The night had drawn long shadows across the room in Oak Hill. It was the first thing Sally noticed after the flinch that took her out of sleep. She rubbed her eyes with a small white fist. When she looked around the room, she saw a different kind of dark.

In the usual dark of her room, the dresser squatted, keeping guard over her while she slept. The blankets spread in a miniature hilly landscape that reached to her chest. The orange pill bottles that kept the voices out of her head and the strange sights away from her eyes stood neatly arranged on the night table beside her bed. The closet door, always closed, still stood against the chair propped beneath the knob. The door to her bedroom also remained closed and locked. Her room, her safe place, where no furnaces hissed threats of boiling skin and no snow chilled the snug corners. No Bad Thing could take that room away from her and make her scared. That’s what her brother Dave had told her. Dr. Fiorello told her the same thing. And she believed them. They had never lied to her. She trusted them.

But the way the moonlight came into the room, long and sideways as if hoping to sneak in without her notice—that didn’t feel right. It made her safe place look crooked, piece- y, like slabs of light and shadow had been pulled apart to distort her view.

She sat up and looked at the window. Through it she could hear the soft concert of tree frogs and crickets, a rhythm that reminded her of vacations in Seaside with her mother and Dave. Back then, they’d slept with the shore  house’s windows open. The ocean breeze, a scent of salt and sand and dissipating heat, carried the faint sounds of boardwalk rides and prize booths and laughter and the dull roar of the water. It also drew in the croaking and chirping of the night creatures outside. She’d liked those sounds  once—back when open windows and fresh air meant good things. Back before The Bad Thing made her scared to have too much easy access to the outside world, or for it to have too easy an access to her.

Sally frowned, feeling the night air blow across her. Goosebumps  rose on her skin. She brushed a shy arm over her chest to quell the tingling there. The storm window was up, the screen down.

She never left her window open. She had, in fact, closed it before she’d lain down for her nap that afternoon.

Sally tossed back the covers and swung her feet to the floor. She shivered, wrapping thin arms around her narrow ribs, and got up, scowling at the window. She might have slept straight through until morning without the safety of a pane of glass between her and the night, if not for the bad dream. Outside, the rolling expanse of lawn that covered the quad between the buildings of Oak Hill Assisted Living was empty. Trees stretched their  black-fingered shadows over the hills. A red rubber ball lay cupped by grass. A green bench stood to the side of the path leading out to the parking lot.

Nothing there, and yet she wished Dave was with her. Something about the emptiness didn’t feel right. Something about it reminded her...

... of scraping and chattering and whips and blades and The Bad Thing she  wasn’t supposed to talk about because it was dead and  wasn’t ever coming back. But what if, what if it did... The Bad Thing without a face that hated her and showed her blood and wanted her to die, die, die!

In the dream, she’d been scared because she’d been alone. It found her like before and hurt her in the head because she’d been alone. But then Dave came and fought it and it had run away.

She spent a lot of time alone now, at least after the others in the community had gone in for the night, and usually she didn’t mind. But something, now, about the yard, the window, the quiet, the—

The red ball rolled toward her window, fighting the breeze uphill. It struck her as strange. Wrong, but the reasons why  were difficult to frame in her mind. The throaty sounds of the crickets and frogs sounded now a little to her like laughter.

Dave told her not to talk about It, not even to think about It. It was dead, after all. They’d killed It, hadn’t they? She closed the window, cutting off the weird from outside.

But not completely. Some of the weird had leaked into her room. She felt it as she turned around. Her place, her safe place, had changed. It  wasn’t anything she could quite put her finger on, but . . .

The blankets. She’d folded them back when she got out of bed, but they were pulled up to the pillow now. Something beneath them bulged—not the impression of her body, not caved inward, but swelling outward. The shape formed a headless body, the neck aligned with the edge of the blanket. And where the chest would have been, the blankets steadily  rose and fell.

