The space on the other side was a stairwell. It was clean and simple and plain, not much different than any stairwell Sam had ever seen. The walls and steps were poured concrete. Sam and Dani were on a landing at the very top of the space. Only the first flight of stairs was visible, descending to the next landing down. Dani led the way.

“How far down do the stairs go?” Sam asked.

“A hundred twenty steps. And every step is ten inches high—yes, I measured. So twelve hundred inches, total. That’s exactly a hundred feet. Add the twenty feet of stairs leading down from the weeds, and this stairwell bottoms out a hundred twenty feet below the surface of the cornfield.”

“What’s down there?”

“Two doors,” Dani said. “One of them is locked, with another keypad, but punching in the five sevens doesn’t open that one. Lauren and I only tried it once. We were scared to try again, in case it might set off an alarm or something. But the other door, no keypad. You just open it and walk through.”

“What’s on the other side?” Sam asked.

“You’ll see in a minute. If there’s a word for it, I don’t know it.”

Sam said no more. He continued descending the stairs after Dani. They took each step carefully in the swinging glow of the flashlight beams.

“So here it is from the beginning,” Dani said, “starting three months ago when I moved here. Lauren and I were both new in town. We met, we clicked, we rode our bikes all over the place. We found Echo House, and out of habit we went there practically every day. We noticed the problem with the stove, and the dates. We told our parents about it—my parents and Lauren’s dad. Her mom died when she was born. We told all of them about Echo House, and their response was so odd. They didn’t want to hear about it, but it was almost like … like they were holding something back. And when we pressed it, they’d get mad at us. Like, Stop talking about it, girls, it’s nothing. Strange, right?”

They rounded a landing and continued downward. Sam had already lost count of how many flights they’d descended—maybe three or four.

“By this time we’d met plenty of other kids around the subdivision, and at school,” Dani said. “We told a few of them about Echo House. They reacted like our parents had. It’s nothing. Who cares? They just flat-out refused to talk about it. It was as if every last person in this town had been … trained. And maybe that’s a weird way to say it, but it’s true. It was like they’d all gotten used to the idea that you just didn’t talk about certain things. And they’d hush up anyone who tried to.”