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By the time Annie had bundled Charlie into the car and returned to the house, the night was ablaze with the flashing lights

of two police cars. One was sitting down by the road, the other up by the house. Annie brought the car to a stop by the porch,

a uniformed officer meeting her as she got out from behind the wheel.

“I found him,” Annie told the woman, who identified herself as Officer Standish. Annie opened the back door of the SUV and

carried out Charlie, who was groggy but awake. “I’m sorry.”

“Not at all, ma’am,” Standish said. “Where was he?” she asked.

“Just up the road,” Annie said. “By the train crossing.”

Should I tell her? Annie thought. Should I tell her what I saw?

“How’d your boy get all the way up there?”

Still holding Charlie in her arms, she said, “Just walked. He’s had some issues with sleepwalking.”

Standish said, “If he’s got a history of that, you need to make sure he can’t wander out of the house at night.” She lowered

her voice, as if that would keep Charlie from hearing what she had to say. “This isn’t a busy road, but there’s still traffic.

No telling what could have happened.”

Tell me something I don’t know , Annie said. She could feel the judgment.

“Of course,” she said.

“Just the two of you here?” the cop asked.

“Yes. We’ve taken the house for the summer.”

“Where do you live?”

“In the city.”

“Albany? Binghamton?”

“New York.”

Standish gave her a look, wrote something down in her notepad. She said she had a few more questions.

“Do you mind if I take Charlie in first?” Not only did she want him back in bed, she didn’t think she could hold him much

longer.

The cop was agreeable.

She carried Charlie up the stairs, taking him first into the bathroom to wipe the soles of his feet clean with a wet washcloth,

then gently placed him him in his bed. He was like a rag doll, letting her do whatever needed to be done. As he laid his head

on the pillow, his eyes opened and he smiled.

“You okay?” Annie asked him, and he managed a nod. “Charlie, do you remember anything of how you got to where I found you?”

“No,” he said quietly. “I remember going to bed, and then I was on the road with you.”

She wasn’t sure she could ask, but felt she had no choice. “What did you see when you woke up?”

“I saw you,” he said.

“Did you see anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Just... anything?”

His head moved back and forth across the pillow.

“Okay,” she said, leaning down, kissing his forehead, and pulling the covers up to his chin. She slipped out of the room and

closed the door.

She stood a moment at the top of the stairs. She had an answer to that question she was asking herself moments earlier, about whether she would tell the officer what she had seen.

No fucking way.

Once she was back outside, Officer Standish peppered her with questions. She wanted to know Annie’s full name, her date of

birth, her New York address, a number where she could be reached, who she’d leased the house from.

“Why do you need all this? My son’s home. He’s okay.”

“Just for my report. I think that’s everything.”

Annie watched as she got back into her cruiser, killed the flashing lights, and drove out to the road. Once she had turned

and started driving off, the second car followed.

Something caught Annie’s eye.

The lights were on in Daniel’s house.

Annie put in a call to the leasing agent first thing in the morning.

“Candace,” she said, “do you have a handyman?”

She explained that she needed the home’s two doors—front and back—to be as secure from the inside as they were from outside.

Annie said that if Charlie had another sleepwalking episode, she didn’t want him to be able to leave the house. At the same

time, she didn’t want the place difficult to get out of in the event of a fire or some other emergency.

Candace had a suggestion. “What about a chain on his bedroom door?”

Annie didn’t like that. She wanted Charlie safe, but that didn’t mean she wanted him to be treated like a prisoner. And what

if he had to get up in the night to use the bathroom? But a chain on the front and back doors, mounted high enough that Charlie

could not reach it, might be the answer.

“Let me talk to my guy and I’ll get back to you,” Candace said.

Annie had that call done before Charlie was even down for breakfast. He was more tired than usual, not surprisingly, but other

than that seemed no worse for wear. His mother announced that they were going to do something different today. They were getting

out of the house. No work for her, no trains for him. They were going to explore.

“We don’t have to,” Charlie said.

“But we’re going to,” Annie insisted. “We leave at ten. Got it?”

That gave them an hour before departure. Charlie still had to get dressed and brush his teeth. Annie stayed in the kitchen,

reading the news on her tablet, but finding it hard to focus.

I hope I’m not losing my mind , she thought.

How else was she to explain what she’d seen in the night? That train had seemed so real. The roar of the engine. The ground

trembling beneath her. The headlight glaring at them.

And then it was gone.

Annie hadn’t spoken to her therapist, Dr. Maya Hersh, in some time. She wondered whether she would be available for a Zoom

appointment. She used her phone to send an email, asking if she might have time for a session. Today, if possible.

“Ready!” Charlie shouted.

It was a fun afternoon, and good to get out of the house.