Oh no. No no no. Blankets  can’t do that. I don’t think . . .

Her heart felt cold and heavy, thumping against the fragile bones of her chest and echoing through her ribs. She made small fists with her hands, and her fingertips felt cold against her palm. She crept to the side of the bed. The bulge beneath the blankets moved as if turning on its side. She jumped, letting out a little squeak, and paused. It kept on with its light breathing, but otherwise lay still. She moved forward again.

When she reached the side of the bed, the breathing stopped. Sally felt her own breath hitch in her chest. She swallowed, her hand diving in slow motion toward the covers. The blanket felt stiff beneath her fingers, but they closed around it anyway, and she yanked the covers back.

No body. Nothing at all but a red smear on the sheets, dark like blood, in the shape of an arrow. It pointed to the door of her bedroom. She looked up. The door stood slightly open, not even enough to see the hallway, but open all the same.

And a nagging thought, Dave said, he promised, if I just forgot about The Bad Thing, half crushed between the broken gears of her mind, struggled to gain hold but was lost.

She skirted carefully around the foot of her bed and softly stepped toward the door. A chill spread across the back of her neck, down her arms, across her breasts, down her legs. She eased open the door.

The hallway outside was not her hallway. Cement walls, flaking stucco, and what looked like rust or paint formed a long corridor that turned sharply to the left about twenty feet down. Chipped tile littered the broken floor, and what little light hit it from her bedroom window lit the broken glass in tiny glittering patches.

“Saaa- lleeee . . .”

A spark of recognition made her reel a little where she stood, feeling sick. The voice from the shadows at the end of the hall, both male and female braided together, made her skin crawl. She remembered.

Tears blurred the hallway for a moment before spilling, first hot then cold, down her cheeks.

She remembered the voice of The Bad Thing without the face. They called it the Hollower. It was ageless, it had told her, and it would never die.

But they’d killed it. They’d watched it die. She knew that. Didn’t she? Wasn’t that what Dave had told  her— that the shuddering husk wailing a siren into the strange dawn of River Falls Road stopped moving, stopped being altogether? Wasn’t that why they had come through the rip...

The tears came stronger. There had been others. Three others. And one of them . . . one of them had looked right at them.

“Found you...” The multi- voice laughed in the darkness, and the sound made Sally think of strangled tree frogs and crickets crushed under the heels of black shoes, or in the fists of black gloves.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered, her voice thick with crying. “Please go away.”

“You go.” Its voice floated over her shoulder, close to her ear, and made her jump. “Run, Sally! Run!”

She ran, plunging headlong into the gloom of the strange hall. Anything to get away from the voice, anything to move her muscles and warm her body from the cold hate the Hollower brought with it. Anything to escape.

She turned left and skidded to a stop in front of a grandfather clock, all polished brass and mahogany wood, set up against a dead-end wall. The hands made a patient sweep backward, the minute hand trailing the hour hand around a blank and numberless face. But that didn’t bother Sally. What made her cringe, what made her scalp tingle and her tiny fists clench was the blood that dripped from the top of the face down, pooling in the plastic cover, filling up the face until the hands floated, useless. And it began to chime—clear, melancholy gongs that echoed in the underground hallway.

Sally backed away, shaking her head slowly, soundless words forgotten on her lips. She turned to run again.

Behind her came the high whine of claws scraping concrete and the glassy clink of whips hitting tiles. Its laughter, a crowd of mirth, was louder still. Her own whimpering got lost beneath it. Hot tears blurred her vision, and she blinked hard to clear them.

“I’m going to break you, Sally. I’m going to drive you right over the edge.” The Hollower’s voice again sounded close to her ear, right over her shoulder, and she shrank away from it as she ran.

