The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Esmeralda: The First Book Depository Story by Glen Hirshberg

We first heard about them the way one hears about everything these days: on the web. Some self-styled "urban explorer," wired on whatever and driven by transgressive urges most people claim they get over in high school, snuck into his 532^nd abandoned building in the Detroit metropolitan area. Fortunately, he brought his digital camera and an extra memory card.

Within hours, the first Flickr page went up. Within weeks, the first wiki/blogspot/Facebook groups appeared. The histories of that initial depository were always stitched together out of tall tales and myths. Someone could have found some Roosevelt School District official and asked, but no one did. Soon, the first Crawlers-no one seems to know where that name came from-began braving the empty streets to start exploring and mapping the place. Not long after that came the first trespassing arrests, and the first disappearances. Before too long, the various strands of lore surrounding the Roosevelt Book Depository had coalesced into a story composed of enough truth to become the truth, as far as anyone who studies such things in centuries to come-and publishes them in whatever digital or ethereal or cerebral format one publishes in those times-will ever be able to tell:

A public school district, emptying of students as the last desperate families flee the neighborhoods, its buildings collapsing and its funding gutted, quietly takes over an abandoned tire warehouse on one of those Detroit streets that hasn't seen a functioning streetlamp since the Riots. There, school functionaries-or, more likely, the gang thugs and drunken ex-Teamsters they pay with the last of the district's cash-begin delivering truckloads of used or never used textbooks, supplies, notepads, posters, maps, writing implements, and whole libraries full of outdated, donated boys' and girls' novels and biographies of presidents and sports stars to what they have already christened the Depository. The plan, originally, is to sell it all, in the hopes of renovating the last functioning elementary school in the area.

Then the elementary school closes. The funding is zeroed. The officials disperse back to their homes, which have never been nearby. The ex-Teamsters return to their barstools, the thugs to their gangs.

And in their warehouse with its smashed-in windows and gaping doorframes and ruthlessly tagged cement walls, the books and notebooks and maps and visual aides of the former Roosevelt District Schools lie where they've been tossed, in tottering dunes or great lakes of paper. They huddle like penguins in the Michigan winter snows. They curl and molt in the sucking humidity of mid-summer. They are shredded for nests to house raccoons, rats, pigeons, the homeless. They begin to decompose. To sprout weeds and toadstools. To change.

By the time that first unnamed explorer finds them, they have lain in that space for more than thirty years.

After that, less than six months passed before the discovery-or creation-of the second depository, in the mildew-ravaged, fogbound port hangars near Fisherman's Wharf. That one drew an entirely different breed of explorer. There were boho college kids drifting up the coast through the Youth Hostels. Then a team of college professors from Berkeley who wrote the first academic papers and held the first symposium on the subject, which they dubbed The End. If they were aware of any irony in naming a brand new phenomenon that, they kept it to themselves.

By the end of 2010, there were depositories in Chicago, St. Louis, Ft. Lauderdale. They were always urban at first, their foundations usually the refuse from bankrupt school systems. But then the owners of the last used bookstore in Dallas -a giant conglomerate formed by the desperate owners of the twenty-five largest remaining open shops in Texas -announced that they were closing. And instead of holding a final sale, or throwing everything up for auction on eBay or listing it on ABE, they rented twenty-five U-Haul trailers, filled them at random, and dispersed across the country to seed the depositories.

Other shop owners followed suit. It became an ethical stance, a point of pride, a last great act of self-defeating defiance. They would not scrape the last, dreadful pennies from the bottom of the book well. Instead, they would spread their wares like spores, bury them like acorns in the rich, loamy mulch of decomposing language in the depositories, in the hopes that they would sprout there. Grow a new generation, not of readers-people still read, despite what the academicians tell us-but bibliophiles. A healthier, younger subculture.

Then individuals began following the shop owners' lead. Readers who'd spent their whole lives building and tending their personal libraries formulated wills directing their children to wheel whatever they didn't want to the nearest depots and bury them there. Without open shops, and with the online outlets flooded with merchandise that few sought, selling books became a chore, and a fruitless one at that. Easier by far to find a depository and leave everything there, for whoever might want it.

Of course, the depositories didn't mostly attract bibliophiles. They drew squatters, first. Pushers and junkies. Cultists. Fetishists. When the rate of reported disappearances began to climb, the police took to discouraging, then forbidding visiting the depositories. But they never cleaned them out, rarely patrolled them. And people-whatever their reasons-kept coming, though less often and usually after dark.

