A minute later he and Dani were through the town and back out in the country. The downslope was behind them now, and to their left and right, level cornfields extended for miles. The shoots were bright green and maybe knee high, sticking up out of the ragged soil. The only plants taller than that were a grove of pines off to the east: a city-block-sized vestige of whatever forest had once covered these lands.

Dani pointed ahead and to the right. Sam followed with his eyes and saw a tiny structure far out on the plain. It looked like a single-room house, faded yellow with a black roof. No garage. No vehicles parked near it. Not even a mown yard. Just a weed-filled lot surrounding it, and then more cornfields. It was probably a mile and a half away, line-of-sight. By road it was farther.

“That’s where we’re going,” Dani said.

“What is it?”

“You’ll see.”

The rest of the ride took eight minutes. They came to the tall weeds surrounding the house, and lay their bikes down.

Sam stood staring at the place. Up close it was more impressive than he’d expected. The yellow exterior was brick. Maybe at one time the yellow had been vivid, but decades of sunlight had bleached it to nearly the color of sand. The roof was covered with black stone shingles. Clearly the place had been built to last.

Yet for all that, it was a standing ruin. The window frames were just square, empty holes in the exterior wall, with little bits of rotted wood clinging to grooves inside the edges. The glass panes were long gone. The front door, a red-painted slab of iron or steel, sagged a few inches open in its rusted casement. Huge portions of the door’s paint job had flaked away, bit by bit, leaving the remaining paint in complex patterns that looked like continents and islands. The door might have been a map of an alien world.

“This is Echo House,” Dani said. “That’s what everyone calls it, anyway. It used to have a different name.”

She took a step forward and used her foot to push aside a section of weeds, revealing a stone marker set in the ground. It looked like a tombstone, except for what was engraved on it:

ASHLAND TOWNSHIP SCHOOL
FUNCTIONAL 1847–1938

“An old one-room schoolhouse,” Dani said. “According to this, it’s been here almost a century and a half.”

Sam stared at the marker, then looked at the school again. Through the window cavities he could get only a rough sense of the dim interior. The space was probably about the size of the two-stall garage at his new house. He tried to imagine himself attending this place a hundred years ago, when suddenly Dani clapped her hands three times, loud and fast.