The yaoguai left first.
It was not a retreat in any dignified sense. One moment it was pulling itself upright on the far side of the median, reorganizing its too-many-shouldered mass for a second charge, and then something changed in the red-stained air of the parking lot, a pressure drop so sudden that Jane felt it in his back teeth, and the yaoguai stopped.
It turned its wrong head.
Not toward Jane. Away from him. Away from the school entirely, toward the south end of the parking lot where the access road curved behind the gymnasium. Every jointed, misassembled piece of it went still.
Then it ran.
Not the deliberate predator-pace from before. Something else. Something that had no pride in it, all four limbs and whatever the extra joints counted as working in desperate, graceless synchrony, carrying it over the median and across the road and into the tree line so fast that Jane almost missed the transition from there to gone.
He stood in the middle of the parking lot with his hands still raised and watched the trees.
That, the old voice said, with careful neutrality, is not something I recognize.
That was the first time in two years that Fuxi's memory had said that about anything.
The parking lot had gone very quiet.
Colt was standing near the bike rack with the three students he'd moved. Two of them were sitting on the concrete, the sudden-sleep, chests rising and falling with the deep steady rhythm of people far inside themselves. The third, a junior named Marcus with a lacrosse jacket and a bloody knee from where he'd gone down on the curb, was awake and very still, watching the tree line where the yaoguai had disappeared with the expression of someone who had decided that absolute stillness was the correct response to the current situation and was committed to it.
"It left," Colt said.
"Something scared it."
"What scares something like that."
Jane lowered his hands. His palms had stopped shaking, mostly. "I don't know yet."
From inside the school, muffled by concrete and glass, a door slammed. Then another. The fire alarm was still going, its flat mechanical wail cutting across the red afternoon at intervals, and beneath it, barely audible, the sound of students and teachers doing what people do when procedure fails them: moving, calling out names, making noise.
Too much noise.
The thought landed before Jane could trace where it came from, Fuxi's instinct or his own, it didn't matter. His eyes moved to the south end of the parking lot, to the access road behind the gymnasium, to the place the yaoguai had been looking before it ran.
Nothing there.
The red sky pulsed once, slow and deep.
Then the lights inside the gymnasium went out.
All of them, simultaneously, visible through the long narrow windows along the building's upper edge. One moment fluorescent white, the next nothing. The fire alarm cut off mid-cycle and did not resume. The sudden silence was louder than the alarm had been.
Marcus said, very quietly, "What just happened to the lights."
Nobody answered him.
It came around the corner of the gymnasium at a walking pace.
Tall. That was the first thing, tall in a way that didn't resolve correctly against the building behind it, too much of it visible above the roofline of the single-story annex. It was wearing a suit. Dark, the kind of dark that had stopped being a color and become an absence, jacket and trousers and a white dress shirt, and the shirt was very white, almost luminous against the gray-red sky, and above the collar there was a face.
Jane would think about that face later. He would think about it in the specific way you think about a sound you can't unhear, turning it over carefully, at a distance, without looking at it directly.
What he registered in the first second: tall, suit, wrong scale, and a smile so wide it had ceased to have any relationship to a human mouth and had become something else entirely, an arrangement of features that referenced happiness the way a diagram references a thing without being the thing.
It walked.
Not fast. Not slow. The same pace a person walks when they are going somewhere and are confident it will wait for them.
"Inside," Jane said.
His voice came out level. He was grateful for that.
"Inside," he said again, louder, turning toward the students near the bike rack, "get everyone inside the building right now, grab whoever is down, move."
Colt was already moving. He got his hands under one of the unconscious students, the shoulder-and-drag of someone who'd done it before, and nodded at Marcus, who processed the instruction through a half-second of shock and then got moving, getting under the other side of the limp weight with the desperate coordination of someone who had decided that helping was better than standing still.
Jane did not run.
He walked backward. Facing the figure. Watching it come around the corner and into the parking lot at the same unhurried pace, covering the distance between them in the way something covers distance when speed is not the point, when arrival is already settled.
Do not run, the old voice said, with a certainty that was not Fuxi's cosmological knowledge but something older than that, something that lived in the marrow of a species that had once been prey. Running is an invitation.
Jane didn't know where the knowledge came from. He walked backward and did not run and kept his eyes on the figure's chest rather than its face, because looking at the face felt like a mistake he couldn't articulate yet but believed completely.
The figure's smile did not change.
It walked.
Behind Jane, he heard the crash of the school's rear entrance banging open, voices, Colt giving instructions in a flat tone that cut through the noise. The unconscious students being carried inside.
Jane reached the door.
He went through it.
He did not turn his back until the door was between him and the parking lot.
The corridor behind the gymnasium was a maintenance hallway, low ceilings, exposed pipes, the smell of chlorine from the pool that shared the annex. Emergency lighting had kicked on somewhere, casting everything in the flat red of exit signs, so the red outside had followed them in and made the whole school the same color as the sky.