By chance, they ended up driving by a small regional airport outside Binghamton and stopped to watch small planes fly in and

out for an hour. She and John had taken Charlie out to JFK once to see the big jets come in and take off, so watching smaller

passenger planes and private craft land and depart was less dramatic but just as engaging. The airport had a snack bar, where

they were able to buy a couple of hot dogs.

Continuing on, they spotted a place where you could pick your own strawberries. Annie asked Charlie if he wanted to give it a go, but he was puzzled.

“I thought strawberries came in little cardboard boxes,” Charlie said.

Annie laughed. “And where did you think they were before they ended up in little cardboard boxes?”

“I never really thought about it,” Charlie said.

Together, they filled two quart containers. Charlie was eager to pick more, but Annie said you could only eat so many berries

and it wasn’t like she was going to make a pie.

On the way home, they stopped at an ice-cream stand and bought two chocolate-dipped soft ice-cream cones, and while they were

sitting on a nearby bench, Charlie said, “I like your new monster guy.”

Annie stopped in mid-lick. “What?”

“The creepy thing you’ve been drawing. It’s scary.” But he didn’t look troubled. He was intrigued.

“I’m just goofing around, is all,” Annie said. “Trying something different while I figure out whether to go back to Pierce.

When did you see it?”

“When you went to the bathroom I had a look. I could tell you didn’t want me to see what you were working on. Are you mad?”

“I’m not mad. I guess I was worried it might upset you.”

He shook his head, licked his ice cream. “Nope.”

And that was the end of it.

Within minutes of getting back on the road, Charlie nodded off in the backseat. At least, Annie thought, she didn’t have to

hide what she was working on from him any longer. That was something of a relief, and their outing had managed to push her

various anxieties to the back of her mind.

She’d had only fleeting thoughts about the night before, and had convinced herself she had not seen what she’d thought she’d seen. A brief delusion triggered by stress, she told herself. She’d been in a panic about finding Charlie. Her mind was going places it shouldn’t. And when she found him, her relief so overwhelmed her that her brain short-circuited.

Okay, maybe that was something of an oversimplification. Her therapist, whom Annie had yet to hear back from, would have a

more clinical analysis, of that Annie was sure. But as she headed home, she wondered whether she even needed to have a session.

She felt better. She and Charlie had had a good day.

He woke up when she stopped the car in front of the house. “I think I fell asleep,” he said.

“Just a bit.”

Charlie unbuckled his seat belt, opened the back door, and slid out. His bike was right there, and he swung his leg over the

seat.

“I think I’m going to ride around for a while,” he said.

“Okay,” Annie said. “But you stay on the property?”

“I will.”

She aimed a menacing finger at him. “No riding up the road. Understood?”

“Okay.”

“Good. I’m going to do a bit of work.”

He pedaled off as Annie mounted the steps to the house, key in hand. Once inside, she looked on the back side of the door

to see whether Candace’s handyman had been by to install a chain. No joy there.

She set her purse on the hall table, fetched a bottle of sparkling water from the kitchen, and went up to the studio to review

her sketches. Now that there was no longer any point in hiding what she was doing from Charlie, she was free to move to the

next stage of her creative process.

She would make a three-dimensional version of her rat-wolf man.

Fin had been pretty thorough where it came to stocking her studio with everything she might need, including some packages

of plasticine, but she had no wire to fashion into an armature that would serve as the support for her model. But she recalled

seeing some white wire hangers from a dry cleaner in her bedroom closet here. She rounded up a couple, but then realized she

needed something strong enough to cut the wire, like tin snips or something smaller, and a pair of pliers to twist the wire

into various configurations.

Shit.

She could round up Charlie and head back to that hardware store in Fenelon, but that seemed like a lot of trouble. Annie was

willing to bet Daniel would have the tools she needed, but their last meeting had not ended well, with Daniel revealing that

he knew about Evan Corcoran. Plus, there had been their debate about train sounds in the night. Daniel acknowledging she might

have heard them, even though no trains ran on that nearby line, and Annie changing her position, pushing back, saying it could

have been a truck.

There had been a development. She’d more than heard a train that wasn’t there. She’d seen a train that wasn’t there.

Was she ready to talk to him about that?

Annie left her studio, went downstairs, and looked out the living room window. There was Daniel, across the way, sitting on

his own porch, alone. She went to the front door, opened it, weighed whether to go see him.

No. I can’t do it. I can’t tell him.

Charlie went flying past on his bike. “Hey,” she shouted. “We’re making a quick trip into town.”

They were back in under an hour. Annie had a new pair of pliers and snippers strong enough to cut through coat hanger wire. Charlie resumed training for the Olympics on his bike as Annie went up to the studio.

