is coming from, and it's thin, and it's badly held.

I put my hand out and I move it four inches.

The creature goes up white.

White, top to bottom, standing straight the way the candles stand when they're mine, and no heat comes off it at all. The wallpaper behind it doesn't even scorch.

It doesn't scream. It comes apart from the inside out, and then there's nothing on the floor but a shape in ash, and the smell is gone, and I'm standing alone in a Gage's kitchen with my hand still out in front of me.

Sid is under the table with every hair up.

"It's okay," I tell him.

He doesn't answer. He doesn't come out either.

someone hits the front door.

Once, then a scrabble, then a shoulder. And a voice, ragged, low down near the mat.

"Open it. Maren. Open the door."

Cass.

I stand in the hallway with both bolts thrown and both hands flat against the wood, and I don't move.

Don't open anything for anybody tonight. Gage said it and Lila said it.

"Cass, say something only you'd say."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Say it."

A wet laugh through the wood. "Cream, no sugar. Ma'am."

I open the door.

She comes in on her knees and I get an arm under her and we go down together in the hall. Her jacket's opened up across the shoulder and her sleeve is heavy with blood, and there's black on her boots that isn't hers.

"Bolt it," she says.

I bolt it.

"Neal's down at the tree line. He's breathing. Dario's not answering." She's got her teeth clamped. "There were four of them. I got two."

"Cass."

"I've got a phone in my left pocket, and I want you to hit the top name."