I shook my head. My shadow, which was the biggest and starkest of them all, replicated the movement right in front of me. It occurred to me that someone could literally be hiding in my shadow and I’d never see him. “Just old lamps and furniture,” I said. “A table. Sofa.”

It was a big basement. My light couldn’t even reach the side walls.

“If you see a Ouija board, grab it,” said Benny.

“Don’t you dare,” said Chrissy. “My aunt did the Ouija board once and she doesn’t believe in any of that stuff, but she said that Ouija boards are actually dangerous.”

“Can’t see any,” I said, taking a single step to my left. Twenty more seconds and then I was done. Twenty more seconds.

“Can you see the circle?” Pete asked.

I knew what circle he meant. We all did. Bubba Moon had been found lying on a blanket in a circle he’d painted on the floor.

“Can’t see it,” I said.

“Go in further.”

I took another step, sighed, and shifted my weight, did my best to look energised. “Nope,” I said. “Just junk. It was years ago, anyway. It’s probably faded away to—”

One of the lights jiggled fiercely, and before I even looked back I knew what was happening. Pete was crawling through the window. He was taking my moment away from me again, and I was too weak to stop him.

He dropped down. “Right,” he said, walking past me like he didn’t have a care in the world, “where is it?”

The others came after him. I don’t know how. Didn’t they feel the same cold, sickly dread that I did? Didn’t they feel that something in this house, something down here in this basement with us, was just fundamentally wrong, and out of step with how the world was supposed to be?

I could feel the unnatural malevolence that hung heavy in the air, but I’d forced myself to come down here because I needed to do it. I needed to do it to prove to myself, and to Chrissy, that I could. That I wasn’t about to let my fear beat me. Pete was probably the same, but Benny and Tyler and Chrissy herself? Why they came down I will never know. They regretted it, though. Later, they regretted it.

We spread out. The basement wasn’t that big, not really, but there were moments when it looked big. There were moments, glimpses out of the corner of my eye, when the walls disappeared and the basement went on forever.

“Found it,” said Chrissy.