The former Mrs. Bradbury looked very pale and drawn these days – even Lissa had noticed – but when any of the children asked her if she was okay, she always flashed a troubling, over-bright smile and told them never better, in the pink, rolling in clover. Laurie, who could be blunt, told her she looked too thin. Oh no, her mother responded, Lew says I was turning into a blob over in England – all those rich teas. She was just trying to get back into fighting trim, that was all.

Laurie knew better, but not even Laurie was blunt enough to call her mother a liar to her face. If all four of them had come to her at once – ganged up on her, so to speak – they might have gotten a different story. But not even Trent thought of doing that. One of Lew’s advanced degrees was hanging on the wall over his desk in a frame. While the other children clustered outside the door, nearly vomiting with terror, Trent removed the framed degree from its hook, laid it on the desk, and drilled a pinhole in the center of the square where it had been. Two inches in, the drill hit metal.

Trent carefully rehung the degree – making very sure it wasn’t crooked – and came back out.

Lissa burst into tears of relief, and Brian quickly joined her; he looked disgusted but seemed unable to help himself. Laurie had to struggle very hard against her own tears. They drilled holes at intervals along the stairs to the second floor and found metal behind these walls, too. It continued roughly halfway down the second-floor hallway as it proceeded toward the front of the house. There was metal behind the walls of Brian’s room, but behind only one wall of Laurie’s.

‘It hasn’t finished growing in here,’ Laurie said darkly.

Trent looked at her, surprised. ‘Huh?’

Before she could reply, Brian had a brainstorm.

‘Try the floor, Trent!’ he said. ‘See if it’s there, too.’

Trent thought it over, shrugged, and drilled into the floor of Laurie’s room. The drill went in all the way with no resistance, but when he peeled back the rug at the foot of his own bed and tried there, he soon encountered solid steel… or solid whatever-it-was. Then, at Lissa’s insistence, he stood on a stool and drilled up into the ceiling, eyes slitted against the plaster-dust that sifted down into his face.

‘Boink,’ he said after a few moments. ‘More metal. Let’s quit for the day.’

Laurie was the only one who saw how deeply troubled Trent looked. That night after lights-out, it was Trent who came to Laurie’s room, and Laurie didn’t even pretend to be sleepy. The truth was, neither of them had been sleeping very well for the last couple of weeks.

‘What did you mean?’ Trent whispered, sitting down beside her.

‘About what?’ Laurie asked, getting up on one elbow.

‘You said it hadn’t finished growing in your room. What did you mean?’

‘Come on, Trent – you’re not dumb.’

‘No, I’m not,’ he agreed without conceit. ‘Maybe I just want to hear you say it, Sprat.’

‘If you call me that, you never will.’

‘Okay. Laurie, Laurie, Laurie. You satisfied?’ ’Yes. That stuff’s growing all over the house.’ She paused. ‘No, that’s not right. It’s growing under the house.’

‘That’s not right, either.’

Laurie thought about it, then sighed. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It’s growing in the house. It’s stealing the house. Is that good enough, Mr. Smarty?’

‘Stealing the house…’ Trent sat quietly beside her on the bed, looking at her poster of Chrissie Hynde and seeming to taste the phrase she had used. At last he nodded and flashed the smile she loved. ‘Yes – that’s good enough.’

‘Whatever you call it, it acts like it’s alive.’

Trent nodded. He had already thought of this. He had no idea how metal could be alive, but he was damned if he saw any way around her conclusion, at least for the present. ‘But that isn’t the worst.’

‘What is?’

‘It’s sneaking.’ Her eyes, fixed solemnly on his, were big and frightened. ‘That’s the part I really don’t like. I don’t know what started it or what it means, and I don’t really care. But it’s sneaking.’

She ran her fingers into her heavy blonde hair and pushed it back from her temples. It was a fretful, unconscious gesture that reminded Trent achingly of his dad, whose hair had been that exact same shade.

‘I feel like something’s going to happen, Trent, only I don’t know what, and it’s like being in a nightmare you can’t get all the way out of. Does it feel like that to you sometimes?’ ‘A little, yeah. But I know something’s going to happen. I might even know what.’

She bolted to a sitting position and grabbed his hands. ‘You know? What? What is it?’ ‘I can’t be sure,’ Trent said, getting up. ‘I think I know, but I’m not ready to say what I think yet. I have to do some more looking.’

‘If we drill many more holes, the house is apt to fall down!’

‘I didn’t say drilling, I said looking.’

‘Looking for what?’

‘For something that isn’t here yet – that hasn’t grown yet. But when it does, I don’t think it will be able to hide.’

‘Tell me, Trent!’

‘Not yet,’ he said, and planted a small, quick kiss on her cheek. ‘Besides – curiosity killed the Sprat.’

‘I hate you!’ she cried in a low voice, and flopped back down with the sheet over her head. But she felt better for having talked with Trent, and slept better than she had for a week. Trent found what he was looking for two days before the big party. As the oldest, he perhaps should have noticed that his mother had begun to look alarmingly unhealthy, her skin drawn shiny over her cheekbones, her complexion so pale it had taken on an ugly yellow underlight. He should have noticed how often she was rubbing at her temples, although she denied – almost in a panic – that she had a migraine, or had had one for over a week. He did not notice these things, however. He was too busy looking. In the four or five days between his after-bedtime talk with Laurie and the day he found what he was looking for, he went through every closet in the big old house at least three times; through the crawlspace above Lew’s study five or six times; through the big old cellar half a dozen times. It was in the cellar that he finally found it.

This was not to say he hadn’t found peculiar things in other places; he most certainly had.

There was a knob of stainless steel poking out of the ceiling of a second-floor closet. A curved metal armature of some kind had burst through the side of the luggage-closet on the third floor. It was a dim, polished gray… until he touched it. When he did that, it flushed a dusky rose color, and he heard a faint but powerful humming sound deep in the wall. He snatched his hand back as if the armature had been hot (and at first, when it turned a color he associated with the burners on the electric stove, he could have sworn it was). When he did that, the curved metal thing went gray again. The humming stopped at once.

The day before, in the attic, he had observed a cobweb of thin, interlaced cables growing in a low dark corner under the eave. Trent had been crawling around on his hands and knees, not doing anything but getting hot and dirty, when he had suddenly spied this amazing phenomenon. He froze in place, staring through a tangle of hair as the cables spun themselves out of nothing at all (or so it looked, anyway), met, wrapped around each other so tightly they seemed to merge, and then continued spreading until they reached the floor, where they drilled in and anchored themselves in dreamy little puffs of sawdust. They seemed to be creating some sort of limber bracework, and it looked as if it would be very strong, able to hold the house together through a lot of buffeting and hard knocks.

What buffeting, though?

What hard knocks?

Again, Trent thought he knew. It was hard to believe, but he thought he knew. There was a little closet at the north end of the cellar, far beyond the workshop area and the furnace. Their real father had called this ‘the wine-cellar,’ and although he’d put up only about two dozen bottles of plonk (this word had always made their mother giggle), they were all carefully stored in crisscrossing racks he had made himself.