He had bought the land in a bad market with money he did not entirely have and had built the whole thing in fourteen months to prove a point to men who were now dead.

His children were inside it.

“Then let’s go,” he said, “and let’s not make any noise.”

Part Two: The Years Before

To understand what Chadworth Prescott saw on those screens, you have to understand what had happened to that house four years earlier, and what had walked into it afterward.

Marguerite Prescott died on a Thursday in October, in a hospital forty minutes from the estate, of a cardiac event that three specialists later agreed nobody could have predicted and nobody could have prevented.

She was forty-four.