He heaves a garden gnome as hard as he can at the front window of the house next door. It flies
through with a satisfyingly loud smash. He clears away the remaining shards with the torch and climbs
inside. He remembers nothing about the people who lived here when he was a child, except maybe
they had a pair of older daughters. Or maybe just one.
Either way, there might have been people here who died.
Their front room is as dusty and untended as the one in his own house. The layout is more or less
the same, and he walks quickly back through their dining room and kitchen, finding nothing out of the
ordinary, just more dusty furniture.
He runs up the stairs. There's only one landing in this house – the owners not bothering to make the
attic conversion – and Seth is in the first of the bedrooms before he can even stop to think.
It's a girl's room, probably a teenager. There are posters for singers Seth's distantly heard of, a
bureau with some tidied-away makeup on it, a bed with a lavender bedspread, and an obviously
much-loved and cried-upon Saint Bernard plush toy.
No coffin, though.
The story is the same in the master bedroom, a stuffier, overcramped version of his parents'. A
bed, a chest of drawers, a closet full of clothes. Nothing that shouldn't be there.
He uses the torch to push open the access hatch to the attic. He has to leap a few times to catch the
lower rung of the ladder, but it finally clatters down. He climbs up, shining the torch into the open
space.
He falls back rapidly from a congregation of surprised pigeons, who coo in alarm and flap wildly
out through a hole that's come open in the back roof. When it all calms down – and Seth wipes the
pigeon mess from his hands, suddenly less happy to discover there are birds here – the torch and the
light from the hole reveal only packed up boxes and broken appliances and more startled pigeons.
No coffins with anyone inside.
"All right," he says.
He tries the house across the street, for no particular reason taking the same garden gnome with him to
smash through the front window.
"Jesus," Seth says as he climbs inside.
It's phenomenally messy. Newspapers piled in every corner, every clear space heaving with food
wrappers, coffee cups, books, figurines, and dust, dust, dust. He picks his way through. Each room is
the same. The kitchen looks like something from a hundred years ago, and even the staircase has
things piled on each step.
But the rooms upstairs, including the attic, only have mess in them. No coffins.
The house next door to that one was clearly owned by an Indian family, with brightly colored
cloths draped over the furniture and photographs of a bride and groom wearing traditional Hindu
outfits.
But nothing else, no matter how many rooms he checks.
He begins to feel a harsh desperation as he heaves the same gnome through the house next door to
that one. And the house next door to that.
Each one dusty. Each one empty.
He is growing more and more tired now, the exhaustion getting harder to fight. In what could be the
tenth or twelfth house – he's lost count – he can't even throw the gnome hard enough to break the
window anymore. It bounces to the ground, its eyes leering up at him.
Seth leans heavily against a white wooden fence. He is filthy again, covered in the dust of a dozen
houses. A dozen empty houses. Not a single one even making space for a bafflingly shiny coffin in any
of their rooms.
He wants to cry, mostly out of frustration, but he checks himself.
What has he found out, after all? What new thing has he learned?
Nothing that he didn't think before.
He's alone.
However he ended up here, wherever that coffin came from and however he ended up inside it,
there aren't any for his father or his mother or his brother. There aren't any in the houses up and down
the street. There are no signs of anyone in the sky or on the train tracks or on any of the roads.
He really is alone in whatever hell this is.
Completely and utterly alone.
It isn't, he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.