And yet I endured.

A hand was placed upon my shoulder, and Angel spoke. His touch felt incredibly cool to me, and his breath was like ice upon my skin. And then I became aware of another voice beneath Angel’s, except this one repeated words in a language that I did not understand, a litany of phrases spoken over and over again, always with the same intonation, the same pauses, the same emphases. It was an invocation of sorts, yet one bound up entirely with madness, and I was reminded of those animals in a zoo that, driven insane by their incarceration and the never-changing nature of their surroundings, find themselves endlessly stalking in their cages, always at the same speed, always with the same movements, as though the only way they can survive is to become as one with the place in which they are kept, to match its unyielding absence of novelty with their own.

Suddenly the voice changed. It stumbled over its words. It tried to begin once more but lost its place. Finally, it stopped entirely, and I became aware of something probing the ossuary, the way a blind man might stop the tapping of his cane and listen for the approach of a stranger.

And then it howled, over and over again, the tone and volume rising until it became one repeated shriek of rage and despair, but despair now, for the first time in so long, leavened by faint hope. The sound of it tore at my ears, shredding my nerves, as it called to me over and over and over again.

It is aware, I thought. It knows.

It is alive.

Angel and Louis brought me back to the hotel. I was weak, and my skin was burning. I tried to lie down, but the nausea would not go away. After a time, I joined them in their room. We sat at the windows and watched the cemetery and its buildings.

“What happened in there?” said Louis at last.

“I’m not sure.”

He was angry. He didn’t even try to hide it.

“Yeah, well you need to explain it, don’t matter how weird it sounds. We got no time for this.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” I snapped.

He eyed me levelly.

“So what was it?”

I had no choice but to answer him.

“I thought, for a moment, that I felt something down there, under the ossuary, and that it knew I was aware of it. I had a sensation of being trapped, of suffocation and heat. That’s it. I can’t tell you anything more.”

I didn’t know what to expect from Louis in response to this. Now, I thought. Now we have arrived at it. The thing that has come between us is wriggling its way to the surface.

“You okay to go back in there?” he said.

“I’ll wear a lighter coat next time.”

Louis tapped his fingers gently, in time to some rhythm that only he could hear.

“I had to ask,” he said.

“I understand.”

“I guess I’m getting impatient. I want this to end. I don’t like it when it’s personal.”

He turned in his chair and stared at me.

“They’ll come, won’t they?”

“Yes,” I said. “Then you can do whatever you want with them. I promised you that we would find them, and we have. Isn’t that what you wanted from me?”

But he still wasn’t satisfied. His fingers drummed on the windowsill, and his gaze seemed drawn again and again to the twin spires of the chapel. Angel was seated on a chair in one dark corner, carefully maintaining a stillness and silence, waiting for what divided us to be named. A sea change had occurred in our friendship, and I did not know if the result would bring an end to it, or a new beginning.

“Say it,” I said.

“I wanted to blame you,” said Louis, softly. He did not look at me as he spoke. “I wanted to blame you for what happened to Alice. Not in the beginning, because I knew the life that she led. I tried to look out for her, and I tried to make other people look out for her too, but in the end she chose her own path, like we all do. When she went missing, I was grateful. I was relieved. It didn’t last long, but it was there, and I was ashamed of it.

“Then we found Garcia, and this guy Brightwell came out of the woodwork, and suddenly it wasn’t about Alice no more. It was about you, because you were tied into it somehow. And I got to thinking that maybe it wasn’t Alice’s fault, that maybe it was yours. You know how many women make their living on the streets of New York? Of all the whores or junkies they could have chosen, of all the women who might have gotten involved with this man Winston, why should it have been her? It was like you cast a shadow on lives, and that shadow was growing, and it touched her even though you’d never met her, didn’t even know she existed. After that, I didn’t want to look at you for a time. I didn’t hate you for it, because it wasn’t intentional on your part, but I didn’t want to be around you. Then she started calling to me.”

He was reflected clearly in the glass now, as the night drew in. His face hung in the air, and perhaps it was a flaw in the glass that duplicated his reflection, or maybe it was something more, but a second presence seemed suspended in the darkening air behind him, its features indistinguishable, and the stars were shining through its eyes.

“I hear her at night. I thought at the start that it was someone in the building, but when I went outside the apartment to check, I couldn’t hear her no more. It was only inside. I only hear her when there’s nobody else around. It’s her voice, except it’s not alone. There are other voices with it, so many of them, and they’re all calling different names. She calls mine. It’s hard to understand her, because someone doesn’t want her calling out. It didn’t matter to him at first, because he thought nobody cared about her, but now he knows better. He wants her to stay quiet. She’s dead, but she keeps calling out, like she’s got no peace. She cries all the time. She’s afraid. They’re all afraid.

“And I knew then that maybe it was no coincidence that you found Angel and me either, or that we found you. I don’t understand everything that goes on with you, but I do know this: whatever happened was meant to come to pass, and we’re all involved. It’s always been waiting in the shadows, and none of us can walk away from it. There’s no blame to be laid at your door. I know that now. Sure, there are other women who could have been taken, but what then? They’d have disappeared, and it would be their voices calling, but there would be no one to hear them, and no one would care. This way, we heard, and we came.”

At last, he turned back to me, and the woman in the night faded away.

“I want her to stop crying,” he said, and I could see clearly the lines upon his face and the tiredness in his eyes. “I want them all to stop crying.”

Walter Cole called me on my cell that night. I had spoken to him before we left, and had told him as much as I knew.

“You sound a million miles away,” he said, “and if I were you, I’d keep it that way. Just about everyone you’ve ever talked to on this thing is dead, and pretty soon people are going to start looking for you to answer some questions. Some of this you may not want to hear. Neddo’s dead. Someone cut him up badly. It might have been torture in order to gain information, except there was a rag stuffed in his mouth, so even if he had something to give up, he wouldn’t have been able to speak. That’s not the worst of it, either. Reid, the monk who spoke with you, was stabbed to death outside a bar in Hartford. The other monk phoned it in, then disappeared. Cops want to talk to him too, but either his order is protecting him or they really don’t know where he is.”

“Do the cops think he did it? If they do, they’re wrong.”

“They just want to talk to him. There was blood on Reid’s mouth, and it wasn’t his own. Unless it matches Bartek’s, then he’s probably in the clear. It looks like Reid bit whoever killed him. The blood sample has been fast-tracked to a private lab. They’ll get the results in a day or two.”