Protagonists#

• Clement Scheidegger - FOC Representative, Mountaineer (Michalis)
• Narinder “Nari” Sodhi - Natural Sciences Student (Ioannis)
• Sofia Picado - Chemistry Student (Istvan)
• Susan Chen - History Student (Konstantina)
• Lillian Neill - Anthropology Lecturer (Tasos)

None of Us Are Who We Pretend to Be#

“What is your mother’s name? Susan. You wouldn’t want any accident to happen to Lee Min. And that beautiful restaurant in Boston.”

— Danny O’Bannion, over lobster and champagne at the Regatta

Summary#

The fall term opened on September the tenth, and Miskatonic University looked at the survivors of Cobb’s Corners the way a host looks at guests who have stained the good carpet. Whispers followed them down the corridors. Fingers pointed. The word drunkards floated up in their wake, and somewhere behind it, a crueler nickname — the Moonshine Five. In the Dean’s office they stood in a row beneath the gaze of Marinus Bricknell, who loved rules the way other men loved music, and who told them, in a voice stripped of every warm thing, that one more infraction would end them. The students who had come back wrong from the Green Mountains stood in that same room, and most of them did not care, and one of them — Roderick Block, the gentle giant of the gridiron — sat a full step apart from the rest, with the melancholy of a man who knows he is sitting with the wrong people and cannot say why.

Across campus, in an office that smelled of pipe tobacco and old money, the president of the university told Clement Scheidegger that his conduct had embarrassed the institution and that the arrangement with Federated Oil and Chemical was through. Clement told him, with the perfect courtesy of a Swiss mountaineer who has been told to descend a mountain he is already descending, that the company needed the university more than the university needed the company. He was barred from the campus before lunch.

In the quiet rooms of a boarding house shared with Professor Wilmarth, three old books lay open on a table, and in their margins the dead man’s pencil moved. They do not project. They take it out. They put it somewhere. And beside a sixteenth-century passage about witches and the dogs that know them: The dogs in Cobb’s Corners, they knew. They all died in one night. Robert Blaine had not been one of them. He had been reading, in the squalor of his attic, everything he could find about the things that had taken his friends — and the things had come through his window and made certain he would never finish the work.

A girl who read that the dogs know them went out and bought a dog. A gangster who had noticed his cousin no longer laughed like his cousin invited a history student to the tallest building in Arkham and explained, in the warm amber light of the Regatta, that she would now belong to him. A telephone rang in a professor’s parlor and a voice that was not quite a voice told a girl that none of them were who they pretended to be. And on a circled street name in a missing detective’s notepad, the trail led west, past the old cemetery, to a dark warehouse where a small brass key fitted a lock it had no business fitting — and where the dead man waiting for them on the floor was not the only one in the building.

• The three occult books from Blaine’s nightstand are read and shared: Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft, and Sinistrari’s De Demonialitate — each annotated in Blaine’s hand with desperate, half-legible marginalia.
• Blaine’s notes reveal he believed the things extract something from their victims rather than project consciousness; that they fear and are known by dogs; and that a Franciscan theologian in 1680 had described them with unsettling accuracy.
• The team concludes Blaine was investigating the creatures, not serving them — and that someone came through his window to stop him.
• The fall term opens; the returned students move through the halls in tight mechanical clusters, whispering falls silent whenever the investigators pass.
• Clement is summoned by President Harvey Wainscott and, refusing to be humiliated, asserts that FOC holds the leverage; he is barred from campus indefinitely.
• Dean Marinus Bricknell reprimands the expedition students in a room full of their body-snatched peers, warning that one more infraction means expulsion; he reveals Blaine was to be expelled regardless.
• Roderick Block sits apart from the changed students at meals and in the Dean’s office, visibly distressed; Nari passes him a phone number, but a hallucination of the tiger that took her fingers drives her off before she can reach him.
• Nari phones her father, Professor Harrold, begging him to confirm the call she made the night before the arrest; he refuses to believe her and accuses her of building an alibi for drunkenness.
• A distorted voice telephones Nari at her father’s house: None of us who came here are who we pretend to be — demanding a meeting at Hangman’s Hill at eleven tomorrow night, or the blood will be on her hands.
• Sofia buys a husky from a pet shop on Saulton Street, renames him Amigo, and lodges him with Clement — the books say the things are afraid of dogs, and the things can be smelled out.
• Clement and Lillian find Detective Bobby Colombo missing; on his desk, a notepad with Aylesbury Street circled — a lonely road past the old cemetery, beneath Hangman’s Hill.
• Susan meets Harry Higgins’ cousin, Danny O’Bannion, at the Regatta; over lobster and champagne he reveals he knows Higgins is no longer Higgins, and threatens her mother Lee Min and the family restaurant in Boston unless she becomes his informant inside the university.
• Using Amigo’s nose and the brass key lifted from Higgins’ bag, the group tracks Colombo’s scent to a derelict warehouse on Aylesbury Street; the key turns the lock.
• Inside: crates of dynamite, and the bound corpse of Bobby Colombo. As Amigo barks, a voice calls down from the catwalk above — Terrence Laslow, crying Get your guns — and then, to someone unseen: Gustav, get your gun.

