“Who dares touch me?” he shouted. “I am your keeper!”

The crowd of shadows was shuffling forward now. They surrounded him with their muddy bodies and then seized him and began to pull him and push him, shoving him from one side of their tight circle to the other. They were hungry, like a pack of wild animals. Something had been unleashed. The penitents swarmed around him, thick and heavy with rot and grime, blocking him from sight. Josiah squealed through his torn throat. As his screams turned to liquid burbling, Amy was glad she couldn’t see the rest.

She and Basil turned to leave, but a cluster of penitents stood in the way, as still as stones. “Why aren’t they moving?” Basil whispered.

“I don’t know,” Amy whispered back. “Head left.”

They edged to the left, toward the Bright and Shining Path, but more penitents blocked their passage. It didn’t make sense, Amy thought. She had set them free. She had commuted their sentences.

“What do they want?” Basil asked.

Before she could answer, the penitents were on them, crashing over them like a tide, sending Basil and Amy tossing and turning, submerged in their filthy stench, completely at the mercy of the forces that bore them away. Amy’s screams were cut off as she drowned in their attack. The penitents didn’t want anything; they were simply bound to the same cycle that had governed their spirits for more than a century. This was who they were. This was what they did.

Basil tried to reach her but was caught up in the mass and swept away. The beam of his flashlight jogged and flashed across the ceiling as he was buried beneath the onslaught.

It was the chair again. They were taking her to the chair. Amy struggled, but their hands were iron bands, caked with ice and freezing mud, lifting her from the floor, raising her kicking and thrashing over their heads. She saw the ceiling spiraling above as she was borne across the floor, catching glimpses in the fragmented light from the flashlight. She could feel herself suddenly dropped, lowered toward a dimly glimpsed wardrobe lying open on the floor like a coffin.

“I’m not going to fit,” Amy’s mind gibbered to itself as she was pressed into the tight opening. “I’m not going to fit. I’m not going to fit … ”