The house reminded Sam Dryden of a bad dream—the one recurring nightmare that had ever troubled him. The dream was simple: he was walking through a tunnel, deep underground somewhere. The tunnel was narrow, maybe three feet wide. Its walls and floor were poured concrete, the ceiling some kind of metal gridwork held up by steel beams that ran across from side to side. There were dim white lights set high in the walls every ten feet; they led away into the darkness ahead of him, like a line of streetlamps marking the route of a highway at night, straight as a chalk-line through some pitch-black landscape.

In the dream, he was terrified of whatever lay at the end of the tunnel, though he never reached it—never even glimpsed it. He just walked, feeling that irrational panic rising inside him, like nothing he’d ever felt in real life—certainly not in his adult life. It was a childhood dread that engulfed him, soaked him to the bone.

He had been a child when he started having the dream, somewhere around age twelve. Now he was forty-one, and had spent a good chunk of his past in the United States military, experiencing things that were real-life nightmares by most people’s standards. None of those things had ever come back to him in his dreams, though. Just the tunnel. Just the concrete walls and the metal beams and the weak lights leading away into the black. Two or three times a year, that place would interrupt his sleep, and he would wake in the darkness feeling cold, as if he had the stale air of the tunnel still trapped in his lungs.

“I told you it needed some TLC.”

Dryden blinked and turned.

The realtor showing him the house, a guy in his fifties named Henry Caine, stood in the open entryway. Dryden, in the foyer, had just finished walking through the place by himself. In the five years that he’d been buying and fixing old houses for a living, that had become a custom of his: solo walk-through, no distractions, nothing but his initial gut feeling.

“Maybe even TNT,” Caine added, “but I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Neither would I,” Dryden said.

He’d caught his first glimpse of the house ten minutes earlier, driving up to it. He’d parked and just sat there staring for over a minute.