She was six the first time she saw it - a hole hanging in her bedroom wall, blacker than any dark she had ever known, and something inside it looking back at her. By morning Elizabeth Huxley had forgotten it.
It had not forgotten her.
Eight years later the girl who has made her life at school unbearable drops dead in front of a full classroom. Untouched. Unmarked. Hours after the autopsy, her heart starts beating again.
Detective Zane Nixon takes the case because it is his job. He stays on it because he has seen a hole like the one Elizabeth describes - once, long ago, in a life he has spent years and a great many pills trying to forget.
By nightfall the dead are walking out of the mortuary. By morning Edgebaston is emptying, street by street, into something that has slept beneath the world since before anything alive had a name for it.
It has ended the world five times. To do it again, it needs a door.
Elizabeth is the door.