She stared at her face in the mirror, feeling everything around her slipping away. The face stared back, and she wondered who was looking at her.

Finally, mercifully, the spasms subsided, as the old man’s head lolled back, his mouth hanging open, taking in deep, ragged breaths of stale, recirculated air.

She stared at the phone, feeling guilty. She finally slid across the overstuffed Pleather couch and away from watching old episodes of The Twilight Zone. She was free tonight, apparently, so she might as well pay Ben a visit. She picked up the phone and dialed his cell.

Fred Ruskin barreled through the rain down Buchanan Street in his battered Pacer, the jar his dead wife had directed him to retrieve from his nephew’s coffin bouncing in the seat beside him.

She suddenly felt herself gasping for air, as if she’d momentarily forgotten how to breathe. She rocked back in her chair and nearly fell over, then slumped against the green-covered table. The bowl fell from her fingers, shattering at her feet, broken glass scattering everywhere.

Thinking about such things soothed the creature as it dug at the base of a tall oak tree, deep into the ground, covering itself with dirt and leaves and moss; hiding, healing, waiting.

Shawn slowly climbed the old wooden stairs, listening to the low creak that sounded from his footsteps. He hoped the wood wouldn’t collapse beneath him. But the stairs held strong and a moment later he joined his friend in the kitchen of the old house, a wave of suffocating humidity washing over them as they stepped deeper into its secrets.

Where moments before the bright morning sun flickered through the branches of the huge oak trees surrounding the property, every-thing in a ten yard radius immediately went pitch dark. The air, already a chilly fifty degrees, dropped past freezing in an instant, and the pressure changed to the point where he thought his eardrums might burst.