Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Cobwebs and musty particles floated through air on the other side of the doorway.
Wide-planked floors—Harthwait’s floors—sat layered in dust, warped from years of abandonment.
A few of the floorboards poked up at odd angles.
Moth-eaten rugs lay bunched and flipped up at the corners, as if discarded in either a hurry or from a search.
An old rocker sat in the corner, its back rail splintered in half.
I felt that tug again.
Something was off about the place. It looked like Harthwait, sprawled like Harthwait. But instead of opening to the hallway I currently stood in, as if by an inverted mirror, it opened to what I assumed was the living room downstairs.
Or what had been.
A rug stood, rolled and propped, against the far corner of the room.
A chandelier, swaddled in a thick layer of cobwebs, dangled in the center of a ceiling lined with crown molding.
All of it much too elegant for a modern living room.
Even the window latches were different: rounded, with a single latch in the center, instead of one on each side.
Wallpaper unspooled from the walls, drifting in a breeze from the cracked windows.
Leaves scattered across the furniture—wingback chairs, a sloped sofa that looked too hard to sit on comfortably, and a broken side table with the most delicate, bubbled legs I’d ever seen.
This was a hazy mirror of the living room I’d grown to know.
Every instinct in my body screamed to close the door, but my curiosity strengthened the longer I stared. My fingers inched closer to the doorframe. Just a peek wouldn’t hurt anyone. Then I’d close the door and be on my way to bed.
I took two steps inside. My hand fell away as I crossed the threshold. The air hung humid; much heavier than the other side of the door I’d just come from. It stuck to my skin, strangled my lungs.
“Hello?” I called. I coughed.
The door slammed shut behind me.
I whirled.
Oh no.
The tug that brought me here snapped, replaced by an eruption of panic. I grabbed the doorknob. It was cold now, not warm like it had been a moment before. I pulled—it didn’t so much as jiggle. This couldn’t be happening right now.
I shoved my shoulder into the door. The hinges didn’t even rattle, and no matter how hard I twisted, the lock didn’t release, as if it were cemented in place.
I was locked in.
I beat against the door, frantic. “Emma! Emma, let me out! The knob won’t turn!” I pressed my mouth against the door crack. Labored breaths grated my throat. “Please!”
Still, the door didn’t rattle. My words bounced back against the humid air, each one falling to the floor in defeat. I strained to listen, for footsteps, for movement, but nothing came.
This side of the door wasn’t polished like the other side was. It wasn’t beautiful and enticing; just dull and brittle, like the floors beneath my bare feet.
Pretty on the outside, broken on the inside.
It had lured me in. And I’d taken the bait like a naive child and waltzed right through.
I needed to think—logically. I was still in the house, that much was obvious.
Aunt Cadence had lived in Harthwait for years, as had other people before her.
Not once had I heard her talk about someone going missing that lived there, which was a good thing.
It wouldn’t swallow me alive. Maybe if I waited, the door would open on its own.
No need to jump off the deep end just yet.
A faint, distant trickle of laughter sent chills over my skin.
I wasn’t alone in here.
“Hello?” I tried again.
No response.
I gathered myself, hands fisted in the hem of my sweatshirt, and examined the room for possible signs of life. The dust on the floor remained undisturbed of footprints, which meant the laughter had to have come from outside.
I crept closer to the closest window.
Everything was so green. The type of green that bloomed just after all the petals floated away in the last spring breeze.
The kind of green that promised the start of early thunderstorms and newborn animals.
That explained the heat, if summer was coming, but there were …
snowflakes. Flecks of white drifted from the sky.
With a quiet exhale, I pressed my face to the warped glass. The longer I watched, I realized they weren’t white at all, but gray—because they were ashes.
I blinked furiously against the sharp, cloudless, blue sky. No sun, no rain, just ashes. It was so pretty, so unnervingly unnatural, that I wanted to walk outside to get a closer look.
Immediately, the muscles in my neck tensed, the little hairs on my arms stood at attention. I’d heard laughter. I was supposed to be looking for its source.
With quiet steps, I made my way through the parlor and into the foyer, only to stop again. A chandelier lay in shattered bits at the room’s center. Unlike the crystal one in the living room, this one’s iron-coated handles pointed at odd angles, candlesticks split and smashed around it.
“Momma?” A voice.
