The Duesenberg had cost more than the house behind it--more, certainly, than the house would be worth to anyone but him. The car sat gleaming and almost obscene in the weed-choked driveway, its 1920s-style chrome catching what scant light survived the shading elms. Miles stood before the rectory that his grandfather had built in 1923 and abandoned in 1941.

The door opened easily to his hand, opening almost before he had even touched it. Inside, dust lay so thick that it seemed to be a second architecture, layers upon layers, but somewhere within that dusty ecology, he found a lamp. Its reservoir was still faintly golden with fuel that should have been long-evaporated. He lit it, not imagining that the fire would catch, but soon the mellow glow took the room apart and put it back together all wrong. The stains on the wallpaper resolved into hollow-eyed faces; long-lain spiderwebs became the pearled strands of chandeliers.

He carried the lamp toward the risers, and he saw a second glow, one that flickered like candlelight upstairs. Sliding footsteps descended the stairs toward him, and he understood at last how long the building with the cracked bricks and the dripping roof had been waiting for him.

The front door snicked softly shut, and the old clergy house closed its silence around him.