Deep within the fifth hole, I strike again. There’s something here: a hardness in the soil. My hands scrabble at the grime, pushing it away, until I am staring at two sockets in a dirt-caked, tawny skull.

Dusk has settled by the time I’ve uncovered the entire skeleton, careful not to disrupt its position. Forgoing the shovel, I dig with a small trowel the rest of the way, then use a brush to expose the bones.

Calling forth what I can remember from the forensic anthropology course I took in grad school, I examine the pelvis; the wider subpubic angle and concavity, together with a sharp ridge down the ischiopubic ramus and a ventral arc, identify the skeleton as female. Based on the size and growth of the bones, it is clearly a young girl, prepubescent, perhaps twelve or thirteen.

It is more difficult to be clinical as I examine the skull by the diffuse moonlight and failing sun that dwindles beneath the horizon. The left socket has been cracked open, a gaping hole, and around it the skull is fractured with radial cracks splintering off from the site of impact. I close my eyes and see her eye bursting like a cherry tomato beneath the bludgeoning stone. I open them and stare into the skull’s dark sockets, and think of the vague black pits of his eyes.

I fill in the holes, close Constance back into her bed of dirt; it doesn’t seem right to disturb her remains any further. I will not document this find. She isn’t an artifact to me—not when I’ve seen her running down the hallways, vibrant, full of life.

Whippoorwills cackle with derangement at midnight, when I am tired and aching from my dig, but I can’t sleep for listening to them. They call their names again and again, unable to stop the incessant echo affirming their identity. Doesn’t it seem as if the night, of all times, with its lonesome mystery, is when we desperately repeat our names into the abyss, hoping to come out the same person by morning?

The knowledge that Julian killed, kills, will kill Constance—and others—eats away at me. That he can kill through the span of time. That he can hurt me, even now, even though he isn’t yet born.

My mother already knows something is wrong, even if she doesn’t know what. Maybe I should tell her. She’ll believe me. She won’t tell me I’m crazy.

But what exactly will she do? It will only disturb her.

I need to understand. Maybe if I can talk to Julian, I can find out why he is the way he is, and I can stop him from ever turning out this way. But I’m not my mother; I cannot call up echoes at whim. I need help.

My mother taught me a ritual designed to, in her words, “commune with the spirit world.” It must be done in the dark of a basement, with a mirror and a candle. It’s not exactly the spirit world I’m looking for, but it will have to do; if anything can summon Julian, bring him into the present here with me, perhaps it is this.