When Arthur and Lilia had been in the early throes of their relationship, they'd one night, after a bottle of wine, broached a subject most young couples stumble into at some point: children. Whether either of them wanted any, how many they might want if they did, genders and names of preference, so on and so forth. Lilia had playfully warned Arthur that twins ran in her family so he'd better watch out, that he had plenty of time to reconsider their progressing romance, and he'd been caught off guard when she'd mentioned her own twin sister, Ibane.

Ibane's story wasn't one Lilia wanted to share; she'd in fact immediately regretted having mentioned her twin and caught a ride home. It'd taken her over two weeks to return Arthur's calls afterward. He'd thought their relationship was over.

When at last Lilia had deigned to speak with him, she'd told him a rather heartbreaking yet common tale of a sibling whose late teen years had led to a concomitant running away and drug addiction, and while the possibility that one had led to the other was moot it mattered little to parents who ate through their savings attempting to help their daughter only to have her steal and relapse and run again in repetition. Lilia had confessed that apathy had settled into her parents and herself after years of wasted efforts, and eventually, Ibane had been essentially cut out of the family.

It'd sounded cruel to Arthur, at the time. It'd seemed callous. But Lilia hadn't elaborated, and he'd loved her too much to push.

He couldn't help thinking of his wife's sister now, as he scrambled like the-madman-he-felt-he-was-becoming just to put on clothing. He'd been unable to stop thinking about her for months, ever since he'd fulfilled her last wish and assumed Lilia's enduring wrath for it. Whatever was happening—whether it was mania or something more—he needed to find his family and get the Hell out of this place (which, apparently, didn't exist?).

Skipping shoes, Arthur rambled down the two flights of stairs, calling the names of his children and his wife but getting no response. He moved frantically through the sun-filled lower level and onto the deck where he at last spied the small but definite form of his daughter down at the beach, playing in the sand. Ramona's dark hair and clown-nose-red top shone conspicuously against the whitish sand and gray waters, the strange coloring produced by the bright but overcast sky. As her father approached her, not quite running but certainly hastening, he realized the girl was talking to herself and that some massive, long black thing lay in an arc alongside her. When he reached Ramona, he saw that it was a fat, slimy eel at least four feet in length, glistening and moist, and what was more, the thing (which was clearly dead, its internal organs splayed on the sand through a gash in one side of it) had two heads—two fucking heads! It split into two separate pearl-eyed, translucent-toothed heads, and both were askew, dirtied from hours of baking in sun and seabreeze, and long past beginning to smell.

"Ramona!"

The girl jolted toward her father, caught completely off-guard.

"What the hell are you doing down here by yourself? Where's your mother?"

The child had paused in the midst of burying Bloomy, who was covered up to her head in sand. She said nothing.

"My God, that thing stinks." Arthur waved a hand before his nose. "Why are you next to it? Come on. Get your doll."

Before Ramona could explain or argue, familiar music drifted above the gentle, constant back and forth of waves. She and her father looked at one another and then down the empty beach to see a small figure waddling toward them. In its colorful outfit and ugly mask, it was known to both, although neither of them spoke as the clown advanced with his music box, the hand of which he cranked consistently. Used to the fellow's treats and in spite of all that had happened and was still happening, Ramona clapped her hands excitedly. "Yes, please!" she cried.

Momentarily dazed, Arthur watched the grisly, dwarfish clown with its dripping eyes beyond its white face as it handed his daughter a waffle cone topped with a scoop of scarlet ice cream. He realized suddenly how entirely alone the three of them were, how quiet and too-calm the world seemed, and his nose prickled with the scent of rotting two-headed eel. None of this was normal. It was all wrong.

In one swift motion, Arthur took hold of the clown's tufted wig and yanked it to the right, tearing the mask from its head.

Ramona cried out and both of them stepped back as a gelatinous rush of pinkish slop splooshed out of the rubber onto the sand, taking down and consuming the clown's body and music box with it. Arthur swallowed but found his throat too dry and ended up gagging, just barely stopped himself from vomiting. He was sure there were spaghetti-ish tentacles mixed in with that pile of jelly. Snapping toward his daughter, seeing her wide-eyed but absently licking away at her ice cream, he slapped the treat from her hand.