Sally turned sharply right and then left, the tiles slanting down beneath her feet. The sounds behind her drove her farther, deeper underground. She remembered what Mr. Wranker in 305B said about the catacombs beneath Oak Hill, back when there had been a hospital on those grounds and not a  halfway  house, about how dangerous the weak foundations beneath the off- limits “old spot”  were . . . and how haunted . . . full of asbestos and crumbling floors that fell to sublevels so deep in the earth that no one would ever find you. How the air was thin and polluted with mold. All this flittered through her mind in a few seconds, her feet carry ing her without thought, the faint light that came from no place growing dimmer the farther down she went. Then the hallway opened up. She slowed to a stop in the middle of a room, her breath coming in little pants, and looked around.

Those little breaths caught and stuck in her chest. She felt the air, chilly and difficult to draw into her lungs, and panic ran in tiny threads through her veins. Cold white stone walls and ceiling entombed a tiled floor, and fluorescent ceiling fixtures cast a harsh light over the grimy tables. On the tables lay rows of large metal tools like corroded jaws of strange animals, long and sharp and lined with teeth. One of the walls featured rows of metal doors, an im mense filing cabinet cut into the stone. And in the center of the room . . .

Sally shivered. Mr. Wranker never mentioned a morgue beneath Oak Hill.

She didn’t want to go, but her feet carried her a little way into the room. It felt almost as if she needed to see them better, to take all of them in, to be sure that what she was seeing, what she was understanding, was what was really there. It  wasn’t always, even when she took her pills.

But she could smell them, and what she thought might be on them, covered by sheets. Then she  thought—this made her tingle inside her  skin—that she heard one of the wheels squeak along the dirty, grouted tiles.

Rusted gurneys formed a  half- circle around her, draped in dirty, stained sheets. Beneath each of the sheets was a form very much like a headless body, just as she’d found in her bed. Some looked like women- bodies, some bodies of men. Two looked no bigger than children. Sally’s breaths loosened a bit and became little sobs. And as if on cue, just as the one in her bedroom had done, the chest of each began to rise and fall.

“Join us, Sally.” The words came from one of the gurneys to her far  left—one where a blood corona stained the place where the head should have been. It sounded like Max’s voice.

Max Feinstein, who had taken off the back of his head with a shotgun because he couldn’t bear to deal with the Hollower for even one more day. Max Fein-stein, whose funeral had given Sally the first opportunity to see for herself the Hollower monster that stalked her brother.

“Sally,” the dead man’s voice spoke again from beneath the filthy sheet. “Just lie down and die, girl. Just lie down with us right  here and die, you bitch.”

Sally uttered a cry that echoed back to her ears. Her legs felt weak and tingly beneath her, but she made them move, made them take her away from the awful place, back the way she’d come.

But it  wasn’t the same hallway she stumbled back into. Even lost and confused, she knew the floor beneath her  wasn’t sloping up toward the apartments, up toward her room and safety. Instead, it  rose, plateaued, and dipped again deeper into the earth, turning all the wrong ways as she continued on. The mold patterns and piles of debris were different in these corridors. The dank patches beneath the chipped concrete  here sometimes looked like faces, sometimes like words she could almost make out. One bloody handprint, which looked to Sally like someone had smacked the wall sideways to support rising weight, dripped long scarlet claws from the fingertips. In a crevice where a chunk of concrete had come loose, Sally thought she saw a couple of bloody teeth.

She made a turn at the end of the corridor and a cement wall, glazed wet and spotted with black mold, blocked her way. Unable to stop short enough, she tumbled into it, throwing up her arms to protect her face and scraping them from wrist to elbow.

Sudden sharp, jarring pain speared her skull as well as her arm.

“Damn.” She whispered the word, afraid of it, afraid of the hopelessness contained in it. She backed away from the wall slowly, step by step, her chest heaving, her face pinched tight in a grimace from the throbbing in her head. Clouds in her mind obscured logical thoughts. She could hear echoes and voices that made it hard to concentrate. She  wasn’t sure now if they were outside her skull, bouncing around the hallway, stray threads of sound from the Hollower, or in her head. She counted steps in reverse, the skin around her eyes tight from fighting off tears. She stopped when sharp cold whipped down the neck of her nightgown, across the backs of her arms, and lifted her hair. Sally turned around.

