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outside, sniffing around, nosing closer.
    When I reached the top of the stairs I unlocked and flung open the cellar door. My sister fell against me, but there was no time to catch her properly or comfort her—not while I held the axe, and not while something struggled to breach our stronghold. Her eyes were wild as I lifted her with my free arm. She toppled against my breasts and rapped her cheek against my shoulder. Her strength had been all but spent to bring me ’round, and now she was wasted, exhausted, unable to even stand. A smudge of half-wiped blood streaked from the corner of her mouth, down her jawline, and into her hair.
    Had I done this? Had I brought the uncanny intruder to Maplecroft with my reverie, my stupid fascination with the contents of that iron-capped box?
    I suspected already that the bizarre sea glass and the strange fiends operated in some unholy conjunction, and I wished to know more about their connection, to better judge how closely they were aligned. But not then. Not at the expense of my sister’s life or sanity.
    “Emma, wait here,” I said, and I let her lean on me as she slid to the floor, into a seated position. “I’ll take care of this. I’ll take care of everything.”
    “The
creature
 . . . it’s around back. I saw it, at the kitchen window. Its
hands
 . . .”
    “Shush, don’t talk now. Stay here.”
    She seized my sleeve as I rose away from her. “Don’t leave me alone, with nothing to defend myself!” She did not ask, “What if you fail? What then will I do?” But the questions were implied, and though I did not intend to fail her, I understood her terror.
    I squeezed her hand and saw that her knuckles were bruised, flushed, and welling blood. I dropped her battered fingers and hastened around the corner to the parlor, to our father’s old cabinet, which had once been stocked with his favorite spirits and crystal decanters. Now it was also stocked with a pair of pistols, likewise once his own.
    I seized them both, knowing that both were loaded.
    I ran back to the cellar door, shut it, and dropped the guns into Emma’s lap. They looked so heavy in her hands when she lifted them and checked to see that they were ready. She knew how to shoot because I’d taught her, and I had to trust that she’d defend herself ably should the worst occur.
    But I warned her, “Don’t be an eager shot, dear—I’m not going outside yet. Stay quiet.”
    She nodded with understanding. She knew the routine. Silence and darkness.
    Taking my axe along for the tour, I went from room to room on our first floor and extinguished the gas lamps until nothing but the streetlamps cast illumination into our space. It was feeble light, fractured and prismatic, sent through the leaded-glass trestle and the street-facing windows, but it was enough for me to orient myself, and to feel as if I now had the space to listen.
    I closed my eyes and opened them again, letting the darkness adjust my vision. I stood in the center of the large front room, strange lines and shadows marking me like a nightmare’s checkerboard. I could see the patterns on my dress, slashing dark lines and light grooves across my skirts and down my arms. The tattoos of brightness shifted when I shifted, raising the axe and feeling its heft settle across my shoulder as I waited, squinting at the night outside and wondering where the would-be intruder had gone off to.
    Where was it?
    Emma said the kitchen; she’d seen it at the window. It wouldn’t be there still. It would’ve tried to follow her, circling, tracking her through sound or scent or whatever it is these things use to perceive the world.
    Mostly they seem to be blind, or to see very poorly. But they
feel
 . . . they pat the walls, they lunge at the boards, they trip and scuttle and scramble up our stairs when they stumble across them. They press their weird, webbed hands against the windows and leave prints on the glass in the shape of starfish.
    I held as