That was how it had started—following a cold, one-hundred-year-old trail. At first, he convinced himself that he was just pursuing a good business opportunity: buying up the contents of boarded-up homes, fixing what was in disrepair, and reselling it from his store. He had begun with Samuel Hoegbotton’s apartment, hiring workmen to take the contents of the dining room and transplant it to the room next to his office. They had arranged it exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He would sit in the room for hours, scrutinizing each element—the bottle of port, the plates, the silverware, the napkins haphazard on the chairs—but no further insight came to him. After a few months, he dusted it all and repaired the table, the chairs, restoring everything but the broadsheet to the way it must have been the day of the Silence. In his darker moments, he felt as if he might be ushering in a new Silence with his actions, but still he came no closer to an answer.

Soon even the abandoned rooms of the Silence lost their hold on Hoegbotton. He would go in with the workmen and find old, dimly lit spaces from which whatever had briefly imbued them with a ghastly intensity had long since departed. He stopped acquiring such properties, although in a sense, it was too late. Ungdom, Slattery, and their ilk had already begun to slander him, spreading rumors about his intent and his sanity. They made life difficult for him, but by ignoring their barbs, he had survived it.

Hoegbotton did not give up. Whenever he could, he bought items that had some connection to the gray caps, hoping to find the answers necessary to quell his curiosity. He read books. He spoke to those who remembered, vaguely, the tales their elders had told them about the Silence. And then, finally, the breakthrough: a series of atrocities at one mansion after the other, bringing him closer than ever before.

Hoegbotton finished reading the ledger, took a last sip of the port he had poured for himself, and walked out of the room in time to hear the bell that announced the arrival of a customer. He put the books back in their place and was about to lock the door to Samuel Hoegbotton’s dining room when it occurred to him that the cage might be more secure inside the room. He picked it up—the handle seemed hot to the touch—walked back into the room, and placed the cage on the far end of the table. Then he locked the door, put the key in his desk, and went to attend to the needs of his customer.

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