Night Film

~ ~ ~

“Where you guys from?” the woman asked me.

She was plump, with a round friendly face. She’d been behind the desk the night before, when her husband had checked us in.

“Saratoga,” I answered.

“Not too bad a drive. You guys’re up here to go paddlin’?”

She must have noticed my car had a canoe strapped to the roof.

“It’s gonna be cold the next few days, so be sure to dress in layers.”

“About that extra key?” I asked.

“Right. You’re in room …?”

“Nineteen.”

She unhooked the keychain, handing it to me. “Need any maps or directions?”

“No, thanks,” I said, grabbing the shopping bag at my feet.

“Our restaurant serves supper till eleven. Everything’s home-cooked. We got a mean apple pie. You should check it out.”

“Thanks for the recommendation.”

I exited through the glass door. As it dinged closed behind me, I turned back and saw the woman’s friendliness had been erased from her face and she was inspecting me carefully over her bifocals.

I waved and took off down the covered walkway.

Last night, after sizing up every roadside motel along NY Route 3 between the Adirondack towns of Fine and Moody, I chose Evening View Motel & Restaurant because of its anonymity. It was in Childwold, forty miles north of Crowthorpe Falls, and sat sulking right off the side of the road: twenty dreary rooms, each rationed one cruddy window and a brown door. The motel had a popular eatery, the parking lot crowded with cars, license plates from Michigan to Vermont. Across the street was a busy RV campground — Green Meadows, THE NORTH WOODS’ FRIENDLIEST COMPOUND, read the wood sign — so I’d guessed Evening View saw enough traffic for the proprietors not to pay close attention to any particular guest.

I was way off on that one. The woman had stared at me as if she knew within a matter of days she’d be picking me out of a police lineup.

I made my way along the walkway, scanning the parking lot. It had cleared out after lunch, leaving only a handful of cars, nothing suspicious, no one watching. A bald man exited a white sedan, stretching and yawning as he made his way toward the motel office.

I stopped outside #19—second to last on the end — and knocked once.

Hopper opened it. I slipped inside.

“How’d you make out?” He locked the door behind me.

“Fine. I had to go all the way to Tupper Lake.” I handed him the shopping bag, and he pulled out the new camera battery — this morning he’d discovered his wouldn’t charge, so I’d gone out for a replacement. “She only has one extra room key. Who wants it?”

“Give it to Nora.”

I walked over to the far double bed, where Nora was sitting, eating a protein bar, and handed it to her. She smiled wanly, her eyes lingering a moment too long on my face.

I knew what she was thinking, what we were all thinking: What if this plan we’d methodically prepared over the past twelve days was a mistake?

We had weighed the possibilities. There was no other option. If I called Sharon Falcone and told her that I suspected occult crimes had been taking place at The Peak, she’d tell me what I already knew: Police would need hard evidence for a warrant, evidence I did not have.

The one thing I did have was knowledge of a covert way to access the property. The Spider had claimed he’d cut open the fence for the townspeople along a narrow stream. Marlowe had mentioned it originated from Lows Lake.

Inspecting detailed maps of the area, I could find no such river. It was only after finding an Adirondack geological map that dated back to 1953 that we uncovered where it just might be — a frail, nameless rivulet that twisted off the lake’s north shore, meandering through dense forest, right onto The Peak grounds.

If we managed to locate this stream and covertly enter that way after nightfall, we could see what was at The Peak, once and for all — if there was evidence not just of occult practices but what the Spider had suggested, actual child killings. We’d gather what proof we could, exit the way we’d come before dawn, then get it into the hands of authorities.

The plan was a blind risk — not to mention illegal, immoral, crossing the line of even the slackest ethics of investigative reporting, totally outrageous. It could very well get one of us arrested — or injured. For me, it could mean a new low of professional disgrace. I could only imagine the headlines. Back for More: Fallen Journalist Caught Breaking Into Cordova Estate. Judge Orders Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation.

I’d explained all of this to Nora and Hopper, emphasizing that it was my decision, one that was personal, not professional, and they’d be better off remaining behind. But Hopper was as resolute as I was. He said grimly, “I’m in,” as if it were something he’d resolved long ago. Nora was also adamant.

“I’m coming,” she announced.

And so it was decided.

Over the course of the past week, however, as we’d memorized the plan, assembled supplies, even as we’d driven the seven hours to the Adirondacks, a bleak landscape of gray sky, roads smothered with trees — the reality of what we were doing seemed to swell exponentially in magnitude. It was a mountain we’d started climbing, which grew beneath us into a rambling skyscraping ridge, pushing us back, the summit snowcapped, lost in clouds.

Every word Nora chirped in her singsong voice—Mind if we stop at that gas station? I’ll have the French toast with maple syrup—sounded doomed, made me regret that I’d even allowed her to come along.

I was concerned that as much as we’d uncovered about Ashley and her father, I still didn’t have the complete picture. Cleo had warned me of this: The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing … it never stops.

It was possible The Peak — and Cordova himself — was like that locked hexagonal Chinese box of Beckman’s I’d tried to pry open years ago: something that should remain forever sealed, its contents hidden from the light of day for good reason.

Though Cleo had assured me the spell inside the leviathan was not malevolent, there was little solace in this. Even if Ashley had meant to protect Sam, even if Hopper had loved Ashley, she was still a shifting cipher, her movements that night at the Central Park Reservoir impossible to fathom. The mystery of how Sam came to have the figurine in her coat pocket, the idea that Ashley had once approached her, shook me awake in the middle of the night, filled me with anxiety made all the more acute by the knowledge that it was my fault.

I’d put her in harm’s way. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had shown me my true nature, a raw view as infinite and irrefutable as two facing mirrors, the selfish blind man I was and always would be. My countless phone calls to Cynthia to check on Sam went ignored.

And then there was the question of the Spider and The Broken Door.

I went back to the antiques shop after leaving Enchantments, the same day of Samantha’s fall. I found the store locked, windows black. Nora and Hopper returned with me the next day, and two days after that, every day after. We monitored the building from the shadows of the stoop across the street, waiting for a light in an upstairs window, a curtain gently pulled aside.

Yet the building remained inscrutable and silent.

The Spider had obviously come back, packed a suitcase, and vanished into the night — perhaps forever. It wasn’t hard to imagine; his past had caught up to him, after all, first with Ashley, then the three of us. Yet The Broken Door’s red crumbling façade, the mystery of his absence, and even more chilling, what exactly had happened to Sam in his shop — all left questions that ate away at me, exhausting me, like a fever that wouldn’t break.

I wasn’t even confident I was thinking lucidly. Sam was a line that had been crossed. Staying so nimbly out of sight, letting us view only the twisted shadows he made on the wall, Cordova still existed primarily in my mind — the most powerful place for any enemy to hide. His very films told you that. The suspected but unseen threat, fueled by the imagination, was punishing and all-powerful. It’d devastate before you even left your room, your bed, before you even opened your eyes and took a breath.

That leviathan figurine with its quivering shadow, sliding along the table with a mind of its own — it was proof of a hidden world beyond the one I’d taken for granted all my life, the reality that science and logic assured me was ever constant and changing only within a fixed set of laws. That misbehaving shadow was the edge of the unknown. The world’s certainty and truth had revealed a fault line. It was a minute tear in the wallpaper, which could be ignored, chalked up to my mind playing tricks on me. Or it could be torn back, farther and farther, into an ever larger and grotesque piece, eventually tearing off completely — exposing what type of wall? And if that wall were knocked down, what lay beyond it?

The only way to handle these uncertainties was to shove them aside and concentrate on a concrete plan.

Hopper had finished lacing up his boots. He stood up, zipping his jacket. Nora was in front of the mirror, applying, for mysterious reasons, red lipstick fit for a Parisian jazz club. Smacking her lips, she crouched down, pulling up her army fatigues and thermo-underwear to rearrange the hunting knife strapped to her ankle, which I’d bought her yesterday at a Walmart in Saratoga Springs.

The least I could do was make sure she could defend herself.

“Okay, troops. Let’s go over this one last time.”

I unzipped the backpack, removed the map.

Our carefully hatched plan—it was the rope for us to hold on to.

And yet I couldn’t help but wonder if, fumbling along that cord into the dark, we’d find out that the end was tied to nothing.

We drove to Lows Lake the long way, keeping away from the center of Crowthorpe Falls.

It was a tangle of meandering side roads, every one deserted.

We were in a rental — a black Jeep — but there was no way of knowing who in Crowthorpe was involved in what took place on The Peak property, and I didn’t want to risk drawing any attention. We’d monitored Perry Street, not to mention every car behind us during the drive upstate, and we didn’t appear to be followed.

I’d forgotten in the five years since I’d been here how impenetrable the wilderness was, how suffocating. Evergreens, maples, and beech trees swarmed the hills, massive branches reaching out over the road as if to smother us, soaking up what little daylight there was. Log cabins, groceries, out-of-business video stores stood forlornly in one crumbling lot after the next.

“It’s the next left,” said Nora.

Within a few yards I saw the sign: WELLER’S LANDING.

I slowed, made the left into the parking lot. There were two other cars, a blue pickup and a station wagon — probably other paddlers already out on the lake. I inched into a distant spot in the farthest corner, half hidden by a large hemlock, and cut the engine.

“We’re clear,” said Hopper, looking out the back windshield.

“Any last-minute concerns?” I asked. I looked at Hopper in the rearview mirror. His pointed stare back at me told me everything. Nothing would stop him now.

“Bernstein?” I asked.

Nora was yanking a black knit cap onto her head, tucking in the loose strands of hair.

“Oh, shoot. Can’t believe I almost forgot.” She reached into her vest pocket, pulling out two small plastic packets. She opened one, removing a thin gold necklace. Beckoning me to lean forward, she unclasped the chain and fastened it around my neck.

“This is Saint Benedict.”

It was a crude piece of jewelry, the pendant emblazoned with a gaunt, robed Jesus type.

“He’s the napalm of Catholic saints,” Nora said, reaching back to put Hopper’s around his neck. “You drop Benedict into a situation, you don’t need anything else. He’ll protect us from what’s up there.”

“Thanks,” said Hopper.

“You have one, too?” I asked her.

“Of course.”

“Then let’s move.”

We unloaded the car rapidly — to minimize risk of a witness noticing us. But also I knew that to hesitate now in any way would only let serious doubt flood in, like water in a rowboat full of holes.

Hopper carried the paddles to the load-in area. I unhitched the Souris River canoe from the roof. Nora grabbed the lifejackets, the backpacks. I hid the car key under a rock by the hemlock, in case we became separated and one of us made it back before the others. Hopper and I picked up the canoe, and with a final look back at the Jeep, we took off across the parking lot.

We lowered the canoe into the water, and Hopper stepped in, heading to the bow, shoving his backpack behind his seat. Nora clambered in after him, binoculars swinging from her neck. I grabbed my paddle, threw in my backpack, was just about to climb in, when I noticed my cellphone vibrating in my jacket.

I thought of ignoring it, but then realized it could be Cynthia. I pulled off my glove, unzipped the pocket. It was a blocked number.

“Hello?”

“McGrath.”

I recognized the voice. It was Sharon Falcone.

“Shit, this connection’s crap. Sounds like you’re halfway around the world. Let me call you back—”

“No, no,” I blurted, flooded with an ominous feeling that something was wrong. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Just wanted to get back to you on that tip you gave us.”

“Tip?”

“For child services.”

The landlord and her deaf nephew back at 83 Henry Street.

I’d forgotten that I’d called Sharon about them.

“Sure you gave me the right address? Eighty-three Henry?”

“That’s right.”

“They checked it out. There’s no certificate of occupancy for the building.”

“What?”

“There was no one living there. No tenants in—”

Abruptly, her voice cut out. Loud metallic echoing filled the line.

“Hello?”

“… illegal … a couple times last week …”

“Sharon.”

“… knee-deep in major …”

Her voice cut out into wild static.

“Hello?”

“… thing was okay. McGrath, you still there?”

“Yes. Hello?”

A clanging screeched across the line and it went dead.

I tried calling her back, but it wouldn’t connect. I waited another minute, in the off chance she’d manage to get through again, but the phone had no service. I zipped it back into my jacket pocket, explaining to Hopper and Nora what she’d just told me.

“What do you mean empty?” asked Nora.

“There were no tenants.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“Is it?”

“No,” said Hopper. “Maybe they were illegal aliens. When we showed up, it was too much attention.”

“But Ashley’s neighbor,” interjected Nora. “Iona. She wasn’t illegal. She had an American accent, and she told us she’d lived there for a year. Why would she take off?”

“To avoid arrest for prostitution.”

Nora was unconvinced. “It doesn’t seem right.”

They fell silent, waiting for me to weigh in. I recognized the moment for what it was, the chance not to go ahead, to reconsider everything, and go back.

The sky had faded from white to gray, the surrounding forest hushed and still. I climbed in and grabbed the paddle.

“We’ll look into it when we get back,” I said.

There wasn’t a stream — only a swamp.