I looked up from the chandelier.
There, in what should have been Aunt Cadence’s office doorway, stood a boy. His hair, so blond it bordered white, stuck up and out in all directions. Dirt and grime clung to the creases of his neck. He couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, his feet bare, his pants soiled.
Ice swept through my blood. His voice, his stature—it matched. Momma.
“It’s you,” I whispered. He was the one I’d heard at night. And he’d been here, in this room, this entire time?
Blood dribbled from the boy’s mouth, onto his buttoned shirt. Three of those buttons were missing.
“Oh my—what happened?” I breathed. I dropped to my knees a few feet from him. If I got too close, would he run? “Where did you—y-your mouth.”
The blood trickled so bright, like little rivers, down his chin. Tears threatened to spill over. He placed one hand on his flushed cheek, glancing around, ignoring me. “Momma?”
“I’m not your momma, honey,” I whispered. “But I can help you find her. Is she outside?” What kind of place was this, where a child would be lost, bloodied, and alone?
Was the door covered to keep him in?
Then, a sickening thought that I hadn’t considered, Was this even real?
“Momma?” he asked, louder this time.
I gave a soft smile in an attempt to placate. “I’m not—”
“Momma!” The word morphed into a cry. This time his chest heaved with the word, like a release, a cry building up behind those little ribs. “Momma, I want Momma, where’s Momma!” he screamed.
I glanced around, searching for anything, anyone to help. “It’s okay, everything is going to be—”
His chest lurched with hiccups. Then he looked through me, searching while tears spilled down his round cheeks and muddied the blood on his chin to a watery pink.
I scooted closer, shoving away my growing sense of helplessness. I couldn’t leave him here, not like this. It made me wonder how long he’d been here, crying and waiting, alone.
He needed me.
“Hey, maybe I can go look?” I started to reach for him. The whisper of slippers stopped me. The boy’s moans, which had started to build to a wail, turned into hiccups.
A young woman rushed down the hallway by the stairwell.
I couldn’t see the kitchen beyond, only shadowed walls that stretched for miles.
A worn frock billowed around her ankles; a stained apron covered her lower half.
She wrung a threadbare rag between her hands as if she’d been caught in the middle of something.
She tutted when she spotted the boy.
“Oh, Haddy,” she breathed. Her skin dewed with sweat, her dark hair tucked behind her ears.
She wiped her hands on the rag and stuffed it into the waist of her apron band.
The ties were frayed, stained, but edged with a faded plaid pattern.
The beige in the plaid matched Haddy’s waistcoat, which hung crooked with one missing button at the top.
A knot formed in my throat. I knew exactly where I’d seen a waistcoat like that before: a history project Ivan had copied from me.
I remembered it specifically because it was the first time he’d touched my elbow.
I’d researched interior design for different eras throughout history, and that waistcoat looked almost identical to one I’d seen another child wearing in a textbook photo.
“Momma,” he said. His tears were almost dried now.
I sat back on my haunches. The woman didn’t appear to be his mother, but the way he gaped at her, how his arms reached up, up, the desperation in his curling fingers, sent a bolt through my chest.
I watched as she bent for the boy. She reached, just as needy as he did. As soon as her hands scooped under his arms to hoist him to her hip—her silhouette broke away. Little by little, she dissolved, like smoke dissipating in a gust of wind. She floated away like ash.
Just … gone.
I stared, mouth open.
The little boy’s eyes widened.
Then he wailed.
“Momma!” he screamed. His neck turned purple, face twisted in anger. Blood teemed like an open spigot from his mouth now; the louder he screamed, the faster it poured.
I looked around, frantic, trying to ignore the itching under my skin, the realization that I’d just watched a woman vanish into thin air.
“Wait, wait. Haddy.” I tried to inch forward in case he tried to bolt down the hall.
“I can help you, Haddy. Just please, talk to me. Actually, I think you can help me. I need to get home, and you know this place, right?” Only a foot separated us now.
If I touched him, what would happen? I couldn’t vanish. I was real.
Still, he screamed.
“Haddy,” I choked. I reached for his shoulder.
Just as my fingers brushed—actually brushed—the child’s shirt sleeve, all sound vacuumed out of the foyer. My ears popped as if I were in a car, barreling up a mountainside, the silence beyond it humming like a rattlesnake.