Footsteps on stone. Moving away. Fading away.

Bernard started screaming. “No! Don’t leave! Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me! Please!” Babbling in a high, wild, raggedy voice that hardly seemed to belong to him. “Come back! Please! Please!”

He stopped. Lay shivering, his face contorted as he willed the speaker to return, as he strained and strained to hear.

He heard.

Clank, rattle, creak, thud. The door opening, closing.

And then silence.

“Don’t leave me,” he murmured. “Father.”

And he lay weeping in the dark alone.

10

At that moment, Richard Storm suddenly realized he had arrived.

He was standing in the shadow of the abbey wall, the clouds lowering. He was standing amidst slanting headstones worn faceless with weather and time. The afternoon was roiling, black. The wind was damp and biting. Lightning dashed fiery from the meridian to the vanishing point, and thunder followed hard on, loud, enormous. Around him, broken steles lay crushed upon the grass. A single crypt sat crumbling. The streaking shadows on the ruined wedge of wall made it seem animate, wraith-washed.

He had come upon the living soundstage of his imagination.

He remembered a ghost story he had heard once. A woman dreams she’s standing outside a house. Every night, in her sleep, she’s there, staring at this same house. She becomes so troubled by the dream she decides to take a vacation. Driving into the countryside, she comes upon the very house of her dreams. Unable to resist, she gets out of her car and approaches. The front door opens. A butler stands in her way.

“This house,” the woman says. “I have to see inside this house.”

“Of course, madam,” says the butler. “But I should warn you: the house is haunted.”

“Haunted?” says the woman. “Haunted by whom?”

And the butler replies, “By you.”

Storm looked around him at the ruins of Belham Abbey.

How often, he wondered, had he had put this place on film? Some place like this. He couldn’t count how many times he had dreamed it up as if new, filled it with fresh vampires and ghouls and monsters. Spectre featured a ruined church like this one. So had Castle Misery. So had Hellfire. But it wasn’t until he had come to stand here that he fully understood that they had all been this, this very site.

Because this was the setting of “Black Annie,” which he had read when he was ten years old. Which had made him what he was.