Chapter 9: The Collector's New Game
The house was quiet.
It was a new kind of quiet. Not the quiet of sleep, but the heavy, waiting quiet of a house that was too big for the small life inside it. The carpet in the hallway was a bright, optimistic green, and the afternoon sun cut dusty rectangles across it, but to eight-year-old Clara, the hallway seemed to stretch forever.
Her footsteps were soft, almost silent. She wore a yellow dress, crisp and new, and her white socks were pulled up neatly to her knees. She walked slowly, trailing her fingers along the wallpaper, a repeating pattern of cheerful little birds nestled in ivy. The air smelled of fresh paint and sawdust, a smell that should have been hopeful, but in the enormous silence, it just felt hollow.
She paused outside her parents’ bedroom door. It was open a crack. Inside, the bed was perfectly made, her mother’s perfume bottles arranged in a precise line on the dresser.
Empty.
Downstairs, a single pot clattered in the sink. Clara’s head tilted, listening. She walked to the top of the stairs, gripping the smooth, polished banister. Below, she could see the back of her mother’s head, bent over a ledger book spread open on the kitchen table. Numbers, columns, the scratch of a pen.
“Momma?”
The scratching paused. “Hmm?”
“Can you play with me?”
A tired sigh floated up the stairs. “Not right now, sweetheart. Momma’s busy. Daddy’s busy, too. Be a good girl and play in your room.”
Clara’s fingers tightened on the wood. She didn’t go to her room. Her room was at the end of the long hallway, a pretty little cell full of dolls that stared with empty glass eyes. Instead, she drifted, a small yellow ghost in a bright, empty mausoleum.
She’d learned how to fill the silence. In the living room, she’d arrange and rearrange the sofa cushions into forts that no one would siege. In the dining room, she’d lay a tea party for guests who never arrived, having careful, whispered conversations with herself. But her favorite place was upstairs.
The upstairs bathroom was the only room that felt truly finished. It was cool and clean, with black-and-white checkered tiles that felt wonderfully sharp and cold under her socked feet. The bathtub was an enormous, claw-footed monster of white porcelain, deep and shining. It looked like a boat, or a throne. She’d climb into its dry belly, curling her legs beneath her, and press her cheek against the side. The world outside the bathroom door would soften and blur.
Sometimes she’d trace the patterns in the porcelain with her fingertip, imagining they were maps to secret countries where children were always welcome. She’d hum to herself, a wandering, tuneless melody, the sound bouncing nicely off the tiles.
“Someday,” she whispered one afternoon, her breath misting the cool surface of the tub, “someone will stay and actually play with me.”
It wasn’t a mean wish. It was small, and true, and it ached.
The night it happened began like any other.
A quiet rain pattered against the windows, a steady, gray sound. Her father was working late at the office, the way he always did. Her mother was downstairs on the telephone, her voice low and serious. Clara, already in her pajamas, soft cotton with little blue flowers, stood in the bathroom. She felt restless. The house felt bigger, darker.
She ran the water.
It roared to life in the silent house, a sudden, violent sound that made her jump. She giggled, a nervous little puff of air. Steam began to curl up from the faucet. She turned the hot tap harder, watching the water churn and foam. It sounded like the ocean. It sounded alive.
She started to hum her lonely little tune, lost in the warmth and the noise.
Downstairs, her mother had hung up the phone. The quiet rain had gotten stronger, lashing the windows in gusts. Wind moaned in the chimney flue. Her mother called up, her voice tight with distraction.
“Clara? Bath time’s over at eight-thirty, you hear me? Don’t use all the hot water.”
Clara, mesmerized by the rising steam, didn’t answer. She dipped her hand in, jerking it back from the scalding heat, then laughed again. The sound was swallowed by the roar of the tap and the drumming of the rain.
Her mother, hearing no reply, assumed obedience. A cabinet door in the kitchen opened and closed. The house settled into its layers of sound: the storm outside, the angry rush of water from above, the muffled domestic noises from below, all disconnected.
Clara climbed over the high lip of the tub, her small feet slipping on the wet porcelain. The water was too hot, but she lowered herself in, inch by inch, until it burned just at the edge of pleasure. She sat down, the water rising to her chin. Her humming grew louder, competing with the faucet. She was smiling.
She reached for the bar of pink soap, slick and new, but her hand was small and clumsy with the heat. It shot from her grasp, skittering across the wet surface and landing near the back of the tub with a soft thud.
“Silly,” she whispered to herself.
She leaned forward, stretching her arm, fingers searching. Her pajama sleeve soaked up the searing water. Her fingertips brushed the soap, nudged it. She leaned further, straining. The center of her weight shifted from the solid curve of the tub’s back to the slick, sloping bottom.
Her foot slipped.
It was a sudden, violent lurch. Her chin slammed against the hard edge of the tub. A bright white flash of pain exploded behind her eyes. She cried out, but the sound was a wet gurgle as water rushed into her open mouth.
She flung her arms out, hands slapping wildly against the sides, searching for purchase. The porcelain was a smooth, wet prison. Her legs thrashed, feet kicking the heavy, unforgiving iron of the clawfoot. Her head went under.
The world became a blur of churning, burning white and a deafening, roaring silence. She fought, a frantic, clumsy panic. Her small body convulsed. Her head broke the surface for one searing second, she drew in a half-breath of steamy air mixed with water, and a hand, her own, flailed out and connected with the edge of the sink.
It wasn’t a grip. It was a slap.
Her fingers hooked over the rim, nails digging into the slick enamel. For a moment, she held. She pulled, gagging, coughing, trying to heave her weight up. Her other hand joined the first, clinging with a desperate, sickening strength.
Then, the soap.
Her left foot, pedaling uselessly in the deep water, found the bar of pink soap. It rolled beneath her bare sole.
Her leg shot out from under her.
The weight of her body, suddenly unsupported, jerked against her tenuous fingerhold. Her nails screeched against the sink enamel, leaving faint, white scratches. They held for a single, impossible heartbeat.
Then they tore. With a wet, ripping sound, she fell back.
The back of her skull met the curved lip of the bathtub with a crack that was not loud, but was appallingly final in the small, steamy room. Everything stopped. The thrashing. The panic.
Her body went limp, sinking into the unbearably hot water. Her head lolled to the side, resting against the white slope of the tub. Her eyes, open and unblinking, stared up at the ceiling where the steam was beginning to collect into fat, trembling drops. The water kept running. It overflowed the tub, a silent, steaming flood that spread across the black-and-white tiles, soaking the bathmat, creeping towards the hallway.
