“Long hair. Brown hair, with a little bit of red in it—not half so red as yours, I don’t suppose. But like this…” She pulled a swatch of something stringy and russet colored out of her pocket and held it up to the lantern so the boys could get a gander at it. “I found this nearby. Lots of it, not just this little lock. It’s scattered around the scene. I don’t mind telling you, I took my time here. It’s nasty as can be, but it got me thinking.”

Houjin’s eyes narrowed. “You know what did this, don’t you, Miss Angeline? You don’t know the word inexplicable, but you know what did this.”

“I have an idea, and it’s a strange one—but it’s the only one I’ve got that makes any sense. Come along, boys. I think you’ve seen enough. Let’s go to the Sizemore House and down someplace safer, and then I’ll tell you about my thoughts.”

Chapter 15

Fifteen

They skulked together, guided by their lone lantern. They needed it more and more, and Houjin would’ve struck up another if Angeline hadn’t insisted they shouldn’t. Instead, she recommended that the boys take hold of one another’s shirts, and told Houjin to grasp her hair.

“Don’t tug it—I’m trusting you, Huey. But we need to stay close,” she said in her commanding, quiet voice. “And we should use as little light as we can get away with. Night’s falling. We don’t want to fall with it.”

All in a row, Rector feeling immensely undignified, they escaped the last few blocks of the rich men’s houses and ripped-apart rotters. Angeline knew precisely where she was going, and she brought them to the Sizemore House before the sun was altogether gone behind the wall. The house loomed big and dilapidated, empty and waiting. The front porch sagged, and the roof sagged, too. It looked like a balloon without enough air in it.

“Will it fall down on us?” he asked Zeke, because he was staring at the back of Zeke’s head.

“No.”

“Who was Sizemore?” he asked. He liked the sound of their voices; the darkness made him lonely.

“I don’t know,” Zeke told him. “And shush. We’ll be downstairs in a minute.”

By downstairs, Zeke meant the root cellar. Around the back and through a pair of giant wood doors set into the ground, the quartet descended into a space even darker than the one they were leaving—but the tunnels weren’t choked with Blight, they were only tainted with it. The lantern did good work as soon as those doors were shut overhead. The nervous explorers sighed with relief, but they couldn’t take off the masks.

“It looks clear down here,” Rector protested. “I don’t see any gas.”