“I’ll let him know.”

Tessa had mentioned that Timothy Sabian was doing a book signing at the Mystorium tonight. The bookstore wasn’t too far from the Field Office, their deli sandwiches were pretty good, and so was their coffee. Also, they had a broad selection of teas that would appeal to Calvin. I figured that if he was anywhere in the vicinity, lunch there might be a good choice.

Calvin wasn’t a fan of texting, so I left him a voicemail asking if the Mystorium would work with his schedule. Then, while I waited for a reply, I began examining the lives of the people who’d killed themselves, looking for any connection they might have had with each other in ways that I hadn’t yet considered.

++++

Although Timothy Sabian hadn’t expected it to be easy, digging the hole in the basement’s hard-packed dirt floor was even more work than he had anticipated, and listening to Julianne the whole time was difficult—listening to her ask him why he hadn’t stopped, why he’d done this to her, why he’d killed her.

Muscle spasms and fatigue were common for someone who suffered from Timothy’s condition, and he had to stop and rest a number of times to keep from collapsing from the effort.

Once he’d burrowed out a space large enough to hold her, he carefully lifted her body and nestled her into the hole. There was barely enough room—he had to force her right arm over her chest so she would fit.

There.

Still covered with the sheet.

The bugs that burrowed under his skin chose to scuttle out from the cuts and sores and descend onto Julianne’s corpse. Timothy knew it was a hallucination, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying. He didn’t like the idea that he was seeing things, so rather than call it a hallucination, he called it a nightmare.

A waking one.

The kind he’d been having all too often lately.

When he began to fill in the dirt, he started with her face. That way, he wouldn’t have to think about her staring up through the sheet at him while he shoveled dirt over the rest of her body.

However, covering her face with the soil didn’t make her stop talking to him. She told him it was cold and that she didn’t want to be left here alone, left here in the basement with all these bugs. She asked if he could take her upstairs, let her lie on something soft and comfortable.

“No. Absolutely not.”

A bed.

“No!”

His bed.

“Why? Why are you asking me to do that?”

“Emily wouldn’t want you to leave me here, would she?” Julianne said.

“Emily’s not real.”

He stopped putting the dirt on Julianne’s body and listened to the other voice, the one that never left him alone.