Downstairs, the rain hammered. A clock ticked in the hall. A pot settled on the stove.
Her mother’s voice, slightly irritated, floated up again, lost under the relentless drumming of the rain and the now-senseless rush of the tap.
“Clara? I said enough water! Turn it off, please!”
Upstairs, in the perfect white sanctuary, Clara lay still. The water crept over the tile, finding the grout, seeping into the floorboards beneath. The house absorbed the warmth, and then the creeping cold. The humming had stopped. The room was full of nothing but the sound of water meeting more water, and the distant, indifferent storm.
Later, much later, when the screaming had come and gone, when the police had left and the house had been emptied and sold and new people had come with their own paint and their own noises, the silence returned. But it was a different silence.
It waited.
“Clara Hadley,” Ms. Hilder said, her voice dropping to a whisper, as if the name itself was dangerous. “Lived in this house, oh, sixty years ago. Before your family. She was a few years younger than you. She had that doll. Called it Violet.” The old woman shuddered. “She died. She drawn. One night. Terrible storm, just like this. They never found her.”
The air in the room thickened. The candlelight seemed to grow dimmer, pressed down by the weight of the story.
“What, how did it happen?” Maya breathed.
The chill that had lingered in the room hardened into something absolute. The candles on the coffee table, so vital moments before, now seemed like pitiful flares in a vast, watchful darkness. The steady rhythm of the rain faded to a low hiss, a sound too intimate, too patient. No one moved. They all stared at Ms. Hilder. Her trembling, wet hands cradled the doll with its twisted neck, Violet, as if it were a sleeping infant.
Clara Hadley. A girl. In this house.
“She drowned?” Sheryl’s voice was stripped of its pragmatism, pared down to a bare, harsh whisper. “Here? How?”
Ms. Hilder’s eyes, a pale, milky blue, seemed to look through the walls, through the years. “They said it was an accident. The bathtub upstairs. That big, old clawfoot.” Her focus sharpened, snapping back to Evette with unsettling clarity. “Your room. The master suite now. That was the main bathroom then. Her mother was downstairs. A terrible storm… she must have slipped. Water running… they didn’t find her for hours.”
Evette’s stomach turned to liquid. The master bathroom. The boot print. The coil of rope. The space had felt wrong from the moment they’d gone upstairs. A wet, whispering wrongness.
Nancy made a small, choked sound. “Her… spirit never left? You don’t believe that stuff, do you, Ms. Hilder?”
The old woman didn’t seem to hear. Her fingers, knobby with arthritis, stroked the doll’s matted hair. Her voice dropped, becoming confiding, almost girlish. “She was a lonely thing. Parents always busy. Big, empty house.” She looked at the group of them, her gaze drifting from face to face. “She just wanted someone to play with.”
A log collapsed in the fireplace with a soft thud, sending up a flurry of orange sparks. The sudden shift in light made the shadows on Ms. Hilder’ s face leap and contort.
“The house,” the old woman continued, her tone shifting again, becoming flat and declarative, “has a memory. Stone and wood remember. They soak up sadness. Loneliness. It pools in the corners. In the walls.” She looked directly at the jagged hole taped over with silver duct tape. “You opened a corner.”
Tanya shifted her weight, wincing at her knee. “So what are you saying? The feeling we’ve had… the cold… the calls… it’s the ghost of a little girl doing performance art?”
“Not a ghost,” Ms. Hilder said. Her voice was suddenly, terribly calm. “A remnant. An echo that learned how to speak. How to use the wires. The pipes. How to get your attention.” She held the doll up slightly. “She loved this doll. It was her only friend. When they pulled her from the water… Violet was clutched in her hand.”
The doll’s backward head lolled obscenely.
Outside, the storm, which had been easing, gathered itself for one final, violent surge. A spear of lightning split the sky directly overhead, an instantaneous, blinding white that etched the room in stark, negative relief. The thunder came not as a roll, but as a single, concussive CRACK that shook the windows in their frames and vibrated the floorboards under their feet.
In the simultaneous blackout of their vision from the flash, the candles guttered violently, three of them snuffing out entirely.
In the sudden, profound dimness, Ms. Hilder’s voice changed.
It wasn’t a gasp or a scream. It was a drop in register, a shift in texture. It shed its elderly warble and became thin, reedy, and oddly wet. It was the voice of a child imitating an adult, and failing.
“You found Violet.”
The words slithered into the dark.
Evette’ dread swamped her entirely. Her breath locked in her chest. This wasn’t Ms. Hilder.
The old woman’s body stiffened in the armchair. Her head tilted to the side, a slow, marionette-like movement. In the light of the two remaining candles, her eyes had lost their milky film. They were dark, depthless pools.
Her lips, thin and pale, peeled back from her teeth in a smile that held no warmth, only a terrible, vacant glee. She raised the doll, bringing its porcelain face level with her own.
The doll’s head, which had been twisted backwards, began to move.
It wasn’t a jump cut. It was a slow, grating rotation. A full one hundred and eighty degrees on its fragile china neck. The sound was faint, a delicate scrick-scrick-scrick of painted porcelain turning against itself.
It came to a stop, facing forward.
Its faded blue eyes, now aligned with Ms. Hilder’s empty ones, stared directly at Evette.
The child’s voice, wet and echoing as if spoken from the bottom of a well, came again, this time from Ms. Hilder’s motionless mouth.
“Now we can all play together.”
A long, rattling sigh escaped the old woman’s lips. It was the sound of air leaving a balloon, a final, definitive release. Her body went utterly limp. The doll slipped from her fingers and thudded softly onto the carpet. Hilder slumped sideways in the armchair, her head lolling onto the upholstered wing, her eyes wide open and fixed on nothing.
The silence that followed was total. Even the storm seemed to hold its breath.
Chloe was the first to move. She darted forward, not toward the doll, but toward the old woman. She pressed two fingers to the side of Ms. Hilder’s neck, her own face a rigid mask. She held them there for a ten-count, twenty.
She looked up at Evette, her blue eyes wide with a horror that had nothing to do with ghosts.
“There’s no pulse.”
A collective inhale, sharp and pained.
“She’s… dead?” Nancy’s voice was a paper-thin scrap.
