Corbin felt cold. Sweat drops studded Umar’s face. His lips curled open, a skeleton’s grin. Shadows deepened in the hollows of his cheeks. Flared nostrils expelled steam. Corbin had seen Umar move through men like wheat, but turning his hand a few degrees clockwise seemed to break him.

The latch clicked open. The light above the door went red.

Umar sagged.

Frost covered the doors and walls. Corbin shivered, not just from the cold. “Open,” Umar told him.

He should not. Whatever was inside this room, it was bigger than Corbin Rafferty. But he’d come this far when he should have turned back at every step. And he knew no other way to hurt Her.

He opened the door.

Inside was more a closet than a room. A single table occupied most of the space, surrounded by a glowing silver circle on the concrete floor. A folded jacket and slacks lay on the table, and worn brown leather shoes. Red suspenders coiled like snakes atop the clothes. Beside them stood a steel box.

Corbin pointed, mutely, to the circle.

“It will not hurt you,” Umar said.

Corbin stepped across, as if diving into the ocean on a winter day. He did not die. He felt nothing, in fact.

“Bring me the box.”

“What’s inside?”

“Bring it to me.”

Corbin touched the box, found it cool. Lifted the latch. Packing immaterial swathed the inside, viscous and opaque. He reached into the immaterial and felt a pitted surface like dried, bleached wood. His fingertips traced a dome larger than two big fists pressed together, and ridged at the front, with two large holes and a third triangular gap beneath them. Many-voiced incoherent whispers filled his ears.

Wind whistled through bare grass on a stony moor. Sirens wailed.

He lifted the skull from the box.

Silver lines crossed and recrossed the bone, and cut his eyes like knives. They moved as he watched. Turned. Danced.

The skull weighed nothing in his hand. It grew, filling the closet cell though somehow it still fit in Corbin’s hand. Bone bowed out the concrete walls. Corbin stared into the gulf of its eye socket. At that bottomless pit’s bottom, he saw a glint of fire. He could fall into the skull, burning like priests said rocks burned as they fell from space, to become the fire there himself.

“Return the skull to the box,” Umar said. “And close the box. Bring both to me.”

Given the choice between nameless dread and simple obedience, Corbin’s body chose the latter.

He dropped the skull, or tried. It stuck to his hand. He must have been too afraid to let it go. That had to be the reason. But at last the skull slipped from his palm into the packing shadows, and the box snapped shut. Corbin must have closed it. The evidence locker sub-basement felt too still, too quiet.