It stung like jumping into a deep lake at midnight in February. The shadow clung to me, sliding across the surface of my eyes, dragging itself over my skin. Whispers started in one ear and finished in the other, too many of them, fading in and out, incomprehensible. I held out my hands and walked toward the basement door. My knees knocked into a stack of caskets, sending the tower crashing, lids flying open. I dropped to the floor, dodging corpses, digging my fingernails into the carpet fibers, tracking the familiar geometric patterns of my childhood. I followed its diamond floral maze to the back wall, sliding my fingers along the chair rail, searching for the door.

I found it. When I pulled it open, the whispers turned to moans.

Clinging to the banister, I felt the edge of each splintered step with my toes.

Halfway down, the thick cloud broke. Above my head, a cumulous of shadow roiled. I thundered down the remaining stairs.

“Dan?”

He wasn’t there. Alan, Mr. Brunner, and the young girl were lined up on tables: their faces concave, drained, covered in black ash. I walked over to the girl. No one would ever recognize her now. It was as if her face had been dead weeks before the rest of her. I turned, gagging.

There. The window of the walk-in freezer gleamed black, opaque as a submarine porthole. Dan’s face pressed against the glass. The skin around his eyes was torn apart by erupting fonts of shadow, his eyelids flayed back. His jaw hung open, askew.

I retched. Fell to my knees and puked. Choking, coughing up gobs of tar. Moans rolled out of me, building deep within my center, rattling my bones. I pushed myself back from the caustic puddle, away from the window. The back of my head banged against the edge of Mr. Brunner’s steel table.

Mr. Brunner? I forgot to tell The Village.

The cloud on the stairs had risen further, concentrating itself in the highest reaches of the house. I pressed through the thickness of it, feeling cold fingers rake my skin, malevolent hissing in my ears.

The headlights hit me like a hurricane wave. I swam through the light and climbed in the van.

A mile back and too late again.

The Village seethed, a pit of hell. Each lost in their own shadow world, they ripped each other apart—some already bursting at the face, filling the air with spawning smoke.

I took a long roll of plastic wrap from the kitchen.

I held their frail frames as they ranted nonsense and I wrapped their heads in plastic, sealing in the darkness, stemming the flow of shadow. Their eyes pressed against the clear film, rolling in their sockets, spilling ink into the folds of membrane.

I wrapped them up and zipped them into my black bags, dragging them to the clinic, piling them up in a squirming heap.