“Call 9 1 1,” Sheryl barked, the command automatic, a lifeline back to procedure, to the real world.
Evette fumbled for her phone, her fingers numb and clumsy. She swiped, tapped the emergency call. She put it to her ear.
Nothing. No ring. No voice. She looked at the screen. The little ‘x’ over the signal bars was still there. No Service. She held it up, waved it slowly. Nothing.
“My phone’s dead. I mean, dead, dead.”
A frantic rustle as everyone else pulled out their own devices. A chorus of soft curses, of panicked taps on unresponsive screens.
“Mine too,” Maya whispered.
“Mine’s got 2% but no bars,” Tanya said, her voice tight. “Nothing.”
“Mine’s a brick,” Chloe confirmed, shoving hers back into her wet pocket.
They were cut off. Truly, completely cut off. The storm had taken the power, and now, as if by design, it had taken their last tether to the outside world. The house was an island, adrift in a sea of black.
And on the floor, between them and the dead woman in the chair, lay the doll. Violet. Facing forward now. Its painted smile seemed less innocent, more knowing.
“What… what do we do?” Nancy asked, her voice small. She was staring at Ms. Hilder’s body, at the terrible, slack stillness of it. The friendly, frightened neighbor was gone. In her place was a corpse, a prop used and discarded by the thing in the house.
And in the chill that would always linger in that upstairs bathroom, deeper than any draft, something small and forgotten began, very patiently, to hum.
The crackle of the fire was the only sound, a soft, normal heartbeat in the unnatural quiet that had followed Clara’s disintegration. It was fragile. Evette watched the soot under her fingernails, the reality of the gasoline smell grounding her, until the silence shifted from empty to expectant. It was the second before a held breath is released.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. A familiar, pulsing buzz against her thigh. Then Nancy’s, a jaunty pop song tinny from her jeans. Sheryl’s, a default marimba chime from the coffee table. One by one, then all at once, a discordant symphony erupted into the room. Maya’s indie folk ringtone. Chloe’s heavy metal guitar riff. Tanya’s ominous movie score sting.
They all blinked to life, screens glowing in the dim firelight like a circle of startled, electric faces.
For a fractured second, no one moved. The photos on the wall, now still and crooked, seemed to lean in. The wet spot on the floor from Clara’s final tantrum gleamed.
“Don’t, “ Tanya started, but Chloe was already snatching her phone from the floor, thumb swiping across the screen.
“Hello?” Chloe’s voice was too loud, a defiance of the quiet. She held it away from her ear. “It’s… it’s just static. Loud, wet static.”
The static wasn’t just noise. It was the sound of the phantom pond, churning.
As if triggered by the act of answering, the room convulsed.
The family photos began to spin again, faster this time, a manic whirl of blurred, dated faces. A small decorative plate hanging near the kitchen archway joined in, wobbling on its nail with a ceramic click-clack-click. The overhead light, dead since the storm began, flickered on with a painful pop, stayed lit for three seconds of blinding, sterile white, then died. It came back on, off, on, off, not randomly, but in a stuttering, rhythmic pattern. Long flash, short flash, short flash, long flash.
From the kitchen came a sharp crack as a cabinet door flew open, smacking against the counter. Then it slammed shut. Then open. Shut. Open. Shut. A percussive, angry beat.
The television screen blazed to life, not with snow, but with a hyper-speed channel surf. A cooking show host’s smile sliced into a cartoon duck’s quack, which fragmented into a car commercial, a news anchor’s grave expression, a slasher film’s scream, all gone in half-second bursts, the volume a cascading roar of chopped audio.
“Make it stop!” Nancy yelled, clamping her hands over her ears.
Sheryl was already moving, stalking toward the TV to yank the plug from the wall. Before she could reach it, the stereo on the bookshelf powered on. The digital display became a blur as it auto-scanned through radio stations, a blast of country twang, a slice of preacher’s exhortation, the shriek of an emergency broadcast signal, then more static.
The living room window by the fireplace rattled violently in its frame and then shot upward, the storm’s roar and a spray of cold rain blasting into the room. Before the scream in Evette’s throat could escape, it slammed back down. Then the front door shook, the deadbolt engaging with a heavy thunk, then disengaging, engaging, disengaging.
A new, piercing sound joined the cacophony. The smoke detector in the hallway let out its low-battery chirp. Then the one in the kitchen answered. Then another from upstairs. They chirped in sequence, a round of electronic crickets, until the pattern tightened, overlapped, and became a single, unified, earsplitting shriek.
Through the maelstrom, Evette saw it. The front doorbell rang, a traditional ding-dong. Then, faintly from the back of the house, the older, mechanical buzzzzz of the rear doorbell. They began to ring over each other, out of sync, a discordant, incessant chime-and-buzz. Ding-dong. Buzzzzz. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Buzzzzz.
The house was having a temper tantrum.
Maya pointed a trembling finger toward the far wall, near the hallway. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out over the din.
A dark red line, thick as paint, had begun to seep from the top of the wall where the wallpaper met the ceiling. It traced a slow, deliberate path downward, branching into thinner streams as it descended, a macabre imitation of rainwater on a windowpane. Another line appeared on a different wall. Then another. The metallic, coppery scent cut through the gasoline and ozone. Blood. The thought was cold and clear in Evette’s mind. It’s blood.
Chloe, still holding her phone to her ear, her face pale under her sun-bleached hair, suddenly threw the device onto the couch as if it had burned her. “She’s on it.”
All around the room, the others slowly lowered their own phones. The screens, still glowing, were now all dark except for the universal symbol of a active call. And from each one, amplified not by the speakers but seemingly by the very air of the frenzied house, came a small, petulant, utterly chilling voice.
It didn’t echo. It multiplied. Six identical voices, one from each phone, harmonizing with the slamming cabinet and the screaming smoke alarms and the ringing doorbells.
“That,” said Clara, “wasn’t very nice of you.”
With a final, simultaneous crackle, the calls dropped.
Everything stopped.
The lights went out and stayed out. The cabinet door hung open, silent. The TV and stereo died, plunging the room into a sudden void broken only by the guttering fire and the six glowing phone screens, which now all dimmed to black in unison. The doorbells fell silent. The smoke detectors gave one last, fading chirp.
The blood, vivid and dark, continued its lazy crawl down the walls.
The storm outside was just a storm again.
Nancy was the first to speak, her voice a dry whisper in the ringing silence. “Okay. So. New rules.”
