Chapter 22: House Lights (Patreon)

The kid wrote back on Monday at 3:40 in the afternoon, which I worked out later was the minute he got home from school.

— los angeles: we live on tarzana st in van nuys. the green house with the broken mailbox. my moms name is sophie. my sisters name is rebecca she lives in hollywood over a tattoo place. this is her number (and a number, with a 213 area code) i left all the lights on like you said. mom turned them off. i turned them back on. she yelled. she said diana doesnt like it. i have a flashlight. are you really comingR: I'm really coming. Friday night. Keep the flashlight with you. Check the batteries. What's your name?

He wrote back at 3:52.

— los angeles: martin

I. Rule Two

Here's what I knew about Lights Out, from a theater in another life, and a DVD I'd bought on sale in a bin at a Target in 2017 because it was four dollars.

There's a woman named Sophie who's been sick her whole life. Not sick like a cold. Sick in her head, the way people say it when they don't want to say the real words. Depression, in the movie, mostly. Bad years and less bad years. When she was a girl, she was in a hospital, and in the hospital she made a friend. A girl named Diana, who had a skin condition that meant she couldn't stand the light. And who could get into people's heads. The doctors tried to cure her with a light treatment, and it killed her.

But Diana didn't let go. She got into Sophie, somehow, the way a song gets into you. And she lived there. For thirty years. In the dark spaces in Sophie's mind. And when the lights went out, she could stand in a room. Tall and thin and wrong, with long fingernails, scratching. She killed Sophie's first husband. She killed Sophie's second husband, Martin's dad. She drove Sophie's daughter out of the house at sixteen. And she was going to kill anybody else who came between her and her friend.

In the movie, the way it ends is Sophie realizes what Diana is. That Diana only exists because Sophie does. And she puts a gun under her chin, in the basement, in front of her kids, and pulls the trigger. And Diana dies with her.

The kids live. The movie fades out on them in the back of an ambulance, holding each other. And it's supposed to be a happy ending, sort of.

I'd never thought it was a happy ending.

"Los Angeles," said my mother, at dinner on Monday.

"Van Nuys. It's in the Valley."

"For a ghost."

"It's not exactly a ghost. It's..." I thought about it. "It's a girl who died a long time ago and didn't let go of her friend. She lives in the friend's head. And she comes out in the dark."

My mother put down her fork. She looked at my father. My father was cutting his pork chop very carefully into very small pieces, the way he did when he was thinking.

"Rule Two," said my father, without looking up. "He told us."

"I know he told us, Ted."

"So he's following the rules."

"I know, Ted." Mom looked at me. She looked at my right hand, on the table, in the red glove she'd knitted. "How long?"

"A weekend. I'll fly down Friday after school. Back Sunday night."

"And there's a ten-year-old."

"Martin. His dad's dead. His sister moved out. His mom's sick and she talks to the girl in the dark." I looked at my plate. "He's been leaving the lights on. She keeps turning them off."

Mom was quiet for a long time.

"You'll call," she said.

"Nine o'clock."

"And the sister. Rebecca. She's an adult?"

"She's twenty-two." I'd called her. Monday night, after dinner, from the den, with the door closed. A woman with a flat, tired, smoky voice and an attitude like a locked door, who'd listened to me for about thirty seconds and then said Martin wrote to you? On the internet? and then Jesus Christ and then you're the kid from TV, and then, after a long silence, Okay. Friday. Burbank. I'll pick you up.

My mother looked at my father.

"Ted," she said.

"He's going anyway, Diane." My father finally put down his knife. He looked at me. "Aren't you."

"Yes."

"So." He picked up his fork. "Southwest has a five-forty out of Oakland. I'll get you to it if we leave at three-thirty. You'll have to skip seventh period."

My mother looked at him for a long time.

"You looked it up," she said.

"On Sunday night," said my father, "after he knocked." He ate a piece of pork chop. "Pass the potatoes."

On Tuesday after school I went to the mall in Santa Rosa and bought every blacklight they had.

Spencer's Gifts had six. The tube kind, eighteen inches, in black plastic housings, for making your posters glow. I bought all six, and twelve packs of batteries, and two of the little handheld UV flashlights they kept by the register next to the lava lamps, which the kid working there said were for checking whether money was real. He looked at me with my arms full of blacklights and batteries and asked if I was having a party.

"Sort of," I said.

At Radio Shack, I bought four more flashlights, the big ones, and a lantern, and a box of road flares, and more batteries. At the hardware store on Main, Mr. Hendrickson sold me a pack of emergency candles and a box of kitchen matches and a can of lamp oil and looked at me over his glasses the whole time and didn't ask, and then said, as I was leaving, "Dewey says you're all right," and went back to his crossword.

Tatum drove me. She sat in the Cherokee in the parking lot of every store and watched me come out with bags of light.

"You're going to fight a ghost," said Tatum, "with Spencer's Gifts."

"She hates light. It's the only thing she hates." I put the bag in the back. "And Spencer's is open till nine."

"This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen," said Tatum. "I love it."

On Wednesday night, in my room, with the door closed, I changed the loadout.

I'd thought about it since Sunday. Morbing was still in Slot 1, from the well. Wind Barrier in Slot 2, from the ferry. Both of them good. Both of them wrong.

Morbing was the worst thing I could take to Van Nuys. I'd be standing in a house full of ultraviolet light on purpose. A vampire in a room full of blacklights. I didn't know what UV-A did to Vampire Physique, and I didn't want to find out with a dead girl's fingernails at my throat.

Wind Barrier was better, but it was wind. Diana wasn't wind. Diana was dark.

What I wanted was light.

Ability Slot 1: Morbing → Spirit GunAbility Slot 2: Wind Barrier → Ember[SWAP] (5:00) · (5:00)

Ten minutes, on the edge of my bed, in the dark.

Morbing went out of me the way it always did, slow, heavy, like something sleepy rolling over and going back down into the basement. And in its place, at the end of five minutes, the Spirit Gun came in through my chest and ran down my right arm, the cold one, and settled in the tip of my index finger like a held sneeze. Warm. A lit match without the burn. I hadn't had it slotted since I pulled it in December. I'd never fired it. I knew from the text that I'd get one shot, maybe two, before I was empty for the day.

One shot. Maybe two.

Make them count.

And then Ember, in Slot 2, which I hadn't had slotted since the creek in November. A warmth in my other hand, my left. I held it up in the dark and let a little come out. A flame, the size of a candle's, sitting on the tip of my thumb, yellow and steady and warm, lighting up my room. The VHS tapes on the wall. The poster of Halloween. The Devas in their cage, all four of them awake, watching the little flame with their noses going.

Fire is light. Light that I could make anywhere, without a switch, without batteries, without a plug. Light nobody could turn off.

Never slot it with Morbing, I'd written in the notebook in November. Vampires and fire.

Not a problem this weekend.

On Friday at 3:30 my father drove me to Oakland.

He didn't say much. He drove the speed limit exactly. At the curb at the airport, he got out, and got my duffel out of the trunk, the duffel full of blacklights and flashlights and batteries and road flares that was going to get me pulled aside at security, I was sure, and handed it to me.

"Rule Three," said my father.

"I come back."

"Nine o'clock."

"Nine o'clock."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket and took out an envelope and handed it to me. It was thick.

