That third cellar door is made of thick wood, heavy oak with huge metal hinges. I don’t know why it’s so thick and heavy, strong enough to hold against almost anything that might try to break it down. Maybe it’s just because that was the way some doors were built three centuries ago. A lot stronger than the new door at the top of the creaky cellar stairs.

Had I locked that new door down into the cellar? For some reason the thought of it being unlocked made me feel panicked. No, I’d locked it. I’d done that first, even before latching the windows when we’d taken Bootsie to the vet.

When I was little and just visiting Aunt Lyssa, not actually living in the house, I would scare myself by thinking about how that third door in the cellar used to lead into the tunnels. It was kept locked to keep people from going in and getting lost or maybe buried in a cave-in, because some of those tunnels have become unstable with all the houses and roads built over them now. Everyone in Providence has heard about the tunnels and the caves. Most people have never seen them. Some think that they are just a myth. But I grew up being told stories about them and I’ve done research in the library, and I know they’re real. Some of the tunnels and caves were used by abolitionists back in the nineteenth century to hide the runaway slaves who were following the Undergound Railroad north. But they weren’t dug then. They are much, much older than that. They’re as ancient as one of those nameless things that HPL imagined lurking in the dark, crawling through those tunnels, pushing its way through our creaky old door, coming up the steps one by one. . . .

I tried to keep from thinking about those caves, dark, secret places where almost anything could live. Of course, that is when I finally did fall asleep.

Except I wasn’t asleep, or at least I didn’t think I was. I just closed my eyes and opened them again. And when I did, I could see myself. I watched myself get up, put on my robe, and go downstairs. I watched my hand reach out to unlock and then open the cellar door. The stairs creaked under my feet, so loud that I was sure everyone in the house—and everything hiding at the bottom of the stairs—could hear.

But it wasn’t just the stairs that I heard. I also heard something else, something calling me. It was a whispering voice, a voice so soft that it might have just been my imagination, if I hadn’t felt it pulling me with a force I couldn’t resist, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.