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The city of Corpus Christi was small, with plenty of low buildings and scattered palm trees, but it wasn’t the backwater town

Persephone had led him to believe it’d be. Clouds hung low in the sky, thick and grey and beautiful. It’d probably rain soon,

but the desert-dusted Cadillac wouldn’t hurt for a rinsing.

Don’t tell me I killed somebody , John had said to Mabel when last they’d spoken. No, of course not , she’d said, but there was an incident. And then she’d said something about a small fire that hadn’t hurt anyone, but before she could go into detail they ended

the call, John having sworn he’d seen something dark blooming in a corner of the car park. Likely it had been nothing, but

even here in the daylight, amidst plaza chain stores and hitherto unknown supermarkets, there was a sense of something lurking

around every other corner, and in the air, the threat of violence.

And there was this: the inexplicable, ever-present whiff of french fries.

Something was off.

Even after all of Ruben’s and Persephone’s efforts, the results from the energy exchanged during yesterday’s Overlays were

fading fast. John’s legs were almost certainly more transparent than they’d been three hours ago.

They rode down what appeared to be a few main streets— Dairy Queen!

Dude, gotta hit that at some point —and through a sprawling neighborhood made up completely of trailer homes; they coasted along sunbaked stretches of cracked asphalt and past empty lots left to the wild.

They bumped their way down a forgotten two-lane highway and onto another main street.

“OK,” Ruben said from the passenger side, as he tore into a cylinder of Sour Cream and Onion Pringles. “What I’m about to

say may sound bonkers, but just hear me out. My theory”—he took a swig of his Snapple—“is that the Grey House—the portal to

it— and the Grey Man are in Corpus Christi. We find the Grey House, we find the Grey Man. As we’ve established, Requisite Showdown.”

“Showdown?” said Persephone. “I hate the sound of that.”

“There’s no getting around it. John is going to have to face that thing down.”

“I spoke with Mabel,” John said, “and she believes getting to the Grey House isn’t by way of finding a portal at all.”

“Well, somehow, all three of us are here in Corpus Christi. All the way from the West Coast to your hometown, Persephone.”

“Yay,” she replied.

“Hear me out. Check the timeline. John getting his memories back? We already know that didn’t happen until you two met. John

being able to touch stuff, taste, eat? It’s been established that you guys are connected. There’s just one missing piece.

It’s gotta be here in your hometown.”

“Ruben,” Persephone said, a warning in her tone, “this isn’t some comic book. John?”

“Trust me,” said John, “I know.”

“And I’ve been thinking,” she continued, “do you think you can actually survive a showdown with this grey demon, anyway?”

“I don’t know. And he isn’t a demon.”

“Then what is he?”

“I don’t know. But he isn’t that. And it isn’t as if he attacks me, exactly. He does something else. It’s hard to explain.

He’s malevolent, certainly, but something about him isn’t entirely... foreign, either.”

“What does that even mean?” Persephone paused. “You think you knew him, wronged him somehow? Are you, like, a ghost being haunted by another ghost?”

He thought of the fire he’d set when he was twelve. Had he done something similar later, killed someone that Mabel didn’t

know about? Good god, he would hate to be that man. He tried to push the thought away but felt a kernel of self-loathing despite

not knowing. Really, how much did he want to know about himself?

Enough to get me home.

Fifteen minutes later, Persephone brought the car to a stop in a motel car park. Like the others before it, the building wasn’t

much to see, with its square, gaping windows and beige, uninspired architecture (if one could even call it architecture; the

entire building looked like an afterthought). Ruben checked them in while John waited in the car and out of sight, and when

they put down their things, they agreed to spend the afternoon driving through town to see if anything looked familiar.

It didn’t.

On their way back to the motel, John caught another whiff of french fries, though there wasn’t a fast food chain in sight.

Ruben opened a bag of Cheez-Its. “Persephone’s a woman on a mission, John is an honest-to-God ghost walking, and I’m a charismatic,

debonair boy psychic. Dudes, it’s the Power of Three. Trust me, we got this.”

Persephone answered with something close to a snort, but there was something achingly optimistic about what Ruben said, and

John couldn’t deny that he, too, felt there was a certain power the three held together.

Because, really, it was always there, wasn’t it? That damned hope.

