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In the pantry, standing with a can of pears ready in each hand, Amity heard maybe three or four men enter the kitchen and express their reaction to the scene with an unnecessary number of casually spoken obscenities. Even though she now occasionally used the word shit, and though Duke Pellafino, who was definitely a good guy, now and then used even worse language, it was an article of faith to her that any bad guy's degree of evil could be determined by how foul his mouth was. If that was true, then these bozos were demonic.

She assumed that somehow the gas had dispersed, because none of the intruders sounded like he was wearing a mask. One of them told the others to search the rest of the house, and Amity felt pretty sure that the voice belonged to Falkirk. She tensed and raised the cans of pears, but the searchers trooped out of the kitchen without taking a look in the pantry, their footsteps receding into farther rooms.

Falkirk, if it was Falkirk, stayed behind. Amity listened to him moving around the kitchen, making small noises that she could not interpret. He muttered to himself, but too low for her to make sense of what he said. He sounded like a grumbling troll.

The moment that thought occurred to her, she wished it hadn't. She was reminded of something she read years ago, when she'd been an impressionable child, a story about a troll who stole children while they slept and baked them into pies. It was a stupid story, really and truly, but she'd had nightmares in which she believed she was lying drowsily in bed as Daddy tucked a nice warm blanket around her, only to suddenly realize that the blanket was in fact the top crust of a pie and that she was not in a bed but in a pan, and that Daddy wasn't Daddy.

Maybe it was nervous tension or the faint lingering scent of the gas, or one of the other many smells in the pantry to which she might be allergic, or maybe it was evidence that the devil was real and busily at work in the world, but for whatever reason, she was suddenly overcome by an urge to sneeze. She put down one of the cans and pinched her nose hard with her right hand. The urge didn't go away. The tingling in her nasal passages grew and grew. She put down the second can and covered her mouth because, when you thought about it, the ahchoo part came from your mouth rather than your nose. Her effort to repress the sneeze brought tears to her eyes. Gradually the urge subsided. When she could no longer hold her breath, she removed her hand from her lips and breathed quietly through her mouth. Only when she was as sure as sure could be that the tingling was gone and wouldn't come back, really and truly wouldn't, Amity stopped pinching her nose.

The threat of being undone by a sneeze and winding up in the clutches of Falkirk, the troll, so scared her that she was shaking all over. Through everything that this crazy story had thrown at her, she'd remained pretty darn confident and optimistic. Now she understood that confidence and bravery and fortitude weren't always enough, that you needed a little luck as well, or you could be undone by a sneeze, a cough, a fart. Without the pears, she felt more vulnerable than ever. But when she picked up one of those pathetic weapons, her hand was shaking so badly that the can slipped out of her grasp and fell to the pantry floor.