Meanwhile, the books lay atop each other like bodies in ditches. In breezes, or in a beam of sudden flashlight, they stirred, seeming not so much to have come to life but retained it, somehow. Occasionally, a page even lifted like a waving hand, extending itself toward whatever had disturbed it, or else waving goodbye.

Esmeralda

I'm already in bed when the knock comes. Sitting up, shivering as the twist of sheet and heavy blanket slides from me, I stare at the misshapen shadows stretched over the hardwood floor. It's the snow outside that has given them their head-like humps, their ice-claws. They look like illustrations in a book of fairy tales. Ezzie would have loved them.

I'm musing on that, wondering whether the bottle of rye on the bedside table is as empty as it looks and also whether I've stored another in the bathroom medicine chest five steps from my cot, when the knock comes again. So there really is someone out there, and that means one of two things: the police have finally found something, or Ezzie's relentless sister Sarah has finally found me.

"Just a… " I start, but my voice comes out even thicker than its current usual, and I suck rye-residue and sleep-fur off my teeth and try again. "Hold on."

My feather-robe and fuzzy slippers were both gifts from Ezzie, of course. For the feather-robe and fuzzy slipper birthday party she threw me during our first year in the downtown Detroit loft. Not so long ago, really. Christ, barely three years.

It's my lucky night, turns out; there is indeed a fresh rye in the medicine cabinet, right between the ibuprofen and Ezzie's razor case, which is my only keepsake. She would have approved, if she'd approved of anything I do anymore. The thing she'd held most dear, after all. Unlike most cutters, from what I gather, for Ezzie it was less about the wounds than the weapon.

Uncorking the rye, I take a swig, then replace the bottle and slide the razor case under my robe into my pajama shirt pocket. I turn toward the door, pull the robe as closed as it will go against the constant chill, and as an afterthought decide to take the rye along. In eight steps, I've crossed my lake-rot, one-room efficiency to the front door so I can peer through the fish-eye.

"Knock knock," I say.

The guy out there is big, maybe six-five, in a black coat that looks warmer than all the clothes I own combined, plus black gloves and a black Derby, even. Not a cop. Also not Sarah, unless she's grown a foot and a half and cut off all her hair. Sarah and Ezzie and their dark waterfalls of black curls…

"What?" the guy asks.

"Knock knock."

He stares at the door, and the Lake Superior wind whips up and blows snow on him. It's kind of great, really. A strapping young Oedipus befuddled by the Sphynx. Me. Finally, he takes the plunge.

"Who's there?"

"Exactly," I say.

Pause. Befuddlement.

"Exactly who?"

"Exactly my question."

Poor Oedipus. Big wind. I gulp rye from the bottle I have every intention of sharing with my caller, providing he convinces me to let him in.

"Please," he says, and he sounds nothing like a cop or a vengeful relative or anyone else I know anymore. I open the door. He hurries past me and stands shivering in the center of my all but empty room. Then he starts to unbutton his coat.

"I wouldn't suggest it," I tell him. "It's not much better in here."

Experimentally, he loosens another button. His head almost brushes the bulbous, bug-filled light-fixture that provides the efficiency's only illumination when I bother to switch it on, which isn't often. He removes his hat, and I can't help but smile at the hair, which is black and flat as road tar, with little flattened spikes jagging down his forehead. Little-kid-after-sledding hair.

He takes in my cot, the nightstand, the remaining 365 or so square feet of empty space.

"No… no books," he says, and I understand, abruptly. I consider showing him my iRead, which is the only thing I use now, just to see his face. There's nothing quite like confronting a Crawler with an iRead.

Except I can't quite bring myself to do it. Every time my heart beats, it bangs against the razor case in my pocket. Cold and plastic and empty of Ezzie.

"How'd you find me?" I ask.

"Will," he says. "I'm Will."

"That's nice."

"Can I sit?"

The question cracks me up. I gesture around the couchless, chairless, rugless, room. "Pick a wall."

Instead, he sits where he is, folding his long legs under him and his arms across his chest. Then he looks expectantly at me with wide, shiny eyes. I hold out the rye bottle.

"You're going to need it," I say.

"Not as much as you do," says Will, without guile.

I laugh again, glancing down at myself. Feather-robe with the feathers molting. Slippers with the toes poking through. I can't see my hair, of course, but I can feel it trying to flap off my head in a thousand different directions every time the draft pours through the windows.

