The moan came again.
Cocking her head, she turned down a passageway lined with oil paintings of Ritter knights, maybe Renaissance. At a T-intersection, she shrugged and forked right, turning around, wondering if she’d imagined it. It could be the water pressure in the pipes. A movie.
Except … she felt compelled to find it.
More woo woo, she thought.
Another moan.
Slowing, she spotted two wooden doors flush with the wall, very plain, with brass doorknobs. She tried the first one. It was locked. But the second swung open, into a dimly lit stairwell.
An ornate brass stair railing curved both up and down, and a faint light glowed from below.
Cocking her head again, she started down the stone stairs, worn and uneven but clean. She didn’t know why she didn’t summon someone to investigate. Why she didn’t sound the alarm. It seemed the right thing to do.
She reached the landing.
Another moan.
Another floor down.
She kept going.
And going.
Then the stairs stopped. On the wall was a faded sign that read EINTRITT VERBOTEN . No entry . It was so dark she had trouble reading it. But no trouble at all translating it, apparently.
Passing the sign, she looped around and started down the next flight of the staircase. About halfway down, a terrible stench wafted beneath the scent of her shampoo and body splash. She knew that smell—people crowded in too tightly; sick and neglected people.
She coughed into her fist. The sound echoed. There was a rustling as if in response, and a gasp. And another moan.
She descended one more flight. The smell grew worse, sickening her; making her remember the baby in the desert, and the baby on horseback.
At the bottom of the next landing, a strip of luminous tape had been attached to the stone floor. It gave off white light, like the Pale.
I should get the hell out of here, she thought. I’m not supposed to be here.
Then the moan became strange sounds, like wind chimes:
“****.”
Twinkling silvery.
“****.”
And she knew they meant “home.”
“Hello?” she whispered, staring at the tape. EINTRITT VERBOTEN .
“****.”
Home.
“Do you need assistance?” she asked in a louder voice.
Silence. And … weeping, and then a kind of gasping, like strangling. And another voice, higher-pitched:
“********.”
Help.
Meg sucked in her breath and made a semijump over the tape, bracing herself for a shock, or pain, but nothing happened. Her boots echoed. Rustling, scrabbling sounds came from the space in front of her, which was filled with vague, shadowy box shapes. As she walked forward, her eyes began to adjust.
She was standing at one end of a double row of cubes or boxes. They stretched far into the darkness, into some vast section of the castle she couldn’t picture; an open space this wide, with no supporting beams or columns for the weight of the building above it, shouldn’t be possible. Magick , she realized, and walked to the closest box, about three feet from the line of luminous tape.
The front was barred; she couldn’t tell if there was an additional barrier—Plexiglas, regular glass—but something sat inside, on the floor, with long shins perpendicular to the floor, and feet that appeared to be pulled from gray clay. Long, nubby fingers were wrapped around the shins, and a bald head rested on the knees. Meg stared at it, transfixed.
What the hell?
With a hiss, it whipped its head up and glared at her, its features deep and plain, very human, its eyes filled with hatred so deep that she took an involuntary step backward.
It was a holding cell. And the thing inside it was imprisoned.
It glared, and then it slowly shut its eyes. It remained that way, head raised, eyes closed, as Meg stared at it.