Michelle had shaken her head. “The computer is in there. Just get the quilt and a blanket.”

Dale fetches the quilt and the blanket and returns to the stairs, not understanding the comment about the computer, not focusing on it, not focusing on anything. Their shadows climb the stairs with them. Standing on the landing at the top of the stairs for a moment before entering what had been the master bedroom, Dale wonders idly why there is no electricity to the second floor.

The Old Man rewired it. Cut the wiring to the fuse box.

Michelle encircles his wrist with her fingers at the entrance to the bedroom. The candle flame is reflected in her strangely glassy eyes. Contact lenses, thinks Dale. And too much wine.

Dale starts to speak, can think of nothing to say. The candle she had handed to him below drips hot wax on his wrist. He ignores it. It is strangely warm up here.

“Come,” says Michelle Staffney. She leads him into the room.

The excitement hits him the instant he crosses the threshold, but this time it may be as much because of Michelle’s slim fingers on his wrist, or the sight of candlelight on her pink cheeks and red hair and open blouse, or the mingled scent of perfume and woman rising from her flesh as if activated by the small flame in her left hand.

“I know how this room affected you before,” she whispers and sets her candle on the bedside table. She takes his candle from him and sets it beside hers, removes the quilt and blanket from under his arm, and smooths them onto the old bed—first the blanket, smoothing it down, then the red quilt. Their shadows move across the faded wallpaper and ripple on the closed drapes.

Dale continues to stand there stupidly, watching, as she turns back the edge of the quilt and steps closer. He smells the shampoo scent of her hair. Michelle kisses the side of his neck, presses her right hand against the small of his back through his sport coat, and slides the pale fingers of her left hand down his chest and across his belly until they find and hold his erect penis through his cotton trousers. She looks up at him.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

He kisses her. Her lips are full and very cool, almost cold.

Michelle smiles and uses both hands to remove his sport coat. There is no place to put it. She drops it on the floor and begins unbuttoning his shirt. When her fingers drop away and move to her own blouse, Dale finishes unbuttoning his own shirt, pulling the tails out of his trousers.

Michell drops her blouse on the floor next to his jacket and unbuttons her skirt. Her bra is white, lacy, strangely virginal-looking. Her full breasts rise palely above white lace. Freckles on her throat give way to the whiteness.

She unhooks Dale’s belt and slides down the zipper of his fly. Then she goes to one knee, pushing his chinos and boxer shorts lower, and takes his stiff penis in her mouth.

Dale gasps not just because of the sudden assault of intimacy but because her mouth is as cold as if she had been chewing an ice cube a second before.

What are Anne and the children doing right now? On Christmas Eve?

Dale angrily shakes away the alien thought.

Michelle stands again, smiling, her red lips moist. Both hands replace her mouth now, sliding up and down the moist shaft of his penis. She whispers, “Aren’t you going to help me undress?”

Awkwardly, literally throbbing with excitement as her cool hands stay on him, Dale slides her skirt down and off. She temporarily releases her hold on him and steps out of her shoes as he pulls her white underpants lower. Dale notices that her red pubic hair is cut in a narrow vertical strip; he has seen this form of trimming in magazines and in movies but never in real life. Suddenly he is aware that Michelle Staffney will know all sorts of Hollywood secret pleasures, sex tricks that women in Missoula, Montana, have never heard of. The thought would normally make him smile, but the sight of her standing there, naked except for her white bra, legs slightly apart, thighs curving inward and the pale pink lips of her vulva glowing moistly in the candlelight, does not allow him to smile.

Her arms curve behind her and she drops the brassiere. Her breasts are huge, pale, round, with pink areolae. They are as high and firm as the breasts of any seventeen-year-old girl.

False. No longer real.

Dale blinks away the thought and watches as she squeezes his penis a final time, turns back the down comforter again, and slides onto the blanket. The bed squeaks. There is no pillow. She raises her left leg slightly and props herself on her right arm. Dale can never remember being so sexually excited, not even with Clare.

“Are you coming in?” Michelle asks, lifting the comforter higher in invitation.

Dale suddenly feels a slap of cold air, almost as if another presence has entered the room through an invisible door in the wall. He turns, startled, but sees only his absurd shadow—stiff penis rising—imprinted on the faded wallpaper.

“Dale?” Her whisper is soft but urgent.

He turns back to her, seeing the candlelight dancing in her eyes. Her nipples are hard.

This is not right, Dale.

“This is wrong,” says Dale.

“What are you talking about?” She reaches for his hand, but he pulls it back. Her cool fingers close around the head of his penis. “It doesn’t feel wrong,” she says softly, smiling at him in the candlelight. The flames stir as if to a slight draft.

Dale steps back, not understanding his reaction, feeling a stab of infinite regret as her fingers slip off the hot head of his cock.

This cannot happen, Dale.

“This isn’t going to happen,” Dale says dully. He feels as if the floor of the room is rising and dropping, pitching like the deck of a ship during a stormy night crossing.

Michelle pulls her hand back, sits up, lifts her other pale hand, cups her full breasts, and raises them. Her lacquered nails shine as she plays with her nipples. “Come here,” she whispers.

Dale makes himself look away. His shadow is that of a hunchback, a circus freak, unstable and dancing in the wildly flickering candlelight. Suddenly the air is freezing. He sees his breath fog in the cold air and smells the tang of frozen mold. He does not look back at the bed.

Fato profugus.

“Fate’s fugitive,” gasps Dale, having no idea why he is saying it.

“Dale. . .” It is a throaty entreaty, little more than an exhalation behind him as Dale scoops up his clothes, dropping his left shoe and retrieving it again, leaving his socks behind as he stumbles down the stairs.

Michelle stood clothed and stiff by the kitchen door. She would not look at him.

“I’m sorry. . . I don’t understand why. . .” Dale stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

The woman shook her head and pulled on her coat.

“The extra food. . .” said Dale, turning back to the counter.

“Leave it,” said Michelle. “Enjoy the pie.” She unlocked and opened the door, her back still turned toward him. She had not met his gaze since coming downstairs fully clothed, face pale.

He reached for her, touching her shoulder through the coat, but she shrugged off his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, hearing how stupid it sounded even in his own ears. “Perhaps another time. . . another day. . .”

Michelle laughed. It was an oddly strange sound—hollow, deep in her throat, not feminine at all. She stepped out into the darkness.

“Wait, I’ll get the flashlight,” said Dale. He grabbed the flashlight from the counter and hurried out the door to help her cross the frozen ground to her truck.

The black dogs came invisible out of darkness, three leaping on Michelle and two jumping at Dale where he stood on the concrete stoop. The hounds were huge, larger than dogs could be. Their eyes were bright yellow, their teeth white in the glow from the kitchen. Dale had time to swing the flashlight like a club, lighting the jackal eyes of the closest black dog, and then their paws and the mass of both hounds knocked him backward, his head hitting the kitchen door hard, the flashlight flying away beyond the stoop and illuminating nothing.