We’d spent the last hour crossing Lows Lake, Hopper and I paddling in silent tandem. Battered by shifting currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing straight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we’d edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated—strange, as it’d been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn’t a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry — as if everything alive had fled.

“This can’t be right,” said Nora, turning around.

I hadn’t realized, sitting behind her, how worried she’d become.

“Let me see the map.”

She handed it to me along with the compass.

“We should go back,” she blurted, staring into the reeds.

“What?” asked Hopper irritably, turning.

“We can’t get stuck in this in the dark. We can’t sleep here.”

“Who said anything about sleeping here?”

“We’re supposed to be following a stream. Where’s the stream?”

“We’ll give it a little while longer,” I said.

Within minutes, we were stuck on a submerged log. Hopper, without hesitation, clambered out and, standing thigh-deep in the muck, shoved us loose. Climbing back in, his jeans were coated with mud and that strange neon algae, though he didn’t seem to notice or care. He stared resolutely ahead as if in a trance, beating the grasses with his oar. I couldn’t help but imagine he was thinking about Ashley, because out here, the stark emptiness of the wilderness seemed to naturally summon regrets and fear.

Our progress remained slow. The swamp reeked of decay, a smell that seemed to be coming off the algae, which only grew thicker the deeper into this bog we drifted. We had to shove the paddles straight down to wrestle the canoe even an inch past the sludge and yellow reeds rising around us, forming a suffocating corridor.

I checked my watch. It was already after five. It’d be nightfall in less than an hour. Our plan had been to be on The Peak property by now.

Suddenly Nora gasped, clamping a hand over her mouth and pointing at something to her left.

A faded piece of red string had been knotted to one of the reeds, the end dangling in the water. I recognized it immediately. Marlowe had claimed Cordova discovered such strings when he’d first moved to The Peak. They’d led him to the clearing where the townspeople performed their rituals.

“We’re going the right way,” said Hopper.

We pushed on, the swamp suddenly deepening, the mud thinning. A frail but discernible current appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. The only sounds were the laps of the water, the grasses bending around us, whispering against the sides of the boat.

“I can see the fence,” said Hopper.

Sure enough — far ahead, I could make out the dark silhouette of Cordova’s military fence cutting across the stream, marking the southern edge of his property.

When we were twelve feet away, we extended the paddles to the bank. The fence looked like something surrounding a defunct prison, the chain links rusted, the top looped with razor wire. Where the water passed underneath, the wires had been brutally hacked—exactly as Marlowe had described, the ends gnarled and twisted back, leaving a triangular hole about a foot wide.

“See any cameras?” I asked.

Nora, looking through the binoculars, shook her head.

I unzipped my backpack, removed the fluorescent bulb, and climbed out, heading to the fence. Immediately I spotted three wires running horizontally across the distorted chain links. They hung loosely, and on the closest metal fencepost they’d twisted free of the casings.

I tapped the metal end of the bulb against the wires. It remained dim touching the first two. But on the third, the one closest to the ground, the bulb glowed orange and blew out.

After all these years, it was still a live wire. I stepped closer to the stream, following the cable’s path as it hung slackly between the severed links, dangling across the top, continuing on the other side.

“There’s an electric current in the wire,” I said, stepping back to them. ”It just blew out the bulb.”

“Killer security system,” Hopper said. “No pun intended.”

“It’s not funny,” said Nora, looking at me uncertainly.

“There’s enough room to pass,” I said. “We each lie down. Go through one at a time.”

The other option was to swim through — without the boat, it’d be easy to get by unscathed — but for us all to be soaked from the neck down in temperatures about to fall below twenty degrees would be a major handicap, making a systematic search of the property difficult. Passing under the wire inside the canoe was our best bet, so long as we each stayed lower than the boat’s rim. The canoe was fiberglass, but there was aluminum detailing along the outer edges. I wasn’t an electrician, but it seemed possible it might conduct current if the wire grazed it.

“Hopper,” I said, “you’re first.”

He shoved his backpack into the center of the canoe and, lying down in the hull, crossed his arms.

Pulling away, we took a moment to reposition ourselves, angling the bow toward the mangled opening. It was probably just my eyes adjusting to the fading light, but as we glided forward, I swore the fence’s wires seemed to constrict, squirm like plants sensitive to movement.

When we were two feet away, suddenly we slipped into a strong current and were whipped sideways, crashing against the opening, the wire lowering from the impact.

“It’s about to touch,” whispered Nora.

“Keep your arms off the metal,” I ordered.

She raised her paddle as I shoved mine in, forcing the bow through, the chain links scraping the boat. We eased in another few inches, and I realized the wire was lowering again — as if it were a rigged trap. Before I could react, it struck the rim of the canoe. I waited for a white blast of electricity.

Nothing.

I thrust the paddle into the water, keeping the canoe steady in the undercurrent. I propelled us forward another foot or so. Hopper was on the opposite side, the wire in front of Nora, the chain links rasping.

“You’re clear,” I said.

Hopper sat up. Nora slid the oar to him, and she inched forward, curling up into a fetal position in the hull.

“If I get zapped and it’s my time to go, I just want to say I love you both and these times have been the best in my life.”

“It’s not your time quite yet, Bernstein,” I said.

We jostled forward. There was no sound but the water, the screech of the wires as they curved, protesting against the boat. Suddenly, we hit something submerged and the wire dipped, tapping the sides. I swore I heard a faint sizzle of voltage charging around us, though as soon as I did, the wire raised, we slid through, and it was my turn.

I lay down in the hull, the water rumbling around me.

“Any last words?” Hopper asked.

“Try not to kill me.”

The canoe lurched, that thin wire striking the sides inches from my nose. It slipped over my head and was gone.

“We’re in,” whispered Hopper.

I sat up, checking behind us, surprised to see the fence was already quickly retreating. The current had increased, the water pooling, as if excited by the prospect of delivering us to — what? But that fence wasn’t actually a fence. It was a booby trap. Maybe Marlowe hadn’t mentioned this secret entrance so innocuously, but to plant a seed in our heads, so we’d try to enter exactly this way. Why? To annihilate us on that wire? Or was it to get us securely inside Cordova’s property, trapping us in here?

As we paddled on, the night descended around us like a black tide coming in.

Before, the forest had been blanketed with an unsettling stillness. Now noises echoed from every direction. Branches snapped. Leaves rustled. Trees shuddered — as if all the wild animals that hid during the day were rousing now, crawling out of their holes.

My eyes gave up trying to discern anything beyond Hopper’s silhouette at the bow and Nora’s hunched shoulders in front of me. I recalled, with a twinge of anxiety, the feeling of suffocation Olivia Endicott had described when visiting The Peak. I wondered if I was experiencing it, a vague sense of disorientation, detachment, drowning. I assumed it was just adrenaline and nerves, but then I felt, very clearly, a marked heaviness, as if after inhaling all of this moist air, it was now suffused inside me, slowing my limbs, suppressing my thoughts.

Hopper motioned ahead. Visible at the end of this black tunnel of trees was a shimmering surface.

Graves Pond—where Genevra, Cordova’s first wife, had drowned.

We reached the mouth in less than a minute, pulling over to the bank, listening. Nora pulled the binoculars away, nodding, and we silently eased the canoe out, veering right, keeping tight to the perimeter under the cover of overhanging branches.

Far to our left on the opposite side, a wooden dock became visible.

It looked abandoned, a crude wooden ladder hanging over the side and into the water. Steps led onto a stone path that twisted up a steep hill gradually coming into view.

Suddenly, Hopper and Nora jolted upright.

And then I saw what was coming, what was slowly rising over the crest of that hill like a dark sun.

The Peak.

It sat in moonlight, a hulking mansion of such absolute darkness it made the surrounding night gray. Its grandeur looked straight out of the European countryside, a lost world of horse-drawn carriages and candlelight. Spiked gabled roofs pitched upward, lancing the sky. I could discern an ornate entrance pavilion, a colonnade across the front drive, three stories of windows, every one unlit — all of it fortified with shadow, as if shadows were the very mortar that kept it standing. In fact, the house seemed to challenge the laws of the physical world, the inevitable slide of man’s grandest constructions into decay and ruin, boasting instead that it would be rising over that hill for centuries to come.

A wild overgrown lawn raced breathlessly up to it from Graves Pond. There was no sign of life, no movement. My feeling was the mansion had been abandoned for some time.

We extended the paddles ashore, the canoe beaching in the mud, and the three of us climbed out, pulling on our backpacks. Hopper and I carried the canoe up the bank and into the trees, set it down behind a fallen log, covering it with leaves and branches. Nora shoved a stick into the mud to use as a marker, so later we’d know where to find the boat. Then we took a moment to survey one another. Hopper looked invigorated, his face toughened by the dark. Nora looked disconcertingly blank. I squeezed her shoulder for reassurance, but she only fumbled with her jacket zipper so it was zipped all the way to her chin.

“Remember the emergency plan,” I whispered. “Anything happens, we meet back here.”

With a nod of mutual agreement, we took off. The plan was to check the house first, see if we could get in, and from there find the clearing in the woods where they performed the rituals. We walked due north, keeping to the perimeter of the pond, and then proceeded single-file up a steep knoll through the woods, heading in the general direction of the house. We reached the summit, staying hidden along the tree line, overlooking the eastern wing of The Peak.

Up close, the mansion was palatial, yet I could see how weathered the façade was, the limestone streaked and discolored. I could make out elaborate detailing on pediments and corners, black ironwork and carved stones along the roof. Perched on window ledges and above doorways, what at first glance looked like real birds roosting there were gargoyles in the form of crows. There was a domed glass solarium on the ground floor that led out onto a columned loggia, so soaked in darkness it was as if a black vapor had leaked out of the house and fermented.

A stone pathway led away from the terrace steps, winding through tall grass to an enormous wall of neglected privet at the rear of the house, vanishing somewhere beyond it. I knew from aerial photographs it led into the estate’s sprawling gardens, which had featured prominently in Cordova’s To Breathe with Kings. A check of Google Earth had revealed that hints of the elaborate landscaping were still there — pebbled pathways and sculpture — though most of it was shrouded under wild greenery.

“I’ll see if anyone’s home,” Hopper said.

“What? No. We’re waiting here.”

But before I could stop him, he stepped right out onto the lawn, jogging nonchalantly down the hill. Reaching the steps to the terrace, he ducked and slipped right up them, out of sight.

My shock over what he’d just done quickly turned to outrage. I should have known he’d be reckless, follow his own private agenda. I had every intention of going after him, dragging him back, when I froze.

A dog was barking. It sounded close.

Nora turned to me, horrified. I held up my hand. We’d considered the possibility of dogs and had bought clothing with scent elimination, which supposedly masked our smell from animals.

The dog barked again, angry and insistent.

And then a single faint light appeared in a gabled window along the roof. It was shrouded with a heavy curtain but unmistakable.

Someone was home.

The dog went silent as a sudden gust of wind whipped through the trees. There was no sign of Hopper. Presumably he was hiding somewhere on the terrace, waiting for the chance to make his way back. But then I heard the unmistakable thud of a heavy door heaving open, followed by staccato thumping and the jingling of a dog collar.

I unzipped Nora’s backpack, groping through the clothing, finding the pepper spray. I shoved it into her hands just as a massive hound, barking furiously, came bounding across the mansion’s front entrance.

It looked like something between a Russian wolfhound and a coyote, its mangy coat splotched gray and white, a long curled tail.

The dog froze and howled another warning bark as it stared down the grassy hill toward Graves Pond, ears pricked.

A second dog appeared, this one bigger and all black. It loped around the house exactly in our direction, stopping some twenty yards from the terrace where Hopper was hiding. It growled ominously. Then, nose to the ground, the dog loped up the hill toward us, zigzagging through the grass.

“Get back to the canoe and wait for me there,” I whispered.

Nora hesitated.

“Do it.”

Petrified, she took off, barking exploding around us, as I ran in the other direction out onto the lawn. I headed straight down the incline, racing past the terrace and along the stone path, making a beeline for the privet. When I glanced over my shoulder I saw what I expected: Both dogs were chasing me now, plowing through the tall grass.

I tore along the hedge, finding an opening, and barreled blindly through, careening down a white-pebbled path overrun with weeds.

The dogs sounded close behind me, paws ricocheting across the stones.

I appeared to be running through a garden maze, tall walls of privet growing high around me, birdbaths scarred with lichen, plants clinging to trellises. I could make out crumbling statuary — a headless girl, a man’s naked torso entwined with a snake. Colossal shrubs — probably once topiaries — rose around me, their animal shapes long melted away.

I tripped down some steps and raced into a narrow alcove with a dried-up fountain, a wrought-iron gate.

I stopped, listening.

The dogs sounded as if they’d multiplied, coming from every direction.

I crept over to the wrought-iron gate.

Suddenly a dog leapt up on the opposite side, snarling. I lurched away, expecting, at any moment, its jaws to sink into my arm, but only frustrated yowls exploded behind me. I swung back out, instantly spotted another dog bounding toward me at the opposite end of the corridor.

