Chapter 18: The Bargain
The rain hammered against the porch roof, each drop a small, cold needle against Josh's skin. He pressed his back against the shingles, one arm thrown over his face to shield his eyes from the storm's relentless assault, the music box still clutched in his other hand like a talisman. Beside him, Larry was on his hands and knees, his chest heaving, his shaggy hair plastered to his skull as he gasped for breath.
"We can't just leave him," Larry said, his voice barely audible over the wind. "Kyle's still in there."
Josh's jaw tightened. He could still hear Clara's voice drifting through the attic window behind them, distant and sweet and so terribly wrong. "Kyle's smart," he said, hating how weak the words sounded. "He'll find a way out. He always does."
"You don't know that." Larry's voice cracked. "You don't know what she's doing to him right now."
Josh didn't have an answer for that. He scooted across the wet shingles, boots slipping on the slick surface, until he reached the edge of the porch roof. Below them, a narrow gutter ran along the side of the house, clogged with leaves and debris, water spilling over its lip in a brown, churning waterfall. Beyond it, a drop of at least fifteen feet to the overgrown flower bed below.
"There," Josh said, pointing. The master bedroom window sat dark and empty maybe four feet to their left, its frame latched but the glass old and thin. "We can get through there."
Larry looked at him, his face pale, water streaming down his cheeks like tears. "You want to break a window?"
"I want to get back inside without Clara knowing where we are." Josh shifted the music box to his other hand, his fingers cramping. "The master bedroom is between the attic and the stairs. If we can get in there, we can move through the house without crossing her path."
Larry stared at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, a tight, jerky motion. "Okay. Let's do it."
Josh inched forward, pressing his body flat against the shingles, reaching out for the window frame. His fingers brushed the glass, slick with rain, and he fumbled for the latch. It was rusted, stubborn, refusing to give under his fingertips. He pressed harder, his shoulder screaming with the effort, and felt something give with a sharp, metallic snap.
The window swung open, slamming against the interior wall with a crack that seemed louder than thunder itself. Josh ducked through the gap, landing on the floor with a heavy thud, water streaming off him onto the warped hardwood. Larry followed a second later, his boots hitting the floor with a slippery squeak.
The master bedroom was freezing. Josh felt the cold the moment he was inside, a biting, penetrating chill that had nothing to do with the storm raging outside. It clung to his wet clothes, seeped into his bones, made his breath mist in the air as he straightened up.
The curtains snapped wildly around the open window, their fabric soaked and heavy, whipping against the walls like frantic white flags. The room was dark, lit only by the weak, rain-filtered glow from the storm outside, but that was enough to see the damage.
The ceiling fan hook hung bent and useless from the ceiling, its fixture bare and rusted, rope-burn scarring visible around its base as if something had been tied there recently. Recently, and violently. The wood around it was gouged, deep scratches cutting into the aged surface like desperate fingernails.
Josh's flashlight beam swept across the room, catching the vanity mirror and reflecting back a pale, blurred version of his own face. The four-poster bed stood against the far wall, its mattress sagging, its quilts tossed and rumpled as if someone had been sleeping there only moments before.
And then the beam dropped.
Josh's breath caught in his throat. His hand trembled, the flashlight beam shaking across the shape that was slumped at the foot of the bed, half-hidden by the shadows cast by the tall wooden frame.
A body. Seated against the bed frame, its legs splayed out in front of it, its head lolled at an angle that was deeply, fundamentally wrong. The rope around its neck hung loose, no longer supporting any weight, but the marks it had left were still visible, dark and swollen against the pale skin.
Larry made a sound. A small, strangled noise that might have been a word or might have been a sob. He took a step forward, his boots heavy against the floor, and his voice came out in a broken whisper.
"Hank?"
Josh's mind took a moment to catch up. Hank. The town sheriff's son. The arrogant jerk who'd been making creepy phone calls to Evette all week, the one who'd shown up at every party and gathering uninvited, the one who'd made everyone's skin crawl with his too-wide grin and his wandering eyes.
But this wasn't the Hank they knew. This was a body. A corpse. A husk that had once contained a living, breathing, irritating human being.
Josh's flashlight beam traced the face. Purple, waxy, blue-white. The skin was bloated and discolored, the eyes open and dry, staring at nothing with a glassy, unseeing gaze. The tongue was swollen, protruding slightly through parted lips. The mouth hung slack, as if it had tried to scream one last time and the sound had died in his throat.
"He found the rope," Josh said, his voice hollow. "He found the rope and he thought he'd play a prank."
Larry didn't respond. He was staring at Hank's body, his face a mask of horror and grief and something else, something darker. "Nancy," he whispered. "She's upstairs. She's still upstairs."
More bodies. More death. More of Clara's work.
"We have to find the others." Josh forced the words out, his mind racing. "We have to find them before she does."
But even as he said it, he knew they were too late.
Clara's voice drifted up from somewhere below them, sweet and singsong and impossibly close. "I found another one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. EIGHT friends."
Josh's blood turned to ice. He counted the names in his head, matching them to the voices he'd heard over the years. His. Larry. Kyle. Sheryl. Evette. Tanya. Maya. Chloe.
Eight. They were all here. And Clara was counting them like a child counting marbles.
"No," he breathed. "No, we're not all here. Kyle's still in the attic. Sheryl and the girls are hiding. We can still.”
"She's not counting who's here." Larry's voice was flat, dead. "She's counting who she's already caught."
A creak came from the hallway outside the bedroom door. Slow. Deliberate. Followed by the soft, wet patter of bare feet against hardwood.
Josh's flashlight beam snapped toward the door. The shadows in the hallway shifted, writhing like something alive, and for a moment he thought he saw a small figure standing at the threshold, its head tilted, its dark eyes watching them with patient, knowing amusement.
"One, two," Clara's voice hummed from the darkness, "buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door."