What the Dead Man Knew#

They gathered in the rooms Clement had taken with Professor Wilmarth — a neutral ground, removed from the campus and its watching eyes — and spread the dead man’s books across the table.

Three volumes, all of them cracked at the spine, all of them marked with the same desperate pencil. Susan took the Blavatsky. Nari took the Scot. Sofia, because she could read Latin, took the Sinistrari. And then they sat with the door locked and the curtains drawn, the way all reading is done when the books are about you.

Isis Unveiled was the youngest of the three — 1877, twelve hundred pages, two volumes, the work of a Russian spiritualist who believed that beneath all the religions and all the sciences of the world there lay a single ancient secret doctrine, scattered and forgotten, which might be reconstructed by synthesis. It was vast, contradictory, and deranged. But in the margin of a passage about a man who might project his consciousness beyond his physical body and traverse space and time in the astral light, Blaine’s pencil had dug hard enough to tear the paper.

They do not project. They take it out. They put it somewhere.

Susan read the line aloud, and for a moment no one spoke. The sentence lay on the table between them like a piece of broken glass.

The Discovery of Witchcraft was older by three centuries — 1584, Reginald Scot of Scots Hall, Kent, writing in the early modern English of a man who had set out to prove that witches did not exist and, in the attempt, had accidentally compiled the richest catalogue of folk magic and country superstition ever printed in the language. Nari turned the pages slowly, parsing the antique orthography, and stopped where Scot, having insisted that witches were delusions or frauds, listed the beliefs of the credulous: that a witch cannot say the Lord’s Prayer without stumbling; that she casts no shadow in candlelight; that the dogs know her, and will bark at her where they would not bark at a Christian.

In the margin, in Blaine’s hand:

The dogs in Cobb’s Corners, they knew. They all died in one night.

They argued, briefly, about what he had meant. The dogs, or his friends? It was the dogs, they decided. The dogs had known. And so the dogs had been removed.

The third book was the smallest and the oldest. De Demonialitate — 1680, Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, a Franciscan friar and consultor to the Roman Inquisition — one hundred and fifty pages of Latin theology on a single, narrow, quietly deranged question: whether a demon, in the form of an incubus or succubus, can genuinely beget offspring with a human being. Sinistrari’s argument, translated and paraphrased by Sofia in a low voice at the table, was that the beings called incubi and succubi were not fallen angels at all. They were a separate order of creation — rational animals with bodies of a subtler, finer matter than human flesh, neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual, able to change their forms, to pass through matter, to become visible or invisible at will. Mortal, but very long-lived. Drawn to humans, reproductively and in some deeper way Sinistrari could not name. They wanted, above all, to be clothed in our flesh.

