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John pretended Ruben weren’t acting as if this were a game show and closed his eyes. “I can’t remember.”

“Try harder.”

John, straining to remember, shook his head.

“Jackson? Wilson? Rodríguez?”

“No.”

“Martin. Smith. Rogers.” Ruben paused. “You wouldn’t happen to be a Colón, would you?”

John opened his eyes. “No.”

A low rumble and a rolling beneath the floor, as if something massive had settled beneath the house. Ruben looked down, his

hands splayed just over the table.

“I felt it, too,” said John, though it wasn’t an actual feeling but a strange knowing that something had moved beneath them.

Something not quite benign.

A quiet groan reverberated through the room.

“Um. John?”

“I heard him.”

“ Him? ”

“A man—a creature. He wants my House.”

The candles snuffed out. There’d been no breeze.

They waited in near darkness, the only light half-heartedly slipping in from beneath the door.

“Why don’t you get the lights?” John asked.

Another rumbling, louder, closer. The room flashed white.

“Dude! What’re you doing?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“ You’re the one from the Other Side—what’s happening?”

John caught a whiff of dank air and recognized the scent immediately. “Don’t panic.”

“I’m not panicking!” Ruben said as he leapt from his chair and sent it clattering to the floor.

Lights flickered and shadows darted. Grey fog rolled up and out from the center of the table and devoured the room.

“Make it go away,” said John. “Whatever you did, undo it. What do you normally do in situations like this?”

“ Normally? ”

“Just fix it,” John said impatiently. “Send it back!” But then he wondered if he’d brought it here.

The candles relit only to extinguish themselves a second time.

Ruben screamed, “Come on! Live to fight another day and all that—let’s go!” He stumbled backward, falling into the curtains

that concealed the door before turning to fumble with the doorknob.

The curtains fell through John and he curled forward in pain before falling back just as the lights flickered on again. The

candles had relit themselves and the Grey Man was nowhere in sight. Instead, a churning fog had completely overcome the table.

Nestled atop the undulating gloom: a gentle, dark sea, and in its center, a two-story house of grey stone and brick, not a

scrap of earth in sight.

So this is what it looks like from the outside. The House was truly, in the most literal sense, an island.

“Is that...?”

John’s throat constricted. “Yes. It’s my House.”

“Wow. It’s beautiful. But also... disturbing.”

“It’s home.”

12

My House , he repeated to himself, as if he could will himself there. A world away from these living people and their desires and motivations

and untrustworthiness.

My House.

But was it still his?

John stared mournfully at the empty air above the table. Like a mirage, the image of the House had dissipated.

“Dude.”

John sighed heavily.

“I have to go to work, dude.”

“After what just happened, that’s the pressing thing?”

“Boss said I’m late one more time and I’m fired.”

“How did you do it? Can you bring it back?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I’m guessing maybe you did it. But hey,” Ruben added quickly, “no need to find another diviner. Anywhere

else you go, it’s going to take a warming-up period. You’re going to have a few dead ends. And just when you think it’s all

for nothing, the thing you need to happen will happen. Unless you go to the wrong one altogether—then nothing happens—or maybe

they end up being a fake and figure out a way to trap you in their basement. For decades. Or until they die.”

“What?”

“Look,” said Ruben, “I would never waste our time.”

“It’s not your time I’m concerned about.” But John had just seen his House. Ruben, however unwittingly, had helped conjure

the vision. John wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet, anyway.

“We’re just getting started. Anyone else, that probably would’ve taken you a whole month of false starts.”

John followed Ruben into his living room, where an open bag of Funyuns sat on the coffee table, as well as an oversized gaming

device. A tome of a comic book, The Sculptor , sat beside a neat stack of a dozen or so superhero comics. “When does she return, your mother?”

“Not sure. Depends. But I’ll be fine. I’m nineteen.”

John wondered after his own age. Surely he was older than twenty-five and younger than fifty.

“You can come back tomorrow if you want. No one’s coming until the afternoon. A client, not friends. I mean...” Ruben’s

cheeks and ears darkened and he walked the few steps to the kitchen, which was open to the rest of the living room, and poured

himself a glass of something carbonated, neon red, and by all appearance not meant for consumption. After he downed half the

glass, he walked over and stuffed his hand into the bag of Funyuns, wasting no time shoving a few ring-shaped crisps into

his mouth. “Hey, what happened with the curtains? It was like they hurt you or something.”