"Cash," said my father. "For a cab. For food. For a hotel, if the sister doesn't work out." He looked at the cars going by. "I don't know what things cost in Los Angeles. I put in a lot."

"Dad..."

"Take it." He put his hand on the back of my neck. "I can't come. I know I can't come. You need me here. Your mother needs me here. So I'm not going to come." He squeezed, once. "So take the money, so I feel like I did something."

I took the money.

II. Burbank

Rebecca was waiting at the bottom of the escalator at Burbank Airport at 7:10 on Friday night, with her arms crossed and her weight on one hip and a look on her face like somebody who'd been asked to pick up a package she didn't order.

She was twenty-two. Tall, thin, pale, with dyed black hair cut in a jagged bob and a lot of black eyeliner and a nose ring, in a black band T-shirt for a band I'd never heard of, and ripped black jeans, and Doc Martens, and a black leather jacket with patches on it. She looked like every girl who'd ever worked the register at a record store in every movie set in the nineties. She looked like the kind of person who'd been told you're too much like your mother her whole life and had decided to look like the opposite of anybody's mother on purpose.

She looked at me coming down the escalator with my duffel. She looked at me for a long time.

"You're Randy Meeks," she said.

"Yeah."

"From the TV. From the... with the woman. Gale Whatever."

"Weathers."

"Weathers." She uncrossed her arms. "My little brother found you on the internet. At the library. He's ten. He doesn't even have a computer. He went to the library after school and found a website about how to survive monsters, and he wrote to it, and the guy who runs it is on a plane to Burbank." She looked at me like I was a puzzle she'd been given with half the pieces missing. "Do you know how insane that is?"

"Yes."

"And you came anyway."

"He's ten," I said. "And his mom turns off the lights."

Rebecca didn't say anything for a long moment.

Then her face did something. Not much. Something tightened at the corner of her mouth, and her eyes went bright, and she looked away, at the baggage carousel, at nothing.

"Yeah," she said. "She does."

Her boyfriend was waiting in the car outside. A big, shaggy, sweet-faced guy named Bret, with long hair and a Slayer shirt and an old Honda Civic with a cracked windshield and a dashboard covered in stickers. He got out when he saw us, and took my duffel out of my hands before I could stop him, and put it in the trunk, and shook my hand, very hard.

"Bret," he said. "Hey, man. Big fan. The website. The thing about the rules." He grinned. "Rule four. Never say I'll be right back. I say that all the time. I've stopped. Becca thinks I'm crazy."

"I know you're crazy," said Rebecca, getting in the passenger seat.

"She loves me," said Bret, and got in, and started the car.

I got in the back. There were four cassette tapes on the seat, all metal, and a bag from In-N-Out, and a paperback copy of Pet Sematary with the cover torn off.

"So," said Rebecca, from the front seat, as Bret pulled out into the traffic on Hollywood Way. She didn't turn around. She was looking out the windshield at the palm trees going by, black against the orange city sky. "Let's get this over with. What do you think is in my mom's house?"

I looked at the back of her head for a long time.

"Diana," I said.

Rebecca went very still.

Bret glanced at her. Then at me, in the rearview mirror. And then, very carefully, back at the road.

"Who told you that name," said Rebecca. Very quietly. "Martin? Did Martin..."

"Martin wrote it," I said. "On the website. Her name is Diana. But I knew it before he did."

"How."

I thought about Rule One. I thought about it for a long time, in the back of Bret's Civic, with the palm trees going by.

"I can't tell you that," I said. "I'm sorry. I can't tell you how I know things. But I'm not lying to you, and I'm not here to hurt anybody. I'm here because she's in your mom's house, and Martin's in your mom's house, and somebody has to get him out of the dark."

Rebecca didn't say anything for a long time.

"I left," she said finally. Not to me. To the windshield. "When I was sixteen. I left. Because I saw her. In my room. In the dark. Standing in the corner. And when I told my mom, she said Diana's my friend, she won't hurt you, she just doesn't like it when you're rude to her. And I told my dad, my real dad, and he... and then he was gone." She stopped. "And I left. I got a bus to Hollywood and I didn't go back. And I left my mom alone with her. And then she married Paul, and they had Martin, and..."

She stopped.

"And then Paul died," said Rebecca. "Last month. In his warehouse. In the dark. They said it was a heart attack." She was holding her own arms, in the front seat. "And I knew. I knew the second they called me. And I didn't go back. Because I was scared. Because I've been scared of my mother's house since I was eight years old."

The car was very quiet. Bret had turned the radio off.

"And now my little brother's in there," said Rebecca, "with the lights off. And some kid from TV knows her name."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be sorry." She wiped her face, fast, with the back of her hand, smearing the eyeliner. "Be useful."

"Okay," I said. "I can do that."

Rebecca's apartment was over a tattoo parlor on a street off Hollywood Boulevard, up a narrow flight of stairs that smelled like cigarettes and green soap, in a building full of people who played music too loud. It was one room and a bathroom and a kitchenette, with black walls, and band posters, and a mattress on the floor, and a lot of candles.

And a window, facing the street, and outside the window, on the front of the building, a neon sign. A big one, red, the shape of a heart with a dagger through it, and the words TATTOO · PIERCING under it. It buzzed. And every few seconds, it flickered. Off, for half a second. And on.

Off. On.

Every time it went off, the apartment went dark. Every time it came back, it was red.

"It's always done that," said Rebecca, when she saw me looking. She dropped her keys in a bowl by the door. "Since I moved in. The landlord won't fix it." She looked at the window. "I don't like it. I keep the lamp on."

She turned on the lamp by the mattress. A big one, with a hundred-watt bulb. And the lamp by the kitchen. And the light in the bathroom, and left the door open. And a string of white Christmas lights over the window, that she plugged in.

I watched her do it. Every light in the apartment. Without thinking about it, the way you'd lock a door.

"You sleep with them on," I said.

"Every night since I was sixteen." She didn't look at me. "Martin's not the only one."

I called home at nine from Rebecca's phone. Dad picked up on the first ring. I told him I was there, and safe, and that Rebecca was twenty-two and had a boyfriend named Bret who'd stopped saying I'll be right back because of my website. Dad said that was the most reassuring thing anybody had said to him all week.

Then Martha got on and told me the Devas missed me, and that Maga-Z had been sitting by the window all day, and asked if Los Angeles had palm trees, and I said yes, and she said bring me one, and I said it was a tree, Mart, and she said a small one.

Then I sat on the floor of Rebecca's apartment with my back against the black wall and my duffel in my lap and looked at the neon sign flickering through the window.

Off. On.

Off. On.

Every time it went off, there was half a second of dark in the apartment. Even with the lamps. Even with the Christmas lights. Half a second of red shadow in the corners. And every time it came back, I looked at the corners.

Nothing.

"Can I ask you something," said Rebecca. She was sitting on the mattress with her knees up and a cigarette she wasn't smoking. Bret was asleep on the other end of it, on top of the covers, with his boots on, the way Dewey had slept at the Harbor House. "You said you know her name. You said you knew it before Martin did."

"Yeah."

"Do you know what she is?"

I looked at the corner. At the neon going off and on.

