Phil Parisi

Tess may even have made a more general and expansive invitation.

She couldn't be sure.

Her memory for now was broken.

Generous as Tess was, it was not the kind of invitation she would have normally made.

Like most of us, she would have been more protective of her space than that.

Before the responders came, we absorbed the sight of that large formal circle of chairs one more time and made the wordless decision to move them into a clumsy grouping in the corner of the basement so there wouldn't be questions we couldn't ever answer.

Tess was slowly coming around, regaining herself, a process that had begun shortly after the chairs had been settled into the precise arrangement some forces outside of her had very much wanted.

Natural causes would be the coroner's verdict.

He found that Maeve had been in the very last stages of acute liver disease.

I've been accused sometimes of being grim, unnecessarily cynical, even about the nature of the universe, the things we see, the things we can't see.

People are right to think that about me.

My conclusion has always been that the audience Tess encountered wanted to watch someone die.

Maybe it was nothing more complicated than that.

Tess never spent another hour in that house, so we'll never know what satisfaction they got, or where they went after they forced her to labor for days for their evening's brief, cruel entertainment.

Wouldn't it be strange, I think in odd moments, if it was just the un-scenic woods behind boring Lighthouse Passage 2 they return to, where privileged children are forbidden to go by hovering parents who just want the best for them and to keep them safe.

What scares me is getting stuck really late at night in an unfamiliar town at some intersection that has an inexplicable red light that shouldn't even be red because there's no one around for miles.

It's three in the morning and yet there I am, the engine idling and the seconds are ticking and I'm looking to the left and looking to the right in the shadows.

At that moment, I'm always convinced that I've been set up by the forces of darkness.

And this is the moment when something is going to come out of the dark at my car.

And that thing is going to be, I don't know, let's just say the Wendigo.