I bent down, finding a hole in the hedge, and scrambled through, running out into an open yard, a large swimming pool at the center covered with a plastic tarp.

I sprinted to the farthest corner and bent down, yanking off my gloves, groping at the nylon strings.

I could hear the dogs whimpering, searching for the way in. I managed to undo a few knots, pulled back the tarp, and almost gagged when I saw what was inside.

It was putrid black water.

I yanked off my backpack, plunged my boots in first, and then, gritting my teeth, slipped inside, the icy water seeping into my clothes, swallowing me up to my neck. I pulled my backpack in — doing my best to keep it dry, though there was only about a foot of space between the tarp and water. I removed the camera from the front pocket, yanked the corner of the tarp back into place, and, blinking in the sudden darkness, floated away from the opening.

Instantly, I heard that insidious jingling. The dogs had found me, barking, racing around the perimeter, whining, their paws clicking rhythmically across the flagstones.

I fumbled my way along the perimeter as quietly as I could, groping at the broken tiles covered in slime, the coldness starting to eat away at me.

I kept my eyes on the ribbon of light cutting between the tarp and the side of the pool, my left foot striking something underneath me. A drowned deer? I’d reached the next corner, kicking my way around it, a ripple of water splashing a little too loudly. I froze.

I could hear footsteps, heavy-set. Someone was coming, striding along a paved path and entering the yard.

“What is it, boys?” It was a man’s low voice.

The dogs whimpered as they continued to race around the pool, the man coming closer. Then he stopped.

Cordova?

Suddenly — the powerful beam of a flashlight danced across the tarp, sending a spasm of panic through me, the gold circle gliding to the corner where I’d crawled in.

I pressed my back against the tiles, trying to remain motionless.

I heard faster footsteps, the whisk of the tarp being flung back.

The flashlight sliced across the water, illuminating blackened leaves and branches, disembodied shapes — frogs, maybe squirrels — floating deep inside the pool.

The beam hovered a few feet from my backpack, slipping closer. I tucked the camera under the tarp on the ledge, took a deep breath, and carefully sank all the way underwater, pulling my backpack in behind me. I fell a few feet and then opened my eyes, trying to ignore the searing sting, watching the beam of light slip over my head.

I waited, my lungs feeling like they were going to explode, trying to remain calm. We’d been fine, the three of us, just a few goddamn minutes ago. How had it all unraveled so quickly?

The beam hovered over me for a few more seconds, then at last slipped away to inspect another corner. I floated back to the surface, gasping for air.

Suddenly a sharp scream pierced the night. It sounded like a woman.

Nora?

The dogs erupted into vicious barking, their paws thumping, flashlight streaking away. I heard fumbling, then footsteps striding across the stones.

Soon there was only silence around me. They were gone.

I grabbed the camera, then kicked back toward the opening, but when I reached the corner, I saw the tarp had been pulled back into place. Ignoring my alarm — my mind instantly killing me off, evoking my corpse wafting through here with the other debris — I reached out, my fingers groping underneath the plastic.

The strings had been retied.

I set the camera on the ledge, pulled my backpack over, fumbling inside the front pocket, found the pocket knife, yanked it open with my teeth, and, gripping the knife awkwardly in my frozen fingers, began to saw at the ties.

I managed to sever a few. I shoved the backpack out first, then blindly heaved myself onto the pool’s edge, freezing wind instantly pummeling me. I lifted my head and saw with relief — I was alone.

I crawled to my feet, dragging my backpack up over my shoulder. I grabbed the camera and staggered across the yard, heading toward the arched opening in the hedge, rancid water squelching from my boots with every step.

I hoped Nora was safe and Hopper was with her. I’d meet them back at the canoe and we’d come up with a new plan.

The dogs — and the man with the flashlight — appeared to have gone quite far, because the night was still again.

I stepped outside the enclosure, finding myself on another stone path, what had to be the garden’s western boundary. To my right, beyond a stretch of overgrown lawn, loomed a forest of dense pines, vast and black, and to my left, sitting high on the hill, beyond tangled greenery, the mansion.

It remained in darkness.

I took off across the grass and into the cover of the forest, following the tree line southward, back around the hill toward Graves Pond. A dank cold was shuddering through me, but I ignored it, trying to break into a jog. My legs wouldn’t respond. I stumbled over branches and tree trunks, cutting east when I could see a clearing to my left — shimmering water through the trunks. Within minutes, I reached the same mouth of the stream by which we’d entered the pond and lurched across it, thigh-deep in the water and mud, moving as fast as I could up onto the bank.

I reached the western side, traipsing along the shoreline, and saw with relief — and amazement—the small branch Nora had stuck in the mud.

“Nora,” I whispered, walking straight into the woods.

When I found the fallen log, I stopped dead.

The branches and dirt had been thrown aside.

And the canoe was gone.

I looked around the trees seemingly locking me in an infinite jail.

I stepped back to the lake’s edge, staring out at the moonlit water.

It was deserted.

Hopper and Nora must have been caught. Or they took off, leaving me stranded. Or they’d been chased, escaped, planned to make their way back when the coast was clear. Or someone else had found the boat and confiscated it, someone waiting for me, watching.

I listened intently for footsteps but heard nothing.

I couldn’t stay here. And I couldn’t use a flashlight for fear someone in the distance would notice it. I took off around the perimeter of the lake, following the general direction the three of us had originally taken.

A dog barked.

It sounded miles away. But I picked up my pace and headed directly up the hill, feeling the last bit of warmth somewhere in my gut flickering, as if seconds from going out.

I stopped, staring far off to my right. There was some type of structure standing beyond the trees, glowing faintly blue in the dark. I took off toward it.

It was a gigantic warehouse, a flat roof, no evident windows. I rounded the first corner, finding a set of steel doors, a rusted chain looped through the handles, secured with a padlock. I quickly searched the ground, found a suitable rock, carried it back, and smashed the lock a few times until it twisted off. At this point, I didn’t care if the world heard me.

I slung the chain to the ground, pulled the door open, and stumbled inside.

The moonlight flooding in behind me illuminated a crude beamed wall, a concrete floor, the back of a brown couch farther ahead, a blanket folded neatly over the back — all of it retreating into pitch darkness as the metal door closed behind me with a resounding thud.

I slung off my backpack, untied my boots, stripped down to my boxers, and, nearly tripping over a raised step, collapsed on the couch. I fumbled for the blanket, pulling it over me. And I huddled there, shivering uncontrollably, willing my mind to thaw. I realized after a dazed moment that all I really wanted to do was sleep, which made me figure I had mild hypothermia, but I shoved that idea away as soon as it came.

Sleep will kill you. It’s the drug your body gives you before closing up shop.

Minutes passed. I didn’t know how long, as I couldn’t move my arm to check my watch. My thoughts kept slipping out of reach, tiny deflating buoys I was trying to grab ahold of to stay afloat. I imagined myself sitting in my bed at Perry Street, staring up at the ceiling. I wondered if we’d gotten into a car accident on the way to Weller’s Landing and this was what it felt like to be unconscious, detached from the world, bobbing between life and death, the Earth and the unknown.

Maybe I was still in that rancid swimming pool.

Maybe I’d never climbed out.

But after a while, I realized my eyes had adjusted to the dark. I was staring at an open newspaper sitting on a coffee table in front of me.

The Doverville Sentinel.

POLICE PROBE BOY DEATHS.

I blinked. I was sitting in a modest furnished living room. There was a white shag carpet on a wooden floor, and modern chairs, curtained windows, a brick fireplace.

I’d been here before.

I’d been inside this room.

Hanging on the wall opposite were three framed pictures beside a tiny kitchenette. A floor lamp with a cream shade hung over the couch. I reached up and tried the switch.

Instantly, pale light illuminated the room.

A wicker chair stood beside the front door, a man’s herringbone overcoat slung over the back. To my right, atop an end table, there was an Art Deco bronze statue of a woman balancing a crystal ball on her head. Emily, weeping in terror, grabs that statue to use as a weapon before dashing down the hall, hiding in a bedroom closet. This couch I was on, Emily sat right here in the opening scene, reading the newspaper about the latest child murder, as Brad entered, slinging his coat and briefcase on that chair beside the door.

I looked up. There was no ceiling, only scaffolding some forty feet overhead. Lights had been rigged up there, a few pointing down at me.

It was a film set.

I was in Brad and Emily Jackson’s living room from Thumbscrew—“an ominous tale of suspicion, paranoia, marriage, and the inscrutability of the human psyche,” according to Beckman.

Brad, a handsome professor of medieval studies at a small liberal arts college in rural Vermont, is newly married to Emily, a young woman with a lurid imagination. She becomes preoccupied with a string of local unsolved murders of young boys, every one eight years old, and begins to suspect her husband is the killer. Thumbscrew ends without a definitive conclusion as to whether or not Brad is guilty. I felt he was, though the Internet and almost certainly the Blackboards were rife with arguments for both sides. Beckman devoted an entire chapter to the film in his book American Mask: Chapter 11: The Brief Case. He wrote that the truth, which will set both Emily and the audience free, ultimately exists in Brad’s beaten-up leather Samsonite briefcase, which Brad fastidiously locks away in a safe along with his thumbscrews — the medieval torture device — every night when he returns home from teaching at the college.

Brad’s briefcase dominates the film so entirely — Emily becomes obsessed with it, desperate to steal it, break the locks, see what her husband was stowing inside — it was actually a main character, featured in more shots than Brad himself. Neither Emily nor the audience is ever allowed to see the inside, a narrative device Tarantino used in Pulp Fiction fifteen years later.

In the film’s third act, during the confrontation between Emily and Brad, when they fight each other — Emily convinced she must fend off a psychopath; Brad convinced his wife has gone crazy — the briefcase inadvertently slips down onto the floor between the bed and the wall. It remains there, unnoticed, tucked inside this tiny Vermont cottage, which, with Emily — an orphan — taken away to a mental hospital and Brad dead, will remain deserted for an unknown period of time.

The final shot of Thumbscrew is the briefcase, a slow tracking shot pulling out from under the bed, winding down the hall, out the front door past the police, into the woods, fading to black.

I rolled off the couch — some feeling had returned to my legs — and stepped across the room to the fireplace.

I walked over to the bookshelves. Thumbscrew, I remembered, had been made in 1978, and the worn-out paperbacks were from that time: Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Salem’s Lot, The Gemini Contenders. So was the geometric brown-and-mustard-yellow wallpaper, the lacquered furniture, the orange swag lamp hanging by the front door, the orange-tiled kitchenette, an old GE waffle maker on the counter.

The place had a frozen-in-time feel, as if life had stopped here mid-conversation. No one seemed to have set foot here in decades.

I stepped through the doorway, heading down the narrow corridor. It was dim. I fumbled my way, opening two false doors — they opened back into the warehouse — though the one at the end led into another room.

It was the Jacksons’ master bedroom. I moved to the closet and slid aside the door. Emily’s clothing hung along the racks, housedresses, a pair of bell-bottom jeans, pairs of platform sandals and go-go boots. I stepped to the other end, which had Brad’s clothes, wool slacks, tweed jackets.

I grabbed a pair of the brown corduroy trousers from the top shelf, and a yellow polyester button-down. And I put them on rapidly, because I didn’t want to even attempt to get my mind around the fact that I was donning Brad Jackson’s seventies-era clothes, that I was literally rummaging through Thumbscrew.

The slacks were a few inches short in the leg, but they fit well enough. So Ray Quinn Jr., who played Brad Jackson, unlike most Hollywood leading men, wasn’t a homunculus. I pulled on a red sweater far too tight in the sleeves, found a pair of argyle socks in the chest of drawers, an orange portable Philips record player on top, James Brown’s The Payback on the turntable. After putting them on, I was about to head back to the living room to regroup, when I stopped in the doorway.

I had a sudden vision of Wolfgang Beckman — how he’d shout at me, eyes bulging: “You stumbled, by accident, into Brad and Emily Jackson’s Vermont ranch house and it didn’t occur to you to look under the bed for the briefcase? You’re dead to me now.”

Indulging this hallucination, I crouched down, squinting under the bed.

It was too dark to see anything, so I stood back up, stepped to the bedside table, switched on the lamp, and yanked the bed away from the wall to get a better view.

Immediately, there was a clattering thump. It was there.

I stared at it in disbelief.

The infamous Samsonite fawn-colored briefcase.

It had been wedged against the wall and the other bedside table in the corner. I was shocked, and yet — what did Emily say in the film? Wherever the briefcase goes, Brad follows. I found myself looking over my shoulder to the empty doorway, half wondering if I was going to see Brad’s warped shadow projected on the hallway wall.

I grabbed the case by the handle — it was surprisingly heavy — and set it down on the bed.

I tried the latches. Locked. I realized then I knew the combination. Emily goes to great lengths to figure it out. It was the date that marked the sacking of Rome, the final blow in the decline of the Roman Empire, marking the onset of the Dark Ages.

410.

I spun the numbers into place. The locks popped open.

I lifted the lid.

