Thunder rolled and rain swooshed down in a rush, accompanied by a rattle of hail.

“Oh my God!” Jenny screamed. “Oh my God, look at it!”

The circlet around Mary Fay’s head was glowing a brilliant, pulsing green. I saw it with more than my eyes; it was deep in my brain, as well, because I was the connection. I was the conduit. The glow began to fade, and then a fresh bolt of lightning struck the pole. The choir shrieked again. This time the band passed from green into a coruscating white, too dazzling to look at. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears. In the darkness the afterimage of the circlet remained, now an ethereal blue.

The interior screams faded. I opened my eyes and saw the glow embedded in the circlet was fading, as well. Jacobs was staring at the corpse of Mary Fay with wide, fascinated eyes. Drool dripped from the frozen side of his mouth.

The hail gave a final furious rattle, then quit. The rain began to slacken. I saw lightning fork into the trees beyond Skytop, but the storm was already moving east.

Jenny abruptly bolted from the room, leaving the door open. I heard her crash into something as she crossed the living room, and the bang when the door to the outside—the one I’d had to struggle to close—flew open and hit the wall. She was gone.

Jacobs took no notice. He bent over the dead woman, who lay with her eyes shut and her sooty lashes brushing her cheeks. The circlet was only dead metal now. In the shadowy room, it didn’t even gleam. If it had burned her forehead, the mark was beneath the band. I didn’t think it had; I would have smelled charred flesh.

“Wake up,” Jacobs said. When there was no response, he shouted it. “Wake up!” He shook her arm—gently at first, then harder. “Wake up! Wake up, damn you, wake up!”

Her head wagged from side to side as he shook her, as if in negation.

“WAKE UP, YOU BITCH, WAKE UP!”

He was going to pull her out of bed and onto the floor if he didn’t stop, and I couldn’t have borne that further desecration. I grabbed his right shoulder and hauled him away. We staggered backward in an awkward dance and crashed into the bureau.

He turned on me, his face wild with fury and frustration. “Let me go! Let me go! I saved your miserable useless life and I demand you—”

Then something happened.

 • • •

From the bed came a low humming sound. I relaxed my grip on Jacobs. The corpse lay as it had lain, only now with its hands splayed out at its sides, thanks to Charlie’s shaking.

It was just the wind, I thought. I’m sure I could have convinced myself of it, given time, but before I could even get started, it came again: a faint humming from the woman on the bed.

“She’s returning,” Charlie said. His eyes were huge, bulging from their sockets like the eyes of a toad squeezed by a cruel child. “She’s reviving. She’s alive.”

“No,” I said.

If he heard, he paid no mind. All of his attention was fixed on the woman in the bed, the pale oval of her face deep in the swimming shadows that infested the room. He lurched toward her like Ahab on the deck of the Pequod, dragging his bad leg. His tongue lapped at his mouth on the side that wasn’t frozen. He was gasping for breath.

“Mary,” he said. “Mary Fay.”

The humming sound came again, low and tuneless. Her eyes remained shut, but I realized with a cold chill of horror that I could see them moving beneath the lids, as if in death, she dreamed.

“Do you hear me?” His voice, dry with an almost prurient eagerness. “If you hear me, give me a sign.”

The humming continued. Jacobs put the palm of his hand on her left breast, then turned to me. Incredibly, he was grinning. In the gloom he looked like a death’s head.

“No heartbeat,” he said. “Yet she lives. She lives!”

No, I thought. She waits. But the wait is almost over.

Jacobs turned back to her and lowered his half-frozen face until it was only inches from her dead one—a Romeo with his Juliet. “Mary! Mary Fay! Come back to us! Come back and tell us where you’ve been!”

It’s hard for me to think of what happened next, let alone write it down, but I must, if only as a warning for anyone else who contemplates some similar experiment in damnation, and may read these words, and turn back because of them.

She opened her eyes.

Mary Fay opened her eyes, but they were no longer human eyes. Lightning had smashed the lock on a door that was never supposed to be opened, and Mother came through.

 • • •

They were blue eyes at first. Bright blue. There was nothing in them. They were utterly blank. They stared at the ceiling through Jacobs’s avid face, and through the ceiling, and through the cloudy sky beyond. Then they came back. They registered him, and some understanding—some comprehension—came into them. She made that humming sound again, but I hadn’t seen her draw a single breath. What need? She was a dead thing . . . except for those inhuman staring eyes.

“Where have you been, Mary Fay?” His voice trembled. Saliva continued to drip from the bad side of his mouth, leaving damp spots on the sheet. “Where have you been, what did you see there? What waits beyond death? What’s on the other side? Tell me!”

Her head began to pulse, as if the dead brain within had grown too big for its casing. Her eyes began to darken, first to lavender, then to purple, then to indigo. Her lips drew back in a smile that widened and became a grin. It grew until I could see all of her teeth. One of her hands trundled across the counterpane, spiderlike, and seized Jacobs’s wrist. He gasped at her cold grip and flailed for balance with his free hand. I took it, and thus the three of us—two living, one dead—were joined. Her head pulsed on the pillow. Growing. Bloating. She was no longer beautiful; she was no longer even human.

The room didn’t fade; it was still there, but I saw it was an illusion. The cottage was an illusion, and Skytop, and the resort. The whole living world was an illusion. What I’d thought of as reality was nothing but a scrim, as flimsy as an old nylon stocking.

The true world was behind it.

Basalt blocks rose to a black sky punched with howling stars. I think those blocks were all that remained of a vast ruined city. It stood in a barren landscape. Barren, yes, but not empty. A wide and seemingly endless column of naked human beings trudged through it, heads down, feet stumbling. This nightmare parade stretched all the way to the distant horizon. Driving the humans were antlike creatures, most black, some the dark red of venous blood. When humans fell, the ant-things would lunge at them, biting and butting, until they gained their feet again. I saw young men and old women. I saw teenagers with babies in their arms. I saw children trying to help each other along. And on every face was the same expression of blank horror.

They marched beneath the howling stars, they fell, they were punished and chivvied to their feet with gaping but bloodless bite wounds on their arms and legs and abdomens. Bloodless because these were the dead. The foolish mirage of earthly life had been torn away and instead of the heaven preachers of all persuasions promised, what awaited them was a dead city of cyclopean stone blocks below a sky that was itself a scrim. The howling stars weren’t stars at all. They were holes, and the howls emerging from them came from the true potestas magnum universum. Beyond the sky were entities. They were alive, and all-powerful, and totally insane.

The aftereffects are trailing fragments of an unknown existence beyond our lives, Charlie had said, and that existence lay close in this sterile place, a prismatic world of insane truth that would drive a man or woman mad if it were so much as glimpsed. The ant-things served those great entities, just as the marching, naked dead served the ant-things.