Everything started as a good idea, and the good idea was Nadia's.

That is the part you will keep, whatever else goes soft at the edges: the five of you in the overgrown parking lot at the edge of the property, phones up like little offerings, the message still glowing on one screen.

A number that said it belonged to the school's old photography club.

A club that had not run in years.

Doors open this one weekend only, the council votes Monday to seal the building for good, come see it before it's gone.

Someone had said it would be fun. Someone had said to bring flashlights.

Everyone had come.

"Okay, so... no."

Priya has her hand flat on the fence before anyone is through it.

"I'm saying this once and then I'll let it go. Say it with me now. This is exactly how people end up on the news."

"Five people and two working flashlights." Theo sweeps his beam up the black brick and along the chain. "And a door that is just sort of... unlatched. That's not a horror movie, that's a Tuesday."

Nadia is already crouched at the gap, peering through.

"It isn't unlatched. Someone left it open. Look, there's a wedge under it. Somebody did that on purpose."

"So it opens." By the time anyone thinks to answer you, you are already crossing the lot. That is how the whole night goes. It is easy, and it is funny, and all five of you walk in.

Inside, the dark is not empty, it is thick.

Dead fluorescents in a row down the hall, water stains spreading across the ceiling like continents, a smell of old chalk and damp and something sweeter underneath.

Your footsteps come back off the lockers, off the tile, doubled, like someone walking half a step behind.

"Service just dropped," someone says, in the flat tone of a person reading traffic.

"Of course it did, we're inside a dead building." Theo claps his hands once, and the sound runs away down the corridor and does not come back the way it should. He looks after it. "Okay, that was actually kind of cool, right?"

Nadia takes charge the way she always does, which is cheerfully and without asking.

She wants the gym, because the gym is where those lights were in the message.

Theo wants the second floor, because the second floor is "the actual haunted part, obviously."

Priya wants to go home. Nobody listens to Priya, and Priya comes anyway, because she already came this far.

"Fine, we cover ground," Nadia decides, checking her phone, finding it useless, and dropping it back in her pocket. "Pairs. Fifteen minutes. Meet back here. Shout if anything happens, and if nothing happens, shout anyway, because I want to hear you."

Then someone counts heads, and there are five of them and the math refuses, because a pair needs two and five is an odd number, and everyone looks around at everyone, and the group does that small awkward shuffle of people deciding who is going to be the one who goes alone.

Nadia turns to you.

"So."

She grins at you the way she has since you were both small, before any of this. "Which way are you taking?"

Under the floor, something hums. Steady, patient, like a machine left running on purpose by someone who knew you were coming.

You take your direction, because Nadia asked and because it is your turn, and the plan is fifteen minutes and a shout if anything happens.

The first thing that happens is small. Theo's laugh, somewhere above the ceiling, cuts off in the middle of itself, like a dial turned down, and the punchline never arrives. The building holds the silence with you. Further off a fire door swings open and does not swing back.

The second thing is Priya's flashlight, the only steady light left, sweeping a hallway and then simply going out.

Not dimming. Out.

A beat later comes a sound like something heavy set down carefully on the floor, and then the dark keeps it.

Nadia calls your name once.

The last of it stretches a half second too long, and then the corridor drinks the rest, and you understand in some animal place below thought that you are the only one still being answered.

Footsteps start up behind you. Unhurried. Matching your pace, then not matching it, then closing.

You do not remember the last step. You remember hands, careful, a voice close to your ear saying it's okay, it's okay, you're okay, and the edges of the world going soft anyway.

You wake to candlelight.

Two desks shoved together into a table.

A real cloth, folded straight. Two mismatched chairs. A candle in a glass jar laying warm shapes up a wall gone dark. One steaming bowl set at your place, and, across from you, a chilled can of the exact soda you always order.

You are tied to your chair. Not roughly. The rope is careful, patient work, your wrists bound behind you by the same unhurried hands that did everything else tonight, nothing biting, nothing cruel.

Across the table he sits, elbows on the cloth, watching you wake the way he has watched you all night, and he is still bloody. It has dried along his hairline, across one knuckle, in a dark line under his thumbnail. He has not washed. He chose not to wash.

When your eyes open he lights up, and it is somehow worse than the silence was.

"Hey. You're awake. Good."

He sits forward, hands folded, the perfect host. "You slept through most of it, so I brought you here myself after. I put a blanket under your head when we got in. I checked twice."

He nods at the empty chairs around the table. There are enough of them for everyone who walked in with you. Five of you came through that door, and only one of you is sitting down, and he leaves the other chairs pulled out anyway, like a man who set a table for guests.

"I kept the seats. It seemed rude not to." He paused, and then that small tilt of the head, and the pride underneath it, soft as a bruise.

"Ask me what happened to them." He says, smiling, like it's an invitation. He means it like one.

"Go on. I said anything. I want you to know how it went, because tonight was for you. All of it was for you."

The noodles steam. The candle leans. He waits, kind and terrible and perfectly still, and he has all night.

You almost made it.

Three floors of stairwell in the dark, your breath loud in your own ears, the chained doors behind you and the boarded windows sliding past. You found the hand-cranked fire door by accident, the one thing in the whole building he never touched. You got it open. You got your shoulder through.

