There were four doors on the first floor, each with a suite of rooms behind it, and we treated all of them equally. I’d expected to relax as we continued to find nothing. Instead, I felt as if I were vibrating all over. If I’d had a gun, too, I’d have opened fire on the first cockroach that moved.

We found a door to the basement. It was locked, and the key didn’t open it. Rico looked at me, shrugged, and headed for the stairs.

The second floor had the same floor plan. I took my place beside the first door, and pretended I had no desire to scream.

The first suite was empty. The second was empty. The third seemed empty at first.

The first room certainly was. But the windows were covered over with plywood and tar paper, and loose wallpaper had been pulled down and consolidated in a musty heap in one corner, as if it had been in the way of something, or someone. Rico angled her head toward it, and I nodded. She couldn’t have been more careful at the door to the inside room than she’d been before, out she certainly wasn’t any less.

Nobody waited for us in the inside room. The windows were sealed up here, too. The room contained nothing but another heap of fallen wallpaper near the door, a rickety card table in the middle of the floor, and on it, a sheet of paper.

Rico gestured for me to hold the light on it. It was thick paper, smooth-finished, expensive, and there was a line of writing on it. In dense black ink, in the perfectly formed, soulless hand of penmanship texts, we read: Set down your burden of clay, and enter happily into paradise.

The flashlight faded and died. I toggled the switch again and again, without result. By the door, there was a rustling of paper.

A pale shape rose in the corner by the door. It had started, I thought, as the heap of fallen wallpaper, but something was happening to it; something was sprouting from the paper in faint, bluish light. The shape was humanoid, tall, thin, wild-haired. I thought I heard a little tittering sound from it, like the laughter of demented mice.

I didn’t move. There was no place to move to. I wasn’t sure where Rico was in the dark room, and I was afraid to look for fear I’d find I was alone. Then I heard a small, sharp clack beside me, and Rico’s shaky whispered curse. “If it comes toward us,” she murmured, “go left. If we split up, we might make the door.”

A flash of spitting light from the ceiling, and a resonating whump. Then a near-human groan above us: the voice of wood and plaster straining.