The bedroom door swung shut. The latch clicked. And the room around them seemed to darken, the shadows thickening, pressing in from all sides.
Josh heard Larry's breath hitch. Heard the sharp intake of air as the cold deepened. Heard the faint, steady dripping of water from somewhere inside the room, a sound that made his skin crawl because it hadn't been there a moment before.
"Five, six," Clara continued, her voice coming from inside the room now, from the direction of the clawfoot tub in the en-suite bathroom, "pick up sticks."
Josh turned, his flashlight beam cutting across the bathroom doorway. The faucet on the old tub was turning itself on, a slow, deliberate movement, a thin stream of water spilling into the empty basin.
"Seven, eight," Clara sang, "lay them straight."
Larry grabbed Josh's arm, his grip painfully tight. "We need to get out of here. Now."
They bolted for the window.
The music box in Josh's pocket began to whir. Clattering, grinding, filling the room with a broken, discordant tune that seemed to come from everywhere at once. He could hear Clara laughing, high and bright and delighted, and he knew she was already between them and the door, already cutting off any escape.
But the window was still open. The storm was still raging. And the porch roof was still there, slick and treacherous but solid beneath their feet.
Josh was halfway across the room when he heard it.
The sound of water filling the tub, faster now, a rushing torrent that had no business coming from a single faucet. He didn't want to look. Every instinct screamed at him to keep moving, to reach the window, to escape.
But he looked.
And he saw Clara.
She was standing in the bathroom doorway, her yellow dress soaked and clinging to her pale skin, her dark hair hanging in wet ropes around her face. She was holding something in her hands. Something small and metallic.
A brass bell.
"Where are you going?" she asked, her voice sweet with feigned innocence, but her eyes were dark and depthless and hungry. "The game isn't over. We haven't even played yet."
Larry pulled Josh through the window without a word. They landed on the porch roof hard, the impact jarring Josh's teeth, the music box falling from his pocket and rolling away across the shingles. He scrambled after it, grabbing it just before it tumbled over the edge, his heart pounding so hard he could barely think.
"Our song," Clara said from the window, her voice drifting down to them, soft and almost sad. "You're ruining our song."
He looked up. She was standing at the window now, framed by the storm, her head tilted, her smile gone. She looked almost lonely. Almost human.
"Let us go," he said, his voice cracking. "Please. We're not your friends. We never were."
Clara's expression flickered. For a moment, just a moment, the mask of the child slipped, and Josh saw something else underneath. Something ancient and terrible and hollow.
"Everyone leaves," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "Everyone always leaves."
She closed the window. The latch clicked, sealing them out.
Larry grabbed Josh's arm again, pulling him across the roof, toward the sunroom below. "We need to find the others," he said, his voice raw. "We need to find them before she does something worse."
Josh didn't answer. He just clutched the music box to his chest and let Larry lead him into the storm, into the darkness, into whatever was waiting for them next.
But in his mind, he couldn't stop hearing Clara's voice. Small. Sad. Utterly alone.
"Everyone always leaves."
The rain had soaked through everything. Through his jeans, through his jacket, through the thin cotton of his shirt until it clung to his skin like a second layer of cold. Larry could feel his hands shaking, but he couldn't tell if it was from the chill or from what they'd just seen. Probably both. Probably more of the second.
He was still backing away from the window, his boots slipping on the wet shingles, when Josh grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the sunroom roof. The glass panes below them were fogged with condensation, the faint glow of a lamp somewhere inside casting weak, distorted shapes through the moisture.
"We can't just leave him," Larry said, his voice thin and reedy in a way he didn't recognize. "We can't just, he's still in there. He's just sitting there."
"Larry." Josh's voice was sharp, cutting through the rain. "He's not sitting. He's dead. There's nothing we can do for him."
The words hit Larry like a physical blow. He stopped moving, his feet rooted to the shingles, his chest heaving as he sucked in breath after breath of cold, wet air. His mind kept replaying the image. The purple face. The dry, staring eyes. The way Hank's head had lolled at that impossible angle, like a doll whose strings had been cut.
"He did it before," Larry said, the words tumbling out of him in a rush. "Last Halloween, he faked a hanging in the old barn. Jumped off a stool with a rope around his neck and pretended to be dead. Scared the shit out of everybody." He laughed, a short, broken sound that wasn't really a laugh at all. "I thought he was doing it again. I thought, I actually thought he was doing it again."
Josh didn't say anything. He just stood there, rain streaming down his face, his eyes fixed on Larry with an expression that was somewhere between pity and impatience.
"He had a pulse," Larry insisted, even though he knew it wasn't true. "I didn't check. We didn't check. He could still be.”
"I checked." Josh's voice was quiet, but it cut through the storm like a blade. "I crouched down. I put my fingers on his neck. There was nothing. His skin was cold, Larry. Not room-temperature cold. Dead cold."
Larry's throat tightened. He wanted to argue, wanted to find some hole in Josh's logic, some reason to believe that Hank might still be breathing. But there was nothing. Just the rain, and the cold, and the image of Hank's open, staring eyes burned into the back of his mind.
"We have to go back," he said finally, his voice barely a whisper. "We have to at least cover him. It doesn't feel right, leaving him like that."
Josh shook his head, water flicking from his hair. "We don't have time. Kyle's still in the attic. The girls are somewhere in the house. Clara is still.”
The floorboard creaked.
Both of them froze.
The sound came from inside the master bedroom, from somewhere near the door they'd just climbed out of. A slow, deliberate creak, like someone shifting their weight from one foot to the other. Like someone standing just on the other side of the window, listening.
Larry's heart hammered against his ribs. He reached down instinctively, his fingers finding the edge of a loose shingle, but it was too wet, too rotten to be of any use. His eyes darted around the roof, searching for something, anything, that could serve as a weapon.
His gaze landed on the fireplace poker.
