the mountain were threatening to cut the house loose and send it sliding down into the valley. And each room begins to flood with an awful smell, a scent of horrific rot and hay and shit…
“No, no!” screams Macey. “Not you, not here! I didn’t do anything to you! Leave me alone, please!”
He hits the stairwell, grabs the post, swings himself around, and leaps down the black marble steps, knees protesting with each bound. The lights in the floor above him are dying out, leaving each room dark, and he feels he can hear something rushing through the house after him, moving with the sound of a thousand dead leaves striking pavement…
The floor below is no different. The filament of each bulb sputters, and everything—chairs, tables, lamps—hangs suspended in the air. Macey dodges these obstacles and throws himself toward a large black door tucked away under the stairs. He opens it, falls through, and slams it behind him.
The other side is dark. Macey, breathing hard, fumbles for the switches on the wall beside him. When his fingers finally find them he slaps them all on, and the room fills with light.
The room is huge, nearly two hundred feet on each side, and the ceiling is lined with bright fluorescent lamps. Ordinarily this room would be the garage, filled with expensive, fancy cars that would suit the taste of the house’s owner. But Mr. Macey’s garage is totally empty, nothing but blank gray surfaces on all sides except the ceiling.
This room has one advantage, however: none of its doors have ever been unlocked or used except the one Mr. Macey has just run through. It is completely barricaded off.
How could it be here, he wonders? Such a thing is impossible. Yet then he thinks of the
(invitation)
skull in the box… and he begins to realize that there are many more machinations operating within Wink than he ever suspected, and he has just stumbled into one.
He puts his ear to the door. He cannot hear anything on the other side, nor can he see any hint of flickering lights through the crack at the bottom. He wonders what this could mean… yet just as he does the lights above flicker, just a little, and he begins to smell a horrible odor pervading the room, the smell of an untended barn, stables and coops of livestock lying dead and rotting in the hay…
“No,” he whispers.
He sits up and looks around. And he sees he is not alone.
There is a man standing in the exact center of the garage. He is very tall, and he stands motionless with his arms stiff at his sides. He wears a filthy blue canvas suit, streaked with mud in a thousand places, and sewn into the surface of this suit are dozens and dozens of tiny wooden rabbit heads, all with huge, staring eyes and long, tapered ears. On his face he wears a wooden helmet—or perhaps it is a tribal mask—whose crude, chiseled features suggest the blank, terrified face of a rabbit, complete with curving, badly carved ears. Where its eyes should be are two long rectangular holes. Somewhere behind these, presumably, are the eyes of the mask’s wearer, yet only darkness can be seen.
Mr. Macey falls to his knees. “No,” he whispers. “No, no.”
The figure does not move, yet when the lights flicker out and come back on he is suddenly closer, just yards away.
“You can’t be here,” says Macey. He hugs his chest and wilts before the intruder. “You can’t have followed us. You can’t have been here all along…”
The lights flicker again and the figure in the rabbit suit is closer, standing only a few feet in front of Mr. Macey. He stares up into that blank wooden face, and those dark, rectangular eyes, and he sees…
(a cracked plain, red stars, and a huge black pyramid rising from the horizon, and all around it are thousands of broken, ancient columns, a place where a people once worshipped things that departed long ago)
(a scar-pocked hill, at the top of which is a twisted white tree, and from the tree’s branches are many swollen, putrid fruits, un-plucked and untended for centuries)
(endless darkness, stars flickering through the ether, and then empty, sunless cities made of black stone, each leaning, warped structure abandoned eons ago)
(falling, falling through the black, forever)
(a mesa, sharp and hard against the starlit sky, and clouds gather around its tip and lightning begins to leap from cumulus to cumulus, staircases of light waiting to be