It was piled with papers. I went through them, pulling out an issue of Time dated July 31, 1978, “The Test-Tube Baby” on the cover. Under that was a stack of student term papers, graded with handwritten comments. Marcie, you make a very nice argument that the Dark Ages were a natural rotation of history, but you need to go deeper.

When I saw what was underneath that, I froze.

Neatly folded in the corner was a boy’s plaid button-down shirt.

I picked it up, feeling a wave of revulsion as the shriveled rigid sleeves unfolded in front of me, as if they had a fragile will of their own.

The front of the shirt was stiff, covered in deep brown stains.

It looked harrowingly real, a real souvenir from a real murder. The fabric itself seemed beaten, as if residue of unimaginable violence had soaked and dried into the fabric.

It was a hell of a lot of effort to go through for a prop that never appears in the film. I recalled the ravaged white suits I’d found in Marlowe’s closet. I accessed the deepest, most tormented parts of myself, she’d said. Parts I was petrified of opening because I doubted I’d ever get them closed again.

Maybe Cordova’s films were real. The terrors on-screen, real terrors, the murders, real murders. Was it possible?

It would explain Cordova’s popularity — nothing moved people, made them gawk, like the truth. It also explained why none of the people who worked with Cordova ever spoke of the experience. Perhaps they were complicit — to disclose what horrors occurred during filming would only incriminate themselves. It was feasible that at the end of shooting, Cordova had something on every one of his actors, something that guaranteed their silence. I recalled a remark of Olivia Endicott’s, which at the time had struck me as rather strange — Cordova’s interrogation of her when she visited him for a potential role in Thumbscrew: I began to suspect the underlying purpose of the questions wasn’t so much to know me or see if I was right for the part, but to learn how isolated a person I was, who would notice if I ever vanished or changed in some way.

Undoubtedly, Cordova looked for people he could manipulate. He had an obsession with capturing what was real; he’d forced his son, Theo, to appear in Wait for Me Here, rather than sending him to the emergency room so they could reattach his severed fingers. I also knew from the Blackboards — and Peg Martin — that Cordova used a film crew of illegal immigrants, a complicit squad of men and women who would never speak of what they’d seen.

I suddenly felt wild exhilaration over the thought. How easily it fit in with everything I’d learned about the man, following in his daughter’s final footsteps.

Cordova obviously took great care in assembling his players, every one from different backgrounds, some with no acting experience at all. He brought them here to live in his remote world, locking them inside it, allowing them no contact with the outside. Who would willingly agree to such a thing, signing away their life to one man?

Hopper had asked Marlowe this. Yet did he need to? Millions of people walked through their lives numb, dying to feel something, to feel alive. To be chosen by Cordova for a film was an opportunity for just that, not simply for fame and fortune, but to leave their old selves behind like discarded clothes.

What exactly did Cordova make them endure? Everything his characters did? Then his night films were documentaries, live horrors, not fiction.

He was even more depraved than I’d realized. A madman. The devil himself. Maybe he hadn’t always been, but it was what he’d become living here. But if his films were real, how easy it would be for the man to slip into harming real children, in order to save Ashley.

I rummaged through the remaining papers in the briefcase. There were only lectures and notes, a typewritten letter from Simon & Schuster, dated January 13, 1978. Dear Mr. Jackson: I regret to inform you that your novel, Murder in the Barbican, will not fit within our current list of fiction titles. I remembered Brad had a wall safe he was always unlocking, but it was in his home office, which didn’t appear to be attached to this set. There was a door off the bedroom, which in the film opened into a bathroom, but when I opened it, there was only the black wall of the soundstage.

I locked the briefcase, returning it to its infamous spot under the bed, and then rolled up the child’s blood-soaked shirt, tucked it into my back pants pocket; I didn’t want to lose it, so it was safest to keep it on me. I switched off the lamp and headed back down the hall.

I rooted through my sodden clothes scattered beside the couch, finding my camera in the jacket. Thankfully I’d had the forethought to keep it dry, because it still worked, unlike my cellphone and flashlight. Both were dead. I took a few shots of the living room and kitchenette — fully stocked with seventies-era food: Velveeta cheese (still edible after thirty years), Dr Pepper, Swift Sizzlean Pork Strips — then stepped to the edge of the living room, staring out.

From the lamp, I could see the soundstage extended far in front of me. Beyond the couch, a wall of steel pipe scaffolding was supporting something—probably another set—constructed on the opposite side.

I realized, after a dazed moment, that I was still shivering. My jacket was still soaked, so after lacing up my boots, I strode to the front door, grabbed Brad Jackson’s herringbone overcoat off the chair, and put the thing on — again, not letting my mind consider the absurdity of it, that I was donning the coat of a probable psychopath.

Hopefully, it wasn’t contagious.

I checked my watch but saw it had stopped after being submerged in the pool. It read 7:58, which couldn’t be right. It had to be later.

And then, heaving my backpack over my shoulder, I stepped out of Thumbscrew, following along the scaffolding to see what else was in this massive soundstage, what other worlds plucked from Cordova’s treacherous head I could sift through like an archaeologist searching for bones.

When it became too dark to see anything, I took a picture, looking at it in the camera’s screen.

An enormous red bird had been crudely spray-painted across the concrete wall to my left. I’d seen it in articles about Cordova. It was what Cordova’s fans used as a way to invoke the man’s presence, an anonymous sign calling for him to return. I moved on, stepping around the end of the scaffolding, entering what appeared to be a vast room. I could dimly make out an enormous mountain in front of me strewn with boulders. I took another photo and realized the mountain was garbage, the boulders corroded gasoline barrels, sprouting like giant mushrooms across the expanse.

I took off across it, knocking right into a wooden sign.

MILFORD GREENS LANDFILL

DO NOT ENTER

HAZARDOUS

I was in La Douleur—French for the pain.

The film’s meek and mousy heroine, Leigh — receptionist at a car dealership by day, community college student by night — agrees to spy on her best friend’s husband and not only becomes smitten with him — a native German named Axel — but gets dangerously entangled in his gangland dealings.

The first night, she follows his maroon Mercury Grand Marquis all over town, eventually ending up here sometime around dawn, the Milford Greens Landfill. Leigh watches Axel park his car and take off on foot across the junkyard, flocks of seagulls wafting off the trash like a screeching exhaust.

He carries a small bag, its color the unmistakable robin’s-egg blue of Tiffany—the jewelry store. Spellbound, Leigh tiptoes after him, her hair going fizzy, her frumpy blouse untucking from her skirt. She climbs inside an old funeral hearse to spy on the man as he scales the hill to an overturned school bus. After removing a paper bag from behind the front wheel, Axel sticks the Tiffany bag in its place. Leigh waits for him to drive away, then makes her own way to the school bus, skidding and sliding through the debris. She pulls out the Tiffany bag, and inside finds a small blue Tiffany ring box—a box commonly used for engagement rings. Leigh is about to open it, when, noticing a black car pulling into the junkyard parking lot, she loses her balance and slips, the blue Tiffany box clattering through an open window into the derelict bus. Leigh goes after it. Within minutes, the thug known simply as Y shows up to collect the Tiffany bag. It doesn’t take him long to discover the bag empty, Leigh cowering inside the bus. And that’s the moment La Douleur morphs from voyeuristic suspense into a spellbinding wrong man nightmare.

The landfill didn’t smell hazardous. There was a musty dampness in the air, as if this were a subterranean basement sealed for years, and faintly within it, a smell of gasoline. I stopped to check behind me and saw with surprise that it looked as if I were actually outside. Colossal screens mounted along the scaffolding gave the impression of wide-open sky. I could discern ghostly clouds painted there, though at least twenty feet above, the screens cut out to the empty black soundstage. The effect was dizzying, seemed to suggest some truth about the inherently blinkered nature of human perception. If only you looked a little farther, McGrath, you’d see it all gave way to … nothing.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but down along the section where I’d entered was a small gravel parking lot fringed with bushes, a lone car parked there, beneath an unlit streetlight. With a chill of unease, I realized it was Leigh’s boxy blue Chevy Citation, straight from the 1980s. It looked as if it were waiting for her to come back.

Maybe she never had. Maybe Leigh had never left this warehouse — or The Peak. I couldn’t recall if I’d heard of the actress ever appearing in another film.

I turned, squinting far ahead at the indistinct smudge on the hill, realizing as I stumbled toward it, it was the overturned school bus, the very one Leigh gets trapped inside. In the final minutes of La Douleur, she’s forced in there by the gangsters, blindfolded and bound. Though she struggles courageously, determined to untie her hands using a metal spike jutting out of a derelict seat, the question of her fate is left unanswered. As she whimpers and flails, the film fades to black — though her cries can be heard throughout the end credits, barely drowned by the Beastie Boys song “Posse in Effect.”

The incline was surprisingly steep, and I began to trip and slide in the plastic bags, blown-out tires, mattresses, and cracked TVs. I’d gone a few yards when I realized not just that the incline was growing even more vertical, but that my movement was dislodging the trash beneath me. I could feel it shifting, and within minutes the entire mountain was dislodging around me. I froze but found myself falling backward, nearly submerged in an avalanche of rusted cans and garbage bags. I scrambled upright, untangling myself from a biohazard suit, surfing toward the perimeter of the set as the entire hill continued to loosen, including that bus. It was impossible to get up there. I groped my way to the scrim of sky, lifted the fabric, and scrambled through the scaffolding as the landfill continued to crash behind me. I’d had enough of La Douleur. I’d be damned if I was going to die buried alive in Cordova’s trash.

I lurched to my feet and took off down the dark corridor. Far ahead, at the very end — what looked to be a mile away — was an opening with pale red light. I hoped it was the way out of here.

Every now and then I stopped to listen, hearing only the wind yowling across the soundstage roof high overhead. The longer I walked, the more that red light remained doggedly, persistently far-off. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was hallucinating, or if this warehouse’s concrete floor was somehow a treadmill and I was running in place. At one point I smelled, rather bizarrely, salt water. It was strong, intermixed with the scents of seaweed and sand. It had to be another film set, built behind the scaffolding rising up to my left, but it was too high to see anything.

I could see the red light getting closer and felt sudden nerve-racking curiosity about what it was. Marlowe Hughes’s suburban McMansion in Lovechild? The brothel where Annie looks for her father in At Night All Birds Are Black? Archer’s boxcar clubhouse from The Legacy?

I stepped around the corner.

It was the greenhouse from Wait for Me Here.

What was it Beckman had said about it? “If there was one setting that perfectly evoked the treacherous mind of a psychopath, it isn’t the Bates Motel, but the Reinhart family greenhouse, with its domes of moldy glass and corroded iron, tropical plants growing inside like insidious thoughts run amok, the frail sand pathway snaking through the foliage like the last vestige of humanity shrinking out of sight.”

The greenhouse was a domed rectangular structure, built out of glass panes and pale green oxidized iron, the architecture mimicking the Royal Greenhouses in Brussels. It sat in serene seclusion in a dense medieval forest of Douglas firs — the effect created by more screens rigged around the set. The intense red light was emanating from inside the greenhouse and then, I remembered—of course—from the film.

It was the crimson plant lights.

I waited to be sure I was alone and stepped out onto the lawn, the silvered grass crunching under my boots. I stared down at it, unsettled, because it looked so real, bathed even in a morning dew. I bent down to touch it. It was plastic, the dew actually shiny iridescent paint sprayed across every blade.

I reached the stone path, following it to the greenhouse’s single steel door — the back door, if I remembered correctly. The glass had become opaque from dirt and decades of condensation. Shadows of dark leaves pressed against the panes like the hands and faces of a trapped crowd, frantic to get out.

I grabbed the iron doorknob — noticing it was in the form of an elegant and rather sinister R for Reinhart — and heaved the door open.

A boiling blast of humidity hit my face.

It had to be at least ninety-five degrees inside.

A pathway of immaculate white sand led away from the door, though within a few feet, the dark knots of plants mushrooming from every direction buried it from view. Suspended overhead were green iron barrels lit up with row upon row of cherry-red and blue lights, giving the greenhouse the look of a gigantic oven set on broil.

In Wait for Me Here, the Reinharts’ longtime deaf-mute gardener, Popcorn — prime suspect in the Leadville killings, later found to be innocent — lovingly tended these plants. Glancing around, I realized with unease that they looked exactly as they had in the film. I grabbed a giant shiny black leaf beside my shoulder, rubbing the surface to make sure it was real. It was.

Wait for Me Here, I recalled, had been shot in 1992. The bulbs of these plant lights wouldn’t have lasted twenty years.

Someone must come here regularly to tend these plants.

A chill inched down my spine, but I stepped resolutely inside, shoving back the door, trying to keep it propped open to let some of the heat out.

I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of getting trapped inside here, either, roasted alive by these lights. But even when I wedged in the rubber doorstopper, found buried in the sand just inside, the heavy iron door kept thudding determinedly closed right behind me, so I gave up, letting it slam. I checked to make sure it would still open, then headed down the path, shoving aside the foliage.

