“Yours, too.” He grinned back, revealing his picket-straight, shell-white teeth. I half expected to see canines every time he flashed them, but no, they were ordinary and I was an imaginative old fool. This much was established.

“Mine, too, yes. I agree. Down the hall,” I directed, suddenly feeling odd about our lighthearted exchange. This wasn’t the place for it. Or maybe it was the best place for it, a feeble, mortal attempt to offset the terrible and unfathomable.

Every moment, I turned Ebenezer’s story over in the rear of my mind. Every moment, it played in the background of my everyday thoughts, my everyday actions. The sound he described, the floating boy, the stench . . .

That same stench rose as we slipped single file down the hall, toward Matthew’s bedroom. Much stronger than near the front of the store. “Last door on the right,” I said. I might not have bothered. He could’ve just followed the reek.

The floorboards creaked beneath our shoes, and they were spongy when we stepped on them, like they’d been waterlogged. But they had been, hadn’t they? If I believed Ebenezer at all, there’d been a great tide, flowing from the walls themselves, draining into nowhere. Lifting and drowning and killing.

I’d told him that I did believe. At the time, I’d meant it. In retrospect, I wasn’t so sure—but my heart went back and forth about it, seeking excuses and reasons, answers and logical explanations.

I found none. And I saw plenty of evidence to support the veracity of every frightful word he’d whispered in that courthouse room.

I followed Wolf down the dank hall, stinking of oceans and death; here we were, and this was the smell—just as Ebenezer described it—and the whole building was wet and cool, and the ceiling felt improbably low, and I could feel my heart hammering around in my chest because too much of it was true, too much already.

“Dear God Almighty,” gagged Wolf. He surrendered and whipped a handkerchief out of his pocket, and held it up over his nose. “It’s infinitely worse back here.”

If I’d had a handkerchief, I would have done the same. Matthew’s room was a wreck of soaked bedding, warped floors, peeling wallpaper, and moldering linens stained a bluish, greenish color.

I reached inside for a switch. There must be gas throughout the building—I was reasonably confident, for I knew there were lights in the store itself; but the place was too sodden, and the fixtures wouldn’t spark. No comforting illumination came to warm us, and we were left with the dingy murk that showed us almost nothing.