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There was bright sunlight at the edges of the shutters and the world outside was very quiet. Evelyn levered herself out of the chair and went over to the windows. She tried three of the clasps before she found one that was not rusted shut. She opened the shutters and the light poured in and Evelyn cowered beneath it.

She had not expected to see daylight again. It was a long time before she felt able to open her eyes.

The storm was over, and the garden was gray-white and endless. The sand and dust reached the sill of the second-floor window. It was carved into dunes, stretching toward the horizon. Evelyn counted the tops of half a dozen trees, their dry leaves showing only the faintest rumor of greenery. The window looked south to where the lawn had once been. All gone, along with the beehives, and the orchard, and the wheat field, and the wall, and Mama, and Lily. There was just her and the boy to be buried now. She listened for him. Nothing.

She turned and surveyed the room. Three huge, swollen chairs, big enough for her and Lily to sit in together. A fireplace, into which the chimney had collapsed. Shelves, strangely ribbed. The rug, a hunting scene. The portraits, faces to the wall and slashed from corner to corner.

Evelyn went over to the bookcase. She ran her finger over the spines, amazed at how many there were. Lily had always said that there were more books in the house. These ones were nicer than her and Lily’s book. They had stiff covers to stop the pages from curling. She slipped some of them from the bookcase and found that many had been devoured by mice and mites and turned to yet more dust when she opened them. But some were still intact. She could read the titles but not make sense of them.

Their book had been a forbidden treat, since Mama had decided that words and books were part of the old world, part of the poison. And now here were hundreds more, every one of them a catalog of sins. She selected another book at random and pulled it from the shelf. A handful of pages fell out and she caught them and read a sentence: The organ complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door.

Evelyn could not understand what the words meant, yet they filled her with an oblique, nightmarish dread.

She heard footsteps again, then a noise like something heavy falling. There was a set of double doors at the other end of this room that led, some real or imagined memory told her, into a dining room that also connected with the landing.

She opened them and took the lamp through with her. A vast table on which dishes and plates lay buried under dust like rocks on a beach. The faintest echo of decay. There were more than four place settings, and Evelyn wondered who else had eaten here. Papa had held parties, she remembered, but that was a long, long time before the storm hit. She trudged to the other end of the room, opened the door, and saw that the landing was empty. There were new footprints leading to the floor above.

“Come here, boy,” she called as she climbed. “Come here, beast of burden.”

What to do when she found him, though?

The third floor was brighter than the others. Here the windows had not been boarded or shuttered so completely, since it was less likely that someone would try to break into the house through the top floor. The roof was full of holes and Evelyn could see patches of churned and ragged sky above. There were deep mounds of sand and dust on this landing, broken panes of glass, ivy and creepers hanging from the skylights. The wind wailed through the gappy and broken rafters, and Evelyn thought it was the boy wailing, though she could not see him.

She made her way along the landing and found her and Lily’s shared bedroom, the beds so small they looked like more toys from the playroom. The walls patterned with birds and animals. A plastic cup full of green scum. The boy’s fingerprints over everything.

She found the bathroom with its huge tub, filled almost to the brim now with sand. She had that same memory again, of being lifted from the steaming water and enfolded in a towel so big she feared and hoped she would get lost in it. There was a towel hanging from a rail beside the bath still. The boy had touched this, too. It was stiff and flaky.

She went on, the sickle dangling pointlessly at her side, her arm wrung out like an old dishcloth. She could barely lift it now. The boy could be waiting to pounce on her in any one of these rooms and she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

Beyond the bathroom was another bedroom. Mama and Papa’s, she remembered. Evelyn thought she could smell perfume but knew she was imagining it. The centerpiece was a large and very fine brass bed, sheets and mattress devoured by heaven knew what. On either side was a bedside table. There were photographs on these, too, placed face down like the others.

Evelyn stopped on the threshold but did not enter. A pair of boots poked out from the side of the bed, as if the boy had lain down there to sleep. The boots were not his, though. They were larger, and older.

She leaned on the doorframe for a moment, knowing what she would find if she went only a few paces farther. She dropped the sickle and staggered toward the bed frame. The body was stretched out between the bed and the wall in peaceful repose, like the carved tomb of some monarch. It was a man’s body, though little of it remained. The bones were still wearing a set of clothes, thin and shredded and of no color at all. A shirt and jeans and a cracked leather belt. Evelyn looked down at the boots again. She knew whose they were. He didn’t look anything like the picture in the pack of cards.

Evelyn came forward and knelt beside the bones. She ran her hands over the dome of the skull. The top was smooth and clean, but at the back there was an uneven hole that admitted her fingers. The stock of his gun was just visible beneath the bed.

The skull grinned at her. The monster in the house. Had Mama locked him in here? Or had he locked Mama out?

She sat against the bed and rested her hand on the dead man’s arm and looked up through a crack in the rafters. The clouds had cleared and the sky was a scorched and faded blue. She watched the shadows crawl over the room, the boy somewhere on the edge of her consciousness. Her sweat congealed and she felt as cold and numb as the bones she clutched. Only her throat felt very hot, and very raw, and she realized that she was sobbing now, in defiance of everything that she had been told, for Papa, for Mama, for Lily, for herself, for everyone.