Basil seized it and clicked it on. A powerful beam of white light lanced out.

“You are my new superhero,” he said to Amy. “Now come on, we have to find the others.”

Basil swept his light across Bedrooms.

“Stop!” Amy shouted.

It was too late. The arc of the beam showed what was around them. The filthy ghosts, hundreds of them, scattered through the furniture. Everywhere Basil’s light landed were more penitents, waiting for them with infinite patience, surrounding them, filling the Showroom floor.

Amy remembered being grabbed and carried off to her chair, and a spear of pure terror struck her spine, rooting her to the ground. Hundreds of these un-men with their smudged faces encircled them, motionless, not breathing, corpse still, dead silent. Then a disturbance came from somewhere within their mass—a cluster of figures shuffled to one side, making way for someone bubbling up within their ranks. Finally the figure emerged from the colorless crowd of the dead: Carl, or rather Warden Josiah Worth, dabbing a fabric sample at his lips, his face a twisted leer of pure hatred.

15: Littabod

Amy’s first instinct was to switch off her light, tuck her head under her arms like a little girl, and make them go away. As if they were merely Ruth Anne’s Creepy Crawlies. If she didn’t see them, they wouldn’t see her. But she knew it was too late for that. She couldn’t hide anymore. They were real. So she forced herself to look.

She saw a gallery of rotten and humiliated flesh. Arms hung at obscene angles, legs were twisted and shattered at the knee, spines gnarled and bent, their rags and flesh hanging in tatters, caked with reeking mud. She couldn’t take her eyes off them.

“Work burns the sickness from a man’s mind,” Warden Worth proclaimed. “It is the philosopher’s stone that transmutes the base metal of deviancy into the pure gold of obedience.”

It was the same kind of hellfire and brimstone sermon as before—only this time Amy noticed something wrong with Josiah’s voice. It sounded far away, as if she and Basil were listening over a bad phone connection. Even worse, the sounds of his speech were out of sync with the movement of his lips. He looked like a character in a badly dubbed movie.

“I think we can run for it,” Amy whispered to Basil. “Over on the left.”

He didn’t answer. She turned and saw that his skin was greasy with cold sweat, and he was muttering under his breath.

“My children,” said the warden, smiling at them. “The coward and the fool. What a disappointment that the two of you have not yet grasped my lesson. But I am a tireless instructor, and now you shall join your fellows in my mill where we will grind your minds into a shape more pleasing.”

“Your mill is closed,” Amy said. “It doesn’t exist anymore.”