McCabe stood up, hands bleeding. Dazed, he looked at me. “What is this shit?”

I knew what it was. I knew too well. I never should have brought him into the house. Whoever was in here, whoever was in charge, wanted me alone in the house. Without knowing it, I had broken the rules. Now poor McCabe and I would pay for my mistake.

I turned and walked quickly out of the room to the front door. Of course it was locked. I grabbed the doorknob and tried turning it, but nothing moved, not an inch. It felt welded shut. I knew it was useless to try finding another way out of the house.

I went back to the kitchen. McCabe stood at the sink washing his hands. He did it slowly and precisely. Despite what was happening, he appeared in no hurry. I couldn’t think of anything to say because whatever came out would sound absurd.

With his back to me, he murmured, “It’s here again, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about.” He took a red dish towel off a hook by the window. Drying his hands, he waited for my answer.

“I don’t even know what it is. Strange things have been going on ever since Hugh and I moved in.”

“Is that why Frances wanted us to come see her? Tell me the truth, Miranda.”

“Yes. But how do you know about it? What is it?”

“Frances called it the Surinam Toad. That comes from some line by Coleridge—the poet? She made me memorize it. ‘My thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, sides, and belly, vegetating while it crawls.’

“When I was young it tried to kill me, but Frances saved my life. It happened here in the house.” He sat down at the table. He slowly looked at the debris around the room and pursed his lips. “Here we go again. I thought all that was over a long time ago. The fuckin’ toad is back.”

I went to a drawer and took out a box of Band-Aids. I handed them over and sat down across from him. “Can you tell me about it?”

“I have to tell you about it now. Remember when you asked me if I knew anyone who had powers? Frances has powers. She—”

There was a loud scraping sound. I jerked in my seat and looked across the room. The trunk lid was moving. It dragged slowly across the floor toward us. The other pieces began moving too. The room was filled with the racket of this terrible slow scraping sound everywhere, the long high screech of sharp metal edges digging a path. A deep white line appeared behind the trunk lid as it gouged a wavy path across the wooden kitchen floor.

I reached across the table, and slid my hand across his cuts. Blood was still oozing from them; it spread onto my fingers. Standing, I walked to the closest piece of metal and wiped the blood across it. The movement, the sound, everything stopped instantly. The silence was immense.

McCabe stuck his hands under his armpits, as if trying to hide them. “What’d you do? Why did it stop?”

I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t sure. Instinctively I had known how to stop the pieces from moving, but how I knew was unclear. My mind worked furiously to put it in focus.

A house! It was like a house I’d lived in all my life. It had a certain number of rooms I knew by heart, every angle, the view from each window, But suddenly this house contained twice as many rooms, all filled with unfamiliar things. But it was my house. It had always been my house—I just hadn’t known about these extra rooms and what they contained.

McCabe glared at me, hands still hidden. “Huh? You know things too, don’t you, Miranda? How did you know what to do?”

“Blood stops it. I… I just know blood stops things.”

“Yeah, great. But what now? What the hell happens now?” Without waiting for an answer, he left the room. I stood and listened while he did exactly what I had done—went to the front door and tried to open it. I heard his steps, the door rattling, curses when it wouldn’t open.

His steps crossed the floor again but instead of returning to the kitchen, they began climbing the stairs. He was talking but I couldn’t make out his words. I looked at the debris around the kitchen and part of my mind thought it was funny. Miranda’s junkyard. Come into my kitchen and find a bumper for your BMW. Then I’ll make you lunch. Part of you stops being scared when the sane world of a moment ago goes mad.

If Hugh had been in the backyard the other day, he might still be around. I had nothing to lose. “Hugh? Are you here?”

Nothing.

“Hugh? Can you hear me?”

The kitchen door swung open. But it was McCabe.

“Come with me. Hurry up.”

I followed him out of the kitchen and trailed behind as he started back up the stairs.

“You like dolls?”

His question was so absurd and out of place that I stopped climbing. “What?”

“Do you like dolls? I asked if you like ‘em.” His voice was urgent, as if everything depended on my answer.

“Dolls? No. Why?”

Narrowing his eyes, he stared at me as if he didn’t believe it. “Really? Well then, that’s bad news. ‘Cause they’re in the same room as before. So I guess the same goddamned thing’s happening again! Only Frances isn’t around to get us out this time.”

“What are you talking about, McCabe?”

“You’ll see.”

Then the realization hit me. “I did. I used to love dolls when I was a girl. I collected them.”

When we reached the first floor he walked down the hall to Hugh’s and my bedroom and threw open the door. “Somebody likes dolls.”

Before moving to Crane’s View, we had bought a new bed. There should have been only two things in that room—the new bed and a small leather couch I had owned for years. Nothing else.

Instead, our bedroom was full of dolls. On the new bed, the couch, most of the floor. They were stuck on the walls, across the entire ceiling, the windowsill. They blocked most of the light from coming in the window. Hundreds, maybe even a thousand dolls. Large ones, small; flat faces, fat faces, round; with breasts, without; wearing jeans, dirndls, evening gowns, clown costumes…

All of them had the same face—mine.

“Leave me alone in here, Frannie.”

“What? Are you crazy?”

“That’s what they want. They want me alone in here.”

He glared but didn’t speak.

“The same thing happened in here with Frances, right? In this room. The same thing. Were there dolls?”

His eyes dropped. “No. People. People she said she knew from a long time ago.”

I was about to respond when the first voice spoke. A child’s, it was quickly joined by another and then another until we were surrounded by a deafening cacophony of voices saying different things at once. We stood in the doorway listening until I began to make out what some of them were saying.

“Why do we always have to go to Aunt Mimi’s house? She smells.”

“But you promised I could have a dog.”

“Dad, are stars cold or hot?”

On and on. Some voices were clear and understandable. Others were lost in the surrounding swirl of tones, whines, whispers. But I understood enough. All of them, all of these words and sentences, were my own, spoken in the various voices I had owned growing up. The first one I disentangled was the line about the stars. I knew it immediately because my father, an astronomer, had loved it and repeated it to others throughout my childhood.

My Aunt Mimi did smell. I hated visiting her.

My parents finally relented and gave me a dog, which was stolen three weeks later. I was nine at the time.

If I had remained in that bedroom long enough, I assume all the words of my lifetime would have been repeated. Instead of life passing in front of my eyes, my words were entering my ears. Some of them tweaked memories, most were nothing but the verbal spew of twelve thousand days on earth. I once read that a person speaks something like a billion words in the course of a life. Here were mine, all at once.