Rat-borne illnesses killed almost thirteen thousand people a year.

Susan heard another bus rumble by.

She felt strangely calm now. Like she was watching herself in a movie. Like she was one of those girls who go into the spooky house alone while the audience hides their faces and screams at her not to do it. The house was empty. She had done it. She’d crawled through a fucking basement window. She’d battled a rat. It was practically heroic. She was going to dine out on this story for months.

She just had to find her way out.

Her flashlight beam threw a yellow circle on the sheet. “Hello?” she said. She listened, not expecting to hear anything, and then, slowly, pulled the sheet curtain to the side and walked into the room.

The first thing she noticed was that it was clean. Not regular clean. Weird clean. Crazy clean. Her flashlight beam reflected off the scrubbed hardwood floors. The walls and ceiling were a freshly painted white. It smelled different. Like disinfectant. Like a hospital.

Susan’s stomach somersaulted as she panned her flashlight around. No furniture. No dust. No cobwebs. Whoever had been squatting there had been a real OCD case. Her flashlight swung past the open pocket door to another room, and stopped. Someone had hung clear plastic sheeting between the two rooms. Visqueen. Her mother kept a sheet of it over the compost pile.

She forgot what she was doing. She forgot that she was looking for a way out. She moved toward the plastic, flashlight in hand, but it was so thick that the beam of light couldn’t penetrate it enough to see the other side. She tried to pull it aside but it was nailed up more securely than the sheet in the hall, and she had to duck down and squeeze through below where it was fastened.

She turned, straightened up, and lifted her flashlight to look around.

Something was in there.

The knot in Susan’s stomach tightened. “Hello?” she said.

It was under a sheet. Maybe a piece of furniture. People threw white sheets over furniture to protect it if they were going away for a while. Rich people, with second houses, in the twenties. It wasn’t furniture. Old clothes? Something a squatter left, hoping to come back for later?

It wasn’t old clothes.

Who was the guy who’d phoned her? And why?

Call the cops, her little voice said.

But instead she felt in her purse for the notebook and pen.

She traced the form on the floor with her flashlight. Surrounding it, like some sort of offering, were eight or ten big red plastic flashlights, none of them on.

Maybe it was some sort of renovation project.

It wasn’t a renovation project.

“Okay,” Susan said. She moved tentatively forward, notebook and pen clutched in one hand, flashlight in the other. “I’m going to look.” When she got to the form she knelt down, and the knees of her jeans pressed into something wet. She sat back on her heels and shone her flashlight on her legs. Blood.