And beside the Latin passage where Sinistrari at last gave his conclusion — they are another kind, between man and angel, furnished with a subtle and ethereal body, which bears a peculiar appetite for human bodies, which, so to speak, desires to be clothed in our flesh — Blaine had written, in a hand that seemed shaken:

Yes. This. He knew. He knew in 1680.

They sat with the books open and the marginalia copied into their own notes and arrived, slowly, at the picture the dead man had left for them. Robert Blaine, in the squalor of that attic room with its empty bottles and its unopened mail, had not been one of them. He had been reading everything he could find about the things that walk in the dark and wear the shapes of men. He had been trying to understand. He had been, in his ruined way, investigating.

And then someone had come through his window.

September the Tenth#

The university opened its doors at nine in the morning, and by half past nine the corridors were full of the particular silence that falls on a room when the wrong people walk into it.

The investigators felt it before they understood it. Heads turning. Conversations dying mid-sentence. The slow, deliberate act of students stepping aside to let them pass. Somewhere behind them a voice said drunkards, and somewhere further back, lighter and crueler: the Moonshine Five. Susan kept her eyes forward. Sofia, who had walked through the halls of Miskatonic for two years without anyone looking at her twice, found that the looking was the worst part. It was not hostile, exactly. It was the gaze of people who have already decided what you are.

The summons to the Dean of Students had come down the night before. They were to present themselves at the office of Marinus Bricknell at a quarter past ten.

Bricknell was already standing when they entered — a tall, narrow, severe figure behind a broad oak desk, his hands planted flat on the wood, his mouth a thin down-turned line. His hair was iron grey, oiled and parted with surgical precision. His pince-nez hung on a black silk cord, and he had the habit, uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of, of looking over them rather than through them. A gold watch-chain bisected his waistcoat. He was the university’s conscience, and he enjoyed the work.

The changed students were already in the room.

They stood along the wall in a loose, silent row — Higgins, Trent, Laslow, Noakes, the others — and their faces, as the investigators entered, did almost nothing at all. Laslow, the wealthy snob from New York, the boy who had said ugly things about Nari on the drive north, turned his head and produced a smile that did not reach his eyes. It rested on Nari for a long moment. Then he looked away.

Clarissa Thurber was scratching at her trousers, absently, with the embarrassed air of someone who has only recently discovered where hands are supposed to go. Roderick Block — Little Rod, the gentle football giant from Georgia — was sitting a full pace apart from the rest, his big hands folded in his lap, his face carrying the only genuine expression in the room. It was sadness. He looked, Nari thought, like a man who has woken in a place he does not recognize and cannot find the door.

Bricknell spoke for ten minutes without sitting down. The expedition to Vermont had disgraced this institution. Arrest during Prohibition. Indecent behavior. Public drunkenness. It would go on their permanent record — all of them. Those not formally arrested were reprimanded for failing to prevent their colleagues from disgracing themselves. One further infraction, however small, however trivial, would result in immediate expulsion. There would be no second warning. There would be no appeal.

He paused, and looked at Nari in a way that suggested he had noticed her box-breathing and was not impressed by it.

Nari, who had been rehearsing it in her head for an hour, asked — with the careful courtesy of a daughter who has been raised to be obedient — whether the Dean was aware that Professor Harrold had come to Cobb’s Corners on the strength of a telephone call she had made to her father the night before the arrest, reporting Mr. Blaine’s drunkenness.

The room went very still.

Bricknell looked at her over his glasses.

Miss Sodhi. I would have expected something better from you.

Blaine, he went on, had failed the university. Blaine had failed his colleagues. Blaine had allowed alcohol onto an expedition — alcohol, for God’s sake, during Prohibition — and Blaine, as it happened, was to have been expelled from this institution on the very day he chose to end his life. The matter was not open for discussion. Miss Sodhi would follow the protocol. Miss Sodhi would file her complaint in writing. Miss Sodhi, from now on, would follow the rules.

Nari lowered her head, the way she had been taught to lower it in her father’s house, and said nothing more.

The Dean dismissed them. As they filed out, Laslow favored Nari once more with that wide, empty smile. Roderick Block did not look up from his hands.

