“Just one minute,” Ernst heard her say as the door swung shut.

A momentary silence was followed by muffled shouts, a cry of terror, and then two gunshots. Ernst started forward, but then held back. Did he really want to see? He remembered the eight legs springing from her back and decided he didn’t.

Frantic fingers fumbled with the inner handle, and then the door was yanked inward to reveal…

Loremaster Slootjes stood framed in the doorway, eyes wide, mouth agape, but his sockets were filled with black wriggling things, their legs raking his eyelids. They filled his mouth as well. His throat worked but only faint, strangled sounds emerged. He swayed, clutched frantically at the door frame, then fell back into the room as the door slammed shut again.

Ernst leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He hadn’t known what to expect, but he hadn’t been prepared for that.

The archives room quieted after a while, then the door opened and the girl, Ellie, stepped out.

“Problem solved,” she said, speaking as if she had just adjusted a crooked curtain.

She passed Ernst and ascended the steps.

“The gunshots?”

“The shots went into the floor,” she said without looking back. “No harm done.”

Ernst started to follow her, then stepped back to the archives door for a look—out of curiosity, certainly, but also to assess how much of a cleanup would be required. He had expected blood but saw not a drop. His attention was drawn to the shape on the floor.

At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at, then noticed with a start that the disarrayed heap of clothing contained skin and had a human face—Slootjes’s—though with hollow eye sockets and an empty, gaping mouth devoid of teeth and tongue. It resembled a human skin suit filled with a jumble of disconnected bones. Ernst had never seen anything like it and had no desire to see its like again.

When he reached the main floor the girl was nowhere in sight. From the front door he spotted her walking down the steps toward an older woman who could have been her mother. They linked arms and walked back up toward Allen Street.

BARBARA

“What did you do in there?” I asked as we retraced our earlier path.

I felt, as her mother, I should know what my teenage daughter was doing in a strange building in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“Nothing important. What is important is that now I’m released. No obligations. We can go where we want.”

Could we? Really?

I nodded toward her back where those horrid little things clustered. “What about…you know?”

“They’re content to be with me.”

I experienced a strange, floating sensation, a feeling of unreality. Was this surreality our new everyday reality, Ellie and I? I surrendered to it. At least we were together.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I want to go see Mister Hill.”

“Who’s Mister Hill?”

“The man who carried me from the park last December when the Sheep Meadow signal triggered my…changes.”