It was lying on the sunroom roof, maybe six feet away, half-hidden beneath a tangle of dead vines that had crept up the side of the house. It must have fallen from a stack of firewood someone had left out years ago, long before any of this started. The iron was rusted, the handle wrapped in cracked leather, but it was solid. Heavy. It would do.
Larry scrambled toward it, his boots slipping on the wet shingles, and snatched it up just as another creak sounded from inside the bedroom. This one was closer. Right at the window.
He spun around, poker raised, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
The window was still closed. The latch was still sealed.
But on the other side of the glass, a faint shape was visible. A small, dark silhouette, barely discernible through the rain-streaked pane. It didn't move. It just stood there, watching them.
Josh grabbed Larry's arm again, pulling him toward the edge of the sunroom roof. "We need to move. Now."
Larry didn't need to be told twice. He shoved the poker through his belt, the cold iron pressing against his hip, and scrambled after Josh across the slick shingles. The sunroom roof sloped downward, leading to a narrow gutter and a drop of about eight feet to the muddy yard below. But before they could reach the edge, a sound drifted up from somewhere inside the house.
Humming.
It was faint, barely audible over the pounding rain, but unmistakable. A soft, lilting melody, the same tune they'd heard from the music box. It rose and fell like a lullaby, echoing through the walls, through the floor, through the very air around them.
Larry froze mid-step, his foot hovering over the gutter's edge. The humming was coming from below them. From inside the sunroom.
He looked down through the fogged glass panes at his feet. The room was dim, lit only by a single lamp on a wicker end table, its shade crooked and yellowed with age. The wicker furniture sat faded and damp, the cushions bloated with humidity. Potted plants wilted in the corners, their leaves brown and drooping despite what looked like careful, attentive watering.
And in the center of the room, barely visible through the condensation, a small figure was standing. Facing the wall. Its head tilted at an angle that made Larry's stomach turn.
"Why is she in there?" he whispered, his voice barely audible.
Josh shook his head, his face pale. "I don't know. But we can't go down there. We can't.”
The figure turned.
It wasn't Clara.
It was a boy. Tall and thin, with dark hair plastered to his forehead and wide, terrified eyes. He was pressed against the glass, his hands flat against the pane, his mouth moving soundlessly as he tried to get their attention.
"Kyle," Larry breathed.
Josh was already moving, sliding down the slope of the roof, his boots skidding across the shingles. He reached the edge and dropped, landing in the muddy flower bed below with a wet thud. Larry followed a second later, the poker slipping from his belt and clattering to the ground as he hit the earth.
They didn't waste time picking it up. They sprinted toward the sunroom's sliding glass door, which Kyle was already wrenching open from the inside. His face was streaked with dirt and sweat, his shirt torn at the collar, and there was a wild, hunted look in his eyes that Larry had never seen before.
"Dude," Kyle gasped, grabbing Josh by the arm and pulling him inside. "Dude, you have no idea how glad I am to see you."
Larry stumbled in behind them, slamming the sliding door shut and throwing the lock. He pressed his back against the glass, his chest heaving, and took a long, shuddering breath.
"Kyle," he said, his voice raw. "What happened? How did you get out of the attic?"
Kyle's eyes darted around the room, as if he expected something to jump out of the shadows at any moment. "The ladder," he said. "The old ladder that leads down to the second-floor hallway. I found it behind a stack of boxes. She was so busy talking to you guys that she didn't notice me slip away."
"She?" Josh asked, though his voice suggested he already knew the answer.
Kyle nodded, his expression grim. "Clara. She came up to the attic right after you two climbed out the window. She was talking to herself, reciting that stupid nursery rhyme over and over, and she just.” He shuddered. "She knew you were gone. I thought she was going to flip out, but she just laughed. And then she started humming, like she didn't even care."
Larry's blood ran cold. "She doesn't care because she knows we can't leave. She's got the whole house locked down somehow."
Josh moved to the window, peering out through the fogged glass at the yard beyond. The storm was still raging, rain lashing against the panes, lightning illuminating the twisted silhouettes of the trees. But there was something else out there, too. A shape, dark and indistinct, standing at the edge of the yard near the old well.
"Guys," Josh said quietly, his voice tight. "We've got company."
Larry and Kyle moved to stand beside him, following his gaze. The shape was tall and thin, too tall to be Clara, too still to be an animal. It stood motionless in the rain, arms at its sides, head slightly bowed, like a scarecrow that had come to life.
"What the hell is that?" Kyle whispered.
Josh didn't answer. He just watched, his jaw tight, as the shape slowly lifted its head and turned to face them.
It was Hank.
The door to the sunroom rattled in its frame, a low, insistent shudder that vibrated through the glass. Larry felt his heart drop into his stomach as the figure outside began to walk toward them, its movements stiff and mechanical, its head tilted at that same wrong angle.
"No," Larry breathed. "No, no, no.”
The rattling grew louder. The lock on the sliding door began to turn, slowly, deliberately, as if an invisible hand was twisting it from the other side.
Kyle grabbed Larry's arm, his grip like iron. "What do we do?"
Josh's face was pale, but his voice was steady. "We find somewhere to hide. Now."
The lock clicked.
The door began to slide open.
The sliding door groaned on its track, a sound like a wounded animal dragging itself across gravel. Larry watched it move with a sense of detached horror, his body frozen even as his mind screamed at him to run. Hank's silhouette filled the gap, rain sheeting off his shoulders, water cascading down his face in rivulets that carved through the unnatural pallor of his skin.
He stepped inside.
Each movement was wrong. Mechanical. His feet dragged across the tile floor in a shuffle that left wet streaks behind him, and his head remained tilted at that terrible angle, as if his neck had been broken and someone had tried to set it back without quite getting it right.
"Oh god," Kyle breathed. "Oh god, he's not, he's not.”
"Move!" Josh shouted.
