First: no one will ever see the images that Tyler’s GoPro is shooting at that moment. That’s unfortunate, because if anyone were to study them they’d be witness to something very odd, perhaps even unsettling—to put it mildly. The images are crystal clear, and images don’t lie. Even though it’s a small camera, the GoPro captures reality at an astonishing sixty frames per second, producing spectacular clips taken from Tyler’s mountain bike racing down Mount Misery, or when he goes snorkeling with his friends in Popolopen Lake, even when the water’s cloudy.

The images show Jocelyn and Steve staring with bewilderment past their youngest son, still on the floor, and into the living room. In the middle of the image is a spot of congealed noodles and egg yolk. The camera jerks the other way and Matt is no longer lying on the floor; he rights himself with a spastic twist of his body and shrinks back, bumping into the table. Somehow he has managed to keep the towel around his waist. For a moment it feels as though we’re standing on the undulating deck of a ship, for everything we see is slanted, as if the whole dining room has come apart at the seams. Then the picture straightens up, and although the splotch of noodle hides most of our view, we see a gaunt woman making her way through the living room toward the open French doors to the kitchen. Until then, she has stood motionless in Jocelyn’s Limbo, but suddenly she’s right there, as if she has taken pity on the fallen Matt. The dishcloth has slid off her face, and in a fraction of a second—maybe it’s only a couple of frames— we see that her eyes are sewn shut, and so is her mouth. It all happens so fast that it’s over before we know it, but it’s the kind of image that burns itself into your brain, not just long enough to pull us out of our comfort zone but to completely disrupt it.

Then Steve rushes forward and slides the French doors to the living room shut. Behind the half-translucent stained glass we see the gaunt woman come to a halt. We even hear the slight vibration of the glass as she bumps up against the pane.

Steve’s good humor has vanished. “Turn that thing off,” he says. “Now.” He’s deadly serious, and although his face is hidden from view (all we can see is his T-shirt and jeans, and the finger of his free hand stabbing at the lens), we can all imagine what it must look like. Then everything goes black.

 * * *

“She came right for me!” Matt shouted. “She’s never done that before!” He was still standing next to the fallen chair, holding the towel around his waist to keep it from sliding down.

Tyler started laughing—mostly from relief, Steve thought. “Maybe she’s got the hots for you.”

“Ew, gross, are you kidding me? She’s ancient!”

Jocelyn burst out laughing, too. She took a mouthful of noodles but didn’t notice how much hot sauce she had put on her spoon. Tears sprang from her eyes. “Sorry, darling. We just wanted to shake you up a little, but I think you shook her up. It really was strange how she came walking up to you. She never does that.”

“How long was she standing there?” Matt asked indignantly.

“The whole time.” Tyler grinned.

Matt’s jaw dropped. “Now she’s seen me naked!”

Tyler looked at him with a mixture of absolute amazement and the kind of disgust that borders on a sympathetic sort of love, reserved only for big brothers toward their younger, dim-witted siblings. “She can’t see, you idiot,” he said. He wiped off the lens of his GoPro and looked at the blind woman behind the stained glass.

“Sit down, Matt,” Steve said, his face stiffening. “Dinner’s getting cold.” Sulkily, Matt did what he was told. “And I want you to erase those images now, Tyler.”

“Aw, come on! I can just cut her out.…”

“Now, and I want to see you do it. You know the rules.”

“What is this, Pyongyang?”

“Don’t make me say it again.”

“But there was some kick-ass material in there,” Tyler muttered without much hope. He knew when his father meant it. And he did indeed know the rules. Reluctantly, he held up the display at an angle toward Steve, selected the video file, and clicked ERASE, then OK.

“Good boy.”

“Tyler, report her in the app, would you?” Jocelyn asked. “I wanted to do it earlier, but you know I’m hopeless at these things.”

Cautiously, Steve walked around to the living room via the hallway. The woman hadn’t budged. There she stood, right in front of the French doors with her face pressed against the glass, like something that had been put there as a macabre joke, to replace a floor lamp or a houseplant. Her lank hair hung motionless and dirty under her headscarf. If she knew there was someone else in the room, she didn’t let on. Steve came closer but deliberately avoided looking at her, sensing her shape from the corner of his eye. It felt better not to look at her up close like this. He could smell her now, though: the stench of another era, of mud and cattle in the streets, of disease. She swayed gently, so that the wrought-iron chain shackling her arms tightly to her shrunken body tapped against the varnished doorpost with a dull clank.

“She was last seen at five twenty-four p.m. by the cameras behind the Market and Deli,” he heard Tyler’s muffled voice say from the other room. Steve could also hear that the woman was whispering. He knew that not listening to her whispering was a matter of life and death, so he concentrated on the voice of his son, and on Johnny Cash. “There are four reports from people who saw her, but nothing after that. Something about a barrel organ. Dad… are you okay?”

His heart pounding, Steve knelt down next to the woman with the stitched-up eyes and picked up the dishcloth. Then he stood up. As his elbow brushed against the woman’s chain, she turned her maimed face toward him. Steve dropped the dishcloth over her head and scrambled away from her and back to the dining room, his forehead drenched in sweat, as Fletcher’s fierce, alarmed barking came from the backyard.

“Dishcloth,” he said to Jocelyn. “Good idea.”

The family continued eating, and all during dinner the woman with the stitched-up eyes stood motionless behind the stained glass.

She only moved once: When Matt’s high-pitched laugh sounded through the dining room, she tilted her head.

As if she were listening.

After dinner, Tyler loaded the dishwasher and Steve cleaned the table. “Show me what you sent them.”

Tyler held up his iPhone with the HEXApp logbook on display. The last entry read as follows:

Wed. 09.19.12, 7:03 P.M., 16M ago
Tyler Grant @gps 41.22890 N, 73.61831 W
#K @ living room, 188 Deep Hollow Road
omg i think she digs my little bro

 * * *

Later that evening, Steve and Jocelyn were both sprawled in the living room—not in their regular spot on the couch but on the divan on the other side of the room—watching The Late Show on CBS. Matt was in bed; Tyler was upstairs working on his laptop. The pale TV light flickered on the metal chains around the blind woman’s body—or at least on the links that weren’t rusted. Beneath the dishcloth, the dead flesh at the open corner of her mouth twitched, barely visible. It pulled on the jagged black stitches that sewed her mouth tight, except for that one loose stitch in the corner that stuck out like a bent piece of wire. Jocelyn yawned and stretched herself against Steve. He guessed it wouldn’t be long before she dropped off to sleep.

When they went upstairs half an hour later, the blind woman was still there, something of the night that the night had now recovered.