I take a gulp, extend the bottle again, and he says, "Look. I'm sorry. I don't mean to intrude. I just… I have to know what you saw."

The laughter evaporates in my throat, and the rye on my tongue.

"Please. I have to know."

"I'm not sure I know what you mean," I lie. My hands start to shake, and I slip the one not holding the bottle into my pocket.

But he's all too eager to explain. "Oh. I see. You probably… I mean, since you don't… since I'm guessing you don't go to the depots anymore, you probably aren't keeping up with what's happening."

"Probably not." Ezzie's lens case beats, and I sit down opposite my guest.

"I just need to ask you one thing, okay? Then I'll leave you alone. At the moment your wife-"

"She wasn't my wife."

"Sorry. Lover-"

I start to squelch that, too, but how to explain? The simple truth was that we'd almost never been physical with each other, and even if we'd wanted to be, the overgrown bramble-hedge of scabs and scarring up both of Ezzie's thighs would have been a serious turn-off for me. I hate pain. The funny thing about Ezzie-it took years of our friendship for me to learn this-was that she did, too.

My visitor hesitates a moment longer. Then he tries again. "At the moment she… vanished… "

Again, he waits for me to chime in. I can't, and don't.

"I just need to know," says Will. "Did you see anyone?"

Careful, now. Careful. How is this supposed to work? How does the story they all tell themselves go? "How do you mean?" I say eventually. "Are you asking were there others with us in the Depository that night? There were." That was true enough, although they'd all been on the ground floor. None of them had even heard Ezzie scream.

My visitor stares at me, and I realize I've played too dumb. And this is no journalist, no private investigator. He's a fellow Crawler. Maybe even fellow ex-Crawler. And he's paid for the privilege, same as me.

Or, not quite the same.

"Sorry," I say. "Habit."

"So," says Will. "Did you?"

I blow out a long breath. My heart bangs, and my skin prickles in the cold. Ghost-touch of Ezzie's hair across my forearms. "The thing is, I don't really know when it happened. I mean, not the exact moment. Do you?"

Abruptly, Will begins to weep. He wipes the tears away once with the heel of one huge hand, but otherwise he remains motionless. His voice comes out hoarse, as though ice has lodged in it. "Now I do."

In spite of myself-in spite of everything-I lean forward, clutching the rye bottle. "How?"

He tells me.

"It was going to be our last one, at least for a long time. The St. Paul. Have you heard about that one? It's massive. It's in six abandoned warehouses right on the Mississippi. It stinks. Some local told us the river itself catches fire a couple times a year near there. And there aren't any windows, so the wind blows all the filth from the barges and all the snow and ice in the winter right into the depot. So the books are in awful shape, even by depot standards.

"But God, there are so many. So, so many.

"And they're not even textbooks, mostly. Not shit stuff. This one started just like Dallas. The last used shop owners in the Twin Cities all closed on the same date, in the middle of a snowstorm in the middle of January in the middle of the night. They brought everything they had left to the warehouses. I've heard Crawlers say that for that first year or so, there were even sections.

Local History. True Crime. Classics.

"Sections. Can you imagine?

"Anyway. This was our honeymoon. It was Bri's idea, even though I'm the Crawler. I don't even think she'd been to a depot before she met me. But she loved the adventure. Dressing up in black, going to those neighborhoods, getting dirty. Hiking between twenty-foot mounds of books with our flashlight beams on each other's faces and all that moldy paper whispering all over the place. Bri used to say it was like sneaking into an old-age home and finding all the residents sitting up in their beds gossiping all night.

"You know how it is, I guess. I don't know why I'm telling you.

"This was summer before last. Our St. Paul night. It was so humid. The river wasn't on fire, but it smelled oily. There's a park on the Minneapolis side where I guess people with no sense of smell can picnic and watch barges, but on the St. Paul side, there's just warehouses and landfills and five hundred million mosquitoes. That whining never leaves your ears. I swear, it's like the world has sprung a leak, and everything is just spilling out of it somewhere.

"For our honeymoon, we'd hit five depots in four cities in four days. St. Louis, Topeka, Lincoln, Wall. You been to Wall? South Dakota? It's right on the prairie, maybe a hundred yards from that famous drug store. It's just a big barn. There's almost nothing in it but maps and dried-out pens and thousands of copies of some old biology textbook about evolution. But we saw a buffalo. It strolled right past the doors while we were inside. One buffalo. Bri loved it."

