If something happened to me—if I slipped or got bit by a feral animal or stepped through loose floorboards—no one would know. I could lie here dead and undiscovered for who-knows-how-long, and James would surely think I’d left him once and for all. This realization paired with my quickly dying phone made it difficult to steady my beating heart. I resolved to look inside, then get the hell out.

I pushed the second door all the way open. It swung easily on its hinge, which wasn’t warped and rusted like the exterior door and instead seemed to have remained fairly dry and intact. Standing just inside the threshold, I moved my phone in an arc in front of my body to more closely look at what lay within. The room was small, perhaps ten by twelve, and the floor was packed dirt, the same as the rest. Inside were no crates, no tools, no old building fixtures. Nothing.

But the back wall—there seemed something different about it. Whereas the walls on either side of the room were brick, similar to the building’s exterior, the back wall was made of wood. Some shelves were affixed to the wall, like it had once been a built-in library or cupboard. I took a few steps closer, curious to see if there was anything on the shelves: old books or implements, any forgotten remnant of the past. Again, there was little of interest. Most of the shelves were warped and splintering, and a few had collapsed entirely and lay on the ground near the center of the room.

And yet, there was something odd about the arrangement. I couldn’t quite place my finger on it, so I stepped back and considered the wall of shelves as a whole. A memory of the mudlarking tour came back to me, Bachelor Alf’s eerie words: You are not searching for a thing so much as you are searching for an inconsistency of things, or an absence. I frowned, sure there was something strange about what I was seeing now. But what was it?

I noticed, with a start, that most of the fallen shelves had come from one section of the wall—the far left side. In this place, rather than being secured against the wall, most of the shelves had buckled and crumbled to the floor. I stepped closer, using the light to inspect the panel. Only one shelf on the left side of the wall remained in place, so I gripped it and wiggled it slightly; the shelf rattled easily in my hand, so loose that I felt sure I could yank it off without much difficulty. Why on earth would the left side of the wall have lost its shelves? It was as though these shelves weren’t installed correctly, or the structure behind it was inadequate—