"I think so," I said. "Some of it. Not enough. I need to see something first. Something your mom has. Or had." I looked at her. "Papers. A box. From a hospital. From when she was a kid."

Rebecca went very still on the mattress.

"How," she said, "do you know that."

"I can't tell you that."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she got up off the mattress and went to the closet, a narrow one by the bathroom, and opened it, and reached up to the top shelf, behind a stack of folded black T-shirts, and took down a box.

A cardboard file box. Old. Water-stained. With a lid. And on the end of it, in faded black marker, in a neat, careful hand, a teenage girl's hand:

SOPHIE — LILIAN — KEEP

"I took it," said Rebecca. "When I left. When I was sixteen. I took it out of the hall closet because I knew it had something to do with her, and I thought if I took it, maybe..." She laughed, a little, terribly. "I thought if I took it, she'd come with it. And leave Mom alone. Like a stupid kid." She held the box out to me. "I've never opened it. Six years. I've never opened it once."

I took the box.

It was light. Lighter than it looked. And cold. Not refrigerator cold. Cold like my right hand. Like the bottom of a well.

My right hand, in the red glove, closed on the cardboard. And the cold in my fingers, the cold that had been there for three weeks, the cold that was a little girl holding on, tightened. Hard. The way it had at the funeral. The way a kid's hand tightens when she sees something in the dark she doesn't like.

It's okay, I thought. I know. I see it too.

Outside, the neon sign went off.

And for half a second, in the red-black dark, in the corner of Rebecca's apartment, by the closet she'd just opened, I saw something standing.

Tall. Thin. Too tall and too thin, bent at the top where the ceiling was too low for it. Long hair hanging in front of a face I couldn't see. Long arms. Long fingers, hanging, with long nails.

The sign came back on. Red.

Nothing in the corner.

Rebecca had seen it too. I could tell by the way she'd stopped breathing.

"She's never been here," said Rebecca, in a voice I'd never heard a grown woman use. "Not once. In six years. She's never..."

"She followed the box," I said.

Rebecca looked at the box in my hands.

"Like a stupid kid," she said.

"Like a smart one," I said. "You were right. She came with it." I set the box down on the floor, in the light, in the very middle of the floor, under the hundred-watt lamp. "She came with it because she doesn't want anybody reading what's inside."

I opened my duffel. I took out a blacklight, and a battery pack, and plugged it in, and set it on the floor next to the box, pointing at the corner by the closet. It came on with a hum and a flicker, and the corner went purple. Rebecca's white Christmas lights glowed. Bret's Slayer shirt glowed. The lint on the black carpet glowed.

Nothing else did.

"Which," I said, "is why we're going to read it."

III. Lilian

We read it on Saturday morning, at a Denny's on Sunset, in a booth by the window, in full sun, at nine a.m.

Rebecca's idea. "If she followed the box last night," Rebecca said, at seven, sitting up on the mattress with her makeup from yesterday smudged around her eyes and every light in the apartment still on, "then we read it somewhere she can't. Somewhere with no corners." She looked at me. "Is that stupid?"

"That's the smartest thing anybody's said to me all week."

So it was Denny's. A booth by the window on the sunny side, with the blinds all the way up and Los Angeles going by outside in the bright flat February light, and three plates of Grand Slams, and Bret's hash browns, and the box in the middle of the table between the syrup and the ketchup.

Rebecca opened it.

Inside, there were papers. A lot of them. Old, yellowed, curled at the edges, some typed, some handwritten. Hospital forms. A brochure, faded, with a photograph of a long white building with a lawn in front of it: LILIAN HOSPITAL · A PLACE OF REST AND RECOVERY. Copies of medical charts, made on an old photocopier that turned everything gray. And under all of it, a spiral notebook with a cover that had been pink once, with a teenage girl's handwriting on the front in ballpoint:

S.W. — PRIVATE — KEEP OUT

Rebecca put her hand flat on the notebook and didn't open it.

"That's my mom's," she said. "That's her handwriting. From when she was a kid." Her voice was very steady. "I can't read that. I'm sorry. I can't."

"I'll read it," I said. "If you want. Or nobody reads it. It's yours."

She looked at the notebook for a long time.

"Read it," said Rebecca. "Out loud. I want to hear. I just can't..." She stopped. "I can't be the one."

So I read it out loud. In a Denny's on Sunset Boulevard, at nine in the morning, with the sun coming in through the blinds, I read a fourteen-year-old girl's diary to her daughter.

There was a lot of things written here, a birthday here, an event there, a stupid crush, but this is what I thought was important.

Sophie had gone into Lilian in the summer of 1970, when she was thirteen. For my nerves, she wrote, in the first entry, in big round letters with circles over the i's. Mom says it's just for a little while. Mom says I'm too sad. She didn't like it there. The food was bad. The nurses were mean. There was a girl down the hall who screamed at night.

And then, in the fourth week, there was a girl named Diana.

She's in the room at the end. The one with the dark windows. She can't go in the light because of her skin. It burns. She's so pale. She's the palest person I've ever seen. She's really tall, taller than the nurses. She's fifteen. She's my friend.

Diana says I'm the only one who's nice to her.

Diana says everybody else is scared of her.

Diana can do a thing. I don't know how to explain it. She can get in your head. She can make you feel things. She did it to Nurse Allison and Nurse Allison cried all day. She did it to me once, a good one, she made me feel happy. Like on Christmas. I asked her to do it again. She said she would if I was her best friend.

I'm her best friend.

The pages went on. Weeks of them. Diana and Sophie, Sophie and Diana. Talking through the door of the dark room. Sitting in the dark together. Diana's stories. Diana's anger at the doctors, at the nurses, at the other kids who were mean to her, and what happened to them after. A boy who fell down the stairs. A nurse who quit. Diana says she didn't do it. Diana says they deserved it anyway.

And then, in October, an entry in a different hand. Shaky. The pen pressed so hard it had torn the paper.

They took her into the room with the lights. The doctors. Dr. Hale said it was a treatment. A new kind. They put her in a room full of lights to fix her skin. I heard her screaming. Through the walls. For a long time. And then I didn't hear anything.

She's dead.

They said she's dead.

And then, the next page. Two days later. The round letters back again, the circles over the i's.

She came back.

She came to my room last night when they turned the lights off. She was standing in the corner. She said she's not dead, not really, not as long as I don't forget her. She said I have to keep her. She said if I stop thinking about her, if I stop talking to her, she'll disappear forever, and she'll be all alone in the dark, and it'll be my fault.

I won't let that happen.

I'm her best friend. I'm going to keep her.

I stopped reading.

The Denny's was loud around us. Plates. A baby crying. The waitress calling an order back to the kitchen. Outside, Sunset Boulevard, sun, a bus going by.

Rebecca was sitting across from me with both hands flat on the table and her face very white under the smudged eyeliner.

"Thirty years," she said. "She's been keeping her for thirty years."

"Yeah."

"Since she was fourteen."

"Yeah."

Bret, next to her, had stopped eating his hash browns a long time ago. He put his arm around her. She didn't seem to notice.

I looked at the diary in my hands. At I'm going to keep her. At the round, careful, fourteen-year-old letters.

And here's the thing I saw. Sitting there in a Denny's, in the sun. The thing I hadn't seen in a theater in another life, or on a four-dollar DVD on a couch, because in the movie it went by too fast, one line of dialogue in the dark, and then the gun.

