The page is not fancy. It is ice-ping notes beside a sketch of the grate, two kinds of sound agreeing to share a dry bag.

Glass-ice: a drum the size of a tarn, groaning when it shrinks. Stone-hallway: your clap coming home. Solano, in the morning, means the title kindly:

How a notch makes ghosts.

Kids from town will come and put their gloves on the outside of the bars and clap-and-count (no second miner) and look at hare photos (no walker) and hear a porcupine recording Wen keeps for education (no one in the walls). Nobody gets mocked for having been scared. Everybody gets the mechanism.

Priya pins a copy above the stove. “Wonder stays,” she says, for the second time in your life and not the last.

You sleep without listening for little hammers. The knocks can happen. You know their names.

THE END

What you learned: ice sings and cracks when temperature drops; mine mouths throw echoes; animals chew and hop and hoot. Three sounds, three causes. Folklore collected them. Science sorts them without throwing the stories away. You never needed to go in.