The Office of the President#

Across the campus, in a building that smelled of pipe tobacco and leather and the slow accumulation of old money, Clement Scheidegger was standing in front of a desk that had cost more than his first car.

President Dr. Harvey Wainscott was a patrician figure — broad-shouldered, heavy-set, a full head of white hair swept back from a high forehead, a neatly trimmed white beard. He had the expression of a man who has spent decades looking down at other people from a dais. He wore his academic gown even in the office. He did not stand when Clement entered. He did not ask him to sit.

He wasted no words. Clement’s conduct in Vermont had been an embarrassment. He was inclined to sever the arrangement with Federated Oil and Chemical. He let the sentence hang, watching for the flinch.

Clement did not flinch. Clement had spent forty years in the mountains, and a mountain does not flinch.

It was, he said, unfortunate. It was also not his fault. The expedition had been placed in the hands of a young man who could not control himself. The sheriff’s report was a filthy lie. He would, of course, give his version of the story to the company, and the company could make up its own mind. He paused, and looked at the president with the mild, level gaze of a man who has calculated the odds and found them acceptable.

I made my own reputation, sir. I do not count on others to promote it. I believe that you need me more than I need you. You need the company. You need FOC more than FOC needs you. So I suggest that you reconsider your threats and your claims.

The president’s face, slowly and without changing its expression, went red.

He told Clement, in a voice that had gone very quiet, that he could not dismiss him — that distinction was precisely what saved him, and precisely what limited the president’s patience. But he could bar him from the campus. And he would. From this day forward, Mr. Scheidegger was no longer welcome on the grounds of Miskatonic University.

Clement stood, smoothed his coat, and remarked — with the perfect courtesy that is the particular weapon of a Swiss mountaineer who has been told he is no longer welcome somewhere he never felt welcome — that the president really ought to stop smoking. It was bad for his health.

He left the door open on his way out.

The Dog on Saulton Street#

While the university was closing its doors to Clement Scheidegger, Sofia Picado was walking south on Saulton Street, looking for a pet shop.

She had been thinking about the marginalia. The dogs in Cobb’s Corners, they knew. If the things could be smelled out — if a dog could tell, the way the old book said a dog could tell, that the thing wearing a person was not the person — then a dog was not a luxury. A dog was a weapon. A dog was the only weapon they had that the things, by their own ancient admission, feared.

The shop was small and warm and smelled of sawdust. A young woman with red curly hair looked up from behind the counter. Sofia, who had rehearsed the lie on the walk over, explained that the dog was for an elderly uncle who lived alone.

The woman took her through to the back, where three cages stood in a half-lit room. A husky, two years old, sat upright in the middle cage, tail going, blue eyes fixed on Sofia with the steady, friendly attention of a creature that has decided, firmly and without reservation, to trust her.

I love him, Sofia said. I love him. I’ll take him.

She paid ten dollars. She was assured, twice, that he had no fleas. She named him in the street outside — Amigo — because she had no one else to name him after, and because a friend was exactly what they needed.

She brought him to Clement’s boarding house, because she could not keep him at the university and because Clement, of all of them, had a room with a door that locked. Clement looked at the dog. The dog looked at Clement. The dog’s tail beat a slow, hopeful rhythm against the floorboards.

Why did you bring a dog here?

Sofia, with great patience, explained about the marginalia, and the witches, and the dogs in Cobb’s Corners who had known and who had, all of them, died in a single night for the knowing.

Clement, who had raised dogs in Switzerland as a younger man, said he would train him. Amigo sat down between them, panting, entirely unaware that he had been recruited into a war against things that wore the skins of men and feared the animals that could smell the seam.

The Detective’s Notepad#

Clement, barred from the campus and with a morning to dispose of, went with Lillian to keep their two o’clock appointment with Detective Bobby Colombo.

Colombo’s office was on the third floor of an old four-story building on Main Street, south of the river. No elevator. The staircase creaked. The door at the top was closed, and knocking on it produced nothing.