The figure she saw dulled all sense of thought or flight. She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it. The strength had gone out of her hands, but they flexed open and closed at the sides of her nightgown with weak deliberateness anyway. The Hollower leaned casually against the wall as if waiting for someone (waiting for her), without really touching the wall at all. Its arms  were crossed over its chest. A fedora so black it was almost blue tilted low on its bald, earless head, which was bent down as if it dozed. It wore a long black trench of the same hue and featureless black clothes beneath. Its shoes blended into the gloom gathered at its feet.

It picked up its head to look at her.

The smooth blank plane beneath the hat was utterly featureless. It had no face whatsoever, yet she felt it watching her, even felt it  smiling—something about the trick of light and shade from somewhere inside it, the wrong kind of dark and light, like in her room. It uncrossed its arms and extended one out in front of it. Its black glove closed in a fist. Between the fingers, blood pattered to the tiles in the center of the hallway. On its own, the blood ran off along the tiles, racing toward her. She stepped back, but it formed an irregular circle around her feet. The Hollower laughed, drawing her gaze back up to it.

Like a magician palming a coin that has disappeared, it presented an open, bloodless palm to her with a flourish. Then it waved at her.

“Found you,” it told her in throaty voices. She offered nothing but a miserable sob. It gravitated away from the wall and stood in front of her, blocking her way. “Now, die.”

She spun around and lunged forward. Suddenly her feet felt light, so light she  couldn’t feel the floor beneath her. Her stomach bottomed out. Air whooshed up and tugged her hair, and she realized she was falling, gaining speed as the walls rushed by her, her nightgown tangling up around her waist. She  couldn’t scream; the air pressing against her chest made her scared, too scared to inhale. She twisted midair, her arms flailing to try to slow her fall, her hands grasping at anything to hold on to and finding nothing. She saw the glowing white faceless thing, its hat tipped low, growing smaller as it looked down.

Sally hit the bottom of the concrete shaft hard enough to loosen her teeth when they smashed together. She didn’t feel that, nor did she feel her hip or elbow shattering against the tile floor, because the impact broke her back first. She didn’t feel her leg twisted up under her like a deer mangled along the side of the highway. She had less than a second’s sense of its wrongness, its bulgy poppingness. She bounced once and then landed hard again. This time she didn’t feel the jagged tile that broke her neck bury itself straight through from the base of her skull to her throat.

But she thought she heard Dave’s borrowed voice giggling high and strained, before the darkness swallowed her.

Oak Hill Assisted Living hunkered low on a wildly sloping, lush lawn, its dull grayness a contrast to the vibrancy of the grass that surrounded it. It  wasn’t so much that the apartments looked  run- down or dirty, per se, but rather that something about the shadowed windows and the unsunned corners gave the viewer the impression of a furtive, almost awkward  self- awareness of its own utterly bland appearance. It didn’t have the impressive decay of a Danvers State Hospital or the  pain-soaked hardness of an Eastern State Penitentiary, but it made Detective Sergeant Steven Corimar feel nettled in a way he couldn’t quite explain. Like if the building complex  were a person, he thought, it would have a drawn, haunted face, eyes flickering with suppressed anger, fists stuffed in baggy pockets, a lanky body clothed not for style but for function, for protection from judgment it felt coming from everywhere.

Steve had arrived at Oak Hill’s side entrance at 8:13

a.m. A uniformed officer named Frank Kimner met him there. They’d been introduced sometime two weeks earlier during his first few days with the Lakehaven Police Department. The man, short and compact, dark-haired and  dark- skinned, exuded warm politeness and a kind of confidence that Steve envied. He gave Steve’s hand a firm shake and looked him square in the eye. Then Kimner led him through the employee complex and down a short hallway to a Plexiglas wall lined with security systems. He watched Kimner punch in a code that opened the door. They passed through another short hallway to an officer on guard by a steel door.

