A skeleton key. I jiggled it around in the rusty old lock, and after several jerks and a metallic squeak, it gave way. It wasn’t the key that was meant to fit here, but it was enough to release the ancient mechanism. I pulled the door and it groaned, shrieking its protest into the night.

I froze. The whole place must have heard.

Heart galloping, I shot a glance at the main building. A light appeared inside the second-story window of the wards—infirmary and epileptic—flickering there for some moments. I shoved my candle inside the cracked-open tower door to hide it and waited until the glow left the upper window. My left arm holding the candle began to shake. I couldn’t drop it—the darkness would consume me, and I’d never find my way back.

Deep breath. Slow movements. I shifted my slender frame through the narrowly opened doorway and left it open so the squeal wouldn’t announce my intrusion again when I left. I edged deeper into the musty space and blinked, willing my eyes to adjust to the dimness. Rows of dim gaslights illuminated stone and emptiness, small puddles of moisture. There was nothing here—no sign of life.

A few more blinks, my eyes adjusted, and I found I was wrong. Deep in the shadows, three faces stared out at me from behind the iron bars of a cell, the whites of their eyes illuminated by the bouncing light of my flame as I drew near. A few more stirred behind, rising up to sitting positions on pallets. They moved about and simply stared at me, watching with mild surprise from their side of the bars just as I did from mine. “Hello. I’m . . . I’m looking for a woman. A patient here. What are your names?”

Blank stares.

“Rosamond? Rosamond Swansea?” I scanned each gritty, sun-starved face, skin laid down directly over bones. Eyes framed by red circles peered back at me, staring as if they didn’t understand.

None of the faces looked familiar.

I left that cell and walked toward another, voicing the same name. No response, so I started up the cracked stone steps that twisted deeper into the heights of the old tower, taking me into the shadows above. I stopped at each cell, peering in and repeating the name.

I paused a few times, staggering under the weight of what I was seeing. Flesh and hair and features—humanity, faces, and forgotten names, with histories and talents and beating hearts that tied them still to this earth. Yet they were no longer a part of it.