2

The theory was that some significant place in Persephone’s past might trigger in John a memory of the Grey House.

It wasn’t what Mabel believed, but Ruben still thought a portal might open up, and John didn’t have an alternative idea.

They began at Persephone’s high school, which seemed a lot larger before.

Oh—see that pole? Walked right into it ninth grade year .

The flat, rust-red brick building sparked no recollection in John’s mind, nor did the residential homes that sat on the

opposite side of the street. They passed what could be a tiny park but was no more than a strip of desiccated grass and two

haphazardly placed picnic tables. We used to come out here with one of those little red and white coolers, you know? Sit on those tables and look up at the

sky. Persephone didn’t say with whom, but John thought it might be her brother. They passed a gas station, A+ Convenience, and

she wistfully recounted a couple of anecdotes. As much as she claimed to hate Corpus Christi, and John had no doubt that,

for the most part, she did, it had been her home for a long time, and there were parts of it woven through her. And somehow

John, too, might be connected.

“Let’s keep at it,” Ruben said. “But first, chicken strips.”

He found a Dairy Queen, the car park of which sat beside a four-lane highway, in the middle of which was a wide concrete median

and on the opposite side of which was a tiny restaurant that served something Persephone called Tex-Mex . The idea of anyone spotting Persephone was highly unlikely, but still she sat slumped in the back seat, the hood of her

sweatshirt pulled over her head. Ruben returned to the Cadillac with three baskets of chicken strips, a basket of battered

shrimp, and an ice cream shake.

In seconds, he was halfway through one strip of chicken. “What I like about chains is that no matter what, the food tastes

the same every time. Consistency. Dependability. If you can’t be sure of anything else in life...” He stabbed the air with

breaded chicken for emphasis.

John stared at the chicken steaming in the basket and found he didn’t want one. In fact, since arriving in Corpus Christi,

he found he wasn’t at all interested in eating. Something was unsettling him enough to make him lose his “appetite.”

After Ruben’s chicken-strips break, they approached a plaza in which a two-story building overlooked a cramped car park.

The building held several businesses: a dry cleaner, a tae kwon do school, a massage parlor, a delicatessen, an accountant’s office, and a law firm.

Persephone sent a swift kick into the back of John’s seat, and when John glanced at the side mirror to see her face, he saw that she wasn’t looking at him but at the building.

There was the telltale dent between her brows, the pursed lips; an infinitesimal wince.

“Ruben,” John said, “can you pull into the car park?”

“No!” Persephone’s voice was forceful, violent.

Ruben had already slowed the car, but he didn’t pull into the entrance. Instead, he looked between John and Persephone with

uncertainty.

John asked her, “What is it about this place?”

“Nothing.”

“There’s something, it’s obvious.”

“I don’t know if I even believe the whole thing about any part of this town being significant to you, so I’m not the one to

ask.”

John looked at the plaza again. Should he recognize something there?

“Ruben,” said Persephone.

Ruben took one look at her and drove away. John watched the plaza grow small, wondering what, if anything, he had to do with

a cleaner’s or a martial arts school or a deli.

A few minutes later, they approached yet another intersection. It came over him quickly, the sense of apprehension, and it

rode through the window on a wave of fried potato and oil. John wrinkled his nose as they passed fast food chains and a Payless

shoe store and a mobile wireless shop, and Ruben said something but John couldn’t think past the shouty signage outside and

the stench of french fries.

John was relieved when the road was bracketed only by yellow-green grass and weeds and the odd abandoned shoe.

“Persephone,” he said, turning to face her, “what do you think about your home?” Perhaps it was twisted, but the fact that

she so vehemently didn’t want to go there made him think it the place most likely to hold their link.

She stared out the window, her eyes red and watery. “Not yet, OK? I’m not ready to talk to Parker.”

Ruben’s voice was bright. “It’s always the place you really don’t want to go, the thing you don’t want to do, that’s key. That’s how the story goes, anyway.”

“Well,” Persephone said, “this is real life, and real life doesn’t work like that. Hardly ever and definitely not always.

In fact, always doesn’t even exist in real life. Nothing is always. Unless it sucks.”

But after several minutes of Ruben driving aimlessly, she grudgingly agreed. She mumbled directions and they drove down what

might have been an old highway because it was quite a stretch of road but had only one lane on each side. They crept past