behind me.
She held her flame to one side, revealing a curved door in the wall. It hung open slightly, but only darkness showed through the crack.
We listened. For a long moment there was no sound but our breath and the distant drip of water. Then we heard a noise, but not the kind we were expecting—not a wing-flap or the scratch of a bird’s feet—but something human.
Very softly, someone was crying.
“Hello?” called Emma. “Who’s in there?”
“Please don’t hurt me,” came an echoing voice.
Or was it a pair of voices?
Emma brightened her flame. Bronwyn crept forward and nudged the door with her foot. It swung open to expose a small chamber filled with bones. Femurs, shinbones, skulls—the dismembered fossils of many hundreds of people, heaped up in no apparent order.
I stumbled backward, dizzy with shock.
“Hello?” Emma said. “Who said that? Show yourself!”
At first I couldn’t see anything in there but bones, but then I heard a sniffle and followed the sound to the top of the pile, where two pairs of eyes blinked at us from the murky shadows at the rear of the chamber.
“There’s no one here,” said a small voice.
“Go away,” came a second voice. “We’re dead.”
“No you’re not,” said Enoch, “and I would know!”
“Come out of there,” Emma said gently. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
Both voices said at once: “Promise?”
“We promise,” said Emma.
The bones began to shift. A skull dislodged from the pile and clattered to the floor, where it rolled to a stop at my feet and stared up at me.
Then two young boys crawled into the light, on hands and knees atop the bone pile. Their skin was deathly pale and they peeped at us with black-circled eyes that wheeled dizzyingly in their sockets.
“I’m Emma, this is Jacob, and these are our friends,” Emma said. “We’re peculiar and we’re not going to hurt