He stops, and I think he's going to weep again. He seems to think so, too, and keeps one hand hovering near his eyes. But then he drops the hand and goes on.

"At the first four depots-every night until the last night-Bri covered herself completely before we went. Black tights, long black skirt, black sweater, black wool hat. She said it was for germs, and I teased her so hard. My little suburban rich girl. Hardly held a book in her life. Not a real one, and definitely not one anyone else had read first. She always said she'd be sure to send the ambulance when I got diphtheria and collapsed, and I told her I wasn't planning on drinking the books, just touching them, maybe taking a few, and she'd say, 'Diphtheria. Don't say I never told you so.' She had this way of saying things like that. And this laugh. She could make 'Hello' into a running joke. She had so many fucking friends… "

Will is weeping again, and this time he takes the bottle when I offer it. If he sees my hand shaking, he's polite enough not to say so or smart enough not to ask.

Diphtheria. Bri might have had many friends, but Ezzie wouldn't have been one of them.

Diphtheria-virulent and fatal disease causing permanent and irreversible dippiness. No known cure. That's what Ezzie would have said.

But Will's story has brought it all back. Our first depot night, at the very first depot. The Roosevelt, Michigan warehouse, where the books sprout mushrooms from their ruined pages and the hills of still-shrinkwrapped texts and composition notebooks rise shoulder high and higher, a mountain range of waste paper complete with alpine meadows of pink and green binders and waterfalls of paperclips and liquid paper bottles. Miles and miles of them. There's even weather; the rot and damp create a haze that rises from the ground on warmer nights and drifts about the giant, echoing space, as though the words themselves have lifted right off the pages like little Loraxes and floated toward the window sockets to dissipate over the abandoned thoroughfares of the Motor City.

We were there for hours, sifting things, picking toadstools, staring at the giant graffiti phoenix on the second story wall, massive and orange and angry, rising out of the mural of a broken hardback. I didn't find anything worth having, and Ezzie brought home just one book.

The Scott Michelin 4^th Grade Guide to Native America, Eighth Edition.

That very night, though we got back to our loft after four in the morning, Ezzie began to work. For weeks, night after night, all night long, she kept at it, barely speaking, rarely even retreating into the bathroom for her razor blades. Finally, I came home from work one evening to find the table bedecked with roses, a plate of the Hungarian goulash she never made anymore steaming on the table, and Ezzie's first real masterpiece laid beside the vase for my perusal.

What she'd done was so simple, really. So quiet. At first, I wasn't even sure she'd done anything. Then, as I flipped the pages, past sketches of Sacajawea and photographs of wigwams, I began to notice little smudges that might have been accidental fingerprints from tiny nine-year-old hands, except there were too many, and sometimes they were strewn across the page in unlikely or impossible patterns: half a forefinger here, a thumb all the way down next to the number, a red pen splash in the middle of a chart. As though a spider had stepped in an inkwell and then danced over the text. Then I started noticing the words missing. Some whited away, some stitched closed. Then there were the blotches, bug-shaped, pressed between lines. Some of them, I think, really were bugs. And then the little razor cuts. Thousands of them. If I removed the binding, I half-suspected, and unfolded the whole, I'd find a snowflake pattern in the pages. Or something else entirely.

There was more. I can't explain the effect. It wasn't any one thing, but the cumulative impact. An invented history of a history book no one had read, or would ever read.

That night, while I was asleep, Ezzie went back to the Roosevelt Depot without me. I couldn't believe it when I woke, told her how crazy that had been and how dangerous that place was, as if she needed me to tell her. But she was already back at her work table, hunched over her next project.

I close my eyes, and just like every time I close my eyes, now, I see her there. Crouched in her chair in the middle of the night, cross-hatched thighs drawn up under her nightshirt, unbound hair hooding her, blocking the light of her face from my sight like a blackout shade.

"I don't know why Bri didn't take her gloves to St. Paul," Will says. "Other than that it was crazy hot. Just putting on my hat felt like dumping a bucket of sweat on my head. We caught a bus across the river. There weren't any stops near the depot, and the guy didn't want to let us off, but Bri chatted him up and got him whistling Janet Jackson songs, and finally he agreed to drop us. He even said he'd come back in three hours, and that we'd better be there, for our own sakes.

