Bashford Manor’s dying, painfully, the way most large buildings die: long before anyone gets around to imploding it, the reversed-out missing logos of empty stores look like whimpers for lost children.

Half mall, half pseudogothic mansion, it looks like a Place You Don’t Go. One or two establishments hang on by their regulars, but nobody cleans the windows and the graffiti’s a solid mass. It’s all dark at night. The streetlights are becoming spidery naked trees.

Rob finds it around a dark corner, shining from under a fire door: a glow. Somebody’s in there.

He pushes it open with a stick.