The word broke through Larry's paralysis. He scrambled backward, grabbing Kyle's arm and yanking him toward the interior door that led to the dining room. His boots slipped on the wet tile, nearly sending him crashing to the ground, but Kyle caught him, hauled him upright, and they were moving, all three of them, crashing through the doorway just as Hank's stiff fingers reached for the back of Larry's shirt.
The dining room was dark, lit only by the storm's intermittent flashes. The long oak table stretched before them like a dark river, the chandelier swaying overhead with a slow, pendulum rhythm that had nothing to do with any draft Larry could feel. He didn't stop to look at it. He didn't stop to look at anything.
They were through the room and into the hallway before Hank's heavy footsteps echoed behind them, slow and relentless, like a heartbeat that refused to stop.
"The stairs," Josh said, his voice ragged as they hit the foyer. "We need to get upstairs. We need to warn the girls."
Something slammed against the wall beside them. Larry flinched, his head whipping toward the sound,
One of the framed photographs had fallen from its hook. The glass was cracked, a web of fractures spreading across the faded faces of people Larry didn't recognize. But the face in the center of the frame, the small child with dark hair and a yellow dress, seemed to be looking directly at him.
The music box.
Josh still had it in his hand, he realized. He was holding it so tightly his knuckles were white, the tiny brass mechanism visible through its cracked wooden casing. Why was he still holding it? Why hadn't he dropped it during the escape?
He didn't have time to ask those questions. They were on the stairs now, taking them two at a time, their footsteps thundering against the old wood. The house seemed to groan around them, the walls pressing in closer than they had been moments before, the shadows deepening and shifting in ways that made Larry's skin crawl.
"Evette!" he shouted, his voice cracking. "Sheryl! Chloe! Anybody!"
A door opened above them. Not a visible door, a sound, a creak of hinges, followed by a voice that made Larry's blood run cold.
"I gave you a head start," Clara said, her voice drifting down from somewhere in the darkness. "That was generous of me. You should have used it."
Josh didn't slow down. He burst onto the second-floor landing, his flashlight beam cutting through the shadows, sweeping across the closed doors that lined the hallway. "Where are they?" he demanded, his voice ragged. "Where are the girls?"
Kyle was behind him, his chest heaving, his face pale. "I don't know. I don't know. They could be anywhere."
And then, from the far end of the hallway, a sound:
Soft, muffled sobbing.
Larry's heart lurched. He knew that sound. He'd heard it a hundred times before, when Nancy's dog had died, when she'd gotten the rejection letter from her dream college, when she'd thought nobody was listening.
But Nancy was dead.
And the sobbing was coming from Evette's bedroom.
He moved before he could think, his boots pounding down the hallway, his hands outstretched to push open the door. It was unlocked, swinging open to reveal a room bathed in the pale glow of a string of lights that were somehow still working, casting warm amber rectangles across the lavender walls.
Evette was huddled in the corner, her knees drawn to her chest, her face buried in her arms. She looked up as he entered, her amber eyes red-rimmed and swollen, her dark curls wild and tangled around her face.
"Larry," she breathed, the word cracking in the middle. "Larry, you're, you're alive."
His relief was so overwhelming that for a moment, he couldn't speak. He crossed the room in three long strides, dropping to his knees in front of her, his hands reaching out to cup her face. She was trembling, her skin cold to the touch, but she was alive. She was alive.
"Yeah," he said, his voice hoarse. "Yeah, I'm alive. Where are the others? Sheryl? Tanya? Maya? Chloe?"
Evette's face crumpled. "I don't know. We got separated. Clara, she was in the hallway, and we ran, and.” She broke off, a sob escaping her throat. "I don't know where they are. I don't know if they're okay."
Josh appeared in the doorway, his flashlight beam cutting across the room. "We need to keep moving. She's still down there."
Larry looked at him, then at Evette, then at Kyle, who was hovering in the hallway behind Josh, his face pale and drawn. He could hear the distant footsteps still echoing below, the slow, deliberate tread of something that should not have been walking.
"Okay," he said, helping Evette to her feet. "Okay. We need to find the others. We need to get somewhere safe. Somewhere she can't reach us."
"There's nowhere safe," Evette whispered. "She's everywhere. She's in the walls. She's in the air."
The music box in Josh's hand began to whir.
It was a soft, mechanical sound, barely audible over the rain drumming against the windows, but it cut through the tension of the room like a blade. Josh looked down at it, his brow furrowing, his fingers tightening around the cracked wooden casing.
"What are you doing?" Larry asked.
"I'm not doing anything," Josh replied, his voice tight. "It's just, it's just playing."
The melody was faint, discordant, a music box tune that had been wound too many times, its notes warped and distorted. Larry recognized it. It was the lullaby. The same one Clara had been humming since this nightmare began.
And then the light shifted.
It was subtle at first, a deepening of the shadows in the corners of the room, a dimming of the string lights that had been glowing moments before. But it grew, spreading like ink through water, until the entire room seemed to have taken on a grey, underwater quality.
And standing in the doorway, framed by the darkness, was Clara.
She wasn't wearing the yellow dress anymore. She was wearing a nightgown. White, soaked through, clinging to her pale skin like a second layer of flesh. Her dark hair hung in dripping ropes around her face, and her eyes were fixed on the music box in Josh's hand.
Her eyes.
They weren't the dark, patient eyes they'd seen before. They were black. Completely black, from pupil to iris, with no white at all. They stared at the music box with an expression of such naked, primal fury that Larry felt his stomach drop.
"Thief," Clara hissed, her voice no longer the sweet singsong of a child but something deeper, something that seemed to emerge from the very walls of the house. "THIEF!"
Josh stumbled backward, nearly tripping over the edge of Evette's bed. "I didn't, it's not, I found it in the attic.”