"We walked the warehouses, and the sun went down. At first, we were trying everything we could think of to fend off mosquitoes, but eventually we gave up and let the little fuckers feast. We watched the trash barges floating in the middle of the big, brown river. They weren't even moving. They could have been swim rafts, except no one in their right mind would stick a toe in that water, let alone swim it. In that park I told you about-the one on the Minneapolis side?-there was some kind of military band. We could barely hear it. Not the tune or anything, just that there was one.

"The St. Paul side was completely empty, though. There were a couple abandoned cars, one working streetlight, some pigeons hopping around, and that's about it. But there wasn't anything threatening. Not like St. Louis or Detroit or anything. It was just empty.

"We weren't even the only ones at the depot. Not even close. We came around the corner of this huge ship-container building, and there was this old woman sitting in what I guess must have been the parking lot on a little pile of tires. She had a parasol over her head and everything, and a thermos full of lemonade. She gave us some. She had this whole stack of tatty Dickens novels with her. I have no idea whether she brought them or found them. They were just crappy school editions, nothing valuable, but intact. Totally readable. Nice.

"'It's like summer camp in there tonight,' she told us.

"It was more like a library, though. Isn't it weird how books do that? I mean, who established the whispering rule for depots?

"There were certainly plenty of other Crawlers in the warehouse. Probably fifteen, maybe even twenty. It seemed like most of them knew each other. We figured they came in a group, maybe some community college urban archaeology class or something. We kept seeing them in little bunches, picking apart a book pile or kneeling near some torn-up notepads or just standing in one of the makeshift rows, taking it all in. It almost felt like we were wandering in a downtown Japanese garden, not a depot, with all those flashlights everywhere and the moonlight outside and the snatches of music from over the river.

"For the first hour or so, Bri stayed by me. I think the place had been a canning factory, once; there were these little curls of rusty metal all over the place. I picked Bri a bouquet of toadstools, and she slid one through the top buttonhole of her sweater. That's when I noticed she wasn't wearing her gloves, and I almost said something. For a while afterwards, I thought maybe that's what had happened, or why it had happened then. Until I started hearing about all the others.

"Do you think there's some reason it's mostly happening to women?"

He stops again, as though he actually thinks I can enlighten him. As though he and I have anything whatsoever in common, except loss. As if anyone does. There's a bleak joke here, somewhere. Something about there always having been more women readers. Instead of making it, I jam the rye bottle in my mouth. In the draft, in the Lake Superior wind, I hear Ezzie's laughter.

"Well," he says. "What happened is, I found a book.

Adventures for the Young and Adventurous. I only picked it up because it was still sealed in a wrinkly plastic baggy. The spine almost fell apart when I eased the covers open. But the first story was "The Man with the Cream Tarts." You know it? I didn't. I didn't even know it was Stevenson until… until months later. When everything was over. The title page had so much mold, even I wished I had Bri's gloves. I used my sleeve to turn it. But the inside pages were relatively clean. And right off, I hit one of those sentences: 'He was a remarkable man even by what was known of him; and that was but a small part of what he actually did.' God."

Will makes a whistling sound. Then he shudders.

"There was a little window way up the wall behind where we were, and I just sat down right there. I started to read aloud to Bri, but it was too echoey. Every 's' sounded like a rattlesnake.

"Bri finally grinned and pointed at the mold on my book. She mouthed, 'Diphtheria' at me. Then she wandered off around a mound of staplers with their tops pried up. As soon as she was out of sight, I went back to reading.

"I read the whole story. By then, the moon had risen past the window, and most of the light was gone. But my eyes had adjusted. At some point, I realized it had been a long time since I'd heard any music from across the river or muffled conversations from our companions in the depot. I closed the book, and the cover came away in my hands like an old scab.

"As soon as I stood up, I finally started to understand how vast this place was. It might be the biggest one of all. When we came in, there'd been shadows, at least, and most of them were moving. But now nothing was distinct, everything was just dark, and I couldn't hear a thing. I felt like I'd fallen asleep in school and gotten locked in overnight. I opened my mouth to call for Bri, then thought better of it and moved off in the direction she'd gone.

"I wasn't going to shout. Not in there. Not yet. But looking for someone in a depot is kind of like looking for land in the middle of the ocean, you know? There aren't any aisles. There's no reason for anybody to have gone one way or another. There's no food court. There's only deeper into the depot, or out the doors.

"My first thought was that Bri had gone out. That old woman with the lemonade would have drawn her. She liked people the same way you and I like books.