The building’s janitor — a slow-moving man with a heavy ring of keys and the manner of someone who has been sweeping these floors longer than most of the tenants have been alive — confirmed what the closed door had already told them. Bobby Colombo had not been in his office that morning. He had left early. He had not been seen. This was, the janitor allowed, not like Bobby. Bobby was usually here by landlady’s hour.

Clement, who had spent forty years reading the weather on mountain faces, read the weather on the janitor’s face, and offered to show him a better way to sweep a floor. The man, intrigued despite himself, allowed himself to be led out into the corridor and instructed in the European push-and-gather. Lillian slipped into the office.

The room was tidy. Nothing out of place. But on the desk, on a small notepad, a single street name had been written and circled in pencil, with the nervous emphasis of a man who expected to remember why he had written it:

Aylesbury Street.

She copied it down, and they left.

Aylesbury Street, they learned from the maps and the city’s memory, ran west out of Arkham past the old cemetery — past the wooded graveyard on Hangman’s Hill, where, in 1704, a woman named Goody Fowler had been hanged by the citizens of the town on the suspicion of witchcraft, and where, on certain nights of the old calendar, the curious and the foolish still went looking for her ghost. Some who went, the stories said, came back. Some did not. The street was lonely, half-abandoned, lined with single-story houses and shuttered warehouses. Not a neighborhood where a man went at night without a reason.

They debated, briefly, trying the brass key — the small unmarked key Clement had lifted from Harry Higgins’ bag — on every door on the street. There were a dozen buildings. It could be done. But the afternoon was getting on, and Susan’s meeting at the Regatta was at nine, and the dog was at the boarding house, and the smart thing, they decided, was to come back in the morning with Amigo and the key and a piece of Bobby Colombo’s clothing, and let the dog do what the old book said dogs could do.

The Regatta#

The H.P.L. Tower was the tallest building in Arkham. The Regatta was on the top floor — a piano bar and restaurant, low amber light, windows all around looking out over the city and the dark curl of the Miskatonic River moving toward the sea. A piano sat empty on a small stage. Louis Gibbons, who used to play it, had stopped coming. The room was full of people who could afford to be there: junior bankers, wives and husbands of men who mattered, well-dressed, well-lit, talking quietly over drinks that may or may not have been legal.

Susan came in alone, and Clement came in separately, a minute behind her, and took a corner booth in the shadows where he could watch the room without being part of it. He had left the Alpenstock at the hotel. He was, for the first time since anyone had known him, dressed for a place like this.

At a private booth at the back, a man in his late forties was eating a lobster with his hands. He was broad-shouldered, thick-necked, with thinning fair hair slicked back and the kind of face that has been broad and Irish and patient for a long time. He wore an expensive suit and a gold pinky ring. Beside him, standing with his hands folded in front of him, was a shorter man — broad as a doorstop, scarred across the face, silent.

The short man approached Susan as she hesitated near the entrance.

Miss Chen. My boss wants to talk to you.

She followed him to the booth. The man with the lobster wiped his hands, wiped his mouth, and gestured to the chair across from him.

Well, well. Mrs. Chen. I learned many interesting things about you. How is the restaurant going in Boston?

His name was Danny O’Bannion. His cousin was Harry Higgins. He spoke softly, in the cadence of a man who has never had to raise his voice because other people have always raised their hands for him. He ordered champagne. The waiter brought a bucket of ice and a tall glass. The bubbles climbed.

He came to the point with the unhurried ease of a man who owns the room.

So. Harry. Our mothers are cousins, which makes us cousins. Harry came back from those hills. But Harry didn’t come back. Something else came back wearing Harry. He doesn’t talk like Harry. He doesn’t laugh like Harry. He doesn’t sing like Harry. The worst thing is — he talks like a German.

He cracked a claw with his teeth. He sucked the meat out of it.

I grew up with him. I knew him as a boy. I know how he takes his tea. I know what songs he sings when he’s had a few. And that boy — that is not my cousin.

