She was aware of her father's hands — one hand holding a sheet of paper and the other holding a pencil and scribbling something in the margin; and the writing hand paused, for he was aware of her intrusion. In the bones of her head, over the jagged piano music, she heard him say, What's up, Daph?
She had to keep flexing her right hand to dispel the impression that another hand was holding it — a warm, damp hand, not her father's. Someone standing behind her…
Maybe it hadn't been Peter's fiancйe who'd run away, because now in the movie he was marrying the sister who had stayed. But the wedding was taking place in some sort of elegant Victorian hotel — a white-draped table appeared to be an altar, and a man in black robes was standing behind it with his arms raised; he was wearing a crownless white hat that exposed his bald white scalp, and the brim of the hat had been cut into triangular points, like a child's cutout of a star. He leaned down to press his forehead against the tablecloth, so that his bald head with the ring of triangles seemed to be a symbol of the sun, and then the bride was stepping up to the altar with a knife — there was a quick cut to the other sister, on the seashore, plunging a knife into the center of a starfish—
—and suddenly Daphne realized that it had been only one woman all along, somehow split in two so that one of her could go away while the other stayed home — the woman was in two places at once, and so was Daphne — Daphne was standing up very tall from her father's desk, tossing the paper to the floor and saying in her father's voice, "Daph, who's in the house?"
And then the house lost its balance and began to tip over into the pit — for a moment Daphne couldn't feel the couch under her, she was falling — and in a panic she grabbed with her whole mind.
The house lurched violently back to level solidity again, though the curtains in the front window didn't even sway; and black smoke was jetting out of the vent slots in the VCR.
Daphne was sobbing, and her ears were ringing, but she could hear her father in the hall shout, "Daph, the fire extinguisher, quick!"
She got dizzily to her feet and blundered to the kitchen, and she muscled the heavy red cylinder up from beside the tool chest. Then her father was there, yanking it from her arms with a brief "Thanks!" and turning away — but instead of going straight across into the living room, he ran left, up the hall.
Daphne peered around the corner after him, and saw smoke billowing out across the hall ceiling from the far-right-hand doorway — her bedroom.
Her father could handle that. Daphne hurried back into the living room, coughing and blinking in the fumes of burning plastic, and she tugged the VCR's cord from the wall and then yanked the still smoking thing down off the TV set; she gave it a few more jerks, and when it lay smoking on the rug, free of all connecting cables, she dragged it through the kitchen and out the door, onto the grass. She took a couple of deep breaths of the fresh air before hurrying back inside.
She ran back through the kitchen and up the hall, and she stepped wide around the doorway to her room in case her father might come out fast; smoke made a hazy layer under the hall ceiling and the air smelled of burning cloth.
Her father was shooting her blackened bed with quick bursts of white fog from the extinguisher, but the fire seemed to be out. Her pillow was charred, and the blue wall behind the bed was streaked with soot.
She was wringing her hands. "What burned?"
"Rumbold," her father panted. Rumbold was a teddy bear Daphne's mother had given her years and years ago. "Was there somebody in the house, at the door?"
"Oh, I didn't mean to burn Rumbold! No, that was in Grammar's movie. It wasn't Pee-wee, it was a scary movie. I'm sorry, Daddy!"
"Your mattress might be okay. But we'd better drag your sheets and blankets and pillow outside. And Rumbold, what's left of him."
The teddy bear had melted as much as burned, and Daphne carried him outside on a cushion because he was still very hot.
"The VCR too?" her father asked in the fresh air as he stepped over the charred machine on his way to the trash cans.
Trotting along after him, Daphne called, "Yes, it too. Dad, it was a really scary movie!" Tears blurred her vision — she was crying as much about Rumbold as about all the rest of it. The late afternoon breeze was chilly in her sweaty hair.
Stepping around the truck, her father dumped the still smoking bedding into one of the cans.
"I want to bury Rumbold," Daphne said.
Her father crouched beside her, wiping his hands on his shirt. "Okay. What happened?"
"It was the movie—it wasn't Pee-wee except for the first couple of minutes, then it was a black and white, a silent. And I felt myself falling — the whole house felt like it was falling! — and I grabbed on — I guess I grabbed the VCR and Rumbold, both." She blinked at him through her tears. "I've never been that scared before. But how could I set stuff on fire?"
He put his arms around her. "Maybe you didn't. Anyway, the movie's gone now."
His kindness, when she had expected to be yelled at, set her sobbing again. "She was a witch!" she choked.
"She's dead and gone. Don't—"
She felt her father shiver through his shirt, and when she looked up she saw that he was looking past her, down the driveway.
Daphne turned around and saw Grammar's old green Rambler station wagon rocking to a halt on the dirt driveway, thirty feet away, under the overhanging boughs of the Paraiso tree.
Daphne had begun moaning and thrashing in her father's arms before she heard him saying, "It's not her! Daph! It's some old guy, it's not her! She's dead and gone and her movie's burned up! Look, it's just some guy!"
Daphne clutched her father's shoulders and blinked fearfully at the car.
There was only one person visible in it, a gray-haired man with a pouchy, frowning face; perhaps he had only now noticed the child and the crouching man beside the Ford truck. As she watched, the car quickly reversed out of the driveway back into the street, and then sped away east. She lost sight of it behind the fence and the trunks of the neighbor's eucalyptus trees.
"That was Grammar's car!" Daphne wailed.
"Yes it was," her father said grimly, straightening up. "Probably that guy was the burglar who broke into Grammar's house. Casing our place now, I bet."
"Her keys were gone," said Daphne, shivering and sniffling now. "He must have waited till we were all gone, then took her car." And followed us, she thought.
"I'll call the police. We're dealing with thieves here, Daph, not witches."
And a girl who can set things on fire in rooms she's not even in, Daphne thought unhappily. Even things she doesn't want to burn up. What if I have nightmares about that movie? Could I set fires in my sleep?
A shrill screeching from behind her made her jump and grab her father's leg.
He ruffled her hair. "It's the smoke alarm, goof. It just now noticed that there was a fire."
Four blocks away, the green Rambler had pulled over to the dirt shoulder of Highland Avenue, and a couple of children on bicycles laughed to see the gray-haired old driver open the door and lean out to vomit on the pavement.