"You STOLE from ME!" Clara's scream tore through the room, and the light bulbs in the string lights exploded, one by one, in a cascade of popping glass and sparks. The room plunged into darkness, lit only by the weak glow of Josh's flashlight and the faint, flickering light from the storm outside.
Larry grabbed Evette's arm and pulled her toward the window. The glass was rattling in its frame, vibrating with a force that had nothing to do with the wind outside. He could feel the pressure building, the air thickening, the temperature dropping so fast his breath began to mist in front of his face.
"Josh, put it down!" Kyle shouted from the doorway. "Put the fucking thing down!"
Josh's hands were shaking, his knuckles white around the music box. "I can't, I can't let go, it's like it's stuck to my hand.”
Clara took a step forward. Her bare feet left wet prints on the hardwood floor, dark and glistening in the dim light. She was growing, Larry realized. She was getting taller, her body stretching and warping like something made of smoke and water, until she towered over the four of them, a grotesque shadow against the dark.
"Friends don't steal from friends," she said, her voice splitting now, echoing, layering on top of itself until it sounded like a dozen children speaking at once. "I thought you were my friends. I thought you wanted to play."
She was looking at Josh. Only at Josh.
"Give it back, so that we can play and so that I can be your friend and I can be everyone's friend."
Larry looked at Josh, at the music box still clutched in his hand, at the terror in his best friend's eyes. He thought about charging Clara, about tackling her, about doing anything to break her focus, to give Josh a chance to get away.
But his legs wouldn't move. His arms wouldn't move. The cold had seeped into his bones, rooting him to the spot, and all he could do was watch.
The window exploded.
It happened in an instant, a thousand shards of glass flying inward in a glittering storm, catching the lightning's flash and refracting it into a hundred blinding points of light. Larry felt himself fall, his body hitting the floor as the glass rained down around him, some of it slicing through his jacket, through his jeans, leaving thin, stinging lines across his skin.
Kyle had dropped too, his hands over his head, his voice raised in a wordless cry. Evette was beside them, huddled against Larry's side, her face buried in his shoulder.
And Josh was still standing.
The glass hadn't touched him. Of course it hadn't. It had stopped mid-air, a swirling vortex of razor-sharp shards, spinning around him like a tornado. And he was screaming.
Clara was laughing.
"Friends don't steal from friends," she said again, her voice almost casual now, as if she were discussing the weather. "And thieves get punished."
The glass moved.
It wasn't a single, coordinated attack. It was a thousand individual cuts, each shard striking Josh's body with surgical precision, slicing through his shirt, through his skin.
He stumbled forward, his hands flying to his face, his chest, his arms, but there was nowhere to stop the assault. Everywhere he touched, the glass was already there, carving thin, precise lines across his flesh.
By the time he fell to his knees, his clothes were shredded, hanging from his body in strips. The blood came almost immediately, seeping from a hundred cuts all at once, saturating his shirt, his jeans, pooling on the hardwood floor around him in a spreading dark stain.
"Josh!" Larry's voice tore out of him, raw and desperate. He tried to push himself up, tried to crawl toward his friend, but Evette's arms wrapped around him, holding him back.
"Don't," she begged. "Don't, you'll die."
Josh's eyes were wide, his face pale beneath the blood. He was breathing in short, ragged gasps, each one sending a fresh trickle of crimson spilling down his chin. He looked at Larry, and there was something in his gaze that Larry had never seen before. Fear. Pure, unadulterated fear. But there was something else, too. Acceptance.
"I'm sorry," Josh wheezed, blood bubbling on his lips. "I didn't, I didn't know.”
He toppled forward, his body collapsing into the spreading pool of his own blood. The music box slipped from his fingers, clattering against the hardwood floor.
Clara stopped laughing.
She looked at the music box, lying in the blood, its cracked casing stained with red, and something shifted in her face. The fury drained from it. The darkness receded, and she looked, suddenly, very small. Very young. Very alone.
"It was mine," she said quietly. "My mother gave it to me. When I was alive."
She knelt down, her hands reaching for the box, her fingers trembling. She held it the way Larry had seen his aunt hold her newborn baby, delicately, wonderingly, as if it were the most precious thing in the world.
"I still remember the song," she whispered.
She began to hum.
And the lights in the room flickered, and the walls began to warp, and Larry grabbed Evette and Kyle by the arms and pulled them out of the room, through the door, into the dark, away from the sound of the humming and the smell of blood and the terrible, impossible sight of their friend dying on the floor.
Larry didn't stop running until he was in the dining room.
He crashed into the long oak table, his hands flat against the wood, his breath coming in great heaving gasps. Evette was beside him, her face pale, her hands shaking. Kyle was leaning against the doorframe, his head bowed, his shoulders trembling.
"Oh god," Kyle said. "Oh god. Josh. Josh. He's dead. He's actually dead."
Larry shook his head. He didn't want to believe it. He couldn't believe it. Josh had been fine. Josh had been standing, talking, holding the stupid music box. And now he was dead. Killed by a ghost. Killed by a little girl who had drowned decades ago and refused to let go.
"We have to get the hell out of here," Kyle said, his voice cracking. "We have to find the others and we have to get out."
"Where do we go?" Larry asked, his voice hollow. "The doors are locked. The windows are sealed. She controls everything in this house."
"Then we break through. We break everything." Kyle pushed off the doorframe, his eyes wild, his hands clenched into fists. "We find the girls, we grab anything we can use, and we make a run for it. She's not actually invincible. She's just a ghost. She can't stop us if we don't let her."
And then the chair at the head of the table creaked.
All three of them froze, their eyes snapping to the far end of the dining room. The chair was empty. It had been empty moments before. But now, as Larry watched, it swung outward, as if someone had just taken a seat.
"Hello?" Evette called out, her voice thin and reedy.
The chair stopped swaying. A figure materialized in the darkness, hunched and still, draped in shadow. Larry's flashlight beam swept across the table, catching the edge of a floral dress, a pair of thin, bony hands folded in a lap, a head tilted to one side at an unnatural angle.