Fourteen people in the hallway. Three unconscious, laid out along the wall. Colt. Marcus. Two other students Jane half-recognized from the parking lot, a girl with a cut on her forehead, a boy in a Maplewood track jacket. Two teachers, one of whom was Mr. Dern from the PE department, a solid man in his forties who had the good instinct of someone who coached things for a living and was currently applying it to headcounting rather than panicking.
Mr. Dern looked at Jane.
"Is it still out there?"
"Yes."
"What is it."
Jane looked at him and tried to find the words for that and couldn't, not quickly enough to be useful. "I don't know what it's called. I know some things about how it moves."
Dern processed this with the speed of a man who had coached fifteen years of varsity anything and understood that incomplete information during a crisis was still information. "What do we do."
"Right now, we don't go back outside." Jane moved to the nearest window, a small rectangle of reinforced glass set high in the wall, and looked out.
The figure was standing in the middle of the parking lot.
It was facing the building.
It had stopped walking.
"It's not coming in," said the girl with the cut on her forehead. She was pressed against the far wall, arms crossed over her chest, watching the window. Sixteen, maybe. Jane didn't know her name. She had the clear eyes of someone who was scared and had decided that fear was a data point rather than a verdict. "Why isn't it coming in."
"I don't know," Jane said.
"That's the third time you've said you don't know something," Colt said, not unkindly. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, one knee up. His breathing was completely even. "Is that about to change."
Jane pulled out one of his notebooks.
"Working on it," he said.
"Does anyone," Jane said, looking up from the notebook, "know any stories about this school. Old ones. Things teachers say happened, or things students dare each other to do, or things you're not supposed to do in certain rooms."
The hallway looked at him.
"Urban legends," he said. "Ghost stories. The kind of thing you'd tell at a sleepover and everyone would go, yeah, I heard that one too."
Silence for a moment. Then the girl with the cut on her forehead, slowly: "There's the thing about the drama room."
"Tell me."
She pulled her knees up. Her name, Jane would learn later, was Sasha Reeves, junior, stage manager for the fall play, which meant she spent more after-school hours in the drama room than almost anyone else and had heard every iteration of every story about it. "You're not supposed to say a specific name in the drama room. I don't know what the name is, nobody does, everyone has a different version. But the story is that there was a teacher, a long time ago, who would come back at night and watch rehearsals, and if you said his name he'd come into the light and you'd see his face and you'd lose your mind. Or you'd lose your voice. The version changes."
"What does he look like in the story."
She looked at the window at the end of the hall. At the figure standing in the parking lot.
"Tall," she said. "Suit."
The track jacket boy, who had been quiet up to this point, said, with the specific reluctant tone of someone who didn't want to contribute information that would make things worse: "There's also the game."
"What game."
"The Smiling Man game. You're not supposed to play it at school, that's the rule, everyone knows that rule. You do it at home if you do it. You light a candle, you write a name on paper, you walk the school's perimeter at midnight, you knock three times on the main door, and." He stopped.
"And," Jane said.
"And he walks with you. The whole way. If you finish the circuit without running or screaming or looking at his face, you get a wish. If you break any of the rules, he takes something. Your voice. Your name. Your reflection. Depends on the version." The boy's jaw was tight. "My older brother did it on a dare when he was a sophomore. He said there was something there. He won't talk about it."
There it is, the old voice said, with the slow satisfaction of a puzzle finding its shape.
Jane looked at the window. At the figure, still standing, still facing the building, not moving.
It has rules.
And they had broken one of them, possibly several, by running, by going inside, by refusing the encounter on its terms. The question was whether it was still willing to operate within its own framework, or whether the rules had already been violated past the point of negotiation.
"The candle," Jane said. "In the original game. What does the candle do."
The track jacket boy, whose name was Eli, thought about it. "Keeps it from touching you, I think. As long as the flame's lit."
Jane looked at Mr. Dern. "Is there anything like candles in this building. Any open flame, any fire source, even a lighter."
Dern thought for one second. "Kitchen," he said. "Cafeteria kitchen. Gas range, pilot lights, should still be running even with the power out."
Jane closed the notebook.
Outside, in the parking lot, in the red afternoon, the Smiling Man had not moved.
It was still waiting.
And Jane was beginning to understand that waiting was what it was best at, and that the next move belonged to whoever was willing to walk back out into the open, on its terms, with a flame in their hand and the right rules in their head, and not run.
You're not seriously considering, Colt started.
Jane was already moving toward the cafeteria.
"Someone needs to explain the rules to the people still inside the building," he said, over his shoulder. "All of them. No running. No screaming. Under no circumstances does anyone look directly at its face." He paused at the corner. "And find out if anyone has a lighter."
Colt stared at the empty hallway where Jane had been.
Marcus, who was still holding the wall like it was a personal commitment, said, very quietly, "Is he always like this."
Colt picked up one of the unconscious students' bags, started going through the pockets.
"I've known him for forty minutes," he said.
He found a lighter on the second bag.