“What rules?” Sheryl asked, her own voice flat, devoid of its usual pragmatic tone. She was staring at the red trails on the wall.
“Her rules,” Maya said, wrapping her arms around herself. “She just demonstrated. We don’t get to break her toys. So now she’s going to play with all of them at once. With the whole house.”
Tanya walked to the wall and, with a grimace, touched a wet, crimson streak. She rubbed her fingers together. “It’s not warm. It’s cold.”
“It’s not blood,” Chloe said, but it wasn’t a statement of fact. It was a plea.
“It’s a message,” Evette said, finally finding her voice. It sounded steadier than she felt. The destruction of the ribbon had been an act of defiance. This was the response. A show of limitless power. A reminder that they were in her collection box, and the lid could start slamming anytime she wanted. “She’s proving she doesn’t need the ribbon to tag us. She has everything else.”
A soft, almost nostalgic giggle filtered down the staircase, sounding both far away and intimately close. It melted into the sigh of the wind outside.
Sheryl took a deep, shuddering breath, the anchor re-setting herself. “Alright. New priority. We can’t just react. We need to understand the game. Clara collects by replicating deaths. Hadley, Hilder, Hank. She needed their objects.”
“But she just used everything,” Nancy pointed out. “Doors, windows, phones, the freaking smoke alarms.”
“Because she’s angry,” Maya said. “But anger is messy. It’s not collection. Collection is careful. Precise. This was a tantrum, like Evette said.” She looked at the cold, dark fireplace. “We made it personal, so she got personal back. But the core of her… the little girl who catalogs things… that’s still there. She’ll revert to type.”
Evette nodded slowly, following the logic. “So, the rules haven’t really changed. The ‘tag’ still needs an object. A specific object, tied to a specific person.”
“Which means,” Tanya said, her sharp eyes scanning the room, “we’re not all tagged yet. We’re just… in the tagging zone. And she’s decided we’re all playing.”
Chloe let out a shaky laugh. “Great. So instead of one of us being ‘It,’ we’re all just… ‘It’-adjacent.”
A thump from upstairs made them all flinch. It was a single, solid sound. Like a heavy box being set down on the attic floor.
They looked at the ceiling.
“She’s up there,” Evette said softly. “Sorting her collection. Adding new entries.” Her eyes drifted to the hallway closet, where the yellow raincoat hung beside the now-empty gasoline can. She thought of the plastic vent cover in the upstairs bathroom, the one hiding the fan. The shed out back, currently being pummeled by rain. All the potential objects, waiting.
The fire popped, a single, bright ember leaping onto the hearth. It glowed for a moment, then faded to ash.
The house was quiet, but it was the quiet of a held breath. The silence of a predator who had just finished circling, and was now choosing which part of the herd to take first.
Across town, Hank Miller propped his feet on the cluttered coffee table. He aimed a remote at his TV like a duelist, clicking through late-night channels that held zero interest. The only sound was the aggressive rat-a-tat of rain on his own apartment windows, but his thoughts weren’t on the storm. They were back at Evette’s, hours earlier, on the receiving end of her sharp, disappointing stare.
Stupid. The hanging bridge prank had been dumb, a low-effort jump scare he’d figured would get a laugh or maybe an annoyed shove. He’d craved the connection, any reaction. Her anger had been cold, though.Withdrawn. That was worse.
His thumbs hovered over his phone, the text draft glaring back at him: Hey E, sorry about earlier. Went too far. He stared at the black rectangle of the screen after hitting send. No blue “Delivered” tick. No “Read.” Just an empty grey bubble of a message sent into a void.Great. She was still pissed.
He tossed the phone on the cushion beside him. Or she was deep into whatever marathon horror flick marathon the girls had inevitably queued up. Nancy always managed to drag them into some paranormal documentary rabbit hole.
Thunder, close enough to rattle his loose bedroom window, shook the apartment. The power flickered once. His router rebooted, the lights on the box blinking through a slow, green sequence.
His phone vibrated against the fabric.
A flare of stupid hope lit him up.He snatched it.
The screen showed: Evette
The message preview on his lock screen said: Come over, I’m sorry too, I’ll make it up to you.He frowned. That was… quick. And the tone was off. Evette wasn’t a “make it up to you” texter. She’d say it straight: Apology accepted. Now come eat this pizza before it’s gone.
He tapped to open it. The message sat alone in their thread, beneath his unread apology. He started typing a reply: Uh, you ok? when a second text buzzed through.
This time it was from the group chat. A group picture he’d forgotten he was in, the one the girls used for gossip without him. He never muted it because the drama could be entertaining.
Nancy had just posted a series of expletive-heavy messages about a power outage, flickering lights, and "some creepy bad reception phone call". Followed by Sheryl’s chillingly calm update: Power’s out for good. We’re by the fireplace. House phone is out.
His heart did a slow, unpleasant twist. The flashing LED from his freshly-rebooted router caught his eye in the dark room.
There was a noise on his end too. Underneath the rain. A faint scratching, like a branch on glass, but rhythmic. Coming from the heating vent near his floor.
The words “bad reception phone call” replayed in his head.
He tapped Evette’s contact and hit call.It rang once. Then, a dead, flat silence, devoid of any connection sounds. He pulled the phone from his ear to see the call timer counting up. 00:00:07, 00:00:08. He hadn't heard a second ring after the first. He just… hadn’t heard the call connect.
He ended it and tried again.
Straight to voicemail this time. Her cheerful, slightly awkward message greeting him. “Hey, you’ve reached Evette…”
He stabbed the ‘end call’ button.
He looked at the text she’d sent him. Come over.
Then at the frantic group chat feed, now filling with clipped reports. Maya: Phone lines are messed up again. Everything feels wet in here. Chloe: Prolly just a burst pipe, artist-brain. Tanya: It’s not a pipe. The smell is wrong.
Another message from Evette, to him alone, popped up.
Come in back door, up back stairs.
His palms felt slick.
The girls weren’t playing with him. Nancy’s terror was pitch-perfect. Tanya’s ominous statements were textbook. This wasn’t them. He swallowed, throat dry. The grand prize of all his dumb pranks had finally landed: a real, palpable, skin-crawling sense that something was badly wrong.
He jumped off the couch, his knee cracking from the sudden motion. He grabbed his rain-splattered jacket from its hook by the door, fished his keys from the ceramic bowl on the entry table.