Susan, her hands in her lap, began, very carefully, to tell him what had happened in Cobb’s Corners. She told him about the first expedition, about the dead and the missing. She told him about Blaine. She told him about the thing that had come through the window of the attic room and made sure Blaine would never finish his reading. She told him about the changed students, and how they read all day in the library and went somewhere else at night — somewhere off campus, somewhere they did not sleep in their own beds — and that she and her friends had been trying to follow them and were very bad at it.

Danny O’Bannion listened. He cracked another claw.

He did not, at any point, look as though he doubted her.

When she was finished, he leaned back. He let the silence do some work. Then he leaned forward again, and his bodyguard, very quietly, shifted the lapel of his jacket to show the grip of a pistol.

I want you to get deep down into this and find out what happened with my cousin. You were with him. You will be my agent in the university. You will follow him — only him — and you will report back to me everything you learn. You understand?

Susan said nothing. Her mouth was dry. The champagne was still fizzing in the tall glass, untouched.

*And if you won’t help me — * he paused, and his voice dropped, almost gently, to the register of a man discussing the weather, — you know, there are accidents. Restaurants in Boston catch fire. Dormitories burn to the ground. People get into trouble.

He looked at her.

What is your mother’s name? Susan.

He let the name sit on the table between them.

You wouldn’t want any accident to happen to Lee Min. And that beautiful restaurant in Boston. I’ve never tried the chicken feet. I hear they do it well.

Susan, who had eaten her way through the Arkham oddities and the Cobb’s Corners stews without flinching, who had carried her jars of pickled chicken feet across two states and a mountain range, felt something inside her go very still and very cold.

He told her how to leave messages. He told her he would be watching. He told her, with a parting smile that did not involve his eyes, that she should not try to avoid him, because they would find her.

She rose, and left the booth, and walked out of the Regatta without tasting the champagne, and the gangster’s voice followed her down in the elevator like a smell.

The Voice on the Telephone#

Nari went home that afternoon to a house that had not spoken to her in a week.

Her father’s house on French Hill was a quiet house, a professor’s house, a house in which the telephone sat in the front parlor like an altar no one was allowed to touch except the head of the family. Nari sat in the living room with a copy of Isis Unveiled hidden inside a folded newspaper, and waited for a call she had been promised, and tried not to look as though she was waiting.

Her mother moved through the room without speaking. Her father did not look up from his book. The silence of the house was the silence of people who have decided what their daughter is, and are waiting for her to admit it.

The telephone rang.

Nari reached it a half-second before her father could. She lifted the receiver to her shoulder with the studied casualness of a girl who is only answering because she happened to be passing. Her father looked at her with an expression that was not surprise, exactly. It was the expression of a man who has just been proven right about something.

A voice on the line — distorted, toneless, a voice that did not sound entirely like a voice — said:

Look. I’m not Roderick Block. None of us who came here are who we pretend to be. We were sent here for a reason. And if you don’t meet with me, then the blood is going to be on your hands.

Nari, very quietly: I think you’ve got the wrong number, mister.

Tomorrow. At eleven. On Hangman’s Hill. That’s the only time I can leave while the rest are sleeping.

Her father took the receiver from her hand. Who is that? Don’t call again. What are you doing with my daughter? The line went dead.

In the silence that followed, Nari stood in the parlor with her hand still shaped around a receiver she was no longer holding, and her father looked at her as though she had arranged the whole thing to embarrass him, and her mother began, very softly, to cry in the next room.

Later that evening, when Lillian Neill came to the door under the thin pretext of discussing the Cobb’s Corners research interviews, Nari lowered her head to her father for the second time that day, and was let out of the house, and did not look back.

Aylesbury Street#

They gathered outside the university gates at half past nine — Clement and Lillian, Susan and Sofia, and Nari, who had been collected from her father’s house under cover of a research consultation and who had not, since the telephone call, stopped shaking entirely.

