I wiped the perspiration from my right hand, then gripped the gun tighter. I opened the door and immediately stepped away, expecting something to rush in at me. My back rippled with gooseflesh as I stood there, looking out into the gloom, waiting for horror. Finally, I started moving again, the floorboards creaking gently under my weight.

The landing was empty. There were no lights on in the house. The usual smells one would expect in an abandoned house – smells resulting from drunk teenagers breaking in or passing vagrants spending the night – were absent. No teenager had ever been drunk enough to break in here, and no vagrant had ever been cold enough to seek shelter under this roof. The only smell, apart from the dust, was a damp, unhealthy rot that seeped through the walls. It was like the house was sick, riddled with some wasting disease.

I reached the stairs and looked over the banisters. I had to go down there. I didn’t know how I had got here, but I knew I had to go down there.

I started down the stairs.

Whether this was illusion or madness or magic, or if I had died in that warehouse and this was the hell I was to spend eternity in, mattered little to me at this point. For all I knew, I was still in the warehouse and this was all happening in my mind. Maybe it had affected everyone there. Maybe that bright flash of light had hypnotised me, hypnotised all of us.

Or maybe I was really here. And that thing I had glimpsed, that thing coming through the portal, maybe it was here, too.

I got to the bottom of the stairs without a clawed hand reaching through the banisters and grabbing my ankle. The front door was just ahead of me. I could have run straight to it, pulled it open, and fled. But what would I be fleeing into? Or when? Whatever had happened to bring me here had not only sent me across town, it had sent me across time. I knew, with no doubt in my mind, that this was the night we had snuck into Bubba Moon’s house, all those years ago.

And that meant I had to go down, into the basement.

The basement door was under the stairs. The doorknob was black and loose and rattled when I turned it. I had to give it an extra turn it was fitted so badly. When it opened, the darkness from the basement spread upwards, passing me, darkening the hall, turning everything colder still, and then it settled, my eyes adjusted, and I started down the wooden steps.

There were more steps than there should have been. They descended into a gaping mouth of pitch-black. Twice on my way down I almost lost my nerve – but if I was here, then Sammy might be down here, too, and I wasn’t going to abandon my son.