After a few seconds he lowered the light and swept it over the chamber’s vast floor. It was bare concrete, like the surfaces of the stairwell, and it was mostly empty. Mostly. Here and there, random shapes stood frozen in the near-dark: metallic structures, some as small as children’s toys, others larger than pickup trucks. The shapes were completely foreign to Sam; he had no idea what they were, and none were close enough to see clearly in the limited flashlight glow.

“By then,” Dani said, “the end of that first month, Lauren and I still had no idea what was really going on in Ashland. We only knew something was.”

She waved him forward, and together they moved out onto the open floor. As soon as the wall fell away into darkness behind them, Sam was struck by the sensation that they weren’t indoors at all. In the cavernous space, with their flashlights shining only on the ground ahead, it felt exactly as if they were out in a parking lot in the middle of the night.

“We started looking around for whatever answers we could find,” Dani said. “We studied the town. Looked for anything else that was strange. Which turned out to be pretty much everything. Remember the sandwich shop on Main Street?”

“Yeah.”

“No customers.”

“I noticed.”

“There are never customers,” Dani said. “Never. I have a telescope in my bedroom, and from my window you can see the front of that restaurant. One time Lauren and I watched the place all day, ten hours, taking turns. The old woman behind the counter showed up at eight in the morning. Nobody else went in, the whole day long. She came out at six and drove away. That was that.”

“There would have to be some customers,” Sam said. “Aren’t there ever just … tourists passing through?”

“We’re sixty miles from the freeway. This is probably the exact middle of nowhere. Nobody passes through. But the sandwich shop did have a customer one time. Me. I walked in and ordered a turkey sandwich on rye.”

“What happened?”

“The lady stared at me like I was trying to sell her some cookies. Then she went into a back room and bumbled around for five minutes, and came back out with a sandwich: bologna on white bread. She said they were out of turkey and rye.”

“Everything is fake in this town? Literally everything?”

Dani shrugged. “The cornfields have real corn in them. I think that’s about it.”

They were moving toward one of the metal shapes—one of the larger ones. It was only a dozen yards away now, but Sam still had no sense of what it was. Just the discarded ruin of some strange machine.