“Henry?” his wife said from right behind him. Close enough to touch him. He thought she was going to. He expected to feel her hand on his arm like he usually did, but he didn’t. She was scared, he thought. She was right to be.

“Henry,” she said again, from a foot or two farther back, “they’ve plowed the roads again. We should really go out to the store while we can. We’ve used up all the canned soup, and there’s no milk or bread…”

“We can’t go out there,” Henry said, not taking his eyes off the snow, alert for any signs of movement.

“Henry, it’ll be fine. The truck has four wheel drive.”

“You think you’d make it to the truck?” he asked.

“It would be easier if you’d shovel the walk again, but the important thing is…”

“The important thing is that we’re in here and they’re out there,” he said.

“What’s out there?” she asked.

“Sharks,” Henry said.

“Sharks? Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, just as another triangular fin slid out from beneath the whiteness and glided smoothly across the lawn.

“Look, look!” Henry said, pointing. He turned to see if his wife was seeing it, but she had turned to walk away. When he turned back to the window, the thing had submerged itself again.

“Henry, you’re getting cabin fever,” his wife said. “We all are, I suppose. I’m going to get the kids bundled up.”

“You can’t take the kids out there!”

“They need to get out, even just to the grocery store,” she said. “You do, too.”

“We have supplies left,” Henry said. “We can last until the snowmelts.”

“Supplies? We have fifty pounds of dry cat food you laid in when you were so afraid of that virus,” she said. “We’re not eating that, not when the stores are open and the roads are clear.”

“Honey, please listen to me,” he said, though he recongized the tone in her voice. She wouldn’t be persuaded or reasoned with.

“We’re going in fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen minutes to figure out how he could save his family from what was waiting outside… or to decide if he’d have to settle for saving the children, somehow, if their mother wouldn’t be stopped.

It was a grim choice, but a man had to do what it took to protect his family.

I fear it has started again. Despite all of my precautions, depite the traps and the presence of my faithful cats, it has begun. The protestations of my friend the captain as to impossibility of the testimony of my senses notwithstanding, the facts are irrefutable. The sound in the walls, the mad frenzied scrabbling beneath the surface of the solid-seeming limestone, is only the prelude, the first herald of my nightly torment.

They tell me that I am distracted, that my mind plays tricks on me. This they say to my face. Behind my back, I am sure that they call me mad. I would swear to the Holy Virgin that I am as sane as I was when first I moved to my ancestral home, insofar as I am able to recognize insanity when I see it. What follows each night as once-still curtains sway in sudden draughts and ancient tapestries writhe with the multitude of scurrying, skittering, chittering bodies boiling out of the walls behind them is nothing less than the very distilled essence of madness itself.

Am I mad? I, who have faced this terrible sight thrice thus far? I who alone have stood as mute witness to this secret horror of rhythmic rodentia? No doubt my nerves have suffered somewhat from the ongoing ordeal, but I defy any of my supposed friends or my innumerable enemies to remain as calm, as steady, as resolutely sane as I am when they see the hamsters come out to dance.

Da da di da di do do…

“Janet?” I said.

“There’s something on your mind, isn’t there, Brian?” she replied. She put her hand on the side of my face, her fingers idly playing with a few strands of my hair. “It’s been weighing on you for some time. Why don’t you just say it?”

“Alright, Janet,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I’m under a lot of strain right now, with work and your family and mine and all, and there’s just a lot of pressure for me to look good, to impress, and… I worry sometimes that I might be losing it.”

Her hand stopped moving. She smiled and took a few steps back. Her hand remained where it was on my cheek, detaching neatly from the wrist. The stump bled shiny black beetles that immediately buried themselves deep in the shag carpeting. With her other hand, she reached up and ripped the skin away from her face, revealing a gaping black hole of nothingness behind it… nothingness that contained a horribly fanged maw and two flickering flames for eyes.

“But, Brian,” she said in a voice old and dead, “how can you lose what you never had in the first place?”

“Er, I was actually talking about my hair,” I said.

“What? Oh,” she said, smoothing her face back in place. She ruffled my thinning hair with her one hand while rejoining her wrist-stump to the other. “You look fine, dear. You look respectable. Dignified. My father was bald as an egg when he was your age, you know. Speaking of… we should finish getting ready. They’ll be here soon.”

I nodded, and we didn’t say another word about it. It was just one of those things. Privately, though, I found the whole thing very worrying… especially as my therapist had responded much the same way a few days before.