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“Excuse me,” Dewey said softly, “you brought me a baked potato.”
    His father wasn’t a mean person, he was really very nice, and he loved Dewey so much that it was sometimes hard for Dewey to understand. His father would say things like, “Dooze Man, if it weren’t for you, I don’t know what I’d do.” And he would shake his head slowly and study the air, as if everything were so far away that there was nothing to see.
    Sometimes Dewey thought his father’s problem was just that he got impatient about having to live in a world where almost no one was as smart as him. He liked his father best, most of the time, because they thought the same things were funny (with the exception of Uncle Robbie) and they knew what each other meant without really having to say what they meant or sometimes by saying just the opposite or sometimes by saying nothing at all. But it was his mother he most “respected.” His mother was what they meant when they called somebody “a good person.”
    “This looks like a baked potato,” Dewey said aloud, approaching the doorway.
    Something didn’t feel right. The door was wide open. Dewey stopped in the hall. He was only ten years old, but he sometimes thought pretty complicated things in pretty complicated ways, and what he thought right now was that he could hear himself saying, many years in the future, maybe when he was an adult himself, “I could tell before I walked in the door that something was desperately wrong.”
    Something was desperately wrong. An odd, chalky light seeped from the room, and there were whispering sounds, or buzzing sounds, like when you put the edge of a piece of paper in your mouth and blow. From where he stood in the hall he could see through the door and into the room where Uncle Robbie had slept and on past the bed in Uncle Robbie’s room he could see the snow in the air at the window, which gave him the peculiar feeling that no one was going to be in the hotel room unless, maybe, it was Uncle Robbie.
    But when he entered room 202, he found nobody there, only the television. He checked the bathroom and the room where Robbie had slept and his parents’ room but there was no mother and no Robbie.
    This was not the time to panic. Actually, he told himself, a typical ten-year-old would probably be oblivious to the situation, to the fact that there was anything a little scary and strange going on. At least for a while. A typical ten-year-old would probably just sit down and watch TV. So that’s what he did.
    Only the TV wasn’t showing anything a typical ten-year-old would want to watch—meaning of course that Dewey was soon fascinated, fascinated by the murky, snowy screen that showed figures drifting back and forth in a slow, silent procession with what looked like lights dancing around their heads, disappearing into or emerging from a mouth.
    Dewey discovered a wire that ran from the back of the TV and culminated in what he suspected was an antenna, a little box with two stretchable rods, which he set on top of the TV. The antenna didn’t do much except make different images fade in and out, the long lines of men with the lights giving way to someone running endlessly up and down stairs and through passageways, and then to a room in which no one did anything, nothing was even there, it was just a room, and then the image would change to one of a lot of people holding drinks by a fireplace.
    Dewey sat in front of the TV deciphering the images as best he could, and he thought about how his mother would watch old movies late at night sitting by herself on the couch, and how he would sometimes, half asleep, sneak into the hallway and watch her there, and he would feel just like this, snowy and dim and sleepy in the same way the images were.
    Finally he felt hungry and he looked around the room to find that there was still no one there and it was dark outside the windows and the snow still fell. He would not say yet that he was panicked. Panic, as when