The officer smiled at him. He looked good, really good. Sunglasses lay folded against the breast pocket. Big, muscular arms lay folded over the broad chest. Buzz- cut dark hair gleamed with gel under the glaring lights. Steve had met this officer early on, too—Ritchie Gurban. Gurban loved being in law enforcement. Most of the men in his family  were cops  here and in Wexton and had been even out in Thrall before it withered away from the lifeblood of the county. But what made the biggest impression on Steve was the honesty in Ritchie Gurban’s eyes and his warm grin. Ritchie took care to remember names, to remember mundane, pass-the- time conversations, and when he talked to someone, he always made eye contact. Steve liked that. He’d thought about what it would be like to grab a few beers after work at the Olde Mill Tavern with Ritchie, but he’d quickly squashed the notion. It was problematic enough that he even entertained thoughts about Ritchie in the first place. He definitely  couldn’t consider acting on them.

Besides, one afternoon he’d overheard Ritchie in the locker room talking about his girlfriend. He would not have admitted, even to himself, that it was a disappointment to hear, but some of the wind fell out of the day’s sails for him.

He’d come to the conclusion that it was probably better that way, Ritchie being straight and all. No questions asked by the department, no complications between him and the other guys at the station. Even going out to the bar with them after shifts sometimes made him feel  self- conscious, like every mannerism, every inflection of his words, every subtle context of their conversations was being scrutinized. It seemed like they talked about women and sex a lot. Nothing sacred or secret between brothers in blue, apparently. There  were times when he heard them talk about the chicks they were banging or the stuff their wives and girlfriends (and sometimes mistresses) wanted them to try out in bed, and his mind raced for something to say, for the limited knowledge of women from his youth he could draw on should he be called to do so. They didn’t ask him too much about his love life (he’d mumbled once that he was happily single and focused on his new job over any new relationships, and they’d left it alone), but Steve couldn’t help but feel that they were waiting for him to contribute, that sooner or later one of them would ask if he ever got laid and what was wrong with him that he wasn’t willing to give them the details?

Still, Steve  couldn’t help but return Ritchie’s smile and the genuine amiability he found there.

“Hey, Steve. How’s it going?”

“Not bad,” Steve said. “Hope I didn’t miss anything.”

Ritchie ran a card key past the sensor, and the steel door opened with a groan. “No way, man. We saved all the good stuff for you, New Guy.” He winked, and for just a moment, Steve felt a rush of warmth in his core . . . and then it was gone.

Steve followed Kimner inside. From there they passed into the recreation room and through another  key- carded door to the outside. They crossed the quad to a  paint-chipped door hanging slightly askew on rusted hinges.

“They found it open like that,” Kimner told him in a low voice. “They always keep it locked, so it was sort of a heads- up. Her  doctor—Italian guy, Fiorello or Fiorelli or something—is downstairs with the building manager, Henry Pollock.”

Kimner pulled out a map of floor plans for the catacombs, frayed almost clear through where the folds lay. The ink that detailed the rough shapes and chambers was faded in places to an ugly  brownish- pink.

“We’re here,” Kimner said, pointing to a spot on one of the bottom corners of the map. “We need to be here.” He traced a path almost to the other side of the paper.

“She got pretty far.”

Kimner nodded. “In the dark, in the damp, no less. Girl got herself all turned around in here.”

Steve followed Kimner, who fell in line behind a few other officers with flashlights who seemed to know where they were going.

“Steve?”

“What?” Steve answered the voice before an eerie recognition sank in. The strange acoustics of the catacombs bounced a voice to him that had sounded an awful lot like his grandfather, rest the man’s soul.

“ ‘What’ what?” Kimner called over his shoulder.

“You call me?”

“No.”