"Get your doll," was all he managed to croak.

Holding back tears as she mourned the confection now mingling with sand and seawater, the girl did as she was told, and then her father took her hand and pulled her toward the house. When they passed the lonely-looking kuntskammer, neither noticed the harlequin peek through its folds, a melancholy expression almost perceptible on its own unchanging mask.

Within a few minutes, father and daughter were driving into town. Ramona didn't seem to know where her mother had gone, and neither Lilia nor the boys had answered their phones. By now, Arthur was convinced that if he were going mad, it had more to do with his location and less to do with his actual mind. He intended to find his family members and head back to Chicago as soon as possible. He wasn't sure where exactly to start beyond the police station, thought he'd just check every establishment in town until he found his wife and sons, but on a whim, as he passed Martin Hardware, he pulled the car to a screeching halt before it.

Ramona clutched Bloomy tight to her chest, wrinkling her nose as sand sprinkled from the doll's creases.

"Why've we stopped here?"

"Come on," Arthur ordered, stepping out and slamming his side shut.

"She doesn't like this!" Ramona cried as her father yanked out the passenger door and dragged his daughter onto the pavement. "She's angry at you!"

Arthur hadn't any idea what the girl was rambling about and was too focused to inquire further. He pulled Ramona through the bell-tinkling door into Martin's, expecting to see Max in his overalls, Max with his discomfitingly familiar dangling earring, Max who always showed up at odd times and imposed himself upon Arthur as if they were friends. But the man himself was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the interior of the actual hardware store was nowhere to be seen, not in the way Arthur recalled it, anyway. In place of the register was a massive signboard, sloppily chalked with the words Pickled Punks and Unborn Oddities! One Sense for a Walkthrough—All Five for a Photo!

"She really really doesn't like this," Ramona squeaked, her voice taking on an urgency her father chose not to hear.

Arthur couldn't get over what he saw. The shelves of tools and paraphernalia typical of a small-town hardware store had been turned into some sort of weird spectacle, rearranged into a maze of alleys and corners draped in webby gray gauze beneath the persistently flickering fluorescent lights.

"Max!" Arthur barked across the store. Had the man spent all night putting this haunted house together? What was wrong with this whole town? "Where the hell are you, Max? I want to cut my lease short. I want to see about my deposit. Your brother back in town or can I work this out with you?"

"That you, Art?" Max's muffled voice radiated from somewhere far beyond the shelves, near the bathroom. "Come on back so I can talk properly with you!"

Dancing a bit to the left, then to the right, Arthur attempted to find some easy route through the labyrinth of aisles before coming to terms with what he already knew: the only way back was through. Was it worth it to him? He waffled. That deposit was a decent chunk of money, but he could work it out from Chicago, couldn't he, with Greg, the brother, the one he'd arranged all this with in the first place but never met? Realistically speaking, he'd probably never get that money back. Heat infused him as he pushed away thoughts of what he'd just seen in his shower, what he'd seen on the beach with his daughter. Dammit, it was the principle! There was something weird as hell about this place, something impossible. Either he was going insane, or the town itself was insane, and he was desperate to know which was which.

"Daddy, please. She doesn't like it here—"

"Come on." Arthur grabbed Ramona's wrist and tugged her into the shelves.

The moment they'd crossed from the brighter, dingy-tiled storefront into those metal halls of marinating mysteries, they were cast into a twilit zone, gossamer-threaded alleys of cobwebs and tiny bright bits of dust crisscrossing the dark shelves and settling on the myriad glass containers within. Jars upon jars lined the metal racks once home to paintbrushes and batteries, hammers and light switches and outlet covers and adhesives and lint rollers. The glass vessels appeared to be filled with stagnant yellowish-green and brown fluids, though what those jars held beyond their pickling materials was obscured by the dim lighting. Pickled—yes, Arthur recalled. That sign in the front had mentioned pickled something-or-others. These were . . . what? Vegetables? Potatoes? He'd become distracted from his purpose, taken several steps down an aisle only to pause and draw aside, peer closely into those jars of strange lumpish things floating in their uriney mixtures.

"I want to go," Ramona's voice was a mere whisper at her father's side, her presence a fervent tug at his t-shirt.

