Tonight, instead, the dream dissolved into a new scenario. Suddenly he was alone; he was in a house that was like this house, but bigger, emptier; he was lying on his back in a room with a single high window. There was a diffuse moonlight that illuminated only his bed and left the margins of the room in cavernous darkness.

Hidden in that darkness, things were moving.

He couldn’t tell what sort of things they were. Their feet ticked like cat’s claws on the hard floor and they seemed to be whispering to one another in a high, buzzing falsetto—a language he had never heard. He imagined elves; he imagined immense, articulate rats.

But the worst thing was their invisibility—compounded by what he recognized suddenly as his own helplessness. He understood that the room had no door; that the window was impossibly high; that his arms and legs were not just stiff but paralyzed.

He strained forward, peering into the darkness …

And they opened their eyes—all at once.

A hundred eyes all around him.

A hundred disks of pure, pupil-less, bone-white light.

The whispering rose in a metallic, clattering crescendo—

And he awoke.

Woke alone in this smaller, brighter, but still moonlit and unfamiliar room. Woke with his heart pounding wildly in his chest.

Woke with the sound still ringing in his ears: The hiss of their voices. The clatter of their nails.

Of course, it was only a dream.

The morning house was clean, hollow, blank, and prosaic. Tom paced from bedroom to kitchen listening to the unfamiliar shush of his feet against the broadloom. He put together breakfast, fried eggs and a bagel, and stacked the dirty dishes in the sink when he was finished. Bachelor housekeeping. Maybe the Genius Loci would clean up.

Yesterday’s overcast had spilled away across the mountains. Tom opened the screen door at the back of the kitchen and stepped out into the yard. The lawn had been slashed down to stubble but was starting to grow back, as much weed as grass. No housekeeping elves out here. A stand of tall pine rose up beyond the margin of the yard, enclosing ferns and fallen needles in its darkness. An overgrown trail led away from the corner of the yard and Tom followed it a few paces in, but the trees closed out the sun and the air was suddenly chill. He listened a moment to the drip of water somewhere in this spongy wilderness. Archer had said the forest ran a long way back, that there was a cedar swamp behind the property. (Archer would know, Tom thought. Archer the car-stalker, trailblazer, rock-climber, truant … these childhood memories had begun to freshen.) A damp breeze tickled the pale hair on his arms. A hummingbird darted up, regarded him querulously, and darted away.

He turned back to the house.

Tony called after lunch with another dinner invitation, which Tom could not gracefully decline. “Come on over,” Tony said. “We’ll stoke up the barbecue.” It was an order as much as an invitation: tribute to be paid.

Tom left the dirty dishes in the sink. At the door he paused and turned back to the empty house.

“You want to clean up, go ahead.” No answer. Oh, well.

It was a long drive to Tony’s place. Tony and Loreen lived in the Seaview district, a terrace of expensive family homes along the scalloped bay hills south of town. The neighborhood was prestigious but the house Tony lived in wasn’t especially flashy—Tony was very Protestant about overt displays of wealth. Tony’s house, in fact, was one of the plainer of these homes, a flat white facade which concealed its real, formidable opulence: the immense plate glass windows and the cedar deck overlooking the water. Tom parked in the driveway behind Loreen’s Aerostar and was welcomed at the door by the entire family: Tony, five-year-old Barry, Loreen with cranky eight-month Tricia squirming against her shoulder. Tom smiled and stepped into the mingled odors of stain-proofed broadloom, Pine-Sol, Pampers.

He would have liked to sit and talk a while with Loreen. (“Poor Loreen,” Barbara used to say. “Playing Tony’s idea of a housewife. All diapers and Barbara Cartland novels.”) But Tony threw an arm over his shoulder and marched him through the spacious living room to the deck, where his propane barbecue hissed and flamed alarmingly.

“Sit,” Tony said, waving a pair of tongs at a deck chair.

Tom sat and watched his brother paint red sauce over steaks. Tony was five years older than Tom, balding but trim, the creases around his eyes defined more by exercise and sunshine than by age. It would be hard, Tom thought, to guess which of us is older.

It was Tony who had come roaring out to Seattle like an angry guardian angel—six months after Barbara moved out; five months after Tom left his job at Aerotech; three months after Tom stopped answering his phone. Tony had cleared the apartment of empty bottles and frozen food wrappers, switched off the TV that had flickered and mumbled for weeks uninterrupted, scolded Tom into showering and shaving—talked him into the move back to Belltower and the job at the car lot.

It was also Tony who had offered, as consolation for the loss of Barbara, the observation “She’s a bitch, little brother. They’re all bitches. Fuck em.”

“She’s not a bitch,” Tom had said.

“They’re all bitches.”

“Don’t call her that,” Tom had said, and he remembered Tony’s look, the arrogance eroding into uncertainty.

“Well … you can’t throw your life away for her, anyhow. There are people out there going on with their business —people with cancer, people whose kids were smeared over the highway by semi trucks. If they can deal with it, you can fucking well deal with it.”

This was both unanswerable and true. Tom accepted the chastisement and had been clinging to it since. Barbara would not have approved; she disliked the appropriation of public grief for private purposes. Tom was more pragmatic. You do what you have to.

But here he was in Tony’s big house beside the bay, and it occurred to him that he was carrying a considerable load of guilt, gratitude, and resentment, mostly directed at his brother.

He made small talk while the steaks charred over the flames. Tony responded with his own chatter. Tony had bought the propane barbecue “practically wholesale” from a guy he knew at a retail hardware outlet. He was considering investing in a couple of rental properties this summer. “You should have talked to me about that house before running off half cocked.” And he had his eye on a new sailboat.

This wasn’t bragging, Tom understood. Barbara had long ago pointed out Tony’s need for physical evidence of his worth, like the validations punched into bus tickets. To his credit, he was at least discreet about it.

The problem was that he, Tom, had no such validation of his own; in Tony’s eyes, this must render him suspicious. A man without a VCR or a sports car might be capable of anything. This nervousness extended to Tom’s job performance, a topic that had not been broached but which hovered over the conversation like a cloud.

Tony’s own reliability, of course, was unquestioned. When their parents died Tony had staked his share of the estate on a junior partnership in an auto dealership out on Commercial Road. The investment was more than financial: Tony had put in a lot of time, sweat, and deferred gratification. And the investment had paid off, handsomely enough that Tom sometimes wondered whether his own use of the same inheritance—for his engineering degree, and now the house—was ultimately frivolous. What had it bought him? A divorce and a job as a car salesman.

But he was not even a salesman, really. “For now,” Tony said, carrying the steaks in to the dining room table—Topic A surfacing at last—“you are strictly a gofer, a lot boy, a floor whore. You don’t write up sales until the manager says you’re ready. Loreen! We’re gettin’ hungry here! Where the hell is the salad?”