A violent thump shook the floorboards beneath our feet. It didn't come from the vent. It came from directly beneath the floor, right where the hallway met the stairs.
The key, the voice behind the wall hissed. It didn't sound like Lily anymore. It sounded deeper, layered, like three people speaking the same word at slightly different intervals. Give them the key. Let the old man close the mouth.
My father recovered his balance, his eyes wide and bloodshot. He didn't look at me with anger; he looked at me with a profound, sickening pity. "Rachel, look at the vent. Look at what you're trying to save."
I turned my head. In the dim light of the hallway, illuminated only by the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, I peered through the square opening where the rusted iron grille had been.
The space inside wasn't a standard ventilation shaft. The house was built in 1890, a sprawling, Victorian monstrosity with double-thick exterior walls. The interior gap was nearly two feet wide, lined not with tin or sheet metal, but with rough-hewn limestone blocks that looked like they belonged to a cellar or a tomb.
And there, six feet down in the narrow vertical trench, was a shape.
It was pale—so white it seemed to luminesce against the black rock. It was small, roughly the size of a six-year-old child, but its limbs were wrong. They were folded against its torso in a way that suggested too many joints, like a spider tucked into a crevice. Its face was turned upward toward the light.