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And this time, it was loud enough.

Okay. You know what you have to do.

James Alderson had spent the car journey hunkered down out of sight in the back seat of her car. He came sprinting through the door now, much faster than she’d have given him credit for, and leaped onto the man’s back. They both tumbled over and began wrestling on the tiles.

She started over to help, but as the two of them rolled over and started exchanging blows, Alderson shook his head at her, his teeth gritted with effort.

“Go,” he managed.

With her heart pounding, Katie turned and ran for the stairs.

Forty-five

Leland walked back into what had once been his father’s opulent quarters and had since become Alan Hobbes’s bare flat.

As he stepped over the threshold, he felt another jolt inside him.

It was a little like when he touched the book downstairs, but this one was much stronger. For a moment, the past was superimposed upon the present. The fire was burning beside him, crackling and flickering, and yet it was somehow also black and dead, the coals cold in the iron grate, and it was also gone entirely, bricked up behind the featureless wall. He stared around, keeping tight hold of the book, and watched as furniture appeared and vanished. A baby laughed. The painting of a flayed saint appeared on the wall and then danced away. A door that was not there anymore suddenly was.

And his father’s voice swirled like a storm.

You must never go in there.

Do you hear me, Edward? Nothing matters more.

Leland shook his head.

The present solidified around him again. Now there was just the squalid chamber with its bad air and bloodstains. The door was gone. And only the faintest trace of his father’s voice remained echoing in his head.

You must never go in there.

He headed through.

Christopher Shaw was where he had left him. In the time Leland had been downstairs, the boy had removed his gag and loosened the bindings around his wrists sufficiently to free his hands. Neither mattered. He was still cuffed to the leg of the bed, which was bolted securely to the floor. The boy was trapped in the place where he had been meant to die all those years ago.

Leland took a lighter from his pocket and flicked the flame alive.

Shaw flinched. “Don’t. Please.”

Leland just smiled. And he was about to toss the burning lighter into the corner of the room when he heard a sound from outside again.

He stopped and listened.

Tires on gravel.

Another car.

He snapped the lighter closed, and then stepped over to the ruined wall and stood on tiptoes to peer out through the open brickwork. Far below, he could make out the flicker of red and blue lights at the front of the house.

The sound of a car door slamming.

And then quick footsteps behind him.

He turned, knowing it was too soon for the police to have made their way up. It was the woman—the boy’s sister. Somehow she had gotten past Banyard downstairs and followed him up here. But she hadn’t known what she would find, and the sight stopped her cold. Even as Leland darted toward her, she was still trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

“Katie!” Shaw cried out behind him.

Thank you, Leland thought. Because her attention snapped over to where her brother was lying, and that gave Leland the chance he needed to close the distance. With the lighter clenched in his fist, he punched her hard in the face, felt her nose crunch beneath his knuckles, and then watched as she crashed backward against one of the cabinets and fell to the floor.