Tess sits on the stair like a person who has done this in daylight and still gets a shiver at night, which is allowed.

“Two summers,” she says, “I’ve been testing the stories with a pencil. Peck does columns. I do times. The answering light showed up in 1911 in a newspaper and in 2019 on a blog and tonight in my lens. Same trick. Different ink.”

She shows a margin note: respect + method. The respect is for the keepers who had no radio and needed a story strong enough to keep boys off rocks. The method is for you.

“You fixed the float,” she guesses, or knows from the way you are not dripping as much fear. “Mold still wants a dry day. We can give it one tomorrow. Tonight we don’t pretend the basement is a lung of the dead.”

Tess’s pencil has teeth marks. Researchers are not statues. She shows you a page where she chased a wink in her first summer and wrote stupid and then crossed it out and wrote scared, then smart, sat down. “We keep that page,” she says. “It’s the badge.” You like her more for the teeth marks than for the rules, and you like the rules too.