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Graeme read with horror of the “South Winterthurn conflagration of February 8, 1911"—one of the Matheson textile mills had burnt to the ground, killing more than thirty persons including young children; investigation revealed that the mill hadn’t been properly equipped with adequate fire exits, and in fact, unaccountably, most of the doors had been locked. He found himself staring at a sepia photograph of a smoldering skeleton of a building; firemen and others stood about, and on the snowy ground were corpses in rows, shrouded in canvas, so many! and some so small! A number of the fire victims had been so badly burnt, their faces so charred, absolute identification was impossible.
Bodies without faces
.

Blindly, Graeme shoved the book back onto the shelf. He’d had enough of family history. How right he’d been to feel a sick sort of shame to be a Matheson and to live at the ruin of Cross Hill; erected, as he was only now discovering, upon the bones of such innocent victims.

He decided not to tell Rosalind or Stephen. Not just yet. The revelation was too ugly, too humiliating. Graeme treasured his own adolescent cynicism but would not have wished his more energetic, more attractive sister and brother to share it.
Someone has to protect the innocent from knowing too much
.

He wondered if Mother knew about Moses Adams Matheson. Probably not. Surely not.

And Father? Surely yes.

To be fated, to be accursed—isn’t that also to be special?

Since that June night, early in our summer of exile, when he’d seen the creature he called the thing-without-a-face, Graeme had rarely slept more than an hour or two at a time at night; often he didn’t undress and lie down in his bed at all, for it had become to him a place of torment and misery. And so sleep overcame him during the day, in paralytic attacks; helpless to stay awake, he sank into a deep, catatonic sleep, like an infant; spells from which, blinking and gasping for breath, he’d wake with a violent pounding of his heart. (He might find himself on the filthy floor of one of the shut-up rooms at Cross Hill, or in the spear-like grass of the lawn, unable to recall how he’d gotten where he was. Sometimes one of us was stooped over him, crying, “Graeme, wake
up
! Graeme, please wake up!”) As Graeme’s insomnia worsened, his perverse pride in it increased. He could not trust the night for sleep; he could not trust the day. How he wished he could go on-line, to boast to his invisible friends in cyberspace that he, unlike the rest of them,
no longer slept
. He reveled in the fact that Mother, sunk in upon herself, indifferent now to her children, hadn’t the slightest awareness of his morbid condition; nor did Father seem to be concerned, except to address him ironically at the dinner table when his head nodded or he failed to reply to a question directed at him. ("Son, I’m speaking to you. Where is your mind?” Father would ask; and Graeme would labor to bring back his mind, his consciousness, as a boy might tug timidly at a favorite kite blown high into the sky by an unpredictable wind with the power to tear it to shreds at any moment.
My mind! My mind! Father, here it is!)

Yet to be isolated, accursed—that was to know himself special.

Graeme had ceased to believe that our father might be “redeemed"—that “justice” would be executed. He’d ceased to have faith that we would ever be returned to our old lives in the city; he’d ceased to believe that our “old lives” had ever existed, in fact. As cyberspace, in which he’d spent so many hours of his young life, exists everywhere, but also nowhere.
And nowhere must predominate. The final law of nature
.

Now that Mother had been broken by Cross Hill, now that Father had more obsessively retreated to his quarters at the top of the house (forbidden, as the master bedroom was forbidden, for us children to approach), there came to be a prevailing mood of confusion in the household; like that aftermath of shock, yet a silent, undefined shock, following the passage of a powerful jet plane overhead. It was August; a time of intense, sweltering heat; a time of tremulous, quavering heat; and frequent thunderstorms, and lightning; a time of frequent electric failures, when the inadequate wiring at Cross Hill broke down completely and darkness might be protracted for hours. One day we realized that Mr. and Mrs. Dulne had ceased to come to the house; we seemed to know that the couple hadn’t been paid in weeks and had given up hoping to be compensated for their work. Mother explained in a blank, indifferent voice, as if she were commenting upon the weather, “They will receive payment. Father will write them a check. In time.” But when? we asked. (We were ashamed that this kindly older couple, who’d been so gracious to us, might be cheated.) But Mother merely smiled and shrugged. Since the “betrayal” of the breakfast room, as she’d come to call it, she’d withdrawn from emotion.
Not Mother now
, Graeme thought bitterly.
Then who?

