Slight backtrack!
Now she was looking a little mad. “Maybe I don’t, Mayor. Do you usually let buildings go to rot?”
That got a snort of laughter out of me, let me tell you. “Rot? I wish! Every preacher in town’s asked for that very thing. The damned Place won’t do us the favor of falling apart.”
And then I made a mistake: I tried to tell her what was going on, kind of. I leaned forward and said, “Look. They probably told you, back in training, that it can get weird out here in the middle of the country. People in those Midwest towns will be a little funny in the head sometimes, right? That’s what going on here. There’s a spooky haunted house, we’re all scared to death of the Place, everybody stays away.”
I sat back. “But nobody lives at that address, so why should the Census care? Check it off the list, ma’am. You can call your supervisors first, if you like — but they’ll tell you the same thing. Check the haunted house off the list, go on to the next residence. Soonest begun, soonest done and you can get out of here. You don’t have to care about what’s going on in the weird places. It’s not your job to care.”