“Walls, doors, objects—the curtains—anything solid. I’m all right now.”

“Interesting.” Ruben stroked his chin. “Cross-Planing. When you cross the physical and metaphysical planes, you get sick.

Unusual.” He gestured toward the sofa. “You sure you don’t want to try sitting? Standing around like that, it makes me feel

like you’re constantly ready to go.” He crunched down onto another handful of crisps. He’d hardly chewed twice before he was

tossing in another handful. “That sick feeling when you cross planes? Colón’s Cross-Planing Malady.”

“Is this a phenomenon the experts know about?”

“Science is a living thing, always new stuff to learn.” Ruben raised a finger. “Sickness. Colón’s Cross-Planing Sickness.

And before you say anything, I’ve heard longer. Wait—Colón’s CPS.” Ruben took a moment before stuffing his hand back into

the bag of crisps. “I promise you, you’ve come to the right place.” He shook his head. “That fog was something else, though.

Not to mention that groan. Who—what was that again?”

“The Grey Man.”

Ruben inhaled deeply. “Right.”

“I have to say, you’re taking this better than I’d expect.”

“I’m freaking out.” Ruben raised the nearly empty Funyuns bag. “You can’t tell?”

John wondered if the Grey Man sensed his attempt to get back to the House. “He can’t have it. He can’t have my House.”

“We heard him coming, but I don’t think he could get a location on you, exactly. Or he couldn’t cross over. Either way, if

you weren’t before, I think you’re definitely on his radar now. Your house... is that why he wants to—well, kill isn’t the word, but, yeah—kill you?”

“It seems so.”

“Well, it’s obvious you’re going to have to fight him for it.” Ruben took a swig of his drink. “But him trying to come here

was a good thing.”

“I thought we both agreed it was pretty horrible.”

“And yet it’s a good sign.” Ruben pointed the last Funyun in John’s direction. “Because it means you’re getting close. Stick

with me, dude. We’re already to the part just before things really start to go down.”

13

After a quick shower, Ruben (clad in a pair of wrinkled khakis with a short-sleeved red polo and sporting a name tag, the

top of which read krispy kreme ) was driving John in his yellow, old-model Ford Fiesta, the passenger-side door of which featured a jagged, half-snapped

handle. Ruben was insistent on taking John somewhere, and short of sprinting away, providing a destination was the only way

to stop his pestering. So John blurted the beach , and since there was the issue of sitting, specifically John’s inability to do so, he was coerced into a lesson. In this world, dude, you’re going to need it. Like, bare minimum skill required to get on here.

An initial attempt to sit in Ruben’s car resulted in John sinking through its worn seats and metal frame until he found himself on the pavement, after which he half scrabbled, half rolled away and dry-heaved over the asphalt.

The second time, John maintained contact with the seat for all of thirty seconds before ending in a similar state.

The seats offered more resistance than walls (John still couldn’t even begin to lean against one), but they didn’t buzz and push against him like the ground, either.

There was only the gentle buffer of pressure as he sat; however, that lasted no more than a few moments, and then the seat was just like any other object.

John suspected the resistance required for sitting had something to do with the specific intention of sitting, itself, because no matter how much he willed himself to, for instance, hold Ruben’s keys, he could not.

And as it was possible for John to, when he tried once, sit in the car’s footwell (which was effectively the floor of the car), his theory proved true: there were some unknown rules regarding his own intentions and the intentions of created boundaries; it was why a step would have the same resistance as the ground, or, similarly, a pedestrian’s bridge over one of those small Venice canals.

They were created as extensions of ground , and hence held some metaphysical grounding force.

Why such distinctions existed in the universe John couldn’t say, but he

was determined to, as a point of pride, succeed. And so again, John stepped into the car, thought furiously hard about sitting,

and sat. Off they went.

“OK, dude,” Ruben said now, “I’ve got, uh, two things to tell you. Just to keep it real. One. Like I said, I’m pretty sure

I can help you with getting to your house. And Grey Dude. Somehow. Two.” He heaved a sigh. “Thing is, I’m not actually psychic.

Shocking, I know. But according to my fam, it’s pretty official. I’m about as psychic as my coffee table... I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure no one’s noticed.”

“I know, right?”

“Your three o’clock the other day?”

“One of my mom’s old clients, Mrs. Neault. She came just to let me know that she wasn’t coming again until my mom was back.