I pulled myself into the well and climbed. Halfway up I had to stop and rest, pushing my back against the opposite side of the shaft. When the burn in my biceps subsided, I climbed the rest of the way, scrambling over the lip of the well to land in some grass.
I was in the courtyard of a shabby-looking house. The sky was an infected shade of yellow, but there was no smoke in it and no sound of engines. We were in some older time, before the war—before cars, even. There was a chill in the air, and errant flakes of snow drifted down and melted on the ground.
Emma came up the well next, then Horace. Emma had decided that only the three of us should explore the house. We didn’t know what we would find up here, and if we needed to leave in a hurry, it was better to have a small group that could move fast. None who stayed below argued; Joel-and-Peter’s warning of blood and shadows had scared them. Only Horace was unhappy, and kept muttering to himself that he wished he’d never caught that pigeon in the square.
Bronwyn waved to us from below and then pulled closed the circular door at the bottom of the well. The top side was painted to look like the surface of water—dark, dirty water you’d never want to drop a drinking bucket into. Very clever.
The three of us huddled together and looked around. The courtyard and the house were suffering from serious neglect. The grass around the well was tamped down, but everywhere else it grew up in weedy thickets that reached higher than some of the ground-floor windows. A doghouse sat rotting and half collapsed in one corner, and near it a toppled laundry line was gradually being swallowed by brush.
We stood and waited, listening for pigeons. From beyond the house’s walls, I could hear the tap of horses’ hooves on pavement. No, this definitely wasn’t London circa 1940.
Then, in one of the upper-floor windows, I saw a curtain shift.
“Up there!” I hissed, pointing at it.
I didn’t know if a bird or a person had done it, but it was worth checking out. I started toward a door that led into the house, beckoning the others after me—then tripped over something. It was a body lying on the ground, covered head to ankle with a black tarp. A pair of worn shoes poked from one end, pointing at the sky. Tucked into one cracked sole was a white card, on which had been written in neat script:
Mr. A. F. Crumbley
Lately of the Outer Provinces
Aged forward rather than be taken alive
Kindly requests his remains be deposited in the Thames
“Unlucky bastard,” Horace whispered. “He came here from the country, probably after his own loop was raided—only to have the one he’d escaped to raided, as well.”
“But why would they leave poor Mr. Crumbley out in the open this way?” whispered Emma.
“Because they had to leave in a hurry,” I said.
Emma bent down and reached for the edge of Mr. Crumbley’s tarp. I didn’t want to look but couldn’t help myself, and I half turned away but peeked back through split fingers. I had expected a withered corpse, but Mr. Crumbley looked perfectly intact and surprisingly young, perhaps only forty or fifty years old, his black hair graying just around the temples. His eyes were closed and peaceful, as if he might’ve just been sleeping. Could he really have aged forward, like the leathery apple I took from Miss Peregrine’s loop?
“Hullo, are you dead or asleep?” Emma said. She nudged the man’s ear with her boot, and the side of his head caved and crumbled to dust.
Emma gasped and let the tarp fall back. Crumbley had become a desiccated cast of himself, so fragile that a strong wind could blow him apart.
We left poor, crumbling Mr. Crumbley behind and went to the door. I grasped the knob and turned it. The door opened and we stepped through it into a laundry room. There were fresh-looking clothes in a hamper, a washboard hung neatly above a sink. This place had not been abandoned long.
The Feeling was stronger here, but was still only residue. We opened another door and came into a sitting room. My chest tightened. Here was clear evidence of a fight: furniture scattered and overturned, pictures knocked off the mantel, stripes of wallpaper shredded to ribbons.
Then Horace muttered, “Oh, no,” and I followed his gaze upward, to a dark stain discoloring a roughly circular patch of ceiling. Something awful had happened upstairs.
Emma squeezed her eyes closed. “Just listen,” she said. “Listen for the birds and don’t think about anything else.”
We closed our eyes and listened. A minute passed. Then, finally, the fluttering coo of a pigeon. I opened my eyes to see where it had come from.
The staircase.
We mounted the stairs gently, trying not to creak them under our feet. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, in my temple. I could handle old, brittle corpses. I wasn’t sure if I could take a murder scene.
The second-floor hallway was littered with debris. A door, torn from its hinges, lay splintered. Through the broken doorway was a fallen tower of trunks and dressers; a failed blockade.