Far too belatedly I wondered whether his experiences with Bella had left him more sensitive than me, more alert to anything that might be at large in the abandoned hotel. I made my way along the corridor as fast as he seemed capable of keeping up. Doors crept wide to greet us, or their shadows did, and blotches crawled across the framed prints between the rooms, stains that were the shadows of the frames. Every time we passed a room, faces glided alongside us to peer out of the dark. I thought the repeated sight of our reflections would prompt Roy to utter his formula again – his spell, as I very much preferred not to think of it – but he stayed silent apart from his dogged breaths all the way along the corridor. I made space for him in the doorway of the final left-hand room and shone the flashlight in.

The quilt on the double bed was still raised like a burrow. As the beam found it, the elongated hump stirred as though its denizen was about to rear up or squirm forth. Surely this was just a trick of light and shadow. Dim faces wormed out of the dark as we ventured into the room, but they were our own. We hadn’t reached the bed when Roy halted, jerking up his free hand as if to fend off something he’d seen or otherwise sensed. I wasn’t sure he’d simply wanted to detain me until he said “Must be someone homeless, dad.”

“Shall we make certain?”

“We shouldn’t wake them.” As I took a step forward, since he refused to move, he muttered “You wouldn’t like it.”

When I kept on he aimed his flashlight at the bed to add to mine, revealing how the burrow had begun to quiver with apparent eagerness, or its shadow had. He stayed between the doorway and the bed as I reached the open end of the burrow. I sent the flashlight beam in, and a dark shape slithered to huddle in the depths. It was yet another shadow, and I leaned closer to thrust the phone into the mouth of the burrow, which smelled of musty fabric. It showed me no more than I’d already seen. “They aren’t there,” I complained.

“They must have found somewhere better. Wouldn’t be hard.”

I meant the jars of earth. I gave the empty tunnel in the quilt a last frustrated look and straightened up, imitated by a figure like a dimly illuminated specimen in a glass case. “Unless they’re somewhere else in the building,” I said.

“They can’t be. You can see from their footprints they went out.”

How could I have suggested that the absence of a trail was no proof? Roy still had homelessness in mind, which wasn’t relevant in any sense I would be able to explain. “Can we go now?” he said.