Ironically, Father’s important visitors hadn’t shown up that morning. He’d waited through the day for them, and it was one of our longest August days. He’d waited calmly at first, in a newly pressed blue-pinstripe seersucker suit, white shirt and tie, glancing through documents neatly arranged in stacks on the cherrywood table; then with growing agitation he’d waited at the front entrance of Cross Hill, beneath its mossy, discolored neoclassic portico; as the hours passed, and the whitely steaming sun moved lethargically through the sky, he grew calm again, with a look of ironic resignation; staring across the grassy acreage in the direction of the front gate like one who hears distant music inaudible to others and, at last, inaudible to the listener himself.

It was a mid-August night, gauzily moonlit, when Graeme decided to follow his brother Stephen; to lie in wait for Stephen outdoors in the marshy grass at the foot of the drive. He seemed to know that Stephen was slipping away from Cross Hill by night, in secret, on his bicycle; disobeying Father’s admonition that no one of us should ever again, on our bicycles or on foot, leave the property without his permission. It thrilled Graeme that his brother was so willfully disobeying our father, yet he was envious too.
Where is he going? Who are his friends? It isn’t fair!
Stephen kept his bicycle hidden in one of the barns, surreptitiously oiling it, sanding away the ever-accumulating rust, making repairs; the Italian road bike, though lightweight and graceful in design, was surprisingly sturdy. The chain on Graeme’s bike had never been repaired so it couldn’t be ridden, but Graeme was thinking he might ride Rosalind’s bike; he and Stephen could ride together to—Contracoeur?

So Graeme waited for Stephen, crouched in the tall grass. On all sides, the night was harshly sibilant with nocturnal insects. Some sang in rhythm, others in isolated, piercing, saw-like cries. Graeme’s insomnia, he believed, was particularly triggered by moonlight. That moon! A pitiless eye teasing, winking, glowering at him so far below.
Yet it’s a talent, never to sleep. Never to be taken by surprise
. Graeme was convinced he’d remained awake but suddenly then he was jolted into consciousness by a sound of footsteps, a vibration of the earth; he sat up, dazed, for a moment confused, and saw then Stephen passing close by, or a figure he took to be Stephen’s—noting how tall, how mature Stephen had become; everyone had noticed how muscular Stephen had grown this summer, working outdoors with Mr. Dulne at mowing and tending the enormous lawn, which invariably grew back more lushly within a few days, shoulder-high grasses and brilliantly colored wildflowers in a riot of fecundity. Graeme stammered, “Stephen?—it’s me.” It came to him in a rush that his brother might reject him: he, Graeme, had been sulky and sullen for much of the summer, turning from Stephen’s frequent overtures of friendship. Graeme said, “Stephen? Wait. Can I come with you? Please—” It seemed strange to him that Stephen, knowing now who he was, had not spoken. Strange that he’d halted so suddenly, approximately ten feet from Graeme, arms raised at his sides, his posture tense, vigilant; his face, shrouded in shadow, showing no animation. “Stephen—?” Graeme blundered forward, unthinking.

Seeing, in that instant, that the figure confronting him wasn’t his brother Stephen but—the thing-without-a-face.

Graeme stood paralyzed, transfixed. For it might have seemed to him that this was but a symptom of the insomnia of which he’d grown fatally proud: a nightmare figure standing before him which he’d imagined into being; a dream of his and not “real;” or, if “real,” as the atrocities reported in the weekly Contracoeur newspaper were real, in some way not related to him. He hadn’t time to cry out for help before the creature lunged at him, swiping with its hands as a maddened bear might swipe savagely and blindly; so much heavier and stronger than Graeme, Graeme was knocked to the ground as if he were a small child and not a thirteen-year-old boy.

Except for the sounds of the nocturnal insects there was silence, for the creature did not speak, nor could Graeme scream, his breath choked off as the thing-without-a-face crouched over him where he’d fallen, raining blows upon his unprotected head, clawing and tearing at his face, tearing away the flesh of his face as Graeme fell, and fell, into the earth beneath the wild grasses of Cross Hill.

9. The Traitorous Son

For the second time that summer, in our exile in Contracoeur, the family woke to discover that our brother Graeme was missing. And again we called his name and searched for him; Rosalind led us immediately to the farther shore of Crescent Pond—which, by August, had shrunken so that it was scarcely more than a black, brackish puddle amid marsh grasses and desiccated bamboo. But of course there was no one there. Nor any footprints in the soft earth. Impatiently we called, “Graeme? Gra-eme!” for we’d come to resent Graeme’s childish, self-centered behavior, which upset us all. (With the exception of Mother, who came downstairs late in the morning, in her soiled silk dressing gown, to sit almost motionless in the breakfast room, too lethargic to prepare even tea, as Rosalind customarily did for her; her faded, watery gaze turned unperturbed in our direction.)

