Yet the overall shape of the structure still held, and the vinyl siding, dark green with white trim, remained intact.

“Was it yours?” Dryden asked.

For a moment she didn’t answer. Her expression was one of searching, trying to dial in on what she felt.

“I don’t think so,” she said at last. “But it’s so familiar … like I was here all the time.”

“Maybe it was a friend’s house.”

“Maybe.”

Dryden studied the place more intently, waiting for it to stir any impression. If he felt anything, it was only fleeting—vague enough that he might be imagining it.

Danica took a step closer to the house. “This is the first time I’ve felt like there’s something else trying to come to the surface.”

She crossed the yard to the front door, which was intact but warped in its casing. She put one foot against it, right beside the knob, and simply pushed. With a sound like a bundle of twigs breaking, the frame gave way around the latch. The door swung inward.

The moment they stepped inside, Dryden gave up on the place. Whatever spark Danica had felt about it from outside, the inside wasn’t going to ring any bells. Every wall surface had either blackened with mold or fallen away from the studs. There were a few pieces of furniture—two bed frames with bare mattresses, a table, a couch, a recliner—but even those could have looked nothing like they had when Danica last saw them. All the cloth had darkened or else been chewed away by animals. There were dried-up bird nests embedded in the couch’s foam backing. It was like standing in the skeleton of somebody’s home, with the rotted bits of a few organs left behind for good measure.

They came to the basement last. It was a soggy ruin like the rest of the house—at the foot of each wall, the floor was heaped with crumbled sheetrock that had once covered the uprights. Mold and even ferns and mushrooms had sprouted from some of the piles.

But unlike the upstairs, the basement contained things that had weathered the decades intact—things that had kept their shape, anyway: a row of arcade machines along one wall, a bay window looking out onto the slope, a pool table centered in front of it.

Since they’d entered the house, Dryden had been watching Danica for a sign that she recognized something. Now he felt a jolt of familiarity himself—it flickered like a candle, then flared bright in his mind.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.