Once again I felt afraid that he might be more sensitive than I was to presences in the dark. If I made him confront them, how might that harm him? My duty was to protect him, and I mustn’t risk failing out of confusion. “If you think we should,” I said.

He swung his flashlight towards the corridor at once, and a mass of blackness dodged aside beyond the doorway. He was making me more nervous than I already was, and I hurried after him, trying not to glance into the rooms we passed, where I glimpsed faintly luminous heads bobbing in the depths. As we approached the stairs the flashlight beams strayed into the opposite corridor, and I was afraid that they might rouse something in the dark – that the ill-defined activity at the limit of the light would resolve itself into a crowd of faces that swelled to fill the passage before swarming out of it to overwhelm us. Was I sharing Roy’s perceptions or at least a hint of them? If this was in any way akin to his experience, I felt more desperate than ever to rescue him.

Nothing but jittery light had appeared in the corridor by the time we reached the stairs. As I stumbled down after Roy, resisting an urge to take more than one stair at a time, the walls staggered around us as if they were enacting their dilapidation. The middle floor yawned on both sides of us, and I didn’t risk sending any light into the blackness. The last flights of stairs felt as insecure as the reeling light made the walls look, and the lobby floor didn’t feel much solider. I was about to follow Roy out of the hotel when he peered at the footmarks leading to the reception counter and then raised his flashlight along with his gaze. “Is that what you were looking for, dad?”

I saw a blackened slab propped on the chair behind the counter, and then I recognised the visitors’ book. “That wasn’t there when we came in,” I said.

“Must have been. We missed it, that’s all.”

Arguing was less important than showing him the truth. I had to hold my light close to the encrusted counter before I could locate a flap to lift. When I threw it back, fallen plaster rumbled across the rotting wood, and more of it thumped the carpet. As I grabbed the ledger the rickety chair gave a wakeful squeak. I retreated fast through the gap and opened the book on the counter. I was hoping I’d turned too many pages one-handed when I came to the last one that wasn’t blank. It bore just a single entry, not the list of occult names I’d seen. Turning back, I saw exactly what I feared. The preceding page had been torn out. “She—” I blurted.

“Who what, dad?”