At first, Father remained relatively calm, though annoyed that his work schedule had been disturbed; then, as it seemed that Graeme might be truly missing, he joined in our search, awkwardly, with a convalescent’s uncertain step, blinking in the harsh sunshine as he waded through the thigh-high grass brushing away gnats from his face. We heard his voice echoing everywhere—“Graeme! I command you to return! Son, this is your father speaking!” He was alternately furious and frightened; his fury didn’t surprise us, but his fear began to terrify us, for it was rare that our father betrayed so weak an emotion.

Finally Stephen searched through the things on Graeme’s cluttered desk, where he discovered the cryptic message his brother had so conscientiously hand-printed:

What have I lost: my usemame, my password, my soul
.

Where must I flee: not IRL. There is none

Father was astonished by these words, as if he hadn’t known that his thirteen-year-old son was capable of such eloquence. In a puzzled voice he asked Stephen what “IRL” meant, and Stephen said, hesitantly, “I think it means ‘In Real Life,’ Father,” and Father said, “ ‘In Real Life’—but what does that mean?” and Stephen said, reluctantly, “ ‘IRL’ is a cyberspace term referring to—well, all that
is
, that isn’t cyberspace.” For a long tense moment Father contemplated this disturbing revelation; his pale, wounded mouth worked in silence. Then he said, “So Graeme has left us, then. He has run away. In repudiation of me. He has lost faith in me.”

Stephen protested, “But Graeme might be—lost. Even if he ran away, he’s only a kid. He might need help; we’d better report him missing,” and Father said, with an air of dismissal, “Graeme is a traitorous son. He is no longer my son. I can never forgive him, and I forbid the rest of you to forgive him or get into contact with him. He has repudiated us all—the Mathesons. We must expel him from our hearts.”

Before Stephen could prevent him, Father snatched the message from Stephen’s fingers and tore it briskly into shreds.

10. The Lost Brother

In that way it happened that our brother Graeme disappeared from Cross Hill in the late summer of our exile at Cross Hill and was not reported missing; nor was any trace ever found of him in the old ruin of a house or on the grounds; though, without knowing what she did, Rosalind often found herself looking for him, or for someone—hearing a faint, reproachful voice calling
Rosalind! Stephen!
that, when she paused to listen more closely, faded into the incessant wind. Rosalind wandered through distant corridors and rooms in the old house, discovering parts of it she’d never seen before; ascending narrow, creaking staircases, poking into closets, peering into the dark, cobwebbed corners where household debris had accumulated like driftwood. Outdoors, she found herself drawn to the old, collapsing barns, the rotted grape and wisteria arbors with their look of bygone romance, the tall, rustling grasses of the park that extended for acres like an inland sea.
Rosa-lind! Ste-phen! Help me!
Yet Graeme’s features were beginning to fade in her memory, like a Polaroid photo exposed to overly bright sunshine. And in fact there seemed to be no photos or snapshots of Graeme in the household; it was discovered that most of the family memorabilia, kept in scrap-books once obsessively maintained by Mother, had been lost in the move from the city. So, if Father had agreed to report his missing son to the police, there would have been the embarrassment of having not a single picture of Graeme to give them.

Anxiously, Rosalind examined herself in the murky, lead-spotted mirrors of Cross Hill. Through the long summer she’d grown an inch or more, her slender body was filling out, her legs long, beautifully shaped and subtly muscular; she’d become golden-tan, on the verge of her fifteenth birthday a striking, increasingly self-reliant girl—yet, in these antique mirrors, her reflection was wan, tremulous, fearful, like a reflection in rippling water. Was she, too, disappearing? Or was it, in fact, but the inadequacy of the mirrors? She’d noticed that Stephen, too, appeared vague and irresolute when glimpsed in certain mirrors, and the twins, Neale and Ellen, who hadn’t grown at all this summer but seemed, disturbingly, to have shrunk an inch or so, scarcely appeared at all except as wavering, watery images like poorly executed watercolors. Scrubbing the grime away from a mirror and polishing its glass did little good, for the lead backing was seeping through; as Mrs. Dulne had said, throwing up her hands in genial exasperation when once she and Rosalind were trying to restore a mirror, “Cross Hill is
old.”