In the movie, Diana is a parasite. She lives in Sophie like a disease, and the only cure is killing the host. That's how the movie sees it. That's how Sophie sees it, at the end, with the gun.

But that's not what the diary said.

The diary said I'm going to keep her. The diary said if I stop thinking about her, she'll disappear. Diana hadn't taken Sophie. Sophie had kept her. A lonely, sad, fourteen-year-old girl in a hospital had made a friend, the only friend she'd ever had, and when the friend died, she'd held on. With everything she had. For thirty years. Because she'd promised. Because it would be her fault.

Diana didn't live in Sophie because she was stronger than Sophie.

Diana lived in Sophie because Sophie wouldn't let her go.

You don't have to die, I thought. You just have to stop holding on.

I looked down at my right hand, in the red glove, on the table next to the syrup. The cold in it. A little girl at the bottom of a well, holding on to the one person who came.

It's not the same, I told myself. It's not. Samara's not hurting anybody. Samara's not...

But I sat there for a long time looking at my glove anyway.

Feat: Find a ghost in a dead girl's file.Silver Skill (held).Story in progress: House Lights.

House Lights, I thought. The panel had named it. It always did, the second the story knew what it was. Not Lights Out, like the movie. House Lights. The lights in a theater that come up at the end, when the movie's over and everybody's allowed to see each other again.

I liked it. I hoped it meant something.

"What," said Rebecca. She'd been watching my face. "What did you just figure out?"

I closed the diary, carefully, and put my hand flat on the cover, the way she had.

"I know how she ends," I said.

IV. Tarzana Street

The green house with the broken mailbox was on a street of little stucco houses in Van Nuys, with lawns gone brown in the winter and chain-link fences and palm trees too tall for their yards, and a big pepper tree in front of it with its branches hanging down over the roof like hair.

We got there at four in the afternoon. In daylight. I'd wanted it that way. Bret parked the Civic at the curb, and Rebecca sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and looked at the house for a long time without getting out.

"Six years," she said. "I haven't been inside since I was sixteen."

"You don't have to come in."

"Yes, I do." She opened the door. "He's my brother."

Martin opened the front door before we got to it.

He was ten. Small for ten, thin, with dark hair that needed cutting and big dark eyes with shadows under them, the shadows of a kid who hadn't been sleeping, in a Dodgers T-shirt and jeans. He had a flashlight in his hand. A big one, a yellow plastic lantern-flashlight, the kind you buy at a gas station. It was on. In the middle of the afternoon.

He looked at Rebecca first. His face did something complicated.

"Becca," he said.

"Hey, Marty."

And then he looked at me.

He knew me. Of course he did. He'd found my website at the library. He'd probably seen Gale's hour; everybody had. He looked at me standing on his front walk with my duffel bag full of blacklights and my red glove and Sid's... no. Not Sid's scarf. I'd given it back. Just me. In a flannel. Six feet tall, skinny, seventeen.

"You came," said Martin.

"I said I would."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then his face crumpled, all at once, the way a ten-year-old's does when he's been holding something up for a month all by himself and somebody finally walks in the door and takes the other end.

Rebecca got to him first. She dropped to her knees on the front step and he came out of the door into her arms, flashlight and all, and the yellow light swung wildly over the porch, and she held on to him so hard I heard him squeak.

"I'm sorry," Rebecca was saying, into his hair. "I'm sorry, Marty, I'm so sorry, I should've come, I should've come..."

I stood on the walk and looked at the house over their heads.

All the curtains were drawn. Every window. In the middle of a sunny afternoon. And through the gaps at the edges, I could see that inside, there were no lights on at all.

Sophie was in the kitchen.

She was in her forties, but she looked older, and younger, both at once, the way people do who've been sick for a long time. Thin. Pale. Long hair, going gray, loose down her back. In a bathrobe, at four in the afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold in front of her, in the dark. The blinds were down. The overhead light was off. There was just the gray light coming in around the edges of the blinds, and the green glow of the clock on the microwave.

She looked up when we came in. At Martin, first. Then at Rebecca. And her face lit up, all at once, like a little girl's.

"Becca," said Sophie. "Oh, Becca. Baby. You came home."

Rebecca stopped in the doorway. I watched her not be able to move.

"Hi, Mom," she said.

Sophie got up. She came across the kitchen and put her arms around her daughter, and Rebecca stood there stiff as a board for a second, and then didn't. And they stood in the dark kitchen holding each other while Martin watched with his flashlight and Bret looked at the floor.

And then Sophie looked over Rebecca's shoulder. At me.

Her face changed.

"You're the boy," she said. Slowly. "The boy from the television. Martin showed me. He said you were coming." She looked at me. Not unkind. Puzzled. Like I was a word she knew but couldn't place. "Diana says you shouldn't be here."

The kitchen was very quiet.

I felt it, then. Something I hadn't felt before. Something new. A sort of give. A softness, in the air between Sophie and me, like a door that had been locked to everybody else for a long time being, for me, just very slightly ajar. She was looking at me the way you'd look at someone you already liked, without knowing why.

Crazy Lure, I thought. Crazy, mentally unstable, or otherwise insane people find themselves more attracted to you. It is also easier for you to reason with them.

I hated it. For a second, standing there in her kitchen, I hated it. Because she wasn't crazy. She was sad. She'd been sad her whole life, and somebody had put her in a hospital for it when she was thirteen, and she'd made the only friend she could, and she'd held on.

But it was there. And it was a door.

Only true things, I thought. Only true things through it.

"Diana's right," I said. "I shouldn't be here. This is your house. I'm a stranger. I'm sorry." I looked at her. "Can I sit down anyway?"

Sophie looked at me for a long moment.

Then she smiled. A small, real, surprised smile.

"Okay," she said. "Would you like some tea?"

We sat at her kitchen table in the dark for two hours. Sophie and me.

Rebecca took Martin to his room to pack a bag. Bret went with them, and I heard him in there, talking to Martin about the Dodgers, about Mike Piazza, in his big easy voice, and Martin starting, slowly, to answer.

And I sat with Sophie and drank her tea, which was cold, and listened.

She told me about Paul. Martin's dad. How he'd been so kind. How he'd understood about her bad days. How he'd died in his warehouse, in January, in the dark, a heart attack, and how she hadn't been able to get out of bed for a week after, and how Diana had stayed with her. Every night. In the dark. Talking to her. Keeping her company.

"She's always been there for me," said Sophie. "Always. Since I was a girl. When nobody else was."

"I know," I said. "I read your diary."

Sophie went very still.

"Becca took it," she said finally. "When she left. I always thought she took it."

"She kept it. She never opened it. Not once, in six years." I looked at her. "I'm sorry. I read it this morning. Out loud. She asked me to. She couldn't."

Sophie looked at her cold tea.

"Then you know about Lilian," she said.

"I know about Lilian. I know about the room with the lights." I paused. "I know what you promised her."

Sophie didn't say anything for a long time. Outside, the light around the edges of the blinds was going orange. The afternoon was ending.

"I promised to keep her," said Sophie. "I was fourteen. She was so scared. She said she'd be alone in the dark forever if I forgot her. And it would be my fault." She turned the cup in her hands. "I couldn't let it be my fault."