He paused, a hand on the cold doorknob. Looking back into his silent, familiar apartment, he felt a pull to stay, to text “Nope, you’re being weird, not falling for it,” to brush this off as an elaborate revenge plot.
But Sheryl had said the house phone was out.
Chloe was trying to laugh it off, but her replies were too short, clipped.
And Evette wouldn’t ask him to use the back door and back stairs. She hated them, called them the “midnight creeker” corridor because the old wood squeaked so loud.
He flipped off the lights, plunging his apartment into a gloom lit only by the electric-blue flicker of his muted TV.
He opened his door.
The storm greeted him like a physical blow. Rain, driven nearly horizontal by the wind, slammed into his face and chest, soaking his jeans instantly. The gale ripped the apartment door from his hand and slammed it shut with a crack that reverberated in the stairwell. The humidity, thick and cold, wrapped around him.
By the time he reached his pickup in the driveway, he was drenched, water dripping from his hair into his eyes. He fumbled with the key, the rain drumming a chaotic rhythm on the truck's roof, and finally wrenched the door open. The interior was cold, the vinyl seats smelling faintly of damp and spilled soda.
The engine turned over with a gritty roar. His headlights cut twin cones through the downpour, illuminating the swirling sheets of rain, making the world beyond five feet look like a dark, liquid void. Streetlights were halos of distorted gold in the storm’s fury.
His phone, lying face-up on the passenger seat, suddenly illuminated. A notification: Group Chat.
His wipers beat a frantic tempo on the windshield as he navigated the empty, flooded streets, taking corners slow against the risk of hydroplaning. He wanted to look.He didn’t. He focused on the road, his hands tight on the wheel.The message alert sounded again. And again. Rapid-fire. The updates were coming too fast now.
He pulled over under a yellowing streetlight a block from Evette’s, the truck idling. He couldn’t wait. He had to know.
He snatched the phone.
The group chat was a cascading horror story. Cluttered sentences overrunning each other, frantic abbreviations. He scrolled back to catch up.
Maya: Down stairs. Scratching
Nancy: WHAT IS ON THE WALLS
Chloe: just stay quiet it’s by the hall
Sheryl: Everyone to the couch NOW. Do not make a sound.Do not move.
Then Evette’s familiar contact picture, but the message:
Clara.Then the account name changed. The display picture blurred into a grainy, sepia-toned image of a dress.
He couldn't look anymore. He dropped the phone. It clattered onto the floor mat under the passenger seat. The radio was hissing out soft, static-filled classical music, the kind that played in haunted house attractions. He twisted the knob off.
The silence inside the cab was thick, filled only with the drumming rain and the hammer of his own heart.
He stared out into the gloom where Evette’s house sat at the top of the hill, a dark silhouette against the deeper black of the woods behind it. No lights. No warm squares of yellow from the windows. The wind screamed through the trees that lined the drive.
Come in back door, up back stairs.
He never listened. Not to his teachers, not to speed limit signs, not to warnings. It was a point of pride, or stupidity. But he’d listened to Evette’s quiet reasoning a hundred times over the years. She didn’t plead, she didn’t order. She laid out the facts. And right now, over there in the dark, the facts were screaming.
This was his noise to counter.
He put the truck in gear, pulled back onto the slick street, and began the final climb toward her house. His headlights raked over the swaying, skeletal branches of the driveway trees, their shadows dancing like long, grasping fingers across the gravel.
He wouldn’t use the back door. That was what it wanted.
He pulled his truck right up to the front walkway, tires crunching on the wet gravel, headlights shining directly on the darkened, rain-lashed front porch. He killed the engine.
The storm seemed to quiet for just a second as he sat in the sudden silence.
From somewhere inside the dark house, he heard the faint, brittle sound of breaking glass.
His breath caught. Then he reached down into the floorboard, past his phone, his hand closing not on metal keys, but on cold, heavy steel. He pulled the heavy crescent wrench from the under-seat toolbox. Its weight felt good, solid.Real.
He threw open the truck door and plunged back into the rain, his gaze fixed on the sheer, silent blackness behind the glass of the front door.
The girls were inside. All of them. It was inside.
He took a deep, wet breath, hunched his shoulders, and headed for the front steps, the rubber of his sneakers squeaking on the stone. Every light was out, but he saw it—the dead red rose his cruel text had left on the welcome mat was gone, replaced by a few scattered, wet petals smashed against the bottom of the door.
He looked toward the side of the house, where the narrow, overgrown path led to the “midnight creeker” stairs, the route it had told him to take. The path was invisible in the dark, swallowed by the storm.
He faced the front door again.
Hank looked toward the side of the house, where the narrow, overgrown path led to the "midnight creeker" stairs, the route it had told him to take. The path was invisible in the dark, swallowed by the storm.
He turned away from the front door.
"Fine, back door," Hank muttered to himself, gripping the wrench tighter.
He moved along the side of the house, boots sinking into soaked earth, one hand trailing the wet siding to keep his bearings in the dark. The back door came into view, a darker rectangle against the black wall of the house. He tried the handle. It gave without resistance, unlocked, swinging inward on a silent hinge.
Hank slipped inside, into the kitchen, easing the door shut behind him with a soft click. He stood still for a moment, letting his eyes adjust, the wrench held low at his side.
Hank slowly stepped up the back stairs, not to make a sound.
The door clicked shut behind him, and Hank held his breath. The inside air was different. It wasn't just still; it was thick. It carried the same smell that clung to an abandoned place—damp wood rot, old plaster, and under it all, a sweetness that reminded him of decaying flowers left too long in a vase.
He was in the kitchen. Shapes loomed in the dark: the bulky silhouette of the refrigerator, the sharper angle of the counter’s edge. His eyes adjusted, pulling details from the gloom. There was Evette’s favorite mug, chipped on the rim, sitting by the sink. Chloe’s energy drink can on the table. Small, ordinary proofs of life.
But on the floor, the linoleum near the back door glistened wetly, leading inwards. Not puddles, just a pervasive sheen, as if the humidity had become a liquid skin. He avoided it.
He moved, silent on the balls of his feet, placing each step with care to avoid the telltale creaks he knew by heart from countless late-night raids on this fridge. The doorframe to the dining room loomed, a rectangle of deeper darkness.
From deeper in the house, a soft sob hitched, then was cut off sharply.Nancy. That wasn’t drama. That was the real, wet sound of someone clamping a hand over their own mouth to keep from screaming.
