back against the weeds with a thud.
She stared down into the dark. Then, without another thought, she grabbed the backpack and went down.
Five steps down. She knew that!
And although there was no light in this place, she knew she had to go to the right. Because that was where the other stairs were, the ones that led up into the house.
Awful smells of dank stone and wet earth and the skittering whispers of animals, but she didn’t stop to think about it, just moved slowly but surely through the darkness until her outstretched hand found the wood rail.
Ten steps up. She knew that, too.
At the top, she pushed the door open and stepped through.
Gray light, like a shroud, around her. Dim shapes floated at the edges of her vision — just furniture and boxes — and a wash of smells, dust and paper and something sickly sweet but so faint she almost thought she imagined it.
She dropped the backpack to the floor and moved slowly down a narrow hallway. It led to a small room with faded green wallpaper peeling away in damp layers. The next room was like the first but with yellow flowered paper, most of it in piles on the scuffed wood floor. A third room had light fixtures dangling bare wires and more moldering walls shedding their paper skins.
She stood in the center of the third room, a cold draft swirling around her. It felt like the house itself was moving around her and she was inside it, inside its heart, inside the heart of a dying animal.
Voices.
Where were they coming from? They had always been inside her head before, but now…
Outside her head now. Like they were just a step away in the next room. She went to the front of the house.
Another small room, this one with blue-patterned wallpaper and yellowed lace curtains. The voices were loud here, louder than the usual whisper. And they were-
She turned.
There, in the far corner, she saw it, a small upright piano, dark wood under a gray coat of dust, the top heaped with long, thin boxes.
The voices, so loud here, the same ones that came to her when she slept. She had never been able to make out what they were saying. But now…
She stared at the piano.
Suddenly, she could hear them perfectly. The voices were singing!
The sting of tears in her eyes. The voices were real. She hadn’t been crazy, she hadn’t made them up. Those voices that always came to her in her dreams. They were real, and they were singing real words. The words made no sense, but she didn’t care. The words were real, and so was this place, and so was she.
She shut her eyes tight. The voices were getting louder.
Suddenly, a loud bang. It felt like the floor was moving beneath her feet, like the walls were moving inward. She bolted from the room.
Another bang. Just thunder, just thunder. But it propelled her forward.
She was back in the kitchen. Rain was beating on the small window over the old sink. Or was the beating sound in her head? She couldn’t tell anymore, because something bad was happening. Something was rising up inside her, worse than anything she had felt before, something bad beyond her heart when it beat too fast and beyond her skin when it grew slick with sweat and beyond her head when the voices shouted.
This place, this room. Something bad here.
A boom of thunder. She clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes.
But she could still see it, see it playing on the curtain of her lids. Red. So much red. A thick flow of red everywhere.
She opened her eyes.
The cupboard. There, in the corner, near the sink.
She dropped to her knees, her fingers grasping the rusted handle. The door opened, and she crawled inside. She pulled the door closed and pressed into the dark corner. Tried to make herself small, smaller, smallest until she disappeared.
She started to cry.
Then. Then…
A whisper. That one soft voice that sometimes found her in her dreams, rising out of the screeches of the others, coming to her in this dark place now, soft around her like a blanket.
The other voices faded away. The banging stopped. It was quiet. The invisible blanket was still there, holding her.
She hugged her knees and rocked herself in the dark.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, yes, yes.”
Chapter Two
They had been down this road before. They had been down it so many times that even with the night as dark as it was, even without the blue wash of a moon above or the yellow glow from a house nearby to help light their way, they knew where they were going.
Still, Louis had the feeling something was different this time.
“You okay?” he asked.
The tall man walking by his side didn’t answer.
“Mel?”
“Yeah.” A clearing of his throat, like the crunching of the gravel under their shoes. “Yeah… yeah. I’m fine.”
Louis didn’t look over at his friend, didn’t have to. He knew Mel Landeta was lying. Something had been bothering him all night. Louis sensed it from the moment they sat down to eat at Timmy’s Nook. The talk over grouper sandwiches and beer had been of the usual stuff: the Miami Heat’s seven-game skid, cop gossip from