"And it's been thirty years."

"Thirty-one."

"And she's killed people, Sophie."

Sophie flinched. Like I'd hit her. She didn't look up.

"She doesn't," she said. "She wouldn't. She just doesn't like it when people try to... when they get between us..."

"Paul," I said. "In his warehouse. In the dark. Rebecca's dad, before him. A boy at Lilian who fell down the stairs. A nurse." I said it gently. I said it the way I'd said things to Danny Walsh, on his floor. Only true things. "You know, Sophie. You've always known. You've known since you were fourteen and you wrote Diana says they deserved it anyway in a notebook with a pink cover."

Sophie put her face in her hands.

I didn't say anything else. I let her cry. In the dark kitchen, with the orange light going gray around the blinds, and the green clock on the microwave, and Martin's voice down the hall, talking about baseball.

When she lifted her face, it was wet, and very tired, and older than it had been.

"What do I do," said Sophie. Not to me, exactly. To the table. "What do I do? If I let her go, she's alone. In the dark. Forever. She'll... she'll die. Really die. And it'll be my fault."

"Sophie," I said. "She already died. In 1970. In a room full of lights. That wasn't your fault either."

She looked at me.

"You were a kid," I said. "You were fourteen. You made a promise to a friend who was dying. That's what kids do. That's a good thing to do. And then you kept it for thirty-one years, through everything, because you're the kind of person who keeps her promises." I looked at her. "But you don't have to keep it anymore. You can let go. She's not your responsibility. She never was."

"How," said Sophie. "How do I..."

And the lights went out.

Not the kitchen lights. They'd never been on. All the lights. The green clock on the microwave. The streetlight outside that had just come on, orange, through the blinds. The light from Martin's room down the hall, which Rebecca had turned on, every lamp in it.

Everything went black.

Down the hall, Martin screamed.

And in the kitchen, across the table from me, very close, in the absolute dark, something scratched the wall.

A long slow sound. Fingernails on drywall. Starting high up, higher than any person could reach, and dragging down.

Sophie said, very softly, almost fondly, the way you'd say a dog's name when it's done something it shouldn't, "Diana."

I put my left hand up and opened it.

Fire.

It came up off my palm with a soft whump, bigger than I'd meant, a ball of flame the size of a grapefruit, yellow and orange and roaring, and the whole kitchen jumped into light. The table. The cold teacups. Sophie, with her hands over her mouth and her eyes huge. The blinds. The microwave with its dead clock.

And the corner behind Sophie's chair, by the refrigerator, where something had been standing a second ago. Something tall. Bent at the top. I saw it for one frame. One flicker. A long white arm, and long black hair, and long nails on long fingers, flinching, away from the light, like a hand off a hot stove.

And then the corner was empty.

The scratching stopped.

Down the hall, Martin was still screaming. And then he wasn't screaming. He was shouting. Becca! Becca, the light! The flashlight! It's not working! It's not...

I was already moving.

V. The Basement

I'm going to tell this part fast, because it happened fast.

Martin's room was at the end of the hall. The door was open. Inside, it was black. Dead black, the kind of black you only get in a room with every curtain drawn and no power, at six o'clock on a February evening. And in the black, a yellow flashlight on the floor, its bulb dead, rolling slowly in a half circle. And Rebecca, on her knees, with Martin behind her, against the wall, and Bret in front of both of them with his arms out, a big shaggy shape in a Slayer shirt standing between the kids and the corner.

And in the corner, something.

I came through the door with fire in my hand, and the room jumped into orange, and for one frame I saw it, properly, for the first time. Tall. So tall its head was bent sideways against the ceiling. Thin as a coat on a hanger, all arms and legs and long black hair, and white skin, so white it was almost gray, cracked and peeling like old paint, like something that had been burned by light a long time ago and never healed. And its face. Behind the hair. Turned toward me.

And then the light hit it, and it was gone. Not gone. Just not there. Out of the light. Into the next dark place.

Which was behind Bret.

"Bret..." said Rebecca.

He went across the room. Not like he'd been pushed. Like he'd been thrown, by something enormously strong, all two hundred pounds of him, off his feet and backward through the air and into Martin's closet door, which broke. He went down in a pile of splintered wood and Martin's clothes and didn't get up.

Rebecca screamed his name.

I threw the fire.

Not at anything. At the room. I opened my hand and threw the ball of flame up at the ceiling, and it hit, and spread, a sheet of light across the ceiling, the way I'd done it by the creek in November, and it burned there for two seconds, three, lighting up the whole room, every corner, and in that light there was nothing, nothing in the room but us. Bret groaning in the closet. Rebecca on her knees. Martin against the wall with his mouth open.

The fire went out.

Dark.

"Out," I said. "Everybody out. Now. To the kitchen. Where Sophie is."

"Bret..."

"I'll get Bret. Go."

Rebecca grabbed Martin and went. I made another flame, smaller, on my left thumb, steady, and went to the closet, and got Bret by the arm. He was conscious. He was bleeding from his scalp. He looked up at me with his eyes not quite focused and said, "Dude. Did you just... was that fire?"

"Yeah."

"From your hand?"

"Rule One," I said. "I'll explain later. Can you stand?"

He stood. Mostly.

And from the kitchen, Rebecca screamed again. A different scream.

"Mom! MOM!"

The kitchen was empty.

Rebecca was standing in the middle of it with Martin, in the dark, in the light of the little flame on my thumb when I came in, holding Bret up. The table. The teacups. Sophie's chair, pushed back.

Empty.

And the basement door, in the corner by the pantry, standing open. And dark beyond it. And stairs going down.

And from the bottom of the stairs, very soft, a woman's voice. Talking. Kindly. The way you'd talk to a child who was upset.

"It's okay. It's okay, Diana. Shh. I know. I know they're scared of you. They don't understand. Shh."

Rebecca went white.

"She took her down there," said Rebecca. "She always... when I was a kid, when Mom was bad, she'd go down there. To the basement. In the dark. To talk to her."

I looked at the basement door. At the dark.

In the movie, I thought. In the movie, it's the basement. With Paul's gun. With the kids watching.

I put Bret down in a kitchen chair. I got the blacklights out of my duffel by the door, two of them, and the battery packs, fast, my hands shaking, and switched them on, and they came up with a hum and a flicker, purple, and the kitchen went strange, all the white things glowing.

"Rebecca," I said. "Stay with Martin. Stay in the kitchen. Hold one of these. Point it at anything dark."

"No," said Rebecca. "No, that's my mother..."

"I know. I know it is. I'm going to bring her back up." I looked at her. "I promise. Rule Three. I come back. And I'm bringing her with me."

Rebecca looked at me for a long, long moment, in the purple light, with her brother holding on to her shirt.

Then she took the blacklight.

The basement stairs were wooden and steep and creaked under me. I went down with the second blacklight held out in front of me in my left hand, pointing down, and a flame on the thumb of the same hand, and my right hand, the cold one, empty, at my side.

The Spirit Gun sat in the tip of my right index finger like a held sneeze. Warm. Waiting. I could feel it, the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue.

One shot. Maybe two.