His heart thumped against his ribs, a frantic drum trying to telegraph his presence to every corner of the quiet house. He gripped the cold, heavy crescent wrench tighter, his knuckles protesting.
He glanced toward the front of the house where the living room sat, imagining the others huddled by a dead fireplace. They were close.
Then he looked to his left. The back stairs.
They were narrower than he remembered, tucked into a slot in the wall, a private tunnel up to the second floor. Darkness pooled in the stairwell like black water. It had told him to come up these stairs.
His usual defiance sparked. Don’t follow the rules, make your own. For once, the impulse felt like something other than just brattiness. It felt like a strategy.
He took one step into the stairway's archway.
The back stairs swallowed him whole.
Each step was a negotiation with the dark. The wood groaned under his weight, not the sharp crack of something breaking, but a low, intestinal complaint, as if the house was digesting his presence. He kept one shoulder against the damp wallpaper for balance, the wrench raised like a clumsy torch in the other hand. Lightning flashed somewhere outside, and for a split second the narrow stairwell was bleached into stark, jarring reality: the water stain blooming like a Rorschach test above him, the frayed end of a loose piece of carpet trim, a dead spider curled in the corner of a step.
Then blackness slammed back down, thicker than before.
He counted the steps. Seven, eight. The muffled sounds from the living room were fainter up here, dampened by floor and distance. He could just make out the cadence of Sheryl’s voice—clipped, authoritative—but not the words. Another voice, maybe Tanya’s, sharp with a question. They were down there, alive, talking. The normalcy of it was almost worse. It carved a canyon between his reality in this wet, breathing dark and theirs by the fire.
He reached the top. The landing was a small pocket of space where the stairs met the long hallway. Another flash of lightning illuminated the family portrait hanging crookedly opposite him. The painted smiles of Evette’s grandparents looked stiff, their eyes flat and black in the sudden light. As the thunder followed, a new sound etched itself into the silence left behind.
Skritch-skritch… skritch…
It came from inside the wall to his right. Not random. Deliberate. The sound of something small dragging carefully across the inner surface of the plaster, just behind the rose-patterned paper. It moved parallel to him, keeping pace with his position.
Hank froze, his breath held in his throat. He swung the wrench toward the sound, the metal edge hovering an inch from the wall. The scratching stopped.
He waited. Five seconds. Ten.
From the living room below, he heard Nancy’s voice rise in a strained, desperate whisper. “—just stay together, it can’t—”
Skritch.
Right beside his ear. He jerked back, his shoulder blades hitting the opposite wall. The lightning came again, a sustained flicker this time that made the hallway strobe.
On the wallpaper, at chest-level, the surface bulged slightly. Not a bubble from damp. It was a distinct, shallow mound. As he watched, frozen, the bulge pressed outward, the delicate roses stretching and distorting. The tips of five small fingers formed in the material, each with a defined, rounded tip. A full, child-sized handprint pressed from the other side, the wallpaper clinging to its shape like damp skin.
It held for the duration of the light. Then the thunder came, a brutal roar that shook the floorboards under his feet, and when it passed, the wall was flat again. Only a faint, five-pointed smudge of darker damp remained.
“Okay,” Hank breathed, the word tasting like iron. “Not cool.”
Every joke, every staged hangman’s noose, every jump-scare he’d ever engineered evaporated from his mind. This was a different language. This wasn’t about a laugh. This was about presence. A thing saying, I am here, inside the bones of the place where you stand.
The primal part of his brain screamed at him to run back down, to burst into the living room and yell for everyone to get out. But the image of the texts, of Evette’s name on that message… it was a hook in his chest. If this thing could mimic phones, could get inside walls… it could have them. It could be standing right behind them in the dark and they’d never know until its small, cold hand touched their neck.
He had to see. He had to know what he was dealing with.
He forced his legs to move, stepping off the landing and into the long hallway. The doors to the other bedrooms—a guest room, Evette’s room, a bathroom—were all shut. At the far end, the master bedroom door stood ajar.
Just a sliver. A vertical slice of absolute darkness.
That was the room. Where it had started. Where he’d dangled from the ceiling fan hook, harness digging into his armpits, playing at death for a scream. The memory felt sickeningly stupid now. A parody. A taunt.
As he walked slowly toward it, the floorboards creaking their same, familiar song beneath him, he saw the muddy prints. Small, bare feet, smeared and fading, led from the top of the stairs down the hall toward that door. They didn’t come back out.
The air grew colder with each step. The humid summer-night warmth stripped away, replaced by a dank, cellar chill that raised goosebumps on his soaked arms. His own breathing grew ragged, clouds of mist forming before his face.
He stopped a few feet from the door. The sliver of darkness seemed to pulse. It wasn’t empty. It was full. Full of a watchful, patient quiet that was heavier than noise.
“Hello?” he whispered, the word instantly swallowed.
No answer. But the door creaked inward another inch, inviting him.
Hank tightened his grip on the wrench, the metal now as cold as the air. This was the punchline. All his life, he’d been setting them up. Now he was walking into one. Every instinct told him to bolt.
He thought of Evette’s face when she’d seen him “hanging.” The anger that had been there, yes, but under it, the raw, unguarded fright. The real one. He’d caused that. He’d put that look there for a cheap thrill.
He couldn’t leave them down there with this.
He took the last two steps, raised a trembling hand, and pushed the door open.
The room yawned before him, a pool of ink. The storm provided the only light, flashes that painted the shapes of furniture in quick, aching detail: the hulking four-poster bed, the vanity mirror like a dead eye, the faded armchair in the corner.
And the space in the center of the room, below the ceiling fan.
Lightning flashed.
The open doorway was a mouth.
Hank stood on its threshold, the damp hallway at his back, the room’s cold breath washing over him. He remembered this room just hours before, charged with the adrenaline of his own joke, the rope scratchy against his neck under his shirt, the harness digging into his shoulders. He remembered the triumph burning in his chest as Nancy screamed, as Evette’s face went sheet-white. The sound of their fear had been a validation. He’d nailed it.
Now, the silence was the punchline.
He took one step in. The floorboard under his foot gave a low, terminal groan. His eyes, wide and straining, swept the space.
The four-poster bed was a monolith, its dark wood drinking the weak storm-light. The vanity mirror was a blank, black square. The armchair in the corner was empty.
The ceiling fan hook was bare.
