I smoothed away some flyaways that had escaped my topknot as I took a slow step toward the couch. Careful not to make any noise as I walked across the dark wood floor, I noticed a tumbleweed of dog hair from Bucky and realized I hadn’t heard or seen the dog. Usually he at least gave a cursory bark when people knocked at the door.

Swallowing hard, trying not to think that something terrible had happened to him—that maybe he was at the bottom of the pit—I approached the back of the couch.

Liz lay in a prone position, wearing only a men’s nightshirt and underwear. Her hands were clasped across her stomach, as though folded in prayer. Her dark hair was splayed out around her like a fan, her red painted toes crossed. She looked like a wax figure, a doll from Madame Tussauds. Like I could reach out and touch her cheek and have my finger go all the way through her jaw and brush against her teeth. Or whatever was left of them.

I shuddered as I thought of her skin softening to butter, melting down her face, the way she appeared to me that night in her backyard.

This is Liz. Your friend. She needs you. She deserves your help.

I steadied my breath as I tiptoed across from her, watching her chest rising and falling rapidly, like she had just finished the Chicago Marathon. I waited for it to stop, thinking she was having some awful nightmare, but it didn’t. I looked down at my Apple Watch and timed her breath.

Forty-two breaths per minute.

I wasn’t sure what the range of normal was, but that couldn’t be it.

“Liz?” I whispered. When she didn’t flinch or move, I said her name again, a bit louder. Again, nothing.

Heart pounding, I took a step forward, even though every fiber of my being told me to run. To go back to Mark and round up the children. To drive as far away from Winchester as we could in one night.

I stood directly over her, my body inches from hers. She could have easily shot out an arm and grabbed me. I braced myself for her to rouse, but she just kept panting. The deep whooshing of her breath was like a white noise machine. As I inhaled, I noticed a rotten, dark smell coming from her body.

Cloyingly sweet, mixed with damp earth. That was the phrase that I had heard a podcaster use to describe how John Wayne Gacy’s house had smelled. And he had more than twenty corpses in his crawl space, decaying.