They traveled on, falling a little behind the officers they were following. Kimner panted a little. Steve guessed it was the hiking over fallen rocks and debris on the tunnel floor. That, and the weird air down there. The air inside the tunnel was thin and cold enough to make his toes chilly inside his boots, but occasionally a warm gust from origins unknown would blow across his face like a hot, wet breath. Otherwise, there was little circulation. Altogether, Steve found he either couldn’t fill his lungs up, or the air just sat heavy in his chest when he did. Either way, he was looking forward to being in and out and done with this place.

“Steeeeve . . .”

This time, his cousin Charlie’s voice  rose from beneath the shrouds of childhood memory. Charlie had been hit by a train when he was nine. He’d been thrown all the way to the trestles behind Steve’s aunt’s house. Some of him, anyway.

Steve wiped his forehead with his arm and grunted. Very funny acoustics in this place. “You talking to me, Kimner?”

“What? No.” Kimner had folded the map and tucked it in his back pocket, but he took it out again, along with a flashlight, when he noticed the growing distance between him and the other officers.

“I heard my name again. I heard  it—someone calling me.”

“Ain’t me. Voices sound funny in here, though. They bounce down corridors, echo, that sort of shit. Maybe someone’s talking about you and it’s just carry ing at all odd angles and shit.”

“Yeah,” said Steve, not entirely convinced that Kimner wasn’t fucking with the new guy. “Yeah, maybe.”

The Sussex County CSI team, careful, efficient, and fairly quiet, was nearly done collecting evidence along the hallways of the catacombs when they reached the site, but Eileen Vernon, the state medical examiner, was nowhere to be found.

Steve had met Eileen quite literally by accident. She’d bumped his car with her front bumper in the Lake-haven PD parking lot. He’d liked her right  away—the way her  gray- black hair frizzed out around her temples, the way she’d adjust her bra right in front of him if it so suited her. She had a  flat-A Jersey accent that reminded him of a friend’s big Italian uncle, both in cadence and just about in pitch. It made most of what she said sound like she was flipping off the subject as unimportant (“Fuggedaboutit, Steve”). He didn’t think she was Italian, at least not mostly, but he imagined her with a bunch of cats at home and a saint statue in the front hall and something heavy and  rich- smelling cooking on the stove on weekends.

In conversations, she had never asked him straight out about being gay, nor did she ever mention it as a matter of fact, but he thought she knew. Her flirting was, at times, so direct that it might have appeared to border on sexual harassment  were they any other two people with any less intuitive an understanding of each other’s motives. But that was just it. He knew women who flirted like they were used to getting what they wanted. And he also knew women who flirted in a fairly harmless way, as if they’d never expect any serious reciprocation, and so felt safe but still giggled and blushed along with the flirting game. Eileen flirted with impunity not only because she didn’t expect him to take her seriously, but because she knew somehow that there was no serious stock to be taken in his flirty responses. He thought it meant she knew. But she didn’t seem to care. And more importantly still, she  wouldn’t tell.

“Where’s Eileen?” Steve asked another detective, a tall,dark- haired,dark- eyed man named Bennie Mendez. Steve had also met Mendez early on; the position he’d taken over at LPD had belonged to Anita DeMarco, Mendez’s girlfriend, before she went on maternity leave. Steve had inherited her desk, files, and all her open cases, as well as a slew of unfiled closed ones.

Mendez handed him a  high- power flashlight and pointed to a collapsed area of the floor, which opened down into a shaft that fell to the  subbasement. “She’s down there with the body.”

Steve gave him a nod of thanks, then walked to the edge of the shaft and peered down, shining the light. At the very bottom, some hundred or so feet, Eileen crouched, taking samples in the bright glow of hanging halogen lamps.

Steve craned to look around Eileen to the body. One of its legs twisted up under the hip. Blood stained the floor in a pool around it. A fan of blonde hair covered the face. He’d been told her name was Sally Kohlar and that she had been a resident of the assisted living facility who suffered from both auditory and visual hallucinations.