At the bottom, a concrete floor. A washer and dryer. Boxes. Shelves of paint cans and old toys and Christmas decorations. A furnace, cold. And the purple light from the blacklight going out across it all, making the white things glow: the labels on the paint cans, a Christmas angel's dress, the lint on the floor.

And in the corner, in the farthest corner, where the purple light didn't reach, Sophie.

She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her knees up, in her bathrobe, the way she must have sat on the floor of a dark room at Lilian thirty years ago. She was talking. Softly. To nobody I could see.

And in her lap, in her hands, there was a gun.

A revolver. Old. Black. Paul's, I thought. Or her father's. It didn't matter. She was holding it in both hands, in her lap, the way you'd hold a cup of tea. Not pointing it at anything. Just holding it.

She looked up at me when the light came down the stairs. Her face was wet. And very calm. Calmer than it had been all day. As calm as Richard Morgan's, in a bathtub, with a heater in his hands.

Oh no, I thought.

"I figured it out," said Sophie. Quietly. "What you said. About letting her go. About how I don't have to keep her." She looked at the gun. "And I thought, how. How do you let somebody go, when they're inside you. And there's only one way. Isn't there."

"No," I said. "Sophie. No. That's not..."

"She's inside me. She only lives because I do." Sophie's voice was very gentle. "So if I don't..."

"That's not letting go," I said. "That's taking her with you."

Sophie stopped.

And in the dark behind her, in the corner where the purple light didn't reach, something moved. Something tall, bent against the low basement ceiling. Long hair. Long arms. Long, long fingers, resting on Sophie's shoulders from behind. Like a friend. Like a sister. Like a girl in a dark room in 1970, holding on.

Diana.

I couldn't see her face. I could see her hands. Gray-white, cracked, with nails like a bird's, resting on Sophie's bathrobe, very lightly. And I could feel her. The way I'd felt Samara pushing at the door at the bottom of the well. Not pushing at me. Pushing at Sophie. Soft. Steady. Insistent. Do it. Do it, Sophie. We'll be together. It won't hurt. We'll be together forever, in the dark, and nobody will ever be mean to us again.

Sophie's thumb moved on the hammer of the gun.

And I felt it come up in my throat. The hum. The organ's lowest note. Unbroken. When people stand with you and can hear you, a little of your resistance becomes theirs. Fear, despair and outside influence slide off them a little easier while you're talking.

Outside influence.

And the other thing. The crooked new thing at the back of my head, from the plane over Oregon. Easier for you to reason with them.

I didn't decide to use them. I just talked. Low and steady, the way I'd talked to Gale on Dewey's couch, the way I'd talked to six people on a living room floor in the glass. I put the blacklight down on the floor, pointing at the corner, at the edge of the dark. I put out the flame on my thumb. And I knelt down on the concrete floor, ten feet from Sophie, so she'd have to look at me, not at the gun.

"Sophie," I said. "Listen to me. Just listen. You don't have to say anything."

She looked at me.

"You were fourteen," I said. "And you had a friend. And your friend was dying, and she was scared, and she asked you to keep her. And you said yes. Because you were a good kid. Because you loved her." The hum. Steady. Out of my chest and into the dark. "And she died anyway. In a room full of lights. And it wasn't your fault. None of it was your fault."

Diana's hands tightened on Sophie's shoulders.

"And then she asked you to keep her," I said. "And you did. For thirty-one years. You kept your promise. Through two husbands and two kids and a hospital and every bad day you ever had. You kept it." I looked at Sophie. Only at Sophie. Not at the hands. "You don't have to keep it anymore. You've kept it long enough. You can stop."

"If I stop," said Sophie, very quietly, "she's alone."

"She's already alone, Sophie. She's been alone since 1970. You can't fix that. Nobody can." I swallowed. "But you've got a daughter upstairs. Who's been sleeping with every light on since she was sixteen. And a little boy. Who's been leaving the lights on, and you've been turning them off, and he's been turning them back on, by himself, for a month, every night, with a flashlight. Because he's ten. And he loves you. And he didn't know what else to do."

Sophie's face broke.

"They're not alone," I said. "Not yet. You can still be there. You don't have to go anywhere. You just have to let go of her." I held out my hand. My left hand. The warm one. Ten feet across the concrete, empty, open. "Put the gun down, Sophie. And let go."

And behind her, in the dark, Diana screamed.

It wasn't a sound. Not really. It was a pressure. A wave of it, out of the corner, through the basement, through me, like the sound a building makes before it falls. The paint cans on the shelves rattled. The Christmas angel fell off its box. The blacklight on the floor flickered and buzzed. And it hit me, square in the chest, in the head, the full weight of thirty-one years of a dead girl's loneliness and fury, pushing, at the door, at the locked door, the deadbolt, clack.

The door held.

It held so easily. The deadbolt from Christmas Eve didn't so much as tremble. Diana pushed and pushed and the door didn't even notice. She wasn't Samara. Samara had been a flood. Diana was a fist.

But she wasn't pushing at me.

She was pushing at Sophie.

And Sophie could hear me. Ten feet away. Close enough. When people stand with you and can hear you, a little of your resistance becomes theirs.

I kept talking. I don't remember what I said. Something. True things. You can do it. You're stronger than she is. You always were. You're the one who kept her. You can be the one who lets her go.

Sophie closed her eyes.

And I watched her do it.

I watched her let go. Not of the gun. Of the other thing. Something I couldn't see, inside her, that she'd been holding since she was fourteen in a dark room at Lilian. Her whole body changed. Her shoulders came down. Her hands loosened on the gun. Her face, wet and white and closed, opened, the way a fist opens, finger by finger, slowly, after it's been clenched for a very long time.

"I'm sorry, Diana," said Sophie. Very softly. "I'm sorry. I can't anymore. I have to go upstairs. My kids are upstairs."

And she put the gun down on the concrete floor, and pushed it away from her, and it slid across the floor and stopped at my knees.

And behind her, Diana came out of the dark.

She didn't mean to. That's the thing. I don't think she could help it. Sophie had let go, and whatever had been holding Diana in the dark spaces in her mind, safe, out of reach, under thirty-one years of a promise, was gone. And Diana came out of it the way a hand comes out of a glove when you yank the glove off. All at once. Exposed.

Into the purple light.

She stood up behind Sophie, all the way up, bent against the low ceiling, seven feet of gray-white cracked skin and long black hair and long arms, in the blacklight. In the edge of it. And for the first time, the light didn't make her vanish.

It made her glow.

Every crack in her skin lit up purple-white, like the lines on the inside of a leaf held up to the sun. Her hair. Her nails. Her eyes, behind the hair, two points of white. She was there. Solid. Visible. Caught in the light, with nowhere left to go, because the only dark place she'd ever been able to go was Sophie, and Sophie had closed the door.

She screamed again. This time it was a sound. High and thin and terrible, a fifteen-year-old girl's scream, from a room full of lights in 1970.

And she came at Sophie. Arms out. Nails out. To take her anyway. To take her down with her into the dark.

I was already up.

I pointed my right index finger at the thing in the purple light. The cold hand. The one somebody was holding.

And I felt the cold in my fingers move. Not away. Forward. Down my arm, into my hand, into the finger, next to the held-sneeze warmth of the Spirit Gun, as if a small cold hand had wrapped itself around mine and was pointing too.

Okay, I thought. Together.

I fired.

