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No, not a wall.

A stage.

Putnam took a step into the room.

This was what was left of the original theater.

Now he felt afraid. He had been expecting something grand, a huge theater with an orchestra pit and a balcony, a gigantic auditorium with filigreed columns and plush velvet-backed chairs. He had not been expecting this grimy narrow room with its lone dummy audience and its pitifully primitive munchkin stage, and the strangeness of it all cast everything in a sinister light.

You didn’t go up there, did you?

He pointed his flashlight toward the raised stage. Facing him from the platform was a tableau of small figures the size of dolls, horrid ugly things attired in garments of sackcloth and hair. He stepped closer, past the seated dummy, and focused the beam of his light on the figure nearest him. It was a nasty and horribly unnatural thing. The head, larger than the body, was made from a type of squash: a yam or pumpkin or something in between. The eyes were inset marbles, the nose whittled wood. Real teeth, human teeth, appeared to have been set in the upper and lower gums of the carved opening that was a mouth.

He felt suddenly chilled, but his flashlight moved on, to the others. The small figures each wore different expressions, different clothes, but they were all equally hideous and all seemed to be made from the same materials. They were all posed or positioned in aspects of movement, as though they had been frozen in mid-performance.

Without thinking, Putnam found himself stepping next to the stage. It was cold here, a frigid breeze blew in from somewhere, but the drop in temperature affected him only peripherally. He already felt frozen inside. He reached out and touched a tentative finger to the nearest doll. The figure was warm to his touch. And squishy.

He drew back, feeling repulsed and sickened, practically stumbling over his feet in his effort to get away from the stage. The finger with which he had touched the doll felt slightly slimy, and he held it out in front of him, as if to keep it from contaminating the rest of his body.

He made his way back toward the door, careful not to touch anything. He hated the dolls and he hated the theater. Hated them with a passion. It was a strangely irrational feeling, not one he would have expected, and not one that he stopped to analyze. He just wanted to get out of this place and get back to the bookstore. There was something wrong with what was up here, and that wrongness, which had at first frightened him, now filled him with an irrational loathing.

He hurried out of the theater and into the hallway, and by the time he reached the stairway at the far end he was running. He sprinted down the steps two at a time, and when he reached the bottom, he slammed the door behind him and with trembling fingers locked it. He wanted to wash his finger, but he did not want to stay in the bookstore any longer—not alone, not with that room upstairs—so instead of going into the bathroom he quickly turned off the rest of the lights in the store, and locked the door on his way out.

He stood for a moment in the street in front of the bookstore, sweating, breathing heavily, looking up at the long building. He had never noticed that the series of shops here were all housed within a single structure—their facades were all so different—and he never would have figured out on his own that the building contained a second story. Now that he knew, though, he could see the cleverly camouflaged sections of brick that blocked the upstairs windows. He started counting from the bookstore on, to determine which bricked window hid the theater, but gave it up instantly. He didn’t want to know.

Shivering, he hurried around the side of the building to the parking lot where he had left his car.

At home, five minutes later, he went immediately into the bathroom to wash his finger. He scrubbed his skin with Dove, then with Ajax, but the slimy feeling would not go away. He opened the medicine cabinet, took out a box of Band-Aids and used several of them to wrap up his finger, and that felt