It was like the Amazon. Stems as solid and twisted as water pipes laden with white tubular flowers, trees at least eight feet tall, limbs barbed with thistle, black star-shaped blooms, buds with tiny red berries — all of it clutched at my face and arms like swarming orphans desperate for a handout, for human contact. Their aromas were overpowering and pungent, sweet as honeysuckle, though as soon as I inhaled them they seemed to turn earthen and foul. Given that I was wearing three layers of Brad Jackson’s wool clothing suitable for a brutal winter in Vermont, I was already sweating profusely. But I did my best to ignore the heat, jostling past a cluster of verdant trees leaden with drooping yellow blossoms as big as my hands. They collided with my face, getting into my nose and mouth, the pollen tart and acidic.

I spit, left with an acrid aftertaste. Within a few yards, I saw with relief something I recognized: the koi pond.

The pond was a perfect circle made of stones, filled to the brim with black water. In Wait for Me Here, giant Amazonica lily pads floated across the surface. And when Special Agent Fox nearly drowned in there, held underwater by the killer, he clawed at them for dear life, but they only dissolved feebly in his hands.

Now the pool was devoid of plants, the black water so slick and smooth it looked to be made of plastic, though as I shoved my way past the foliage to reach the stone perimeter, I saw perfectly well it was real. I dipped my finger in to make sure. Lazy circular ripples marred the reflection of the red lights and the hulking glass and iron dome overhead.

I assumed there’d be no koi left, not twenty years after the film was shot. But no—in the murky water, I glimpsed a white and orange streak through the murk. As quickly as it appeared, it vanished.

Someone must come here regularly to feed the fish.

In the film, Popcorn notoriously fed them Cracker Jacks from a box he kept in the front pocket of his filthy dirt-streaked Levi’s overalls.

Maybe he still did.

Maybe the poor man worked in here, lived in here.

The thought made me turn, my eyes scanning the twisted leaves for some sign of that old gardener, his black face wrinkled and glistening, the bright gold tooth in his smile. “The Reinharts’ glorious greenhouse is Popcorn’s holy sanctuary,” I remembered Beckman intoning one night to his students. “It’s his refuge from ridicule — the one place in the world he doesn’t feel afraid.”

I took a moment to recalibrate my mind, to assure myself I was alone and whatever I found in here was a narrative plucked from Cordova’s head. I was not and never had been in Wait for Me Here—though as I noted this, I realized the very fact that I needed to reassure myself of such a thing was horrifying in itself.

Had I already lost my head? Not yet.

I wiped the sweat off my face and headed around the pond’s perimeter, staring into the red-soaked greenery.

Within minutes, I found what I was looking for: Popcorn’s work shed.

The old blue wooden door was ajar, the same crooked sign nailed to the outside: PRIVATE KEEP OUT. I gently pushed it open.

Popcorn wasn’t home.

It was no bigger than a walk-in closet, filled with meticulously organized shelving, cubbyholes housing envelopes of seeds, plastic trays, terra-cotta pots, bags of mulch and fertilizer. Directly in front of me, facing the greenhouse’s glass walls — too dirty to see through — sat a desk and tall stool, where Popcorn could always be found smoking his cigars, reading his comic books, and listening to the Beatles. A small wire cage — some kind of trap for catching raccoons — stood atop the desk beside a faded comic called Mikey’s Friend and a half-smoked cigar in an ashtray.

I stepped inside to pick it up. It smelled recent.

Next to the desk on the wall was an old bulletin board, jumbled with poorly written directions for tending the soil and plants, a tattered postcard of colored shacks standing on stilts along the edge of a dark bay.

I tugged it loose and checked the reverse side. There was no address, only four scribbled words on the back.

Someday soon you’ll come.

I put it back, turning. Various gardening tools had been mounted along the walls using old spikes: hand sickles, Austrian scythes, pruning saws, axes of all different sizes. I moved over to inspect them—the same way Special Agent Fox had inspected them.

In Wait for Me Here, the eleven teenage bodies of the Leadville killings had been mutilated in ways mimicking accidents that occurred at an old paper mill — chemical burns, boiler explosions, industrial roller entrapment. But there was another constant: Each victim was a high-school student killed by a stab through the left ventricle of the heart using a pair of hedge shears, the pointed blades exactly nine and a half inches long.

Special Agent Fox sneaks in here in the dead of night to examine Popcorn’s gardening tools — every saw, snip, and clipper — trying to find a blade with that exact measurement. He comes up empty-handed. Because the hedge shears weren’t hidden in the work shed, as he’d suspected.

Now where in the hell were they?

My eyes were stinging, and I was drenched in sweat, getting steamed alive in here like a lobster. The heat was so overpowering I could hardly think, hardly remember that pivotal scene at the end, when Popcorn accidentally finds the shears buried somewhere in here, in one of his beloved flower beds.

I remembered they were encrusted in blood and the look on the poor man’s face when he came across them planting a new set of seeds, seeds with a bizarre name. His look was of such horror.

Real horror?

Was it my imagination or was it actually getting hotter in here?

I shrugged off my backpack, yanked off Brad Jackson’s herringbone coat and the sweater, leaving them on the wire trap. I wrenched a hoe off the wall and exited the shed, slipping around the koi pond.

Popcorn was the only person in the film to know the truth behind the murders. “Sometimes only the silent man can see the full picture.” Beckman had said it, or was it someone in the film?

I needed to get my hands on those shears.

I stepped into the flower bed, traipsing through plants growing so thickly I couldn’t see the ground.

I bent down, noticing a white handwritten sign stuck into the dirt.

EYE-PRICKLES, it read.

I stepped forward a few feet, spotting another.

DEATH CHERRIES.

There were countless similar signs arranged under the leaves.

BLUE ROCKET. TONGUE TACKS. SORCERER’S VIOLET. MAD SEEDS.

That one sounded familiar. Pushing up my sleeves, I raked the hoe through the dirt and immediately felt something hard in the loose soil. I bent down, seeing something shiny.

It was a brass compass, the glass face cracked.

It had belonged to Popcorn. The compass was a source of ridicule throughout the film. The whole town mocked the way he constantly pulled it out of his overalls, closely inspecting it as if to make sure he was still on course on his very important journey around the world, the joke being that the poor man had been born in Leadville and had never set foot outside the tiny town.

I pocketed the compass and shoved the hoe deeper into the dirt, the blade catching on something else.

I crouched down to inspect it. It was a half-decomposed cardboard box, sodden and limp, though I could make out the letters on the front.

Cracker Jack.

I threw it aside, ignoring the unease flooding through me, doggedly digging into the soil again. And I felt something else there, something bulky. I bent down to it.

Something was buried deep in the dirt.

Fighting a wave of nausea — it had to be the oppressive heat, the red lights making every plant and flower, even my own hands, look blood-soaked — I stabbed the hoe directly downward. It caught in some roots. Crouching, I brutally tore out some of the plants, leaves and limbs shuddering in my face as if in protest.

I could feel it with my hands, something hidden here, something hard.

Something human-sized. Popcorn?

It made no sense. At the end of the film, Popcorn was in the clear, safe. He was keeping the killer’s secret, and if anyone could keep a secret it was a mute man. Then what the hell was buried here? Why were his compass and box of Cracker Jack — the two items the gardener was famously never without — hidden here? Had the killer decided to finish him off? Had Cordova?

As my mind spun, suddenly I was aware of, somewhere far away, a dull thud. It sounded like a door banging closed. I scrambled to my feet.

I could hear faint footsteps of more than one person — two, maybe three. They echoed through the warehouse, moving quickly, probably hurrying down those narrow corridors between the film sets.

I was no longer alone. I tried to ignore this reality for a few seconds, frantically digging through the flower bed with my bare hands.

I just needed one glimpse of what was here. I uprooted plants, throwing them aside, tunneling through the soil, my fingers feeling something.

It felt like denim. Popcorn’s overalls.

I fumbled to take the camera from my pocket, but realized, idiotically, I’d left it back in Brad’s herringbone coat. To excavate whatever it was buried here would require clearing away the entire flower bed.

I paused, listening.

Those footsteps were getting louder. They had to know I was here.

I’d have to come back.

I stepped out of the foliage, racing back around the pond to the work shed. I grabbed Brad’s coat, pulled it on, throwing the backpack over my shoulder. I fought my way through the plants to reach the back door.

I opened it a crack, staring out at the deserted lawn. I darted out, gulping down the freezing air, relieved to be out of that gory crimson light, that tropical heat, barreling into the crisp darkness of the soundstage.

I froze. The entire building was hiccoughing with footsteps, seemingly coming down the same passage where I’d entered Wait for Me Here.

I took off in the opposite direction, moving down a stone path out of the set straight into a vast desolate beach of white sand dunes and bristling sea grass. In the distance, an angular beach house rose high in the sky on stilts.

It was Kay Glass’s house from A Small Evil.

I headed across the sand toward the house and beyond it, the moonlit ocean. My sense was this set would take me back to the Jacksons’, and hopefully the exit out of here.

Suddenly — far ahead, a dark figure with a flashlight streaked over the dunes, heading straight for me.

I whipped around, stumbling back out, careening through the next opening I could find, finding myself racing down the middle of a deserted street.

It was the Main Street of a small town, a ghost town that I didn’t recognize, though I could see fairly well, due to the blinking red and green Christmas lights strewn up over the road.

Dark storefronts slipped past.

SILVER DOLLAR SALOON.

SUNSHINE GROCERY.

PASTIME GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. MEMBERS ONLY.

Sprinting footsteps ricocheted behind me. I leapt up onto the sidewalk to Dream-a-lot Movie House, heaved the door open, and sprinted past candy and soda counters and down a narrow hall, theaters advertising Distortion at eleven-thirty, Chasing the Red at twelve.

I yanked open the first door and it dumped me, thank Christ, back into the warehouse and smack into something hard, a concrete wall. I charged along it, looking behind, and saw the flashlight was there again, and another one was heading straight toward me. I grabbed the bars of some scaffolding and began to climb. I’d gone ten, twelve feet, when I reached a wooden platform. I scrambled up onto it.

“See anything?” I heard a male say below.

“He headed the other way.”

I waited several minutes, and, when the lights were farther off, cautiously stood up. The platform was sturdy, the rigging supporting tungsten lights pointing downward into some kind of stone interior. A pillar stood about four feet across from me with a banner reading — I could barely make out the words — STIR THE WATERS. It was Father Jinley’s church from A Crack in the Window. Just beneath me along the wall were stained-glass windows, a three-inch ledge. I bent down, sliding down onto it, and with a silent Hail Mary, leapt across the divide—intending to grab the pillar and slide down.

I missed. I reached out, seizing some sort of mounted wood plaque to break my fall. It wrenched loose, tiles clattering around me as I crashed to the floor, the plaque skidding across the stones.

Fuck. I scrambled to my feet, seeing a flashlight slipping down the arched passageway in front of me, illuminating a vaulted ceiling, alcoves with statues. I hurried away from it down the rows of pews, heading to the back portal, spotting the confessional in the back corner. The simple sight of it made my stomach plunge, but I unlatched the ornate door — it emitted a faint moan — and climbed inside.

It was tight with my backpack on, pitch-black.

I crouched down to the floor, waiting.

Within seconds, I heard someone enter the church and stop—no doubt inspecting the smashed hymn board I’d pried off the wall.

I waited, my heart pounding, noticing a stench. Vomit? Urine? The footsteps resumed, the flashlight edging closer, illuminating the confessional door, which I could see was a carved wood screen of vines and flowers. I recognized the pattern and could hardly believe now I was staring out of it with dread, exactly as Father Jinley had stared out — albeit for somewhat different reasons.

The film’s opening scene took place right in here, when Jinley was conducting his first confessional duties. He was fresh out of seminary school and believed, with the arrogant optimism of the young and inexperienced, that he would lead the depraved to the righteous path. After waiting for more than an hour without a single penitent sinner showing up, a mysterious figure at last enters the other side in a rush, sitting down on the seat with an ominous thud.

The memory made me inadvertently crane my neck to inspect that confessional window only a few inches above my head, the dark latticed smoke screen ensuring total anonymity.

This enigmatic stranger, as the priest soon realizes, knows Jinley’s dark secret, that he put his three-year-old bastard daughter on a Brooklyn rooftop, allowing her to teeter along the edge while chasing the roosting pigeons, and then, losing her balance, fall to her death on a sidewalk far below — all the while, Jinley watched from a crack in the window and did nothing. Jinley had his reasons, of course — he believed his little girl to be the devil incarnate. But as for who was watching him that afternoon, who this mysterious person was poised behind the screen, someone who vows in a knowing whisper to tear him apart and make him renounce God—it takes Jinley the whole film to figure it out, the identity of the person even more terrifying than his secret.

I realized the footsteps sounded as if they were retreating down some other passage, the faint light now gone.

I rose a few inches, sitting on the wooden seat just behind me, listening. I appeared to be alone. Had it been this side of the box Father Jinley had been sitting on or the other? Was I on the good guy’s side or the side of evil? Where was that goddamn smell coming from? I leaned forward, staring through the screen, the latticed openings in the form of minute crosses.

