Solomon found his way there, passing three other children on the way. He came to a closed door next to a back pantry. Solomon heard the unmistakable clinking of a chain, and the creak of a bedspring. A sound he thought was a voice let loose a startling CAW, but he realized it was one of the crows on the laundry line outside. He was in that back part of the house now.

The door opened outward. It was more of a storage room than a bedroom, but inside there was a bed, set against the far wall, upon which a thin mattress lay with no bedclothes. Upon the mattress lay a small body, a boy, turned toward the back wall. Medium-weight chains ran from padlocked loops around the iron bed-frame rails to manacles around the boy’s wrists and ankles. Blood stained the foot of the mattress from his apparent struggles against the ankle cuffs, his skin there raw, his feet swollen to a man’s size.

The sight of the manacles set Solomon’s mind racing. They looked like slave chains from a century ago.

He noticed now that the air inside the windowless room was different. There was a changed atmosphere inside here altogether, like an airplane cabin that had been depressurized. He heard a dull, distant sound that was a cross between ringing and roaring, similar to what he heard after a long afternoon training at the FBI Academy shooting range. But it was more than that. He felt disoriented, light-headed. If his brain were a radio, he’d suspect its reception was somehow being jammed.

All this was forgotten when the boy turned to him. The chains rubbed against the bed frame, iron against iron, and the shirtless boy raised his head slightly, fixing his eyes on Solomon. His eyes. They were steely, almost silver, maybe blue. And wide with madness. The young boy’s face was twisted and contorted like an old leather glove worn by a too-large hand. Solomon trembled.

The boy’s mouth opened, and stayed open, on the verge of speech, for what seemed a long time. Just when Solomon believed no sound would come out of it, his dry lips spoke.

“Blackwood.”

The voice was faraway, hushed, rawed by many days of mad bellowing. Solomon was shaken, breathing fast and in distress at the sight of this ill boy. Blackwood? Maybe he had heard the word wrong.

The boy’s eyes bored into him. Solomon recalled the tales his grandfather used to tell, growing up in Illinois, about sailors and merchant mariners he had known in his years at sea who had explored uncharted islands and were lured by exotic women and promises of wealth and magic, only to get mixed up in dark rites. In one awful tale, he and his crew had to leave behind a cabinmate who had attacked them in the night after becoming possessed by a demon.