My husband, once a man of mild ambition and milder vice, knelt at a country crossroads one starless night and bartered his birthright for a crown of American success-how quaint, how utterly grotesque. He returned to me, eyes too bright, hands too busy, as if Time had begun to whisper directly into his ear. This is the story of how I, the attentive and unremarked-upon wife, traced the strange scent of sulfur in our linens, the way clocks began to misbehave around him, and the dreams-oh, the dreams!-that stitched Papa Legba into the seams of our suburban walls. I tried, reader, to pry open the lock before the gate swallowed him whole. This is not so much a ghost story as it is a love letter written backward in the dark.