She fashioned a wire stick figure in short order, then wrapped crumpled tinfoil around it to build up the body. Next came

the plasticine, which she worked up into a torso and limbs and a head. The details would come after she had the basic shape

done.

She lost track of time. While she molded her rat-wolf, she reflected on why she was making it. Was she simply working out

her demons? Was this anything more than an exercise? Did she really think she’d do a book with something this repellent? If

not, what was the point?

What suddenly struck her was how quiet it was.

With Charlie outside riding his bicycle, the trains sat idle. Annie cast her eye at the world her son had created, the town

within the large oval of track. The train was parked at the station, where Charlie always stopped it when he was done playing,

a kind of courtesy to the imaginary crew, who could go in, use the bathroom, have something to eat.

The steam engine, the attached tender, the various cars, and at the end a caboose, sat there, motionless. The models featured

such exquisite attention to detail. Even if Annie wasn’t into toy trains, as an artist she could appreciate the work that

went into them. The little engineer in the window of the locomotive, his striped hat and red kerchief at his neck, the chuffchuffchuff sound it made when under power. The way the doors on the boxcar could be slid open, loaded with cargo, closed again, and—

Hang on.

Something, some small motion, had caught Annie’s eye from where she sat at her drafting table.

For a second she thought she’d seen the side door on the red boxcar move from its closed position. It had opened a fraction

of an inch.

No, she had to be mistaken. She knew some of the accessories were motorized. A giraffe might poke its head up through the roof of a circus car. A helicopter could be launched from a flatcar. She knew, from looking at an online catalogue, that there was a wide selection of such items, including a cattle car that horses moved into by way of a miniature conveyor belt.

And, given that the transformer, which supplied power to the rails, was not plugged in, that boxcar door should not be moving.

So—

It moved again.

Annie was certain this time. The door, no larger than a business card, had slid open another fraction of an inch.

Something long and black, not much thicker than a thread, had worked its way around the edge of the tiny plastic door, pushing

it.

“ No no no no, ” Annie whispered.

Then a second thread—no, not a thread, because a thread didn’t have joints like, say, a leg —emerged to assist, giving the door another nudge, opening it the better part of an inch. And then something larger, something

black and round, emerged.

It was a spider. Or, at least, something spider-like .

Its body was about the size of a dime, but as its legs fanned out it appeared much larger. It began to extricate itself from

the boxcar, its legs like feelers, reaching down for the floor. Finding the smooth surface, it slid out completely and paused,

as if looking around, taking in its surroundings.

Annie shivered briefly. She was not a fan of bugs of any kind, but spiders ranked right at the top of the list.

She looked about for a weapon. The pad of art paper was far too big to roll up as a makeshift club. What she needed was a

magazine, or a can of Raid she could use to spray the little motherfucker. Her eyes settled on the coffee can filled with

markers and pens and brushes, the bottom of it perfect for crushing an unwanted visitor.

But as she went to pick it up, she saw more legs reaching around the edge of the boxcar door.

Another spider came out.

And then another. And another.

Like passengers arriving at their destination, they disembarked and started to head off in all directions. They kept on coming.

Dozens at first, and then what seemed like hundreds. Thousands. A section of floor became black with them, an undulating carpet

of spiders, moving slowly toward Annie.

How could that tiny car hold so many? How had they gotten in there in the first place?

Annie’s breathing became short and hurried. She dropped the can, markers, pens, and brushes scattering across the floor. She

had to get out of this room, out of this house, put Charlie in the car without bothering to pack one single fucking thing,

and head straight back to New York.

She heard screaming and realized it was her.

She thought, for a millisecond, of Dolores. What had Daniel said?

“Even before I got to the house I could hear the screaming. Never heard a sound like that come out of my Dolores. I get in the house, and she’s just standing

there at the base of the stairs. Rigid, like she’s at attention. Arms at her side, and she’s got her mouth open and she’s

wailing. I’m standing right in front of her, sayin ’ her name, saying, ‘Dolores, it’s me, it’s Daniel,’ and it’s like she’s looking right through me, like I’m not even there.”

Annie continued to scream.

She heard a noise from outside the studio. Someone racing up the stairs.

“Mom?” Charlie shouted. “Are you okay?”

He burst into the room and ran to his mother. “Mom, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

Annie stopped screaming and pointed.

“What?” Charlie asked. “What are you looking at?”

Annie continued to point, but then blinked several times, quickly. The floor was clear. There were no spiders. Not a one.

The boxcar door was closed.

“Mom?”

Annie pulled Charlie into her arms. “You’re shaking,” he said, his own voice trembling. “What’s going on?”

Her phone, resting on the table, dinged, announcing a new email. Annie let go of her son, picked up the phone, opened the

mail app.

It was from Dr. Hersh.

What are you doing now? her note read. I can send a Zoom link if it’s convenient.