It took him a moment to realize who it was. Hilder. The elderly woman who lived next door. The one who had been missing for the past three days, whose house had been searched by the police, whose disappearance had been the talk of the town.
She was sitting in the chair, her eyes closed, her body perfectly still. Her dress was soaked, dark with water, clinging to her thin frame. Her gray hair was plastered to her skull, and there was a faint, blue tinge to her lips, a pale cast to her skin that spoke of long immersion in cold, dark water.
"Oh no," Larry breathed. "Oh no."
Kyle took a step forward, his hand reaching out. Hilder? Hilder, can you hear us?"
"I don't think she can hear you," Evette said, her voice barely a whisper. "I don't think she can hear anything anymore."
Kyle stopped, his hand hovering in the air, inches from the old woman's shoulder. He looked at her face, at the stillness of her chest, at the way her head was tilted just slightly too far to the left, and his expression shifted from horror to dread to a grim, cold certainty.
"She's dead," Kyle said. "She's been dead for a while."
Larry turned away, his stomach heaving. The world was closing in around him, the walls pressing closer, the darkness thickening, the sounds of the old house groaning and sighing around them like a living thing.
"We have to find the others," he said, his voice hoarse. "We have to find Nancy and Sheryl and Tanya and Maya and Chloe. We have to.”
"Nancy's dead," Kyle said, his voice flat. "I saw her. She's upstairs. There's nothing we can do for her."
Larry felt the words like a physical blow. His chest constricted, his vision swimming, and for a moment he thought he might pass out. But Evette's hand found his, squeezing tightly, grounding him.
"We'll find the others," she said. "We'll find them, and we'll get out of here. All of us. I promise."
She looked at him with those amber eyes, filled with a fierce determination that cut through the fear, the grief, the overwhelming hopelessness of their situation. And Larry found himself nodding, his hand squeezing hers back.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Let's go."
They made their way back through the house, their footsteps silent on the creaking floorboards, their flashlights cutting through the shadows. The storm raged outside, the wind howling, the rain drumming against the windows. But inside, the house was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that settled over a place after something terrible had happened, as if the very air was holding its breath.
They checked the living room. Empty. The kitchen. Empty. The sunroom.
The sunroom was a wreck. The sliding glass door was shattered, raining glass across the tile floor. The wicker furniture was overturned, the potted plants crushed beneath the debris. And in the center of the room, kneeling in a pool of water that had seeped in from the storm, was a figure.
"Chloe?" Larry called out, his voice cracking.
Chloe looked up. Her face was pale, streaked with tears and rain. Her sun-bleached hair was dark and plastered to her scalp. But her eyes were bright, alive, and locked on Larry with an intensity that made him stop in his tracks.
"Larry," she breathed. "Larry, you're alive."
She staggered to her feet and crossed the room, throwing her arms around him, clutching him so tightly he could barely breathe. He hugged her back, his face buried in her wet hair, his shoulders shaking with the effort of holding back the tears.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'm alive."
"Josh?" Chloe whispered into his shoulder. "Is Josh, ?"
Larry didn't answer. He didn't have to. The way he stiffened, the way his arms tightened around her, told her everything she needed to know.
"Okay," Chloe said, pulling back, her jaw set. "Okay. We need to find the others. We need to find them and we need to get out of here."
Kyle opened his mouth, ready to argue, but Evette cut him off.
"She's right," Evette said. "We can't afford to fall apart. Not yet. We need to stick together, we need to find the others, and we need to survive this."
Larry looked at her, at the fire in her eyes, and nodded. "Let's go."
They moved together, a tight, desperate unit, climbing the stairs and pushing open the doors. They searched every bedroom, every closet, every corner. They called out names, their voices echoing through the empty halls.
But the house was silent now. Dead silent.
And in the attic, huddled behind a stack of old trunks, Tanya, Maya, and Sheryl listened to the footsteps below them, their hands clasped together, their breath held, praying that the storm would end, that the nightmare would break, that they would live to see the morning.
But the music box was still playing.
A soft, discordant melody that drifted up through the floorboards like the memory of a song that had almost been forgotten.
And in the master bedroom, cradled in the arms of a little girl who had been waiting for so long, Josh's body grew cold.
Clara smiled, stroking his hair like he was a doll, and hummed along to the tune.
"Sweet dreams, friend," she whispered. "Sweet dreams."
The light dimmed to a poor thing, a weak, sickly yellow, casting long shadows across the attic floorboards. Sheryl watched the dust motes drift through it, ignoring the way her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her temples, counting her breaths in a desperate attempt to stay calm. Maya had her hand pressed firmly over Tanya's mouth, muffling her sobs, the two of them pressed so tight against each other it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The sounds from below had faded, the screaming and the breaking glass and the terrible, wet sound of something heavy hitting the floor. Now there was only silence, thick and watchful, and the occasional groan of the old house as the storm continued to rage outside.
Sheryl wanted to move. Every instinct she had, every bone in her body, was screaming at her to get up, to run, to find Josh, to find the others, to do something. But she couldn't. She was pinned in place by the weight of her own fear, by the knowledge that Clara wasn't just lurking in the house anymore. Clara was the house. She was everywhere. She was watching them right now.
Behind her, Maya shifted. "Maybe she's gone," she whispered, her voice barely a breath. "Maybe she's satisfied."
"Clara isn't satisfied," Tanya said, her voice hollow, muffled beneath Maya's palm. "She's never satisfied. She's been alone for so long, she doesn't know how to stop."
A floorboard creaked.
All three of them froze. The sound came from the hallway below, directly beneath the attic hatch. And then, footsteps. Their soft, intermittent patter drifting upward, growing closer with every second until they stopped, just below the hatch.
