The trouble with going to see for yourself is that you arrive.
Down in the cellar now, at two in the morning, with his uncle and six Crookes tubes and a Tesla coil and enough acid to sterilise a barn — because the thing under that house was never a ghost, and you cannot exorcise it, you have to treat it, like a fungus, like an infestation, and this is the great joke of the whole business: the horror is a household problem and the remedy is chemical. The soil comes up. Under the soil, something the size of a room, folded, soft, and faintly luminous, which has been feeding through the floorboards on the tenants for two centuries and is not finished.
And the town at the harbour is worse walking than it looked from the archive. The streets are the wrong shape, the church has the wrong things in the vestry, and the man who takes his fare will not turn his head, and after dark the whole population comes up the road together and does not hurry, because there is nowhere on the coast for him to go and everybody in that town already knows it.
The stone in the desert stands over him. He puts his hand on it. The angles are wrong the way the photograph promised and worse the way it could not — the corner he is looking at is further away than the wall behind it.
And somewhere under all that fitted stone, patient as arithmetic, something enormous turns over in its sleep.