Then the door swung back on its own, heavy as a coffin lid, and there he was on the landing below. Not running. Just standing at the bottom of the stairs with his bandaged hands loose at his sides and his head tilted, watching you with the flat attention of a man who has already done the arithmetic.

"You found my door." There is no admiration in it, only a note taken. "That's fine. I left it for you. I wanted to see if you'd try, and now I know, and now I can stop wondering."

He walks up slow, one step at a time, and there is nowhere left for you to stand except back against the crank housing with the cold rail at your spine. He stops two steps below you and looks up. In this light his face is calm all the way down.

"I'm not angry." A pause long enough to fit a lie into. "Okay. I'm a little angry. You ran from the one room in your life that was ever built around you. Do you know what that does to a person? No. You wouldn't. You don't know me that way yet. That's tonight's problem, and I'm fixing it."

He takes his hand out of his pocket. There is nothing in it. He holds it out, palm up.

"Come back down. Or don't." He shrugs, light and easy, and his eyes do not come off your face. "There's only one other way off this landing. I'm standing on it."

The home economics room smells like instant noodles and something burning at the edges. Two desks pushed together into a table, covered with a tablecloth he must have brought from somewhere, real cloth, folded straight. Two mismatched chairs face each other. A candle in a glass jar throws warm shapes up the wall. One bowl of noodles for you, and one can of soda set at the place across from him: the exact brand you always order.

He notices you in the doorway and lights up in a way that is somehow worse than the silence had been.

"Sit. Please. I did it right, I tried to do it right." He pulls your chair out with both hands, then steps back so his own chair is a body's width away, leaving you room. "I know it's not a restaurant. I know. But it's warm in here and the other rooms are cold, and I thought you'd want to eat something before we talk. People are better when they've eaten. That's what my grandmother said, and she was right about most things."

He sits opposite you and does not touch his own food. He watches you lift the soda, and the small ordinary act of it seems to please him more than anything you have said all night.

"I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer honestly. It's the only honest thing I'll ask for tonight." He turns the candle a quarter inch so the shadows move. "What would you want from someone, if you could have anything? Not me. Anyone. Ask for whatever you want, and I'll get it for you."

He says it like a person who can.

"Eat first. Then tell me. And then we'll do one more small thing after that, and then that's all, I promise." He smiles, and it is almost warm, and he does not move again until you answer. "I'll remember whatever you say. I remember everything you say."

You shouldn't have heard it. Three floors up, past the chained front doors, above the hum of the generator, you shouldn't have heard it. But the building carries sound, and sound runs both ways.

Someone is pounding on the front doors and shouting your name. A voice you know. Marlow, cheerful and uncomplicated, standing on the wrong side of a trap he does not know is a trap.

You get to the window above the entrance. Through the gaps in the boards, out in the floodlit dark, you can just make out the shape of them, fists on the chain, calling up at the building, at the wrong window, at nothing.

Then you are not alone at the glass.

He comes up behind you without a sound until his reflection is beside yours in the black pane. He looks down at Marlow the way you would look at weather.

"There he is," he says, pleasantly. "I hoped he'd come. I wasn't sure he was brave enough. He is. Now I have to do something about that, and I want to be clear it isn't your fault. None of this is your fault. I want you to remember I said that."

He turns from the window. He tucks a loose strand of hair behind his own ear with unhurried fingers, then reaches back and tightens the bandage wound across his knuckles, testing the give of the gauze the way someone checks a pair of gloves before work.

"Stay here." He pauses in the doorway and looks back at you, and for the first time all night he actually wants something from you. "Or don't. If you come down there, you'll want to hold his hand while I do it, and then you'll have to watch, and that'll be a different night for the both of us." He smiles. "Be up here. I'll be quick."

He is gone without hurrying.

The pounding stops. The dark below goes very quiet. It stays quiet for a while.

The ceiling tiles are yellow with decades of old smoke. You come back to yourself on the floor of what used to be a classroom, desks shoved against the walls, a folded blanket under your head that you do not remember. Somewhere below the floor a generator hums, and the lights flicker like they are deciding whether to stay on.

Someone is sitting not far away.

He is cross-legged on a desk, hood up, watching you with the patience of a person who has been watching for a very long time. When your eyes finally focus he does not startle and he does not smile. He just tips his head, relieved, the way a nurse checks a temperature.

"You're awake." His voice is soft and careful, one word at a time, like he practiced it in a mirror. "I didn't touch you, I want you to know that. You fell asleep on the drive and I carried you. That's all. I put the blanket under your head so the floor wouldn't hurt you. I checked twice."

He slides off the desk and crouches down to your level, elbows on his knees, close enough that you can catch rain and something metallic soaked into the black wool of his uniform. Not close enough to touch.

"They told me you said yes to him." His voice does not crack. His hands do, a little, in his lap. He looks at them like they belong to someone else. "That's why we're here. I just want one honest conversation. Nobody's coming for you. I made sure of that, so we have time. We have all night."

Somewhere in the dark a door settles in its frame. He does not look at it. He looks at you.

"You've got choices here. I want you to know that." He says it kindly. "You can eat. You can sleep. You can talk to me. You can even tell me no." He means it the way a man means that a locked door is still a door.

Behind him, past the doorway he left open exactly a hand's width, the hallway is black and very long and very quiet. He waits for you to look at it, and then he waits for your answer, and he has all the time in the world.