It came out of my fingertip like a sun.

Blue-white. Small, at first, the size of a marble, at the tip of my finger. And then it wasn't small. It went out of me with a sound like the inside of a jet engine, a roar and a crack at the same time, and a recoil that knocked my arm up and threw me backward onto the concrete. A ball of light the size of a basketball, so bright it whited out the whole basement, every corner, every shadow, every dark place, all at once, there was no dark anywhere.

It went through Diana.

Not into her. Through. Through the middle of her, where a heart would be if she'd had one. In the purple light and the white light, I saw her come apart. Not like flesh. Like an old photograph held over a candle. From the middle out. Curling. Browning. Burning away to nothing in a ring that spread outward through her chest, her arms, her long hair, her face behind the hair.

I saw her face. For a second. Just a second, before the ring got to it.

A girl's face. Fifteen. Very pale. Very scared. Very, very tired.

And then the ring went over it, and she was gone.

The light went out.

The Spirit Gun's blast hit the far wall of the basement and left a black scorch mark on the concrete the size of a dinner plate, smoking. The blacklight on the floor buzzed and flickered. The paint cans stopped rattling.

And it was quiet.

Just quiet. A basement. A cold furnace. A washer and dryer. A woman sitting on the floor against the wall with her hands over her face. And a seventeen-year-old on his back on the concrete with his right arm numb to the shoulder and his ears ringing and his heart going like a drum.

Upstairs, every light in the house came on.

I lay there for a while.

My right hand was cold. Still. The way it had been. I flexed it. The fingers moved. The cold stayed. But for just a second, when I'd fired, it had been warm. The held-sneeze warmth and the cold, together, in one finger. A little girl's hand around mine, pointing.

Thanks, I thought.

The cold in my hand squeezed. Once.

And in front of my eyes, in the light from the bare bulb that had just come on over the washer, the panel opened.

Feat: Shoot the dark.Silver Ability (held).Feat: Keep the mother the story wanted dead.Silver Trait (held).

I closed it. I sat up. Slowly. Everything hurt.

Sophie was looking at me from the floor against the wall. Her hands were in her lap. Her face was wet. She looked at the scorch mark on the far wall. At the gun on the concrete by my knees. At me.

"She's gone," said Sophie. Not a question.

"She's gone."

Sophie didn't say anything for a long time.

"I can't feel her," she said. "For the first time since I was fourteen. I can't feel her anywhere." Her voice wobbled. "It's so quiet."

"I know."

"Is it always this quiet? Inside? For other people?"

I thought about it. About Theo and the kid, and the door between them, and the gold door, and the merge. About Battle Maniac under my breastbone, and Survivor at the back of my neck, and a little girl holding my right hand.

"No," I said. "But it's yours now. Just yours. You get to decide what goes in it."

Sophie looked at me for a long time. Then she laughed. A small, wet, broken laugh, the first one I'd heard from her.

"You're a very strange boy," she said.

"I've been told."

And from the top of the stairs, in the light, a small voice.

"Mom?"

VI. House Lights

They took Sophie to Northridge Hospital at nine o'clock that night. Not an ambulance. Rebecca drove her, in Bret's Civic, with Bret in the back with a towel on his head, because he wanted to go too, because, he said, he was definitely concussed, and Martin in the back between them, holding his mother's hand.

Sophie went on her own. That was the thing. She walked out to the car on her own, in her bathrobe and a coat of Rebecca's, and got in. She said she wanted to talk to somebody. A real doctor. About the sad. About thirty-one years of it. She said she thought she might be ready to talk about it now, since she had the room.

I called home from the kitchen phone at 9:02. Two minutes late. Dad didn't mention it.

"Is it done?" said my father.

"It's done. Nobody died. Everybody's in a car to the hospital, but nobody's hurt bad. The boyfriend hit his head."

"The one who doesn't say I'll be right back."

"He said it once tonight. In the car. By accident. Rebecca almost killed him."

My father laughed.

Then Mom, who wanted to know if I'd eaten. And Martha, who wanted to know if I'd gotten her a palm tree. And then I hung up and sat in Sophie's kitchen, alone, with every light in the house on, and the green clock on the microwave blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, and waited for them to come back.

Rebecca came back alone at one in the morning.

She'd left Bret at the hospital for observation, with a bandage on his head and a nurse who thought he was charming. She'd left Sophie admitted, on a voluntary hold, in a room with a window, with all the lights on, asleep. She'd brought Martin back. He was asleep in the back seat. She carried him in, a ten-year-old, too big to be carried, with his arms around her neck and his flashlight still in his hand, and put him in his own bed, in his own room, with the broken closet door, and turned on every light, and left them on.

Then she came into the kitchen and sat down across from me at the table, where her mother had sat, and looked at me.

"You shot a ghost with your finger," said Rebecca.

"Yeah."

"Bret saw you make fire. From your hand."

"Yeah."

"You're not going to tell me how."

"I can't," I said. "I'm sorry. Some of it I can't tell anybody. Some of it I'm still figuring out."

Rebecca looked at me for a long time. Then she reached across the table and took my right hand. The cold one. In its red glove. She held it in both of hers, the way my mother had, and looked at it.

"Your hand's freezing," she said.

"It's a long story."

"Everything about you is a long story." She didn't let go. "My mom's in a hospital, talking to a doctor. On purpose. For the first time in her life. My brother's asleep in his own bed with the lights on. And I'm sitting in this kitchen at one in the morning, and for the first time since I was sixteen, I'm not scared of the dark in this house." She looked at me. "So I don't care how. I don't need to know how."

She let go of my hand.

"Thank you," said Rebecca.

I gave Martin my Maglite.

In the morning, Sunday, before Rebecca drove me to Burbank. The Maglite from Bradley Video. The one I'd taken off the shelf behind the counter on my first night, in September, before I knew anything, before I'd met Billy in a garage or Freddy in a dream or a doll on a porch. The one I'd hit Ghostface with. Black. Heavy. Three D-cells. It had been in my duffel for every trip since.

He was sitting on his bed with his yellow gas-station flashlight in his lap, with the dead bulb. I held the Maglite out to him.

"It's heavier," I said. "And it doesn't die. I've had it since September. It's been through a lot."

He took it. He held it in both hands. He clicked it on, and off, and on, and pointed it at the corner of his room, where the closet door was broken. Nothing there. Just a corner.

"Is she really gone?" said Martin.

"She's really gone."

"Will anything else come?"

I thought about Rule One. About telling a ten-year-old the truth.

"Maybe," I said. "Something might. Someday. That's how the world is." I looked at the Maglite in his hands. "But you know what to do now. Lights on. Don't go in the dark to fix it. Stay in the light. And if you can't, you find somebody. Your sister. Your mom. Me." I looked at him. "You found me once. From a library. You can do it again."

Martin looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded, very seriously.

"Okay," he said. And then: "Can I keep this forever?"

"It's yours."

He clicked it on again, and pointed it at the ceiling, and lay back on his bed, and watched the circle of light on the ceiling, and didn't say anything else. When I left, he was still lying there, watching it.

At 8:14 on Sunday morning, in the passenger seat of Rebecca's Civic, on the Hollywood Freeway, in the sun, with Los Angeles going by in the bright flat light, the panel opened.

