“Keep thinking. It’ll come to you.” I headed for the back rooms without bothering to wait for him—if he put his foot through a rotten floorboard in the shadows, that was his problem. After a moment he came sulking after me.

Nothing interesting in the back, nothing interesting in the hall-floor rooms, except a huge stash of vodka empties that someone had apparently preferred not to put out with their rubbish. At the top of the basement steps, Kevin balked. “No way. I’m not going down there. Seriously, Frank.”

“Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.”

Kevin said, “Shay locked us down there once. You and me—I was only little. Do you remember that?”

“Nope. Is that why this place gives you the vapors?”

“It does not give me the fucking vapors. I just don’t see why we’re trying to get ourselves buried alive for no bloody reason at all.”

I said, “Then wait for me outside.”

After a moment he shook his head. He followed me for the same reason I had wanted him there to begin with: old habits last.

I had been down in that basement maybe three times, total. The local urban legend claimed that someone called Slasher Higgins had slit his deaf-mute brother’s throat and buried him down there; if you invaded Gimpy Higgins’s territory he would come for you, waving his rotting hands and making terrible grunting sounds, cue demonstration. The Higgins brothers had probably been invented by worried parents and none of us believed in them, but we still stayed out of the basement. Shay and his mates sometimes hung out down there to show what hard men they were, and a couple might go there if they were truly desperate for a shag and all the other rooms were otherwise occupied, but the good stuff happened upstairs: the ten-packs of Marlboros and the cheap two-liter bottles of cider, the matchstick-thin spliffs and the games of strip poker that never got more than halfway. Once when Zippy Hearne and I were about nine we dared each other to touch the back wall of the basement, and I had a vague memory of bringing Michelle Nugent down there a few years later, in the hope that it would scare her enough to make her grab hold of me and possibly snog me. No such luck; even at that age I went for girls who didn’t scare easy.