Whatever was pulling Ruth Anne pulled harder, yanking her wrists from Amy’s grasp, dragging her deeper into the darkness. Amy wriggled forward but she wasn’t fast enough; she couldn’t keep up.

“Ruth Anne!” she yelled.

Her friend didn’t seem concerned at all. She was no longer resisting; she had stopped trying to fight back. “Don’t you worry,” Ruth Anne said. “If I can’t see them, they can’t see me.”

Then without hesitation she hooked her bony fingertips into her eye sockets and raked them down her face.

“No!” Amy screamed.

She grabbed her flashlight and aimed it into the crawl space but it was too late: Ruth Anne was gone. All that remained were bloody handprints on the drywall. And the sound of a lifeless corpse being pulled deeper into the store.

Ruth Anne had hugged her that morning when she thought she’d been fired. Snoopy was sitting on the sofa waiting for her to get home and watch TV. She hadn’t hesitated when Carl was hurting himself, she’d just stripped off her blouse and tried to stop the bleeding. Ruth Anne had been the best of them.

Something hardened inside Amy and she promised herself she would get the others out. All of them. It didn’t matter what tried to stop her or what she had to go through. She’d quit on enough things in her life—she wasn’t going to quit on this. Whatever had happened to Ruth Anne wasn’t going to happen to anyone else.

Amy hauled herself out of the hole, scraping the skin off her ribs as she went. She closed the supply closet door gently behind her and made her way through the back of house until she reached the swinging double doors that led to the café. She switched off the flashlight and pushed open one of the doors, slipping out onto the floor. In front of her, in the orange glow from the café windows on her right, Amy could make out the elevator and stairwell leading down to the Market Floor. Children’s was to her left, and she could see just enough of its shadowy shapes to navigate by.

Her guard was down, so when something moved to her right, Amy clicked on the flashlight and pointed it into the café. The first thing she saw was a man’s back. He was wearing a rough gray coat with wide stripes running across it. As she watched, the figure reached with both arms to his right and took an Arsle café chair from the man next to him. They held it by the legs, at chest height, and passed it along as though they were ferrying furniture out of a friend’s house. Then the man passed the chair to another man on his left, who passed it to another, and another, and another, all the way around the ring.