EPILOGUE
The shop is called Perfect Ten and it has been closed for renovation since the fourteenth of October, which nobody on Peabody Street finds strange, because the sign in the window is professionally printed and the skip outside is real.
Thaddeus Halloway works nights, because of course he does.
His right hand is gone at the wrist. It will grow back; it takes about a year; it is, he has discovered, the worst thing that has ever happened to him, and he has thought a great deal in the last three weeks about a woman in a canvas jacket with a bolo knife, and about the fact that in two hundred and twenty years nobody in that vault ever considered that a human being might be a problem.
He has learned something from that. He intends to apply it.
At twenty past two in the morning he sweeps the floor, because the dust matters, and then he moves the pedicure chairs, and then he lifts the four sheets of plywood in the back room and looks at the concrete underneath.
There's a hole in it now. It's about a foot across.
It took him nine nights with a core drill and a great deal of water, and beneath the 1974 concrete there is rubble, and beneath the rubble there is a void, and at the bottom of the void, eleven feet down, there is a floor made of ship's timber laid in 1783 and carved, in the winter of 1813, with eleven hundred marks by five women of the Verity line.
Two hundred and six of them left.
Halloway kneels at the edge of the hole with his one hand and lowers the lamp on its cord, the way he has every night for nine nights.
The light goes down through the dark and swings, and the boards come up out of the black — grey, salt-eaten, close-grained, carved so thick in places that the wood looks like fur.
And in the middle of the floor, in the small clear space where the marks have been worn away, something has been drawing in the dust.
It wasn't there last night.
It's a shape about three inches across: two curves crossing, and a line through them — drawn wrong, drawn backwards, drawn by something that has been lying under a warded floor in the dark for two hundred and thirteen years, looking up at the underside of the marks, learning them from the wrong side.
Thaddeus Halloway holds the lamp steady and does not breathe, because he does not need to.
"Not long now," he says.
And eleven feet down, in the dark, in a voice like a door in a house nobody lives in, something that has not spoken since the winter of 1813 says:
"Her name."