I froze in horror. Someone was there.

There was a person sitting on the other side.

I hardly believed my eyes, yet I could hear breathing, the shifting of heavy fabric, and then — as if aware that he was now being observed — he slowly turned to face me.

I was barely able to make out a face shadowed by a dark hood.

The next few moments happened so swiftly, I was hardly aware of what I did: I blasted out of the box, racing past the transept, passing the entrance to Jinley’s office and through a door, which if I remembered correctly led into an underground crypt. It was too dark to see. I reached out, waiting for the feel of cold stones, then realized I’d been emptied back into the soundstage.

I heard pounding, a chorus of neon lights moaning above. The lights were coming on. Suddenly I was drenched in bright light, half-blinded. I stumbled forward, feeling a door handle, pulled it, wheeling out into another freezing room.

But it wasn’t a room.

Real leaves crunched under my feet. Real wind rushed my face. And looking up, I swore that was a real moon over my head.

I didn’t let myself believe it, that I’d actually escaped that soundstage. But after running a few yards, I looked back and saw the warehouse sitting quietly in the woods behind me. It looked innocuous, so wan and blank-faced — no hint of the levels of hell that lay inside.

I was back in cold, hard reality, thank Christ. I ran back down the hill, heading toward Graves Pond. The men must not have realized I’d escaped, because no one was running after me anymore. Who the hell were they? And what had I seen on the other side of that confessional?

I checked my watch, forgetting it was broken: 7:58.

I fumbled in my pockets, taking a quick inventory of what I had—the child’s blood-soaked shirt and Popcorn’s compass. They were there; so was my pocket knife, but my camera was gone. It had been deep inside the pocket but must have fallen out when I’d yanked the coat back on. Berating myself for such sloppiness, fighting the urge to go back for it, I broke into a sprint, the wind hissing punitively in my ears, the moon lighting the way.

A dog barked. It sounded like one of the hounds that had chased me, but frustrated now, tied up, though it was probably just a matter of time until it was set loose again.

I’d come to Graves Pond. I crept to the water’s edge, staring through the foliage to its shimmering surface. There was still no sign of Hopper, Nora, or the canoe — not of anyone. Hopper and Nora. I realized with amazement those names seemed to come at me from far away, deep in my past. How long had I been inside that soundstage? Years? Was it some sort of wormhole, a dimension away from time? I hadn’t thought about them, not their well-being or the mystery of where they’d gone. I hadn’t been aware of anything except Cordova. Those sets were narcotics, dominating my head so entirely there’d been no space for any other thought.

They must have gone for help. They were paddling back the way we’d come, safe. I needed to believe this so I wouldn’t worry, instead devising a new plan. But I knew in my gut Hopper wouldn’t give up on Ashley so easily. Neither would Nora. They must both be here somewhere, then, wandering, running in desperate circles.

Squinting out at the opposite shoreline, the black hill, I spotted another one of the flashlights moving over the crest. The person seemed to be hurrying down the path to the wooden dock. Something was running through the grass. It had to be one of the dogs.

I stepped away from the lake’s perimeter, breaking into a jog, heading east. I could gage my direction from what I knew of the lake’s position. East was the shortest distance to the property’s perimeter and the closest public road, Country Road 112. It was my best bet for help. My priorities had changed. Lives might be at stake now, if Nora and Hopper were trapped somewhere inside here, possibly hurt—or worse.

Considering this as I ran, I’d unconsciously taken Popcorn’s compass from my pocket, clasping it as if it were a prized possession, a last hope. I saw in surprise that though the glass face was cracked, the needle was trembling due north.

I turned in a circle to check its bearings. They were spot-on.

The thing actually worked.

I raced on, every now and then checking the compass to make sure I was on course—just as old Popcorn had checked it, much to the entertainment of the entire town.

When in hell was I going to have the chance to go back to that greenhouse? I’d given up too soon. Popcorn, if he was actually buried there, would remain an entombed secret. My mind spinning, I forced myself to keep moving. The forest seemed to parade past in a cruel loop, like the synthetic backdrop in an old movie where the characters chat and drive but never look at the road. Were these real trees? Every trunk of every spruce was elongated and bare, identical to the others, every one.

And then, staring off to my left, I saw it again, the warehouse.

I froze, horrified.

I’d run in a complete circle.

Popcorn’s compass had been playing tricks on me, deliberately leading me astray. But no — taking a few steps toward the hulking structure, I realized this one was cylindrical, a silo, the exterior painted yellow.

I turned my back to it, breaking into a sprint.

Within fifteen minutes, I’d reached a paved road. It had to be the lower section of The Peak’s driveway, which meant I was going in the right direction. Reassured, I veered away from it, keeping under the cover of forest but following its general direction. Within minutes, I could discern far ahead the dark blur of the military fence.

I sprinted toward it, flooded with relief.

There were no discernible electrical wires. I took a chance, running my hands along the rusted links, waiting for a shock.

I felt nothing.

I grabbed the chain link and began to climb. I was six feet off the ground when I noticed, far off to my right, two roofs protruding through the foliage, each with a blackened spike.

The Peak gatehouses.

I recognized them because I’d driven up here years ago. I’d climbed out of my car and took a snapshot of the entrance, so desperate to get inside here. Now so desperate to get out. I recalled what the Spider had told us, how he’d taken that underground tunnel, which linked the mansion to a gatehouse, in order to help the Crowthorpe townspeople enter the property.

It meant—if the Spider had been telling the truth — access to that maze of tunnels underneath the property was right there, yards away, so goddamn close. I could see it with my own eyes.

After a split second’s hesitation, I was clambering back down the fence and back into The Peak, my mind screaming in protest. I leapt into the overgrown grass, moving along the fence, heading straight for those two cottages flanking the wrought-iron gate.

The first one had no entrance. The second had a narrow black door, a window at the top. There was no discernible light inside, no evident camera, the paint was flaking, the glass too filthy to see through.

I needed one quick look at the entrance to those tunnels, to substantiate Villarde’s story—and then I’d get the hell out of here.

It was locked, so I smashed the window with a rock, unlocked it, and slipped inside. It was a minuscule room, with a window overlooking the approach to the gate, a desk with an old computer, an office chair glazed with dust. The floor was bare — except for a small black carpet in the corner.

I walked over to it and pulled back the rug.

There it was: a small wooden hatch. I slid aside the metal bars, grabbed the rings, and heaved it open, staring into the raw black hole.

Concrete stairs, barely a foot wide, led sharply downward. I moved down a few, crouching to take a look.

The tunnel extending in front of me was black. Only a few feet of brick walls were visible before cutting out into a darkness so absolute it looked as if this part of the world had been left unfinished — a raw edge of the Earth, which gave way not to simple darkness, but to outer space.

Staring into it, my head urged me to get the hell out now, close the hatch, climb back over that fence while I still had the chance.

But what did I have on Cordova? What did I actually know?

I tried to mentally grab hold of a few hard facts to stay afloat. I had in my pocket a few items, which might incriminate the man, but could very well amount to nothing as far as the law was concerned. I had stories, eyewitness accounts, testimonies, the truth that Ashley was dead. But was it enough to bury him? I’d hardly speared Cordova, my great white whale. He could go on with his black magic, his live horrors. Ashley was dead, so there was no need for an exchange, but had he stopped? What had I seen with my own eyes?

As I considered this, the decaying brick walls of the tunnel seemed to constrict imperceptibly around me.

Just what, exactly, was I escaping unscathed back to?

An empty apartment. No one would be waiting for me when I made it back to Perry Street. Life would go on as before. I’d go on as before. Simply to think this was suddenly unbearable.

What in the hell was I waiting for? When in life was the truth right in front of you? Because it was here, beyond the pitch darkness. Even if I couldn’t see it now, it was somewhere in front of me.

Do I dare? I took three more steps down. The air was frigid, an iciness that ate at my bones. I yanked off my backpack, rummaged in the pocket for my flashlight, tried turning it on, but it still didn’t work. I removed a Ziploc bag containing a box of matches, heaved my backpack on, and lit a match.

The tiny orange flame trembled as I held it out before me.

I almost laughed out loud. The dark was shoved back just a few inches. The redbrick walls were crumbling, the ceiling low, thick with mold. It looked like a shriveled artery to hell. I checked my watch.

Seven-fifty-eight. I was making incredible time.

I moved back up, grabbing the hatch. I pulled it closed over my head with an irrevocable thud. Had I just sealed myself inside my own coffin?

The match abruptly blew out. I lit another and began to walk.

When that one extinguished, I slipped on through the darkness as quickly as I could. There were a hundred matches in the box. I had to ration them. I remembered the Spider mentioning the distance between the gatehouse and the mansion was two miles. If I walked four miles an hour, within fifteen minutes I’d be halfway. I waited for my eyes to adjust, but after a time I realized the swirling black liquid I was staring into was my eyes adjusted.

My footsteps were a metronome for my breathing.

Beyond that, my hiking boots crunching down the grimy floor, there were no other sounds, just a marked pressure — of being sealed, as if this passage were cutting under a body of water.

When I couldn’t stand the dark any longer, when I actually began to feel confused as to whether or not I was actually moving, I stopped and lit another match.

The constricted corridor had shrunken around me, and was now less than four feet wide, extending identically in both directions. I realized that seeing the fragile light was infinitely more disturbing than just plunging forward in total darkness. I might as well put my head all the way under. Just don’t stop swimming. When that light burned out, I dropped the match and kept on, my right hand running along the crumbling bricks as a guide. It kept me tethered to the world, to reality, because this darkness was so total it became physical, a thick black curtain. It turned me upside down, made me wonder if I was actually submerged in black water and I’d forgotten which was the way to air and light. Gravity seemed to be frail down here.

I tripped on something bulky, instantly gripped with an irrational dread. It was a body, a severed limb. I kicked it a second time. It sounded like a bed sheet.

I fumbled to light another match.

A red piece of silk lay on the ground, covered in dust.

I picked it up. It was a woman’s dress — cranberry red, old-fashioned — with long sleeves and a black plastic belt. Nearly all of the front buttons were missing. I studied the neck and glimpsed the pale purple label of Cordova’s longtime costume designer—Larkin—seconds before the match burned out.

I unzipped my backpack, stuffed the dress inside, zipped it back up, and shuffled on. After a time, I worried that I’d accidentally turned around and was blindly rushing back to the gatehouse, but I didn’t stop. It was just disorientation, the dark bullying the mind. How flimsy was a single person’s authority, his confidence about his place in the world. Give him fifteen minutes of this, even Einstein would start to doubt the laws of the physical world, who he was, where he was, if he were alive or dead.

To my horror, I kicked something again. It scuttled noisily across the floor, something hard. It sounded like a piece of wood.

No. It was a bone. I lit another match.

It was a woman’s black leather pump with a square scuffed heel, covered in dust.

I checked my watch without thinking: 7:58.

I stood up again, holding the match out in front of me.

The view was a carbon copy of the one from before — a wizened brick corridor disappearing infinitely in both directions.

It looked like I hadn’t moved.

I continued on, trying to remain calm. Why was the dress down here? A woman had tried to escape? Very much like the boy’s blood-soaked plaid shirt in my pocket, the dress looked like the vestiges of violence. To die here, alone and cold, to never be found, never be loved again. Sam would think I’d abandoned her. I tried to wrench my mind away from these thoughts, chuck my attention onto something cheerful, but this place, so black and cold, extinguished levity within seconds.

I stepped on something.

Pebbles.

I stopped, feeling so many of them — hard and round — rolling underneath my boot. Children’s teeth? Molars, sprinkled here like crumbs?

I fumbled with another match, lighting it.

They weren’t teeth, but the red round plastic buttons of the dress.

I bent down to inspect them. A few feet away, lying along the wall, was the other black shoe. I grabbed a handful of the buttons, shoved them into Brad’s overcoat pocket, and stood up again.

It was exactly the same view — a black tunnel extending in front of me and behind me, eternal. I was on a treadmill, running in place. I was trapped in a fourth dimension, purgatory, where there was no time or progression, only inert floating.

The match, I realized, was burning my fingers.

I let go of it, lurched forward, faster now. I could feel my mind faltering as if on a tightrope, threatening to lose its balance. I lit another match and saw with relief only a few yards ahead — a break in the tunnel. In my haste to get there, the match blew out. I hurried on. When I felt the wall open up to my right, I lit another.

I was in a small circular alcove, gaping mouths of more tunnels fanning out, seemingly in all directions. I slipped past them, seeing faint words scrawled above each opening in crude white paint.

GATEHOUSE. MANSION. LAKE. STABLES. WORKSHOP. LOOKOUT. TROPHY. PINCOYA NEGRO. CEMETERY. MRS. PEABODY’S. LABORATORY. THE Z. CROSSROADS.

Pincoya Negro? Laboratory? The Z? I remembered the Spider had mentioned there existed at this central point other secret passageways, which led to other hidden parts of the estate. I lit another match, holding it up to the word painted on the wood right in front of me.

Crossroads.