STORY COMPLETE: House Lights.Feat: Leave a light on.Gold Random.All tickets unlocked: 4.Fuse charges: 2.Next story loading.

House Lights, I thought. The lights that come up when the movie's over and everybody's allowed to see each other again.

I closed it. I looked out the window at the palm trees.

"What," said Rebecca. "You're smiling."

"Nothing," I said. "Just glad it's daylight."

VII. Four

I pulled them on the plane home, in a window seat over the Central Valley, with a man in the aisle seat asleep with his mouth open and a girl across the aisle, about nineteen, in black lipstick and a dog collar and a Bauhaus T-shirt, reading Anne Rice.

The first one was the file.

[PULL] Silver Skill.

It came in at the back of my head, cool and solid. Like a deadbolt sliding home. Clack.

Mind Control Resistance (Rare Skill)Batman - Thanks to the teachings of the Tibetan Monks you have learned how to resist Mind Control and Mind Reading. The amount of resistance you can put up is proportional to your mental strength and overall power level.

I knew it. I'd had it before. On the night of the fifteenth of December, after the siege, with a gold ticket for cheerleading right behind it. I'd fused it away on Christmas Eve, into Unbroken, into the door and the key.

And now here it was again. A second deadbolt, on the same door.

Huh, I thought.

I thought about Diana, in the basement, throwing herself at the door. How it hadn't even noticed. How easy it had been.

Two deadbolts. I didn't know if I could fuse it again. I didn't know if I'd want to. I could dismantle it, for Salvage, someday, if I needed to. For now, I left it where it was. A spare key, in a drawer. You never know.

The second was the mother.

[PULL] Silver Trait.

It came in somewhere around my collarbones, and it felt like nothing at all. And then, across the aisle, the girl in the black lipstick looked up from her Anne Rice.

She looked at me. For a long time. Then she smiled.

Goth Magnet (Uncommon Trait)Goths and Punks are drawn to you for some reason, making it easier for you to garner affection and favor from those with daddy issues. In addition, people turn a blind eye to your less-than-favorable actions more easily, just like how those fathers turned a blind eye to their daughters.

I read it twice.

Then I read it a third time, very slowly, and looked out the window, and felt my face go very hot.

For saving a mother, I thought. The Gacha gave me that. For saving a mother. For a girl who sleeps with the lights on because of her dad.

The Gacha didn't have a sense of humor. I'd decided that a long time ago. It had something worse. It had timing.

Across the aisle, the girl in the black lipstick was still looking at me. She'd closed her book on her finger.

"Hey," she said. "I like your glove."

"My mom made it," I said.

"That's so sweet," said the girl, sincerely, and went back to Anne Rice, and kept glancing up over the top of it for the rest of the flight.

I left it on. It wasn't hurting anybody. And, if I was honest, the part about people turning a blind eye to your less-than-favorable actions sounded like something a guy who shot ghosts with his finger might need someday.

The third was the dark.

[PULL] Silver Ability.

It came in through both hands, warm, and then warmer, and then bright, like opening your palms to a lamp.

Exorcists Light (Uncommon Ability)Allows the user to conjure and emit the Light of an Exorcist, while ineffective against morst entities, the Exorcists Light deals considerable damage towards Infernal and Dark entities. The more energy the user expends, the brighter and more potent the light.9th ability. Stored.

Morst entities, said the Gacha. Typos and all.

I looked at my hands. Light. After a weekend of fighting a girl who lived in the dark, with Spencer's Gifts blacklights and road flares and fire, the Gacha gave me light. Real light. Infernal and Dark entities.

A week late, I thought.

And then I thought: No. Right on time. For whatever's next.

The 9th ability. One more and I'd get a third slot.

The last was the light.

[PULL] Gold Random.Random → Trait.

It came in everywhere and nowhere. Like stepping into a warm room.

Lady Killer (Uncommon Trait)You are a natural lady killer, women always find you at least a little attractive regardless of their preferences, and a decent chunk of women would consider you attractive.

I put my forehead against the window.

The flight attendant came by about four minutes later. She was in her forties, with a blond bob and a Southwest smile, and she'd been brisk with everybody in my row since Burbank. She stopped at my seat. She looked at me.

"Here, hon," she said, and put down three extra bags of peanuts on my tray table, and a can of Coke I hadn't asked for, and smiled at me in a way that wasn't the Southwest smile at all, and went on down the aisle.

I looked at the peanuts.

Goth Magnet. Lady Killer. And in the panel, already, from January: Crazy Lure. And waiting, in a few weeks, from a story that hadn't happened yet, I had a feeling, more.

Kristen, I thought. Tatum. Sid. Windsor.

Oh no.

Fuse charges: 2

I closed the panel. I ate the peanuts. They were very good peanuts.

VIII. Coming Attractions

Gale called on Sunday night at 9:20, twenty minutes after the nine o'clock call, while I was still sitting in the kitchen with the phone in my hand and the plate of meatloaf Mom had saved for me.

"It's Gale," said Gale Weathers.

"Hi, Gale."

"I'm not writing about you," she said. "I want to be clear about that, before I say anything else. I said I'd never write about the mountain. I'm not. This isn't that."

"Okay."

"I didn't say I'd never call you."

I put down my fork.

"Top Story gets tapes," said Gale. "You know that. Since October, boxes of them. Since the hour, a mailbag. I've got an intern who screens them." She paused. "On Friday, the intern brought me one and said she didn't want to screen it anymore. She said she'd watched four minutes of it and she couldn't sleep."

I didn't say anything.

"Not that kind of tape," said Gale, fast. "It's a home video. Hi8. A camcorder. A guy in San Diego. His name's Micah. He's a day trader, he says, whatever that is. He and his girlfriend just moved into a house. And he set up a camera in their bedroom, on a tripod, at night, pointed at the bed. Because she says something's been following her. Since she was a kid."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"There's a timestamp," said Gale. "On the tape. In the corner. And every night, Randy. Every night he sent us. At around three-fifteen in the morning..." She stopped. "The door moves. The bedroom door. By itself. And then there's a sound. Like footsteps. In the hall. And she gets up out of bed, the girlfriend, Katie, in her sleep, and stands there. Next to the bed. For two hours. Looking at him."

I closed my eyes.

Three-fifteen, I thought. Find 3:15 on somebody else's tape.

"He sent a letter with it," said Gale. "He wants us to put it on the show. He thinks it's going to make him famous. He thinks it's the coolest thing that ever happened to him." Her voice went very flat. "He doesn't understand what he's looking at."

"No," I said. "He doesn't."

"I'm not going to air it," said Gale Weathers. "I'm never going to air it. I gave the intern the week off." A pause. "And I called you."

I looked at my right hand on the kitchen table. In its red glove. Cold.

"Where in San Diego," I said.

Gale gave me the address. I wrote it on the back of an envelope, under the meatloaf.

"Randy," said Gale.

"Yeah."

"His girlfriend's name is Katie," she said. "On the tape, when she stands by the bed. At three-fifteen." She was quiet for a long time. "She's smiling."

I looked at the address on the envelope.

Then I got up, and went to the stairs, and called up them.

"Dad. Rule Two."

From upstairs, after a long pause, I heard my father put down a book.

"Where," he said.

"San Diego," I said. "There's a camcorder."