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his house—not the winter home in Ludlow, not too far from the University, but the summer place in Castle Rock. The north bay of Castle Lake opened out behind the house, and Thad could hear the faint sound of waves lapping against the shore. There was a POR SALE sign on the small patch of lawn beyond the driveway.
    Nice house, isn’t it? Stark almost whispered from behind his shoulder. His voice was rough yet caressing, like the lick of a tomcat’s tongue.
    It’s my house, Thad answered.
    You’re quite wrong. The owner of this one is dead. He killed his wife and children and then himself. He pulled the plug. Just wham and jerk and bye-bye. He had that streak in him. You didn’t have to look hard to see it, either. You might say it was pretty stark.
    Is that supposed to be funny? he intended to ask—it seemed very important to show Stark he wasn’t frightened of him. The reason it was important was that he was utterly terrified. But before he could frame the words, a large hand which appeared to have no lines on it at all (although it was hard to tell for sure because the way the fingers were folded cast a tangled shadow over the palm) was reaching over his shoulder and dangling a bunch of keys in his face.
    No—not dangling. If it had just been that, be might have spoken anyway, might even have brushed the keys away in order to show how little he feared this fearsome man who insisted on standing behind him. But the hand was bringing the keys toward his face. Thad had to grab them to keep them from crashing into his nose.
    He put one of them into the lock on the front door, a smooth oak expanse broken only by the knob and a brass knocker that looked like a small bird. The key turned easily, and that was strange, since it wasn’t a housekey at all but a typewriter key on the end of a long steel rod. All the other keys on the ring appeared to be skeleton keys, the kind burglars carry.
    He grasped the knob and turned it. As he did, the iron-bound wood of the door shrivelled and shrank in on itself with a series of explosions as loud as firecrackers. Light showed through the new cracks between the boards. Dust puffed out. There was a brittle snap and one of the decorative pieces of ironmongery fell off the door and thumped on the doorstep at Thad’s feet.
    He stepped inside.
    He didn’t want to; he wanted to stand on the stoop and argue with Stark. More! Remonstrate with him, ask him why in God’s name he was doing this, because going inside the house was even more frightening than Stark himself. But this was a dream, a bad one, and it seemed to him that the essence of bad dreams was lack of control. It was like being on a roller-coaster that might at any second crest an incline and plunge you down into a brick wall where you would die as messily as a bug slapped with a fly-swatter.
    The familiar hallway had been rendered unfamiliar, almost hostile, by no more than the absence of the faded turkey-colored rug-runner which Liz kept threatening to replace . . . and while this seemed a small thing during the dream itself, it was what he kept returning to later, perhaps because it was authentically horrifying—horrifying outside the context of the dream. How secure could any life be if the subtraction of something as minor as a hallway rug-runner could cause such strong feelings of disconnection, disorientation, sadness, and dread?
    He didn’t like the echo his footfalls made on the hardwood floor, and not just because they made the house sound as if the villain standing behind him had told the truth—that it was untenanted, full of the still ache of absence. He didn’t like the sound because his own footsteps sounded lost and dreadfully unhappy to him.
    He wanted to turn and leave, but he couldn’t do that. Because Stark was behind him, and somehow he knew that Stark was now holding Alexis Machine’s pearl-handled straight-razor, the one his mistress had