"So I went what I thought was back the way we'd come. Only there weren't flashlight beams around anymore, and it's not as though we'd dropped a breadcrumb trail or paid any attention to where we were or anything. I walked what felt like a quarter mile in as straight a line as I could judge, and all I saw were huge piles of paperbacks and towers of old cardboard boxes. I didn't hear anything except my own feet. There was a little light, and it didn't seem far away, just indirect. I couldn't get a fix on the source. Twice, I thought I heard the river to my right and turned down the first passage I came to, only to find another endless depot row.

"By now, I was calling Bri's name. Not too loud. But I was definitely making myself heard. Even to myself, I sounded strange, like some croaking bird in the eaves. I had a flashlight, but I wasn't using it. I kept hoping I'd spot hers. Or anyone's.

"In my mind-I know this can't be true, but I swear I remember every step I took-I walked for an hour. Either it had gotten darker or I'd gone deeper into the depot or my eyes had stopped adjusting, because I could barely even see my hands. A couple times, I put my foot down on a shifting pile of papers and slipped. The first time, I cut my hand bad on a little semi-circular metal scrap. The next, the paper I fell into was all wet, and it stank. It was like lying on lilies in a dead pond. I'd had enough. I opened my mouth to start yelling Bri's name, and then…

"Then… "

For a second, I think Will has stopped because my face has given me away. Of course it must have. I can't seem to get my mouth to close, and the goddamn draft has cemented me where I am, crystallized me like an icicle. He probably thinks it's because I'm anticipating what comes next. Really, I'm just fixating on the scrap of metal, the cut it must have opened in his hand. Little razor cut.

All at once, he's on his feet, looming. I still can't make myself move, but the survival instincts that got me out of Detroit three years ago, that have kept me moving to new places ever since, that launch me out of bed and to the grocery store for rye but also carrots and cereal and winter gloves, has awoken at last. I'm trying to remember where I left the snow-shovel, just in case I need to murder my way out of this room.

But Will, it seems, just wants to weep some more. And why not? What's happened to him has nothing to do with me. Even less than he thinks.

"Look, dude. The woman I saw… This is why I'm here. This is what I'm telling you, the thing I've learned. It's a breakthrough. Maybe the first one. It might help you, too; if you go find some of the others, I can even give you some addresses and-"

"You're babbling," I snap. Now I'm on my feet, too, waving my feathered arms and squawking in my ridiculous voice, hoarse from disuse. "What do you want here? Why are you bothering me? What could I possibly tell you about what happ-"

"I learned her name," he says.

My jaw smacks shut. My arms are still out, as though I'm going to take flight. But I'm frozen again.

"The one I saw. Her name was Anna." He wipes his tears with his long, bony hand. Despite his size, he looks even younger, now. The tiny bit of me that doesn't want to hurl him through my window wants to make him hot chocolate.

"Her name was Anna."

"Tell me," I hear myself say.

"Like I said. There was nothing. Just blackness, and I was bleeding all over myself. I couldn't even find the doors, let alone Bri. I started to get up, and for some reason, I looked to my left. And there she was.

"She was just standing there. Dark hair, kind of bushy, pulled back in a ponytail. Glasses. Pale cheeks, penny loafers, flashlight. Clutching a composition notebook against her chest, as though she'd stepped right off the cover of a Nancy Drew novel. She looked at me for about three seconds, maybe even less. This is the strangest part, except it won't sound strange to you; everyone who's experienced it says the same thing. It was the most peaceful three seconds of my life.

"'Hey,' I started to say, and that was it. Poof. No penny loafer girl. No light. Nothing but depot junk. '

Hey!' I shouted, and once I'd started shouting, I couldn't stop.

"I have no idea how long I was in there. Not much longer, I don't think. Suddenly, I was at the doors, different doors than the ones we'd entered through, maybe half a block farther down the street. I ran back to the lot where we'd seen the old woman, but she was gone, too. I ran to the first set of doors, and I screamed Bri's name over and over and over, but I couldn't make myself go back in there, and my voice didn't even seem to penetrate. It was like screaming into a mattress.

"Finally, I ran back to where the bus driver had let us off, and the bus came, and the driver radioed for the cops. They got there pretty fast, too, for all the good it did. For all the good they ever do.

"For weeks afterward-months-I kept waking up every night thinking I'd heard the key in the lock. Even now, I sometimes think I smell her. Hear her whispering 'diphtheria ' in my ear. I went to a grief counselor, and he said losing a loved one like that, when you don't completely know, is like losing a limb. There's a part of you that won't ever accept that she's not there.

