Margot shook her head to clear the image and then crossed the patchy grass toward the sheds. One of the doors had been left ajar. The metal rang out with high, straining wails as the wind pulled it back and forth an inch at a time like a pendulum.

She tried the left-hand shed, putting her shoulder into the door to gain access. Inside was dim and musty and smelled like earth. Margot squinted against the poor light. She hadn’t brought her phone, she realized. It would still be in the bathroom, tucked among the clothes she’d changed out of.

She’d promised herself she would be more careful about where and how she spent time around the building, but she was already slipping up, leaving her phone behind and herself caught in the dark.

Still, enough light came through the door that she could make out a tumble of old objects strewn about the place: power tools to her left; old chairs and doorframes, cracked beyond repair; gardening tools caked in rust.

And near the rear of the shed, she caught sight of the stepladder.

Margot stretched to step over a stack of old garden pots. Faintly, she could hear the other shed’s door creaking. Inside her own metal echo chamber, the noise sounded distorted. Like a woman releasing low, wrenching wails.

Chills prickled over Margot’s skin. She kept her head down to avoid a row of gardening tools hung from the ceiling. As she eased around an old rocking chair, she saw a small, strange scuff mark in the dust-laden floor.

It looked strangely like a footprint.

Not a shoe mark, though; she could see clear outlines for the toes and the curving hollow where the arch belonged. This person had been barefoot.

Barefoot in a shed, in the middle of a field.

Margot crouched, squinting as she traced the outline. It was large. A man’s foot, she thought. The first toe’s imprint was bigger than her thumb. It was smudged around the edges, though, blurring forward, as though the owner had been dragging his feet while walking.

She tried to guess whether it was fresh or perhaps years old, but the light was too poor. She traced one finger over the impression and it came up smeared in dust.

The other shed’s door continued to move, scraping, wailing, and it really, truly did sound like a woman crying. Not just sobs, though, but wails, deep and guttural and howling, raw enough to set flame to Margot’s nerves, harsh enough to ache in her teeth.

It’s growing louder, isn’t it?

Still crouched by the footprint, Margot held her breath, listening. The wind teased at the edges of her hearing as it whistled through narrow gaps in the shed’s metal plating. The maple branches scraped across the shed’s walls and ceilings. They sounded like fingertips dragging across the surface, asking to be let in.