Sheryl knew she was holding her breath. Her lungs were beginning to burn, but she couldn't let it out. She could not make a sound. She could not breathe in a way that would give her away.
A slow, mournful creak of the attic stairs being pulled down.
Maya made a small, choked sound. Tanya grabbed Sheryl's arm, squeezing hard, her nails digging in, leaving marks.
The ladder began to descend, unfolding with a series of loud, jarring clanks that seemed to shake the entire house. Sheryl could see it in the corner of her vision, the dark shape of the ladder's rungs materializing through the dim light from the single window, its old wooden frame groaning under a weight that hadn't yet settled on it.
She had to move. She had to run. But there was nowhere to go. The attic was an enclosed space, a coffin of dust and old memories, and Clara's voice was already drifting up from below.
"I know you're up there. I can hear you breathing."
Sheryl's heart skipped a beat. She could see the top of Clara's head now, her dark hair, still wet, appearing through the square opening in the floor. The eerie silhouette of her small, pale hand gripping the ladder's side rail.
The girl was ascending.
"Found you, friends." Clara's voice was bright and light, the voice of a child playing hide and seek. "I found you."
A hand closed around the edge of the attic opening. Sheryl looked at Maya, at Tanya. They were frozen, their faces pale, their eyes wide with terror.
And then, from somewhere in the house, a door slammed.
Clara stopped climbing. Her head turned, a sharp, jerky motion that looked almost unnatural. Her dark eyes seemed to fix on a point beyond the attic, beyond the walls, as if she had heard something far away that demanded her attention.
A second slam. A third.
And then, a voice. A man's, deep and familiar and unmistakably furious.
"CLARA!"
Clara's face twisted. The innocent mask dropped, replaced by something older, something sharp and venomous. A glimmer of recognition passed through Sheryl's mind, a faint memory of a voice calling from the doorway of the old Victorian, a voice that did not belong to any of them. Hilder.
The dead woman was in the house. And she was coming for Clara.
Clara stepped back from the ladder. Her gaze remained fixed on the attic's dim depths for another moment, a promise in that look, a declaration that hung so heavy in the air that no words were needed. Then she turned.
Her descent was silent. The ladder rattled as she stepped off, the sound echoing through the floorboards. A pause. A door somewhere in the house opening. The silence that followed was deep and total, a void of sound except for the storm.
Sheryl let go of the breath she'd been holding. She lowered her head, her entire body trembling. Maya's hand had dropped from Tanya's mouth, her own relief so overwhelming she looked almost sick with it. Tanya grabbed Sheryl's arm, her grip desperate and grounding.
"We have to go," Tanya said. Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but it carried a force that seemed to shake the attic. "We have to go now."
Sheryl looked at her, at the fear in her dark eyes, at the stubborn set of her jaw. They were terrified, all of them, but they were alive. They were still alive. The music box had stopped playing.
Sheryl rose, her joints protesting, her legs on the verge of giving out. She moved to the attic hatch, peering down into the darkness below. The house was still. Silent. Waiting.
"Stay close," she breathed. "Stay quiet. We're getting out of here."
She let herself down onto the ladder, her hands slippery with sweat, her heart pounding in her throat. The wood creaked beneath her weight, too loud, too loud. She froze for a moment, listening. Nothing.
She climbed down, her feet hitting the hallway floor with a soft thud. Maya and Tanya followed, their movements slow and stilted. Together, they moved down the hall, past the closed doors, the peeling wallpaper, the faded photographs that seemed to watch them as they passed.
They were halfway down the stairs when they heard it. Footsteps. Not Clara's. Heavier. Boots.
Sheryl stopped, her hand on the banister. "Someone's in the foyer."
Tanya's face went pale. "Is it her?"
Sheryl shook her head, straining to listen. The footsteps were moving now, fast and clumsy, accompanied by a sound she couldn't quite identify.
"ONE TWO THREE," Clara sang, her voice a metallic hiss, the words slicing through the air like glass. "BUCKLE MY SHOE."
The lights went out. There was a deep darkness that was like being swallowed whole.
"FOUR FIVE SIX," Clara sang, her voice drawing closer, a giggle threading through the sound. "PICK UP STICKS."
Tanya grabbed Sheryl's arm. Maya was sobbing, her hands pressed over her ears.
"FOUR FIVE SIX," Clara sang, a memory of a game, a song turned into a threat. "PICK UP STICKS. SEVEN EIGHT NINE, YOU'RE DONE THIS TIME."
The front door exploded off its hinges.
What the Water Took
___________________________________________________________________________________________
The front door exploded off its hinges.
It didn't just swing open. It didn't get blown in by the wind. It was ripped outward, torn from its frame with a sound like a scream of splintering wood and shrieking metal, and it tumbled into the darkness beyond the porch, swallowed by the storm in an instant. The wind rushed in through the gaping maw of the doorway, a howling, furious torrent that sent papers flying and candles guttering, that ripped at hair and clothes and threatened to knock them all off their feet.
But it wasn't the wind that made them freeze.
It was the storm beyond.
Where the porch should have been, where the gravel drive and the old oak trees and the distant glow of town should have been visible, there was nothing. Just darkness. An absolute, impenetrable blackness that seemed to press against the threshold like a living thing. The rain fell in sheets so dense they looked solid, a curtain of water that swallowed the world beyond the step. Lightning flickered somewhere deep within that darkness, but it was wrong, wrong color, wrong shape, branching across the sky in patterns that didn't look like lightning at all, that looked more like cracks spreading across a pane of glass.
Clara screamed.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, a sound that pierced the storm's fury and cut through to the bone. Not a child's scream. Not even a human scream. It was a sound of pure, unfiltered rage, layered and discordant, as if a dozen throats were screaming in unison, and with it came a pressure that made Larry's ears pop, that made the floorboards beneath his feet groan and buckle.
The storm intensified.