Steve called out Eileen’s name, and she looked up from a pile of jagged tiles and waved. A flashlight of her own was hooked into the belt of her pants. Her rubber gloves shined in places with blood. “Hey, handsome,” she called up to him as she stood.

“Hello, beautiful. What do you have for me?”

“Looks like our little lady banged herself up pretty good in the fall. Time of death, I’d place at three to five

a.m. It’s cold down  here, though. May be earlier than

that. I’ll let you know once I get her back to my place.”

“So did she fall? Jump?”

Eileen put one hand on her hip and used the other to shield her eyes from the light. Stepping away from the body, she said, “See, that’s the thing. Like I said, I’ll have more for ya later. But off the bat? I  would’ve said suicide, except judging by the impact wounds, I don’t see how the hell she wrote her note.”

“Note?”

Eileen took down one of the halogen lamps and held it near a wall, hooking a free thumb at it. Steve looked in the direction of her finger, and what he saw on the wall flash-burned unease in his gut. He never could swallow suicides as easily as hom i cides. Catching a killer felt like standing up to the bully and winning, a public ser vice, a balance of order. But suicides left him feeling like an invader. Who was the killer, the bully, in that scenario? And who was he righting a wrong for? It was the note, he thought, that got  him—the ghost of words that meant something once to someone who didn’t care about them anymore, that lasted longer than the person who wrote them. It always got a little under his skin.

On the wall, in the Kohlar woman’s blood, in big, clear block print, someone had written one word: HOLLOW. Steve glanced back at Mendez, but the other detective looked down and away. Then he turned and walked toward some of the crime scene guys, flipping open his notebook and clicking the tip down on his pen.

After a moment of looking between the word and the body, Steve looked at Eileen and said, “She  couldn’t have written that herself.”

“Ooh, brains and brawn. You excite me. Take me.” She blew him a kiss, and without missing a beat, continued with, “But yeah, not likely she did it herself.”

Eileen stripped off her bloody gloves and disposed of them in an envelope. “It would have been a bitch and a half for someone  else to get down  here, kill her, write on the wall in her blood, and climb up again, unless he or she had help. Just look over by Rubelli at that mess of cords and  shit—that’s what they’re supposed to use to get me the hell outta  here. And if you wanna know my opinion, any equipment that would get a killing type up and down this shaft would have probably  attracted the attention of someone  somewhere—ground patrol, security guys, what have you. From what I’ve overheard down  here in the hole, no one saw nothing.”

“Doesn’t even look like there’s much room down there for two and a struggle. Not likely someone was down there when she died, right? Sure she died of impact?”

“Pretty sure. And yeah, I think she hit bottom alone. No trace of anyone else  here, except this note.”

“Okay, thanks, Eileen. Thanks.”

She nodded. “No problem, handsome. Stop by later for wine and cheese and lab results. It’ll be a hoot.” She winked at him in the semideflected glow of his flashlight and then added, “Do me a favor, sugar, and tell them to hoist this old  whale up, eh?”

He smiled. “Wonder you  can’t float right up on your angel wings, beautiful.”

She laughed, and he gestured to one of the officers that Eileen was ready. He walked off a ways, checking the route marked off in police tape that the officers thought might have been Sally’s last hundred yards or so.

“No trace of anyone else  here,” Eileen had said. A locked room job . . . so to speak.

“But I am  here,” voices whispered close to his ear. His aunt, grandfather, Charlie, his old  babysitter—a flood of voices that in an instant he both recognized and realized would be impossible. A fast shiver ran across his back. He turned sharply. No one stood close enough behind him to have said it.

Steve gazed around with deliberate, slow attentiveness, looking for the smirking face, the chuckle stifled behind a hand, and saw nothing.

“And I still am.” This time, the voices came like a cold breath on his neck. He jumped, turning again. No one was there.