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"We are echolocators," Joel-and-Peter said

They were also, apparently, very sharp of hearing

The passage forked, then forked again At one point I felt a sudden pressure in le them to release it That’s when I knee’d left 1940 and entered a loop Finally we came to a dead-end ith vertical steps cut into it Joel-and-Peter stood at the base of the wall and pointed to a pinpoint of daylight overhead

"Our house--" said the elder

"Is up there," said the younger

And with that, they retreated into the shadows

The steps were slio slowly or risk falling They ascended the wall to h which shone a single gleaers into the crack and pushed sideways, and the doors slid open like a ca a tubular conduit of bricks that rose twenty or thirty feet to a circle of sky I was at the false bottom of a fake well

I pulled myself into the well and cliainst the opposite side of the shaft When the burn inover the lip of the well to land in so house The sky was an infected shade of yellow, but there was no sines We were in some older time, before the war--before cars, even There was a chill in the air, and errant flakes of snow drifted down and round

Emma came up the well next, then Horace Emma had decided that only the three of us should explore the house We didn’t knoe would find up here, and if we needed to leave in a hurry, it was better to have a sued; Joel-and-Peter’s warning of blood and shadows had scared the to hieon in the square

Bronaved to us from below and then pulled closed the circular door at the bottom of the well The top side was painted to look like the surface of water--dark, dirty water you’d never want to drop a drinking bucket into Very clever

The three of us huddled together and looked around The courtyard and the house were suffering frorass around the as tarew up in weedy thickets that reached higher than so and half collapsed in one corner, and near it a toppled laundry line was gradually being sed by brush

We stood and waited, listening for pigeons From beyond the house’s walls, I could hear the tap of horses’ hooves on pavement No, this definitely wasn’t London circa 1940

Then, in one of the upper-floor s, I saw a curtain shift

"Up there!" I hissed, pointing at it

I didn’t know if a bird or a person had done it, but it orth checking out I started toward a door that led into the house, beckoning the others after round, covered head to ankle with a black tarp A pair of worn shoes poked fro at the sky Tucked into one cracked sole was a white card, on which had been written in neat script:

Mr A F Crued forward rather than be taken alive

Kindly requests his remains be deposited in the Thames

"Unlucky bastard," Horace whispered "He came here from the country, probably after his own loop was raided--only to have the one he’d escaped to raided, as well"

"But ould they leave poor Mr Crumbley out in the open this way?" whispered Emma