It was what the Spider had called the clearing where he’d taken Ashley.

Crudely nailed planks, once blocking the passage, had been hacked away with an ax. It was what Villarde had done for the townspeople. Only bits of splintered wood and twisted nails had been left, some strewn on the ground.

This corridor was cruder than the others, barely three feet wide, and looked as if it cut straight through granite, the walls slick from water seeping in from somewhere. Taking a step down it, I could see more words had been scrawled on the rocks in the same white paint. Farther down, there were drawings of stick figures with protruding noses and screaming mouths.

I stepped forward to read some of it. If y go father leave all your love right HERE at the floor. WARNING: ye will leav this path neither amimal, vegetabl, or mineral. Say goodbi to ye lamb. May the Lord help y

The match flickered out.

I lit another and forced myself to take one more step inside, holding the flame out. It swiftly extinguished, a subzero wind blasting my face, swelled and quickly dispersed. Then, I heard sizzling in my ears, so deafening and close, I lurched backward, stumbled on the uneven floor back into the alcove, dropping the box of matches.

Fuck. My heart pounding, I knelt down, groping for it along the floor.

It had disappeared.

Something was with me here, standing behind me, toying with me.

Trying not to panic, I wheeled around unsteadily, getting down on my hands and knees, fumbling for the matches in the dirt.

Calm down, McGrath. The box has to be here.

The side of my left hand hit something. Matches. I grabbed them. But somehow, impossibly, the box had been tossed far behind me, wedged against the opposite wall between two passageways. It was like the leviathan’s shadow. It had a mind of its own.

I got to my feet, ignoring that thought, lit a match, and stepped back to the opening.

Crossroads. The tunnel twisted sharply left and out of sight.

I took another step down the passage, the flame burning calmly now. Just for the hell of it, I groped in my pocket and removed the compass, curious to see what direction I’d be heading in.

I could only stare down at it, incredulous.

The red needle was going berserk, spinning madly counterclockwise.

I shook it, but the needle wouldn’t stop rotating, around and around.

It was too much for my mind to compute, so I dropped it back into Brad Jackson’s herringbone coat pocket and, trying to forget I’d ever looked at the thing, I took off down the corridor.

I didn’t know how long I walked.

I had the distinct feeling I wasn’t alone.

It was a bone-chilling understanding that I was in close proximity to something alive and was seconds from running headlong into it. And yet when I shoved the flickering flame in front of me, expecting to see a face, animal eyes—there was only darkness in every direction.

The Spider’s insidious voice began to worm its way into my head, growing louder with every step, as if that day at The Broken Door, he’d been narrating not his own secret, but the future, this walk, my walk. I can still remember the sound of her bare feet, how soft and clean they were, padding along the filthy ground next to mine.

Was that what I was hearing, what I sensed beside me? Ashley?

I kept walking, listening, but there was only my own boots, trudging on.

After a time, the Spider’s voice faded and my mind became blank, a dirty chalkboard, smeared with half-erased thoughts.

Ashley had come this way.

And Cordova. He walked this, every time he had a new child to try and barter with the devil. Anything to save his daughter.

I could discern a strong smell of metal mixed into the heavy moisture and mud. At one point, I heard distant rumbling, as if, overhead, animals were thundering in a stampede across the property, fleeing in terror. I touched the slippery rocks, warm water trickling through my fingers. The walls felt as if they were vibrating. Pebbles came loose from the ceiling, rattling to the ground. But then the noise was gone, the tunnel as silent as before, and I was left wondering if my anxiety, needing some type of outlet, had conjured the whole thing.

I plodded on, noticing that my brain felt loose inside my skull, as if it were melting. I noted with a stab of horror that I was sweating as if I were back inside that greenhouse, as if I’d never escaped, never gotten out from under the blood-splattered lights. Yet I shivered, riddled with chills, the feeble flame I was holding revealing what I already knew: The black tunnel unspooled in front of me, on and on.

The moment I accepted it, understood I could very well die wandering here, I’d reached the end.

A few feet ahead, a bent and rusted metal ladder extended to the ceiling.

I paused, listening, hearing nothing but the wails of powerful wind. I grabbed the rungs and climbed up, my arms and legs oddly weakened and slack as if filled with sand. When I reached the top, I could feel another wooden hatch above me, seemingly identical to the one I’d entered at the gatehouse. I slipped back the rails, shoved my shoulder against it, and opened the hatch.

I was in a dense forest of birch trees, the entire world in razor focus. I could make out every leaf and branch, rock and weed bathed in green moonlight. It had to be a side effect of being submerged for so long underground in blackness, as if my eyes, ecstatic to be granted one last chance to see, were doing their best.

I climbed out.

I took off down a rutted dirt path, noticing, tied to an overhanging branch, a red string dancing in the wind.

A few yards ahead, I saw a bridge. The devil’s bridge.

Simply thinking it sucked the breath from my lungs.

There was no one here. I was alone. The wind was howling furiously, shoving the coattails of my coat so far out, it felt as if a crowd were grasping at it.

The bridge was arched, made of dark gray stone. The construction looked meticulous, as if every piece had been laid by a master’s hand, a delicate curved structure diving up and over a deep ravine, where, I saw as I stepped closer, a river was raging, icy and black. I noticed the water didn’t flow freely but dammed around the rocks, then rolled over them in lumps like tar. Yet the sound of an ordinary river surged in my ears.

Or was that the wind?

The bridge was long, ending in another grove of trees.

Ashley ran the entire length of this bridge.

She was the first human soul to cross it.

I stepped onto the first laid stones. I had nothing to fear. The curse was finished. The devil had what he wanted. Ashley. Yet I found myself whipping around to stare behind me into those skeletal trees to make sure no one was there, that Sam hadn’t somehow followed me, believing I’d been kidnapped by trolls.

When I was halfway across, I was hit by a rush of vertigo. It was as if the bridge had been rising imperceptibly under my feet, because I could see great distances, high over the branches of an immense forest, stretching out for miles, churning in the wind like a mad sea. A roof with black spikes protruded from the treetops, so far away.

A nauseating dizziness suddenly overtook me, and I had to turn away, staring ahead to the bridge’s end.

Something was there.

I felt myself go numb. It was only half human. What the other half was, I didn’t know. It was tall, seven or eight feet, with gaunt arms and a round, wide face so coarse it looked like bark. I could see its eyes, round red eyes, like two fire holes in the dirt, a mouth of thorns.

I had to be hallucinating. Or I was asleep, in a coma. Dead.

What in the hell was happening to me? How flimsy sanity was.

I waited for my eyes to tell me it was an illusion, a hoax of the birch trees and the shadows falling in dark piles across the bridge as if they’d been severed from the objects that had created them. I reached for my pocket knife, realizing I was holding Popcorn’s compass.

How had it snuck into my hand again? The red needle had stopped spinning and was now pointing straight ahead.

The wind launched into another shrieking fit. I blinked, staring back to the end of the bridge and saw in disbelief that that thing wasn’t a trick of my eyes. It was still there, yet beginning to slink away, its bony limbs gyrating as if caught in some invisible eddy before vanishing into the trees.

Get off this bridge, a voice screamed in my head. I tore down the incline, slipping on the leaves plastering the stones, stumbling blindly off, barreling down a dirt path, which led me into a circular clearing.

It was deserted.

That strange vision, whatever it was, had to be hiding somewhere. It was here they performed the rituals, where Cordova became one of them. I stepped forward, the movement making me so off balance I fell to the ground, staring up at the night sky, a sky so smooth it looked like black liquid had been poured between the trees. What was happening to me? My limbs were melting.

I willed myself to sit upright. I wasn’t sitting in ordinary dirt, but fine black powder glittering with minerals, a few feet away, a charred log. I reached for it, astounded that even though it looked like the ordinary remnants of a bonfire, it was as heavy as iron and I couldn’t lift it.

A ripped piece of white fabric was caught underneath it. It looked like it’d been torn off a child’s blouse.

I pulled it loose, but a blast of wind whipped it out of my hand, sending it tripping like a stray white leaf across the clearing, vanishing into the trees. I stumbled after it. When I saw where it had escaped to, what had just sucked it down, I could only stare in horror.

It was a trench filled with children’s belongings.

I could make out every item lying there, some fifteen feet below: tiny slippers and T-shirts, baby dolls and trains, undershirts and sneakers, all of it decomposed and sodden, some blackened as if burned. It was here where Cordova had thrown it all, the stolen objects, his attempts at an exchange. I could see it so vividly, a clarity that seared my eyes — his mania, his desperation, his willingness to let every corner of his soul go black so that his daughter might live.

I realized in shock that I was lying facedown in the dirt.

How long had I been lying here? Hours? Days?

I lifted my head, which was throbbing, the dark ground and spindly trees swinging drunkenly away from me.

I wasn’t alone.

Black robed figures were standing farther off, all around me, silent, hidden by the dark, as if they’d grown off of the shadows themselves. One suddenly streaked between the trees, wearing a hooded black cloak, and then another beside him. And then another.

They were moving toward me. I scrambled to my feet.

“Stay where you are,” I said. “Don’t come any closer.”

Was that me shouting? The voice sounded miles away. I fumbled for my pocket knife. It was gone.

It wasn’t normal, how fast they moved, faces missing inside those black hoods, and then I felt hands gripping me as I was pulled backward.

There was the night sky and then a bag over my head, smells of dirt and sweat and my herringbone coat—no, no, it was my backpack—wrenching off of me, my arms pulled as if to tear them off. I heard one man’s terrible screaming. When the cries didn’t stop and I felt myself hoisted into the air, I realized they were my own.

When I opened my eyes I was aware of nothing but a moth.

It was small, pale white in the dim light. It appeared to be injured. One of its wings would not fold over its back. Just a few inches from my nose, it was trying to climb a dark wall. It walked up the wood and kept falling off, trying again, falling. Ruffling its wings, it moved straight toward me. It had a furry head and brown legs, antennae working in apparent consternation. Sensing I was alive and large, it shifted directions, away from me and back to the wall.

It was cold. The air was subzero. My hands were numb.

Where the hell was I? I was flying. The draft on my face was the wind pummeling me as I swerved to avoid a cluster of black clouds, atmospheric particles, ice and dust and sharp snowflakes spraying my face. A shrill note was ringing in my ears, a painful sound like a long needle stitching my brain.

I tried to sit up, but my head hit something.

I reached out. It was a smooth wooden wall.

I was inside something, a capsule spinning upside down, vibrating with velocity. But it was only a dream. I let go of my fear. I stretched out my legs — I was still wearing boots — and they encountered another wall on both sides. This enclosure I was inside, this spaceship, was tight, yet a good foot or two larger than I was.

I opened my eyes, blinking, but there was nothing to see, as if I were suspended high above the Earth, between layers of atmosphere and outer space. The ringing in my ears went silent.

I had nothing to worry about, because eventually I’d wake up. That was what dreams were for, the waking, the floods of relief, shock that the mind could be so easily deceived, tangled sheets, sunlight streaming through a window. But then, what was the hurry? If the dream was born of my subconscious fears and desires, why not remain inside here a little while longer, soaring through space, to explore the dream, ransack it, find out its laws and parameters and what I’d been so afraid of.

My arms reached out around me, groping at the sides.

Aha. Same as below and above. The coffin. I am in my coffin.

I opened my eyes. This wasn’t a dream, I realized with sudden horror.

I couldn’t wake. I was awake.

The pale white moth — somehow it had made it onto the ceiling and it was crawling in circles, as if it, too, were realizing it was trapped, that there was absolutely nowhere to go.

I began to shout, banging on the walls with my fists, pummeling and kicking.

It sounded as if I were only calling into an empty hole in the earth.

Oh, God, no. This couldn’t be right. This couldn’t be real.

Suddenly, I understood. I was meant to know where I was. To see. The fresh air would keep me alive for days, even weeks, as I struggled and fought the inevitable, so I could lucidly consider everything I was about to be ripped away from.

My mind froze as I tried to remember where I’d been only moments ago. I had the feeling I’d traveled miles. My arms felt as if they’d rowed across an ocean. Maybe I was dreaming, then, because dreams had so many layers, so many slippery departures and ends of ends I couldn’t find footing or the slightest edge for my fingers to grasp hold of.

I reached out, feeling the space around me.

Odd. The coffin appeared to have more than four sides. I maneuvered myself around on my back, using the heels of my boots to propel myself in a circle, counting the walls. But I had no endpoint, and when I’d counted twelve, I was certain I’d done more than one rotation.

I leaned down to my right foot, untied the laces around the metal hooks of my boot, and wrenched it off. I turned onto my stomach, inched myself close to a wall, feeling for a corner, leaving the shoe there as a marker, and then I slipped along the floor counterclockwise, my hands counting.

One. Two.

I spun on like this, a captive animal inspecting the boundaries of his cage.

Three. Four. Five. Six.

I touched the boot again. Six sides.

A hexagon.