"I don't know what made me go back to the depot forum websites. I didn't ever want to go to a depot again. But one night I surfed by, and I started clicking around, and I kept following links, and somehow I wound up in a discussion thread marked 'HAVE YOU SEEN… ' which I assumed was about book-hunting. The first post read:

"Jamie. Twenty-four. Straight blonde hair, beach sandals, pink button-up shirt, gypsum pendant necklace, plastic cereal-box rings on fingers. Vanished Long Beach Depot, 7/22/10. At the end was a photo of her.

"There were 488 follow-up posts. The 432nd read:

"Laughing, dark-haired Anna. Twenty-eight. Penny loafers. Glasses. Always looks at you sideways. Vanished San Antonio Depot, 2/14/11. There wasn't any picture. But I knew.

"Now, you see, right? Now you understand why I'm here. I just want to know she's… somewhere. I just want to know someone's seen her. So please. I'm begging."

He's begging, alright. Weeping again.

But I'm panicking. Trying to dredge up some face from my high school yearbook, someone I can pretend I glimpsed, so he can say

Gee, no, that's not Bri, and get out of my apartment and let me start throwing my things in a duffel so I can disappear again. He thinks this is news to me, that so many Crawlers have had the same experience. And it is, in a way. The fact that they're seeing each other's ghosts, that the lost ones are somehow finding their way back, but to the wrong places, or else they've become pressed permanently into some new universe of fictional characters who live (or don't live) like dried butterflies in the pages of discarded books, forever who they were at the last moment they were anyone, still accessible to us but at random, a collective cultural memory instead of a personal one…

I'd be fascinated, really. If it had anything whatsoever to do with me.

"Dude," says Will, and now, finally, he's grabbed me. I knew he would. I have that effect, these days, on people like Will. "Please. I don't mean to dredge up bad memories. Maybe there's even hope, have you thought of that? If we're all seeing them, maybe we can get them back? Or at least see our own again. Wouldn't you like to? Wouldn't it be worth anything-anything-just to see her one more time?"

I almost break, then. I almost give him exactly what he wants. The whole, pathetic story. Me getting mugged and beaten bloody by some cranked-up street thug who'd been using the Roosevelt Depot as a warm, dark place to freebase. The laughing Crawlers who found me an hour or so later and shoved cigarettes in my mouth and fed me beer and got me on my feet again. Going up that rotted, collapsing staircase in the dark to find Ezzie and show her my new bruises and bring her down to meet my new friends.

Finding her.

How much of it did she intend? That's the only thing that haunts me. Most of it, clearly. Almost all of it. It was the logical extension, after all, of everything she'd done as an artist, but also as a person. That desperate, driving hunger to get inside other people's stories. To leave traces. To cut deep enough below the surface of absolutely everything to determine, once and for all, whether there was anything in there. Or to prove that there wasn't.

It must have taken her hours.

All around her, arrayed in a perfect square just longer and wider than her body, she'd laid paper. Some of it blank and white, some of it torn from whatever texts were near, or maybe she'd picked them specifically. Probably, she did. I'll never know. Even if I saw, I wouldn't remember.

The only thing I will ever remember about that moment is Ezzie lying atop the paper, stark naked in the icy February dark, head tilted almost onto her right shoulder, the spray of her blood fanning onto all that whiteness like great, red wings she'd finally unfolded. Her arms and legs a relief map of tiny and less tiny cuts, each of them flowing into the next, pouring like long, red tributaries toward the great, spurting geyser on her right thigh, where she'd pressed too hard-or exactly hard enough-and severed the femoral artery.

For too long, maybe the critical few seconds, I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything but stare. I thought she was already dead, which was so stupid, I mean, I could see the blood still pumping. That new, red ocean bubbling out of the crack Ezzie had opened in herself and spreading across the paper continents she'd created. But she wasn't moving, didn't seem to be breathing. The color had gone completely out of her; she was whiter than the paper. And she looked… not happy, not even at rest, just… still. I'd never known Ezzie still.

Then she woke up, for the last time. That's when she screamed. She even got out a sentence as I lunged forward. "

Stop it!"

