Why would God create these people and weave the tangled thread of madness into their lives? Make it so the only life they could have was one of constant darkness? My firm idea of God as ultimately good, the kind God who’d rescued me in my childhood, began to slip. A sense of something in a minor key wove through this place, and I heard not a single note of hope on the air. Felt no rescuing presence in the dark.

Why, God? Why come into the darkness then, in that larder, and not here and now?

As I peered into their faces, the only answer that occurred to me was, I must have imagined it. I’d simply made it up in childish desperation.

My breath shuddered, air coming thin and meager. I couldn’t bear the magnitude of that possibility, of the God I so dearly loved not truly existing, so I shoved it away and refocused on the search.

Near the top of the tower my head grew light and airy, moist wind whipping in from the moors and stealing beneath my bulky uniform, chilling my clammy skin. It wasn’t right, this tower. My being here. None of it. And now I understood why. These were things I wasn’t meant to see—things most human hearts could not handle. Mine included.

I forced myself, even as I trembled and grasped the bars, to look into every face. Every stare that was turned out at me, and those still sleeping on the mats. There was no one familiar. No one.

Thank goodness.

Then a low groan sounded above me. A large metal door, I thought at first, but no, it was a voice. A human voice. It banished any desire I might have had to reach the pinnacle of that tower, for the noise vibrated like the roar of a beast. One I did not wish to meet.

Nearly falling back down those stairs in my haste to escape, I was soon standing outside, gulping lungfuls of fresh, clean air. How good the outdoors felt now, despite the chilly darkness just beyond the little glow of my candle. I leaned heavily on the wall, my heartbeat slowing with each deep breath.

Hand feeling along the fence to steady my steps, I held out the candle and made my way back toward the laundry and the main building. Yet when I’d crossed half the blue-black yard, there was another light. It glimmered and flickered through the knotholes of the fence.