Horror gripped me once again. It actually had a face and legs, a massive beast with skin of black rubber, a bony spine, and it was perched right beside me, waiting for me to give up hope so it could feast upon me. I struggled and kicked, banging my head multiple times, screaming for help—someone, anyone—though after a while, when there was no answer, when that shrill noise had returned, ricocheting inside my skull like a lazy bullet without the strength to make its way out, I could only lie back down, wheezing, in my six-sided coffin.

I closed my eyes, letting my fear wash over me. I had to bathe in it, accept it, drink it down, let it cover me like sludge, so it became nothing so extraordinary, nothing so fearsome—and I could think.

Images wafted through my head. Sam was there, playing hopscotch across a checkered floor. The Peak came into view, dark and colossal, rising up on its overgrown hill, and then I saw myself in an overcoat, running across a bridge, figures like a black fog overtaking me, blotting me out.

They must have dumped me in here, my oubliette. Why couldn’t I remember? My memories, they’d been hacked into, tinkered with, cut away, because there was nothing in my immediate past — nothing at all.

But if there was a way in, there was a way out.

I opened my eyes, realizing, in my wild flailing, I must have accidentally brushed the moth off the ceiling. It seemed to have sought refuge in a corner, and once again, fluttering its wings, it was trying to climb the wall.

Taking care not to squash the thing, I managed to put my boot back on, then spun on my back like the rotating minute hand of a clock. Each foot that I moved, I pounded downward on the walls with my feet. On and on I went, the beating noises oddly muffled, so much despair flooding through me it felt as if it were splashing off my elbows and feet.

When I heard the fifth panel crack, I struck it a second time. The wood buckled right in half, splintering, falling through. I looked down at my feet, my heart pounding.

A gray rectangular hole stared back at me.

I immediately twisted around, staring out the opening, my euphoria quickly sliding back into horror.

There was nowhere to go — only another wooden panel just two feet away.

It appeared to be another box.

I pulled myself through. There was incrementally more light and more space, though my old coffin took up most of it, sitting in the center. I couldn’t sit up in here, either, the ceiling just a few inches higher. I crawled on my stomach along the outside perimeter and when I scrambled past the hole I’d just crawled out of, I knew I was right, I was inside yet another hexagonal box.

What the hell was this? A hell of coffins built like Russian Matryoshka dolls, one inside the next, on and on, toward infinity? Or was it a mind game built from an M. C. Escher print? A scene from a Cordova film — I tried to think back through every scene of every film, but I knew I’d never seen anything like this.

If I broke out of the first, I could break out of the second. Wedging my back against the first hexagon, positioning my feet on the outer walls, I bashed each panel as I had before, making my way around the perimeter.

I did it once, twice, three times. Not one wall gave way.

I inspected the first coffin and could make out in the faint light smooth wood, the side panels painted black. The sight suddenly triggered a memory deep in the storm-flooded cellars of my head.

And then it hit me, exactly where I’d seen this before.

The realization was such a shock, I could feel myself falling away from whatever flimsy reality I’d just been grasping, and I dropped backward, spinning through cold, black space.

“There it is,” Beckman had said. “The mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe … Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.”

Right now, a box like this was sitting on top of Beckman’s coffee table in Beckman’s living room, beside piles of faded newspapers and a tray of tea. It was the infamously locked box that had belonged to the killer in Wait for Me Here, his prized possession containing the thing that had destroyed him as a child, a box that had never been opened. Beckman had caught me trying to pick the lock. And just a few weeks ago when I’d visited him, I’d held it in my hands, shaking it, amused to hear the same old mysterious thumps inside, wondering what in the hell they could be.

They were me. Those rattles were my own bones. What I’d wanted to see inside, I was now locked in.

I heard myself gasp out loud at the irony of it. I could feel tears welling in my eyes, sliding off my face. It was too cruel an ending to fathom, a punishment that was pure Cordova. The man was showing me that some mysteries were best left untouched, that the truth of them was the unknown. To try and wrestle them open, letting their contents come to light, was only to destroy oneself.

Suddenly filled with such rage, I began to pound every wall around me, over and over again, like a reptile trying to hatch. I shoved my back against the ceiling, heard it crack, and, thrusting my shoulder against it again, felt it give way. I climbed up, emerging onto a floor, blinking in the increased light at a third black hexagon boxing me in. How long would it go on? How many cages were there? I pounded every panel until another gave way, and another. I kept on escaping, crawling through walls that broke down, one box giving way to another, clambering forward and backward, up and down, so disoriented at times, I had to sit, letting my legs and arms settle on the ground, feel which direction gravity was coming from, so I’d know which way was up and which was down.

I didn’t know how many boxes I’d crawled through — it felt like dozens, the light increasing with each one, inching ever closer — when, pressing against a ceiling, abruptly the floor gave way.

Bright light, and I was plummeting, plummeting straight down—

I reached out, grabbed the edge of the box seconds before it flew past, desperately hanging on as the panel I’d just smashed struck the ground.

I looked down, blinking.

Maybe it was just my faltering vision, my eyes unable any longer to register great depths or space, because it appeared as if I were hanging off the top of a skyscraper, the concrete ground about a mile below.

Bright light was pouring in from somewhere, through a window out of sight. Craning my neck upward, I could see that I was inside a vast metal tower, dangling like a bit of snagged thread out of a hole in the bottom of a large wooden structure, which appeared to be suspended from the ceiling.

There was nothing else here except a single metal ladder, which extended from the ground, up the steel wall, disappearing from view over the top of this box.

I had to get up there. I couldn’t go around the outside. The only way to climb out was to climb back in. I swung myself up onto my elbows, the entire structure swaying dangerously from the movement. The cables or ropes, which were keeping this thing suspended in the air, emitted off-putting creaks, as if the whole thing were literally hanging by a thread — as if I were hanging by a thread.

I managed to heave myself back inside the box, and then, trying to keep my movements easy so as not to dislodge the entire structure, I crawled back through every hole in every hexagon that I’d made. It felt nauseating to do this, to be breaking back inside the boxes from which I’d just liberated myself, my mind protesting as the light around me fell away, as if, with it went my every hope for escape. For life.

I spent the next few hours searching for another way out, pounding the other panels in the other hexagons, trying to find the walls that would take me up to the top — to that ladder.

But no matter how hard I pounded, nothing gave way.

I couldn’t help but suspect in my brutish demolition, my fury, I’d inadvertently destroyed the correct way out of here, the only way, and all I could do now was wait for the inevitable.

Time became a milky liquid I let myself float on, drifting away from this box on its lazy current, back and forth.

Then I realized I was lying on my right side, gazing through the hole I’d made in that very first coffin. A sudden sound of fluttering caught my attention, waking me from a dream.

The moth.

I’d forgotten about it. I was overwhelmed with relief at the simple sight, the understanding that I wasn’t alone. It was crawling on the ceiling, but fell off, and then calmly righting itself, took off again for one of the walls. I leaned in, gently brushed it into my hand. Working its antennae, it began walking around, exploring the boundaries of its new cage, which was, of course, the palm of my hand.

So I would die in here. I’d leave my little life.

I’d barely worn it out. Life had been a suit I’d only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I kept it in the back of my closet, forgetting it was there. We were meant to die when it was barely stitched anymore, when the elbows and knees were stained with grass and mud, shoulder pads uneven from people hugging you all the time, downpours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.

Sam came into my head.

She came the way she always did, padding over to me with her brown bare feet and her wise face, staring down at me, wrinkling her nose. What would she think when Cynthia told her I’d disappeared? I’d become a mystery she’d have to give life to. I’d become a hero, a world explorer who’d gone missing searching for buried treasure on the high seas, more courageous than I’d ever been in real life. Or no—I’d be a cavern in her heart she’d brick up and wallpaper over, hang paintings in front of and potted plants, so no one would ever know that dank and hollow passage was even there.

I could hear Beckman, as if he were suddenly here, staring dubiously at the walls enclosing me before downing the vodka in the shot glass in his hand. Did I not warn you, McGrath, that to capture Cordova was to try and trap shadows in a jar? You wanted the truth. Here it is. It’s boxes inside of boxes. What made you so certain you could ever figure him out? That his questions even had answers?

But what had Beckman shouted, when he’d caught me drunkenly trying to pick the lock on that hexagon box? “Traitor!” “Philistine!” And yet, before he’d slammed the door in my face, he’d said something else.

“You couldn’t even see where it opened.”

It was a hint that I wasn’t seeing all of it, not the full picture, that I was blind to something, that the way out wasn’t the way out.

I had it wrong.

I noticed the moth had managed to fly even with its injured wing. It was crawling again across the ceiling of that first box. I stuck my head inside, watching it move in circles, and then, working its antennae and legs, it paused, then slipped through a hole in the wood, vanishing from sight.

I reached out, running my hands across the ceiling, feeling where the moth had disappeared, an opening the size of a grain of rice. Tracing my fingers along it, I could feel something else, an indentation. I fumbled through my own clothing, which felt strangely foreign and detached from me, as if I were riffling through the pockets of another man, a man who was passed out or dead. I groped, hoping to find some type of tool to use, yet the only hard object I could find was some type of pendant around my neck.

It was the Saint Benedict necklace Nora had given me. I yanked it from my neck and, wedging the metal into the crack, inched it along the trench. After I’d gone all the way around it, I could see it was some type of circular door. I managed to lift up the wood a few centimeters, enough to wedge my fingers underneath. The door, a circular panel, came loose in my hands, falling away.

I was staring into a black pipe entirely devoid of light, nothing visible at the end. I reached out, running my hands along the smooth metal sides, accidentally grazing that moth.

It fell out onto my cheek.

I rolled over, collecting the insect into my hand, and then, making sure it was all right, tucked it in the inside pocket of my coat, where I hoped it’d remain safe and alive. Then I wedged myself up inside the pipe. It was tight, horrifyingly so, like being trapped in an old air vent. There were no rungs to climb, nothing to grab hold of. All I could do was inch blindly up into the thing by pressing against the sides as hard as I could, bracing myself with the soles of my boots. Within a few yards I encountered a wall.

I pressed against it. It opened easily and I shoved it back, blinking in the bright light.

The metal ladder was directly over my head, bolted to the ceiling.

I pulled myself out onto the top of the wooden hexagon, staring around me. This box I was standing on was a perfect replica of the box back at Beckman’s. Light was flooding in through narrow windows in the ceiling, though there were no trees visible and no sky, only white light. I couldn’t tell if it was artificial light or from the sun.

I took another step. Suddenly there was a jolt and a sharp snap.

I reached up, tightening my grip on the ladder’s rung just as the entire hexagon box swung out from under my feet, dangling for a moment by a piece of thread before breaking loose. And then the entire box was plunging, a spinning black box tumbling out of the sky. There was a sucking noise and then an explosion as the boxes shattered on the ground below.

I didn’t wait, and I didn’t look down. I swung from rung to rung, heading toward that wall in front of me where the ladder twisted downward. As I moved, I noticed with amazement that the tiny white moth had managed to escape my coat pocket. It was now crawling down my arm, over the cuff of my sleeve, slipping over my watch.

It was still only 7:58.

Reaching the tower wall, I started my descent, the metal bars slipping eagerly into my hands and under my boots. But then, I began to realize in horror, the ground with its piles of demolished wood, it wasn’t getting any closer, no matter how long I went on. I was never going to reach the ground, never feel it hard under my feet, never wake up.

Suddenly I was no longer on a metal ladder.

I was tripping frantically down another black corridor. It looked exactly like the one leading to the crossroads. Had I been walking it for days and, reaching no end, simply lay down on the ground and fallen asleep?

Or was I passed out on the living-room couch back in Thumbscrew?

Abruptly I reached a wall with a ladder, at the top, another wooden hatch. I climbed up, sliding aside the rails, and opened it.

I was in an abandoned factory surrounded by hulking machinery with rusted blades, piles of stripped logs and rubble. I scrambled out, racing across a floor strewn with wood chips and sawdust, heading for the small door—

What the hell was happening? I was outside, racing through a field of grasses up to my waist, across old railroad tracks. I was sprinting past a derelict caboose on which someone had spray-painted another red bird, when I realized in shock I’d been running the entire time with my eyes closed.

I opened them.

Blinding sun crashed into my eyes.

“I think he’s dead.”

“Dude. Can you hear me?”

Something sharp poked my shoulder.

“Oh, my God. Don’t touch him. He’s covered in maggots.”

“That’s not a maggot. That’s a moth.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t. My throat felt like it’d been burned. Sight slowly came back into my eyes. I was lying on my side in a muddy ditch. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, were staring down at me. The boy appeared to have been prodding me with a long branch. Behind them, a blue station wagon was parked on the shoulder of the road.

“Want us to call you an ambulance?” the girl asked.

I rolled upright, my head throbbing. I stared down at myself, dimly taking an inventory. I was wearing a heavy overcoat, corduroy slacks, hiking boots, argyle socks, all of which were caked in black mud. My right hand, covered with dirt, was clasping something. My fingers felt dead, as if the bones had been broken, the flesh swollen stiff around them, because they refused to loosen their grip on what they clutched so resolutely, what I realized was a brass compass with a shattered face.

And I was alive.