Did she mean staunch the wound? Or get away from her? I didn't care. Slipping and sticking, I dropped onto my knees and plunged my hands onto the open spot, but they went straight through, her skin was like spring ice stretched too thin. It wasn't even warm inside her, just sticky-wet. I could feel the severed strands of artery, or I felt artery, anyway, gristly bits, but trying to grab anything and hold it closed was like trying to tie silly string. I ripped off my coat and started sliding it under her to make a tourniquet, but that just made her scream louder. I'm pretty sure I was screaming, too, and then-God knows how, maybe it was reflex-one of her hands shot up and grabbed my arm.

" Lawrence," she snarled. "It hurts."

And I understood. I still think I really did. It was already too late to save her. If I was going to do anything for her, I had to do it then. I grabbed the first thing handy, and it was as though it had been laid there for me.

The World Book Encyclopedia, 1978. Heavy and frozen hard as a stone.

Lifting it, I looked once more into Ezzie's eyes. I saw the defiance there. The ruthless, obsessive imagination. The unimaginable pain, and-more surprisingly-the panic. Because she thought I wouldn't do it? Because she suddenly knew I would?

I didn't ask. I slammed the book down and smashed in her skull with one blow.

I don't know how long I stayed there. I remember noticing that the blood against my legs wasn't pumping anymore, and stirred only with my own movements. I remember getting cold.

I have no memory of going downstairs. But the people who'd helped me were still there. What a sight I must have been. Beaten purple from my own encounter an hour or so earlier, shirt and pants saturated with Ezzie's blood, fingertips dripping with her brains. Somehow, I must have communicated that they should go upstairs, because some of them did. When they came down, one of them lifted me out of my crouch and said, "Man, you need a hospital."

Then they took me to one. The next morning, the police were by my bed to take my report. It was a long time before I realized they were asking only about the mugging. That they didn't know about Ezzie. I told them they needed to go back to the depot, check the second floor under the phoenix mural.

They found blood there, gouts of it. But no Ezzie. "You're lucky to be alive," they told me the last time they came. I gave them my address, promised I'd let them know where I was, though they didn't ask me to. Then they left me alone.

How did Sarah even find me in the hospital? How did she hear about what had happened? I have no idea. But she's as relentless as her sister was. Also less creative, and less fun. An hour before the doctors discharged me, she called my bedside from her Connecticut home.

"Where's Ezzie?" she said as soon as she heard my voice.

I hung up on her, unplugged the phone, and waited to be released. When I got back to our loft, there were seventeen messages from Sarah. The last one said, "I'm coming."

I packed my duffel. Just clothes and bathroom stuff and a rye bottle. No notebooks, and definitely no books. Ezzie's empty razor case, but none of the artifacts she'd made. I moved to Battle Creek. When I arrived, I let the Detroit police know my new address. The next time I moved, I did the same. If they ever find anything, or they want to do anything about me, I want them to be able to.

But not Sarah. I can't face Sarah.

I look up at Will, who is still staring at me out of his childlike, teary eyes. Childlike, because he still really believes there's more to his story. Maybe there is.

"I'm sorry," I tell him, and I mean it, in my way. "I didn't see anyone."

He just puts on his hat, then. His shoulders have slumped. Shrugging back into his coat, he turns for the door. He's got it open when I grab him, abruptly.

"You didn't answer my question," I say.

Now he just looks stupid. Blind, befuddled Oedipus again. Or is that me?

"How did you find me, Will?"

"I… don't remember," he says. "Wait, yes I do. There was an e-mail."

"An e-mail." From a cop, maybe? Someone working the chat rooms and message boards in the hopes of solving something?

"It mentioned you and gave me your address."

"From whom?"

"Didn't say. They rarely do." He takes a step outside in the Marquette wind, turns abruptly back. "I think it came from Arizona, though."

Now it's my turn to stare. "Arizona?"

"I'm just guessing. From the e-mail addy. Phoenixgirl. At gmail, I think."

In my hands, the empty rye bottle seems to throb. Pump. Against my chest, the razor case beats.

"Jesus," Will says, "I'm sorry. I almost forgot. She asked me to give you a message if I saw you."

"A message." Are these tears in my eyes? Is this fear? Am I scared of what Ezzie will do when she finds me? Or heartbroken that her last great effort was a failure, that she couldn't, finally, cut her way in. Or out. Or wherever it was she always wanted so desperately to go.

Am I even sure phoenixgirl is Ezzie? If it's Sarah, then Sarah finally knows.

I'm grabbing the frozen doorframe. It's so cold that it burns my bare fingers. I hang on anyway.

"It wasn't much of a message," Will tells me. "I think it was just… it just said, '

Tell him I'll see him soon.'"