Susan, in the back of the taxi, told them what had happened at the Regatta. She told them about Danny O’Bannion, and the bodyguard, and the lobster, and the quiet voice asking after her mother’s name. When she was finished, the taxi was very quiet. Nari, despite everything, was crying. Sofia put an arm around her and told her, firmly, that she would have to be brave now, because they could not afford the noise.

They stopped at Clement’s boarding house and collected Amigo, and a scrap of clothing taken from the bed in Bobby Colombo’s office — something that carried his scent. Then they drove west, past the river, past the lit windows of the residential streets, past the campus, and out along the road that climbed toward the old cemetery and the wooded dark of Hangman’s Hill.

Aylesbury Street was a lonely road. The streetlights did not reach its far end. Single-story houses stood in overgrown lots. Warehouses, shuttered and dark, sat back from the curb behind broken gates. The hill rose beyond them, and on the hill, the cemetery — big trees, leaning stones, the city’s old dead laid out above the city’s old west road.

They put Colombo’s clothing under Amigo’s nose. The dog, who had been panting happily in the back of the taxi, went very quiet. He dropped his nose to the sidewalk. He moved left. He came back. He moved right. He circled a gate. And then he set off down Aylesbury Street at a purposeful walk, tail low, ears forward, the walk of a dog that has found the trail and does not intend to lose it.

He led them to a warehouse.

It sat at the far end of the street, set back from the road behind a broken gate, a dark, windowless block of old brick with a single iron door. There were no lights in any of the windows — what few windows there were. Nothing moved. The street was empty. The hill and its cemetery leaned above.

Clement took the brass key from his pocket — the small, unmarked key he had lifted from Harry Higgins’ bag in the geology laboratory, weeks ago, in what felt like another life.

He put it in the lock.

It fitted.

It turned.

The door swung inward on a black and silent interior. Amigo’s tail gave a single, slow wag, as if to say: good.

They stood in the doorway and let their eyes adjust. The warehouse was a single high space — a brick shell, an open floor, a wooden catwalk running around the upper story where the old offices had been. A few crates stood stacked near the entrance. Sofia, looking closer, saw what was printed on their ends, and her breath caught.

Dynamite. Sticks of it. Crate after crate, stacked neatly, as though someone had been preparing for something that required a great deal of it.

And on the floor, just inside the door, in the dark —

A body.

A man, face down, hands bound behind his back with cord. He was not moving. The smell in the warehouse was the smell of a room in which a body has been lying for some time.

Lillian knelt. Turned the head, gently, toward the light from the open door.

It was Bobby Colombo. He had been dead since at least the morning. His face was the color of wet clay.

Sanity broke in the doorway like a glass. Sofia stepped back, hand to her mouth. Nari, who had been holding herself together by main force since the telephone call, began to cry and pray at the same time, in Hindu, in a high thin voice that did not sound entirely like her own, and in stepping back she trod on Amigo’s tail. Susan let out a short, sharp gasp that she could not suppress.

Amigo did not yelp.

Amigo, who had been a happy dog on Saulton Street an hour ago, who had ridden in the taxi with his head out of the window, who had wagged his tail when Clement fitted the key to the lock — Amigo was not a happy dog anymore. He stood very still. The hair along his spine rose. He scented the air of the warehouse in long, deep pulls, the way a dog scents a thing it has never encountered and cannot name. Then he began to growl — low at first, and then louder — and then he was barking, full-throated, the sharp alarm bark of an animal that has identified a predator and is trying to make it larger than itself by the only means it has.

From the catwalk above, a voice.

It was Terrence Laslow’s voice — the wealthy snob from New York, the boy who had smiled at Nari in the Dean’s office, the boy who had said ugly things on the drive north. It came down out of the dark with the bored, irritated clarity of a man interrupted at his work.

Who is that? That’s the scared boy, isn’t it — the bookish one?

And then, louder, to someone on the catwalk that none of them could see:

Get your guns.

A pause.

Gustav — get your gun.

Next: Hangman’s Hill. The warehouse. And somewhere in the hills above Arkham, at eleven o’clock, an appointment at the witch’s grave that one of them has been told, on a telephone, not to miss.