The wind howled louder, funneling through the doorway with enough force to send the overturned coffee table skittering across the living room floor. The rain that lashed through the open frame wasn't just rain, it was freezing, biting, mixed with hail and debris, stinging against exposed skin like a thousand tiny needles. The lightning outside flickered faster, strobe-like, illuminating shapes in the darkness that were there one moment and gone the next, figures that stood too still and moved too fast to be anything but wrong.
"Holy shit," Kyle breathed, his voice barely audible over the roar.
They were all in the foyer now, emerging from different corners of the house, drawn together by the explosion of the door and the impossible storm beyond it. Larry stumbled forward from the dining room, Evette pressed against his side, Chloe close behind. Sheryl, Tanya, and Maya appeared at the top of the stairs, their faces pale, their eyes wide with a terror that mirrored Larry's own. They met in the center of the foyer, a desperate, huddled cluster of frightened young people, and for a moment, everyone just stared at the open doorway, at the screaming darkness beyond.
"We have to go," Chloe said, her voice cracking. "The door's open. We can, "
She took a step toward the threshold, and Larry grabbed her arm, pulling her back. "Chloe, wait. Look at it."
She looked. They all looked.
The darkness beyond the doorway wasn't just dark. It was wrong. There was no depth to it, no sense of space or distance. It was like looking into a void, a place where the universe had simply stopped existing, and the rain that fell within it fell sideways and upward and in patterns that defied gravity. The porch light, which had been dead for hours, was on, but it was on behind the void, a faint, sickly glow that seemed to come from impossibly far away, as if the house was no longer connected to anything real.
"That's not the outside," Sheryl said, her voice hollow. "That's not our world."
Clara's scream faded into a laugh. It came from behind them, from within the house, from the walls, from the floorboards, from the very air they were breathing. It was a child's laugh, bright and delighted, but it made Larry's blood run cold in a way that no scream ever could.
"You're not going anywhere," Clara's voice said, soft and sweet, as if she were standing right beside them. "None of you. Ever again."
The door began to rebuild itself.
It was impossible. It defied every law of physics and nature that Larry had ever learned. But the shattered fragments of the door, the splintered wood, the twisted hinges, the broken frame, began to lift from the floor, to float through the air, to rejoin each other in a grotesque parody of reconstruction. Shards of wood flew together, fusing, sealing, the grain knitting itself back together as if it had never been broken. The hinges reattached themselves to the frame with a series of sharp, metallic clicks. The door swung shut with a deep, resonant boom that shook the walls.
And then it was sealed. Seamless. As if it had never been touched.
Sheryl moved first.
She crossed the foyer in three quick strides, her hands slamming against the wood, her fingers scrabbling at the edges, the lock, anything. "No. No, no, no." She pulled at the handle, threw her shoulder against the frame, kicked at the base with her boot. "OPEN UP! OPEN THE GODDAMN DOOR!"
But it didn't move. It was solid. Immovable. As if it had been there for decades, as if it had never been open at all.
"Sheryl." Larry's voice was quiet, pained. He reached out, touching her shoulder, trying to pull her back. "Sheryl, stop."
She spun on him, her eyes wild, her face streaked with tears and rain. "We have to get out! We have to, Josh is, " Her voice broke. She pressed her hands against the door, her forehead against the wood, and let out a sound that was half sob, half scream. "Josh is upstairs. Josh is upstairs and he's dead and I have to tell his parents, I have to, "
The name hung in the air like a blade.
Josh.
Larry felt the weight of it settle onto his chest, crushing, suffocating. He'd been so focused on the door, on the storm, on the immediate terror of the moment, that he'd allowed himself to forget. To slide into the comfortable delusion that Josh might still be alive, that this was all a nightmare they would wake from at any moment.
But Josh wasn't going to wake up. Josh was dead. Josh was dead and bleeding out on the floor of Evette's bedroom, killed by a ghost who had torn him open with a hundred shards of glass.
"I have to see him," Sheryl said, her voice suddenly steady, too steady. She turned from the door, her face set, her jaw tight. "I have to, I have to make sure. I have to be there."
"Sheryl, don't." Tanya's voice was sharp, cutting through the tension. "You don't want to see that. You don't need to see that."
"Yes, I do." Sheryl's eyes locked on Tanya's, fierce and unyielding. "He was my boyfriend. He was my best friend. I was supposed to protect him, and I didn't, and I need to see him. I need to say, " Her voice cracked again, but she forced the words out. "I need to be there."
No one argued. No one could.
Sheryl turned and walked toward the stairs. Her steps were slow, deliberate, as if she were forcing herself to move one foot in front of the other through sheer force of will. She climbed the stairs without looking back, her hand trailing along the banister, and disappeared into the darkness of the second-floor hallway.
The foyer fell silent.
The storm raged outside, but its fury seemed muted now, distant, as if the house had swallowed it. The candles that had survived the wind flickered weakly, casting long shadows across the walls. The only sound was the soft, ragged breathing of the survivors, huddled together in the heart of the house that had become their tomb.
Evette spoke first. Her voice was barely a whisper. "We're trapped."
No one responded.
"We're trapped," she repeated, louder now, her amber eyes sweeping across the faces of her friends. "The door won't open. The windows won't break. The storm isn't real." She gestured toward the door, her hand trembling. "That wasn't rain. That wasn't lightning. That was her."
"Don't say that." Chloe's voice was thin, cracking around the edges. "Don't say that like it's real. Don't say that like we're actually stuck here."
"Chloe." Larry's voice was gentle, but firm. He reached out, taking her hand, squeezing it. "We're stuck here."
Chloe tried to protest. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. Instead, a small, broken sound escaped her throat, something between a gasp and a sob, and she crumpled. Her knees buckled, and she would have fallen if Larry hadn't caught her, pulling her into his arms, holding her as she shook.
"It's okay," he murmured against her hair. "It's okay, Chloe, it's okay."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.