At first I didn’t understand. It took a moment to grasp.
When I turned around I saw scrawled across the giant photomural of the deserted skate park, in massive red lettering:
D I ss a pE AR
HE r e
I breathed in but did not start panicking immediately.
I wasn’t panicking because something on the floor caught my eye and momentarily replaced the panic with curiosity.
It was sitting next to the open door, off to the side.
As I neared it I thought I was looking at a large bowl made from chewed-up newspaper scraps (it was) that someone had placed two black rocks in.
I assumed it was an art project of some kind.
But the black stones were wet. They were glistening.
And as I stood above the bowl, looking down into it, I realized what it actually was.
It was a nest.
And in the nest the black oval objects were not stones.
I knew immediately what they were.
They were eggs.
There was another nest next to the closet door. (And another one was later found in the guest room.)
I flashed on something Miller had warned me about.
Miller had said that fumigation was necessary so nothing living would be left in the house once the cleansing began.
That was why the house had to be fumigated: the spirits, the demons, would try to find anything living to enter so they could “continue their existence.”
A question: What if a doll had hidden itself and waited?
What if the Terby had hidden itself in the house?
What if it had survived the exterminators?
What if something else had entered it?
The connection between the doll and the nests was sane and immediate.
I remember rushing out of the room and tumbling down the staircase, gripping the railing so I wouldn’t fall.
When I hit the foyer I started dialing Robby’s number.
Again, I don’t remember this exactly, but as I waited to leave a message, I think that was when I noticed Victor.
Because of Victor, again I didn’t leave a message for Robby.
(But if I had called a third time—as any number of people did later—I would have been told that the cell phone had been deactivated.)
Victor was lying in a fetal position, shivering, on the marble floor of the foyer.
The grinning dog that had excitedly loped toward me minutes ago did not exist.
He was whimpering.
When he heard me approach he looked up with sad, glassy eyes and continued to shake.
“Victor?” I whispered.
The dog licked my hand as I crouched down to soothe him.
The sound of his tongue lapping the dry skin of my hand was suddenly overtaken by wet noises coming from behind the dog.
Victor vomited without lifting his head.
I slowly stood upright and walked around to his backside, where the wet noises were coming from.
When I lifted the dog’s tail I tried leaping out of my mind.
The dog’s anus was stretched into a diameter that was perhaps ten inches across.
The bottom half of the Terby was hanging out of the dog and slowly disappearing into the cavity, undulating itself so it could slide in with more ease.
I was frozen.
I remember instinctively reaching forward as the talons of the doll disappeared, causing the dog’s body to bulge and then settle.
Victor quietly vomited again.
Everything stayed still for one brief moment.
And then the dog began convulsing.
I was already slowly backing away from the dog.
But as I did this, Victor—or something else—noticed.
His head suddenly jerked up.
Since the dog was blocking the front door and I did not want to step over it I had started moving back up the staircase.
I was moving deliberately.
I was pretending to be invisible.
Victor’s whimpering had suddenly morphed into snarling.
I stopped moving, hoping this might calm Victor down.
I was taking deep breaths.
The dog, still curled on the marble floor of the foyer, began foaming at the mouth. Foam, in fact, was simply pouring out of his mouth in a continuous stream. It was yellow at first, the color of bile, and then the foam darkened into red, and there were feathers in it as the foam continued pouring out. And then the foam became black.
At that point I remember running up the stairs.
And in what seemed like an instant, something—it was Victor’s jaw—had clamped itself around my upper thigh as I was midway up the curving staircase.
There was an immediate pressure, and a searing pain and then wetness.
I fell onto the stairs face-first, shouting out.
I turned over onto my side to kick the dog away, but he had already backed off.