Relief, thin and dizzying, washed through him. Nothing. It was just a room. The muddy prints outside were probably from the search party earlier. The hand in the wallpaper a trick of light and frayed nerves. The texts? Some glitch, maybe a bad cell tower amplified by the storm and their own paranoid chatter. Evette was probably downstairs right now, about to laugh at him for creeping around like an idiot.
A weak, hopeful smirk started on his lips.
Then the door behind him sighed shut.
Not a slam. A soft, definitive click of the latch engaging.
He spun, wrench raised. The door was just a door again, dark wood in a dark frame. He grabbed the handle, turned. It didn’t budge. Locked. Or held.
Panic, hot and sour, surged up his throat. He rattled the handle, threw his weight against the wood. It didn’t even shudder in its frame. Solid. Final.
“Okay,” he said aloud, forcing a chuckle into the thick air. It came out strangled. “Real funny, guys. You got me. I’m officially creeped out. Open up.”
Only the rain answered, a relentless tattoo against the window.
He turned back to face the room, the wrench now feeling like a child’s toy. His gaze landed on the floor, directly below the fan.
His own muddy boot prints from earlier were there, scuffed and chaotic from when he’d been. But beside them, fresh and stark against the dark wood, was another set. Small. Bare. The prints of a child, toes perfectly defined. They led from the center of the room toward the bed and disappeared underneath it.
Under the bed.
A coldness settled in his gut, a weight he’d never felt before.
The air in the room shifted. It wasn’t just cold anymore. It was actively draining the warmth from his skin, from his breath, pulling it away. He saw his own exhalations as thick, desperate plumes.
From the vanity mirror, a pale smudge moved in the reflection.
He jerked his head toward it. Nothing. Just his own pale, wide-eyed face staring back, haloed in the dark.
Skritch
Skritch.
The sound came from the wall beside the closet. The same dry drag of small fingers on plaster.
Hank backed away, until his shoulders hit the locked door. “Who’s there?”
The scratching stopped.
Then, from directly behind the vanity mirror, a soft, wet sniffle. A child, crying quietly.
His heart hammered against his ribs. “Clara?”
The name hung in the air. The crying hitched, then faded into silence.
A new sound. A faint, rhythmic creak. The sound of rope bearing weight, twisting slowly. He looked up.
The ceiling fan hook was still empty.
But from the shadows just beside it, a length of rope began to lower. It uncoiled from the darkness above the fan like a serpent descending from a tree, slow and sinuous. The end brushed the floor with a soft tap.
It was the rope. His rope. The one he’d used. But it looked different now, older, drier, the fibers frayed and discolored as if by decades of sun and strain.
It began to move. Not swung by a draft. It moved with intention. The loose end lifted from the floorboards, curling upward in the still air. It looped itself once, then began to twist, forming a noose. The knot tightened itself with a series of precise, audible pulls.
Hank could only watch, his lungs frozen, the wrench hanging uselessly at his side.
The noose, complete, hung suspended in the middle of the room, about seven feet off the ground. It turned slowly, as if searching.
Then it drifted toward him.
He stumbled sideways, his back scraping along the wall, moving toward the window. The noose followed, a lazy predator. He swung the wrench. It passed through the rope as if through smoke, meeting no resistance, but the rope itself was solid, real. It continued its advance.
“Get away!” he yelled, the command cracking into a plea.
It picked up speed.
He dove, rolling across the cold floorboards, coming up near the foot of the bed. The noose shot past where his head had been, then stopped, reoriented.
His breath came in ragged gasps. This wasn’t happening. It was a dream, a panic attack, something.
The rope tasted of dust and mildew. It wasn’t a clean, dramatic snap around his throat; it slithered, a cold, dry serpent seeking purchase, first brushing his jaw, then coiling tight. Hank’s hands flew up, his fingers frantic and stupid, trying to shove the rough fibers back out, to pry them loose. The skin under his nails tore.
His mouth opened. A sound tried to form, a “no,” a “get off,” anything, but his airway was already a flattened straw. All that came out was a wet, strangled gargle, like a drain struggling against a clog. His earlier, theatrical silence in his harness was a childish joke compared to this. This silence was total, absolute, and it came from inside him.
The rope cinched. A hot, sickening pressure bloomed behind his eyes. He was being lifted, not by a harness distributing weight, but by pure, focused force on the single band crushing his trachea. His boots left the floor.
It was too slow.
He rose, a grotesque marionette, the ceiling groaning as if in protest. His feet pedaled the air, once, twice, finding no purchase. His vision tunneled, the dark room collapsing into a pinhole of light from the storm-lashed window, which itself began to star-fracture into spiderwebs of grey.
He thought of the wrench. It had already clattered to the floorboards far below. A useless metal slug.
The pressure reached a zenith. A distinct, internal pop vibrated through his skull, a crunch of cartilage giving way. A new kind of darkness bloomed behind the pinprick of light, a warm, thick ink spreading from the edges of his mind.
Below the panic, a cold, analytical slice of his brain – the part that always planned the prank, that calculated the timing – recognized the stages. First, the lack of air, the burn. Then the thundering in the ears. The fireworks in the vision.
The confusion came next, soft and cottony. His kicks became twitches. The image of Evette’s face, her disappointment earlier, flickered and dissolved. A different face replaced it. From the vanity mirror across the room, his own reflection gazed back, eyes wide and bugged, face a mottled plum, tongue a bloated, purpled thing thrust between slack lips. That couldn’t be him. That was part of the bit. That was the joke.
The storm outside didn’t rage.It murmured.
The last pulse of fight in his legs sent a shudder through the rope, which transmitted it to the ceiling fan mounting bracket. The whole apparatus squealed, a rusty, high-pitched protest.
Then a gentle, rhythmic sway took over.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
His body turned a slow half-circle, presenting his profile to the empty room. His expression, in the end, was not one of terror, but of profound, dawning confusion. The final thought was a quiet ghost in a dying system: This… wasn’t… the plan.
The rope held. The light from the window painted a weak grey trapezoid on the floor below his still-twitching feet, framing the heavy, abandoned wrench.
Downstairs, the shift was immediate.
The living room, which had been holding its breath in a tense quiet after the supernatural tantrum, flinched as one. A single, violent tremor passed through the floorboards beneath the rug. Then a long, wrenching squeal cut through the air from above, layered with a thud that wasn’t quite solid, more like a heavy sack of grain hitting a wall.