Arthur was so close to a container as large as his head that his nose was almost touching it. His eyes narrowed as he attempted to see past his flickering reflection into the glass. The thing in there, it almost had a shape like . . . a little animal of some sort. Were those—yes, perhaps that was a leg, with—a foot, and toes? "What are these?"

A hole blinked open behind the glass where an eye should've been, a gaping hole in the mound of misshapen, doughy flesh, and beneath it a tiny set of pink worms peeled apart a second, much smaller hole . . .

Tripping over his own feet, Arthur stumbled backward. Other things in other jars were shifting as well, though all of their movements were silent as an underwater graveyard. Here and there and everywhere the man and his daughter looked, malformed almost-human things were placing miniature crooked fingers against their glass prisons, or they were twisting their two-faced or split craniums toward their viewers, or they were attempting to pry apart the curtains of their drifting bowels to get a peek, and many were far, far too disfigured to even resemble anything human at all and so their movements were in themselves horribly indecipherable. The absence of sound inflated a tense bubble around everything, capturing the writhing, muted, screaming monstrosities and Arthur and Ramona until suddenly the overhead lights in all their erraticism glowed brighter and brighter, illuminating the aisles and jars of mangled fetuses in a blinding white light.

At the last moment, Ramona dropped to the ground and covered her head with her doll, but she had no time to warn her father, who was showered with bits of glass when the fluorescents reached peak intensity and burst in a frazzling electrical display.

When the sparks and tinkling shards had mostly settled and the girl became aware that her father was calling for her rather desperately, she at last stood, quivering, and brushed herself and Bloomy off as best she could. Emergency lights had come on at the front and back entrances of the store, putting out enough gray light by which to see, and thankfully, the contents of the jars had receded back into obscurity.

"I'm here, Daddy. Right in front of you."

"Oh, thank God. Are you all right? Where, honey?" Arthur had his hands before him, was groping for his daughter as if he were having trouble locating her though she stood mere feet before him.

"Right here, Dad! Can't you see me?"

The man's hands gripped his daughter's shoulders. "There you are! Oh, baby. It's so damned dark! What the hell happened to the lights? Must've been a power surge of some kind. We'll have to find our way, but just hold onto me, all right? If we stick together—"

"Daddy, can you see me?"

"I've got you now, Ramona, I—"

"Where's my doll?"

"What?"

"Bloomy. I can't find her. Where is she?"

Arthur's eyes were open, but he stared right past his daughter, who held the yarn-haired stuffie in her arms. "Honey, you'll just have to leave her. We'll find Bloomy on the way out, all right? We've got to get to the back of the store." He straightened up. "Max! You there?"

One sense for a walkthrough, Ramona recalled. Her father was blind. Blind! She began to back up, slowly, toward the entrance of the aisle. "I'm going to wait in the car. I don't like this. It scares me."

"Come on, Art! Back here! I've got your deposit!"

Arthur perked up like a cat sensing movement in the grass. "Fuck it all," he grumbled, having completely given into the absurdity at this point, and extending his arms, he headed in the direction of the bathroom, thinking he'd be making his way through a maze in a dark store and bound to be dismayed when he discovered that the dark was actually in his head.

Left to herself, Ramona glanced at her doll's painted features. She listened intently for a moment, her brow crinkling in the space above her nose, and then she shook her head of dark hair. "I don't want to," she asserted. "No, I really don't."

Bloomy stared up at her.

Ramona's upper teeth sucked in her lower lip. Her little nostrils flared. "Well, all right. Which one? Any of them?" She approached the shelves of jars and, with a pale, slender, visibly shaking hand, reached out and touched one of them.

At once, the child was cast into warmth and darkness, and rather than the sensation of fear she was sure she'd experience, it was instead intense love that enwrapped her. Warmth, black, love, and comfort. But there was more, as well, something colder, a thread, a string of some uglier thing . . . shame. Yes, shame. Whatever embraced her in what should have been a sanctuary was tarnished by shame and discomfort. Whatever it was, whatever it meant . . .

Ramona dropped her hand from the glass, opened her eyes. She understood nothing of what she'd felt. Swallowing a sob rising within her, she abandoned her father to his fate and hurried from Martin's Hardware, back out into the gray day and empty streets of Blackswallow Beach, where she began to cry.