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Six months later, they met again.

This time not in Pennsylvania, not in New Hampshire, but rather, just outside of Madison, Wisconsin.

The first stop: a little coffeehouse café called the Oasis.

They made small talk, catching up. Owen and Lore had been meeting every couple weeks, working on their game—they pulled out of their stall, got development moving together. (Nick asked if they were fucking, and they refused to answer, which told everyone all they needed to know.) Hamish had The Talk with his wife, told her that he’d been cheating on her. He spent a couple weeks in a motel, then they decided they were going to try a marriage counselor on the way to what at the time seemed the inevitable divorce lawyers—but during the counseling, it came out that Hamish had once died. A fact his wife never knew. And she hadn’t known about his childhood, either—losing his friend Matty. It was enough, it seemed, to engender in her a specific kind of sympathy. She was angry at him still, but he was back in the house. And talk of divorce was off the table. For now.

Nick, for his part, did not, in his words, “have shit going on.” Said he’d taken a new job at a local garden center—“none of that Home Depot shit”—and liked it. Also was seeing, to their absolute shock, a therapist . “I’m on drugs, now,” he said, almost chipper, shaking a bottle of lorazepam at them like a baby rattle.

They got to the end without talking about their nightmares, but eventually, it came up. It was Owen who brought it up. He asked them if they were all having them, and they were. Nightmares about being in the house, wandering it endlessly, aimlessly. All that horror, all that pain. Owen asked them if it still felt like they were there, sometimes, in the house. Lore said sometimes when she was falling asleep, it was like her legs were walking her way through it, and then she took a wrong step down a strange staircase, and it always woke her up. Hamish said that for him it was just the bathroom, the one with the broken mirror. He dreamed of it constantly. Nick, for his part, just shrugged, said, “I just dream of you fuckin’ weirdos. And it’s nice. But then I dream of Matty, too, and…” He sniffed. “And that’s why we’re here, so I think we should get down to business. So, where’s this house?”

—

The house was about five miles south of where they had coffee, in a town called Fitchburg. It was a farmhouse off of a back road called Oak Hall Hill, a road lined in spots with old bent oaks—though no hill to be seen.

The house was red, and looked like a sister to the black barn next to it. A pair of bent, corroded silos sat behind, and all around were fields—corn, mostly, or just scrub. The driveway was stone, but had long gone without renewal, and so pockets of weeds were sticking up. An old beater-ass Ford pickup sat parked. The sunlight flickered through the turning blades of an old tin windmill.

They let the engine of Hamish’s rental car idle for a bit.

All four of them sat. Nick up front with Hamish. Lore and Owen in the back.

“This is it?” Hamish asked.

“It’s what the investigator gave us,” Lore said, looking at the map on her phone and the printouts in front of her—they’d hired a private investigator to look for Matty. He had, after all, supposedly made it out of the house—with the house still in him. Doing its work. Carrying its, what, message? The investigator found someone going by Matthew Shiffman living here. Took some photos, and the evidence was pretty convincing that it was their old friend. Amazing that he’d…been here the whole time. That felt extra cruel somehow. That he’d made it out and hadn’t ever thought to find them. Then again, if what the house had said was true, then why would he? He thought they’d abandoned him. So he abandoned them.

Or worse, the house had so taken him over, there was no Matty left. No memories of his friends to speak of.

“We ready for this?” Owen asked them.

“I’m not,” Hamish said. “What if…”

He didn’t finish the question. He didn’t have to. They all knew what the private investigator had told them. That there were women who had gone missing in the area. College girls, mostly. Six of them over the last ten years. None of their bodies ever found. Could it be Matty? Was it possible that he was carrying the pain of the house forward, hurting people on its whim? He didn’t have a family. He lived alone, kept to himself here. Had ample space to hide the women, living or dead. Not that anyone had ever even looked at him as a perpetrator of these crimes. He was a nobody around these parts.

Maybe, they told themselves, it wasn’t him. Maybe the pain he waged against the world was smaller, simpler; maybe he hurt himself. Maybe he just sat all day, stewing in hatred. Maybe he was fine. Maybe he had forgotten it all. Maybe Matty was too good for the house, and he had escaped it in his own way.

Hell, maybe the house had been lying to them all along.

They knew there was only one way to find out.

And then, the front door opened. A man stepped out. Lore knew him immediately. They all did. He was older, unquestionably. Gray in the hair at the sides of his temples. Maybe a little more weight in the front. But same build. Same posture. Same Matty, all these years later. But was it? Was it, really?

He came out, dumped a glass of water into a potted plant on the porch, then looked up, saw the car parked. Their car.

“It’s him,” Owen said, no uncertainty in his voice. No fear, either.

“He sees us,” Nick said, a kind of warning.

Hamish finally asked the question:

“What if the house is still in him?”

“Then we get it out of him,” Owen answered.

“And what if he’s…done things? Things we can’t fix?”

Lore said, “Then we deal with that however we have to.”

She didn’t tell them about the handgun she had in her bag.

Just in case.

Just in case .

She knew it was possible they’d find the house still in his eyes. They might see those rotten slats of siding. Irises like black windows with crying faces behind them. Brass knobs turning, ready to open into the maze of rooms his mind had become. Rooms upon rooms upon rooms of pain, filling up and spilling out. Maybe he was a real fixer-upper. Maybe they could save him. But maybe the only thing they could do was burn it all down. Sometimes that’s how it was.

“The Covenant,” she said, finally.

“The Covenant,” the others answered, in unison. Meaning it in all the ways it could be meant.

They got out of the car, unsure what they would find, or what was to come—but ready to stand together, just the same.