They all looked up, as if they could see through plaster and wood.
“What was that?” Maya whispered, her hand finding Evette’s arm.
Tanya stood up, tilting her head. “It came from… the master bedroom.”
The colour drained from Evette’s face. “Hank.” It wasn’t a question.
Chloe was already on her feet. “No way. He’s probably just up there trying to scare us again, knocked something over.”
But the sound hadn’t been a crash. It had been structural.Final.
“Clara can use objects, right?” Sheryl said, her voice low and urgent. “Re-create deaths. Whose object is up there?”
A sickening connection clicked into place in the silent room. Nancy’ modern face crumpled.
“The rope,” Evette breathed. The word tasted like ash. “He left the rope. And the hook.”
Before she could move, the overhead light in the living room flickered once, decisively, and bloomed back to a dim, steady glow. The hall light followed. Then the lamp on the side table. The house had power again.
A new text notification chirped on Sheryl’s phone, still on the coffee table. Then Nancy’s.Then all of them.
They stared. It was from Hank.
The preview read: come up here. see my best prank yet.
Silence pooled in the room, deeper and colder than the dark had been.
Sheryl took a step forward, her own protective instinct overriding her fear. “Don’t,” she commanded, her voice leaving no room for argument. “It’s not him.”
Evette’s gaze was fixed on the ceiling, as if it had burned through to the room above. The memory of him hanging there just hours ago, his stupid grin breaking through his fake-dead face, collided with the silent, awful reality of the thud. The fake had been practice. The stage had been set. The actress was already in the wings.
Her amber eyes hardened.
“I’m going up,” she said, her voice barely audible.
“Evette, no,” Maya pleaded.
“He’s my friend.” She looked at them then, her fear calcifying into something brittle and sharp. “And he’s an idiot. And if that’s him up there messing around, I’m going to kill him myself. And if it’s not…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She just turned and walked toward the hallway.
Tanya grabbed the heavy fire poker from the hearth, hefting it. “If you’re going, we’re all going.” Her cynicism was gone, replaced by a grim, practical determination.
Sheryl picked up a stout, glass candleholder from the mantel. Chloe followed Evette, her fists clenched, every muscle coiled. Nancy and Maya exchanged a terrified look, then fell in step. The unspoken pact held. Together.
They moved as a unit into the hallway, the restored lights feeling like a trap. The air was unnaturally still, the lingering smell of gasoline and ozone replaced by the mundane scents of old house: lemon wax, dust. It was worse.
They took the main stairs, their footfalls loud on the creaking steps. The second-floor hallway stretched before them, long and empty, every door shut. At the far end, the master bedroom door stood ajar.
Just a crack.
Light spilled from it, yellow and ordinary from the restored ceiling fixture inside.
From within, a faint, rhythmic creaking sound began. A familiar sound. The sound of rope, bearing weight, swinging gently.
They froze halfway down the hall.
Sheryl held up a hand, listening. There was no other sound. No triumphant cackle, no scuffling, no fumbling of props. Just the metronome tick of the creak.
“Hank?” Evette called out, her voice steady but thin.
No answer. The creaking continued.
Her heart was a wild animal in her chest, but her feet carried her forward. The others followed, a tight knot of dread.
She reached the door first. The others fanned out behind her, weapons held ready, breaths held.
The creaking was louder here.
She pushed the door open.
The room was bright. The antique four-poster bed, the swaying velvet curtains, the vanity mirror—all lit with stark, unforgiving clarity.
And in the center of the room, below the ceiling fan, Hank hung.
The rope was old and rough, biting into the swollen, bruised skin of his neck. His face was turned away from the door, tilted toward the window where the rain streamed down in chaotic rivulets.
For a half-second of pure, wilful delusion, Evette thought, The harness. He got better at hiding the harness.
But his arms hung limp at his sides, heavy as wet rope themselves. His legs were still, toes pointed listlessly toward the floorboards a foot below them.
He wasn’t breathing. The rise and fall of a chest, the subtle tremble of a stifled laugh—there was nothing. Only the slow, lazy arc of the body as it turned, pulled by its own deadweight momentum.
He was turning to face the door.
They saw his face. The eyes, once vivid green and full of mocking light, were open. Clouded, dry.They saw nothing. The tongue was a grotesque, swollen thing. The complexion was a mix of deep purple and waxy blue-white. His expression was blank, a wiped slate of confusion erased by finality.
He hadn’t been dead long, but he was utterly, irrevocably gone.
Nancy made a sound like a punctured tire, a hiss of air leaving her lungs for good. Her hands flew to her mouth.
Chloe took a stumbling step back, her fearless bravado shattered.“No. No, man, come on. Get down.”
Tanya stood rigid, the fire poker lowering until its tip scraped the floor. Her sharp mind, so good at patterns and inconsistencies, could find no loophole here. This was the data, raw and absolute.
Maya began to cry, soft, hopeless sobs she tried to stifle.
Sheryl’ narrator eyes scanned the room, the floor, the window.Logistical. The harness wasn’t there. The rope was the only thing suspending him. This wasn’t a prank. This was a report. An incident. Her brain started forming the next steps: Cut him down. Call.Explain. It stalled on the explain.
Evette didn’t make a sound. She walked into the room, past the others, her eyes locked on Hank’s empty face. The cold that had emanated from this room before was gone. It was just room temperature now. The storm raged outside the window, indifferent.
She stopped beneath him. His work boot, muddy from earlier, was level with her eye. She reached out, her hand trembling violently. She touched his leg, the damp denim of his jeans. It was still the same temperature as the room, but it lacked the vital heat of life. It was cooling. Object-cooling.
He was just a thing hanging there.
Her stomach twisted, a violent surge of nausea that she forced down. The reality was a physical blow, a rearrangement of her universe. Hank was loud.Hank was motion. Hank was a force of chaos and noise and relentless, annoying presence.
This silence was obscene.
“Clara,” she whispered, not to the thing hanging, but to the room.The house.
From the vanity mirror, their reflections were caught: six shattered girls and the hanging boy. But in the corner of the mirror’s frame, another reflection lingered, just out of focus. A small figure in a yellow dress, sitting cross-legged on the floor as if watching a puppet show.
It was gone when Evette blinked.
The floorboards by the closet were wet. Not with rainwater, but with a clear, viscous fluid that smelled faintly of pond scum and copper. The wrench lay in it.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.