“Hell’s going on down there?” Orr wanted to know.

The bio-signs from the suits were reading agitation and fear now, stress: rapid heartbeats, increased respiration, rising blood pressure.

Bell tried to speak, but what came out was a choking sound. “Something…there’s something here with us.”

“Be careful,” Javonivic said, but then she had to say something.

“Pan around,” Orr told them.

They did and there was that shape again. Video caught it, lost it, then captured it again. The image shook as the divers tried to bring it into focus.

Javy saw it.

Her own vital signs went through the roof.

A little girl.

Incredibly, impossibly, a little girl was standing there, floating in the murk. She was maybe eight or nine, wearing the ragged, gray Halloween costume of a nurse with a blue cape, her scarlet hair flowing around her in the current like kelp. She was terribly pale and her eyes were like black holes drilled into her face. She was smiling and there was something about that smile that was simply obscene. Macabre.

“Jesus H. Christ…you seeing this?” Bell wanted to know.

“I see it,” Javonivic admitted. “She’s just floating there.”

Like a corpse, she was going to add but didn’t dare. The girl looked like flesh and blood, but cadaverous, eyes black and depthless. Maybe not just a little girl, but a little girl that had died and brought back with her all the hideous secrets from beyond the grave.

“Murphy?” Bell said. “You see that?”

His voice was breathy and dry. “Yeah…yeah, I see it, all right.”

The girl floated there. She held out her pallid arms and opened her hands like she wanted something. Her mouth opened and dozens of those bioluminescent squid came darting out in a cloud, more and more of them. And then a column of rising bubbles erupted around her. And when they were gone, so was she.

“Holy shit,” Bell said. “You people see that?”

“Yes,” Javonivic said, unable to even imagine how absolutely horrifying it all must have been in the city. Her skin was crawling in frigid waves.

There was silence for a time. The divers panned their lights about, but there was nothing to see. Nothing but that chamber and the silt and the moving shadows.

Bell: “Murph? Murph? You okay?”

Murphy: “Yeah, I…yeah.”

Bell: “What is it?”

Murphy: “That girl…I know her. That was the girl who disappeared in Haymarket that Halloween. Sarah Burges. It was her, it was really her.”

That’s his deepest fear, Javy thought. Something that terrified him so much that he repressed it like I did with Regina. The city knows it.

“All right, that’s enough,” Orr said, sounding pissed off, scared, too many things at the same time. “Pack it in. Proceed and plant your charges.”