Bernhard opened the car door for the young woman and watched as she emerged from the vehicle. She was tall, her arms swinging as if they were too long for her. Dandruff flaked from her scalp onto the shoulders of her t-shirt. “Thank you for agreeing to this, Ms. Jasmit. I know this can’t be easy. There must be a lot of memories attached to this place.”

Jasmit moved like a sleepwalker, not looking where she set her feet, stumbling over a mass of weeds sprouting from the gravel driveway. But she advanced steadily toward the sagging mansion, the main entrance the focus of her eager gaze. “I’ve wanted to come for a long time,” she said. “To see if they’re still here.”

“If they’re still here?” Bernhard pressed, stepping aside to make room for Julia, who followed the girl with her camera. Observing the stern concentration on the girl’s face as she approached the house, Bernhard felt discomfort in his gut. He should have used the toilet before leaving the hotel—he must have eaten something bad. But he’d been so eager to come here again in the company of one of the missing children. He wanted so badly to help her piece her story together, to get closure for whatever had happened in her past. He would use her tragedy to create awareness on important issues—he would make something good of it. “You mean that woman, Ayomi? Who else?”

“Kavith’s brother, Baduka.” Jasmit’s face was slack as she recited these names. “Ayomi was trapped with him in the Dry House that day. When she rescued me.”

“You think they’re still here? You didn’t mention this before.”

“If I’d told you everything, you wouldn’t have brought me here. You would have gone home to your country.” Jasmit swung her backpack down from her shoulder and set it on the grass. She didn’t take her eyes from the house even as she rummaged through the pack’s contents.

Jasmit was at least ten years older than in Mandari’s photo, well into her twenties. This coincided with the time passed since she returned to her family, but not with the time since the photo was taken. If this was the Jasmit in the photo, she had somehow arrested a normal aging process for at least twenty years.

Jasmit watched the house like Bernhard would watch a stray dog at night, when no one else was out and the creature’s eyes gleamed hungry in the streetlights. The old foundations and the discolored walls seemed immovable, but they might bare their fangs at any moment.

Bernhard hoped that the camera could capture that sense of menace lurking beneath a surface of paint and plaster. Despite the unbearable heat, he shivered half with excitement. “The House of Drought” was almost complete—it just needed this cornerstone to hold it all together. Jasmit revisiting her ghosts was not only fitting, it was authentic.

“There.” Jasmit found what she had been looking for and pulled it out of her pack. She clenched her teeth, jaw tightening.

“What is it? Julia, get a good shot.”

“It’s just water,” Jasmit said. She let the backpack slump into the grass and stood holding a plastic shopping bag. The handles had been tied with a knot, and Bernhard glimpsed several plastic bottles inside.

“What for? We’ve brought enough to drink.” Bernhard flicked his flashlight on and off.

“Yea.” Jasmit’s voice trailed off as she traced the peeling relief that adorned the entrance, her fingers slipping between twisting vines and star-shaped blossoms. “It’s not for us,” she said, and went inside.

 

“This was uncle Ushu’s room,” Jasmit announced as they arrived at the upper floor bedroom. Sunlight had bleached the blankets and pillow casings on the bed, even since Bernhard’s first visit.

“Ja, we thought so. There’s a washroom behind that door, right? And a lot of broken glass.”

Jasmit gestured for them to follow as she moved to the side of the room. She opened her plastic bag and arrayed the bottles on a nightstand carved with lotus flowers. She unscrewed the cap and began to pour the first bottle into the drawer.

“What is this for?” In Sri Lanka, Bernhard had seen exorcisms performed in colorful devil dances and people dangling from hooks to prove their religious devotion, but never anything like this. “What are you doing?”

“Almost looks like a séance.” Julia’s camera pivoted in its gimbal and panned over the room. “This house drives people a bit crazy, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not crazy, auntie.” With one water bottle empty, Jasmit paced to the window and pulled the curtains closed. “I want to see into the house. Can you turn off your torches?”

With lights extinguished, the bedroom sank into twilight. Bernhard’s stomach turned as he noticed a wet current like drifting fog evaporating from the drawer, flowing toward the inside wall.

“This is where I spent more than twenty years,” Jasmit breathed. “The other side of the house.”

“Bernhard?” Julia moved beside him, her camera whirring as it tried to refocus in the low light, but Bernhard didn’t turn his head. “This isn’t right. She isn’t in her right mind, we need to cut.”

“Wait.” Bernhard held up a hand. “Get it on film, all of it.” He reached out to Julia in the low light. He gripped her shoulder, but she jerked away.

“Wait.” Jasmit’s voice echoed Bernhard’s. “Twenty years I was trapped there. Ayomi rescued me, and she didn’t even know who I was. I should have come for her sooner, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t.”

The room trembled. Heavy dust hung in the air, and Bernhard now saw a hallway where the window had been, a narrow corridor leading into impossible depths. He coughed on the dry particulate that was suddenly everywhere. The house was stretching, but it was old and had been dry for so long. Beside him, Julia choked, her throat clicking through contractions.

“I’m out of here, Bernhard,” Julia whispered, lowering her camera as her gaze darted from one expanding corridor to another. “Take the girl away—don’t stay here. Bernhard? I’m sorry, but I’m leaving.”

Bernhard didn’t see Julia leave, but he heard the creaking of floorboards and her footfalls on the main staircase. It was just Jasmit and him now, and whatever else awaited them in this house.

 

“Twenty years.” Bernhard shook his head in disbelief. “How is that possible?”

“It felt like less,” Jasmit said. “The house falls into its thirst like you fall into a rift. It collapses in on itself. Only when it senses moisture does it climb back, open up. Only when people come to the house.”

Bernhard was mesmerized by the hallway and the room behind it, so similar to the one he stood in. He could feel the room twisting into its inverted form—even if he could not yet see it. If he could somehow capture this, his film wouldn’t just be a great climate change documentary, it would change the world. He pulled out his phone and swiped until he found the camera, activating video mode.

“Ayomi! Baduka!” Jasmit shouted as if to reach to the end of the house and all its iterations. “Ayomi!”

Columns and curtains stretched beyond the boundaries of the house. At the far end of the hall, a woman stumbled into view. She was emaciated and pale, her scalp visible through thin and patchy hair. Julia should have been here to film this; the phone camera dissolved everything into pixels and shadow. The woman carried a child on her back, and Bernhard hesitated. She stumbled, struggling under the weight of the child. The camera blurred as it focused and refocused on the pair, and Bernhard stuffed the phone in his pocket. His guts still churning, he released a humid breath and stepped toward the woman.

Jasmit grabbed his hand. “Don’t go in. It isn’t safe. The house is still thirsty.”

Bernhard shook himself free of Jasmit’s grip. The corridor consumed his field of vision, contracting like a throat. The woman with the boy staggered, one hand held to a rippling wall, and Bernhard wrested himself from terror’s hold.

“Uncle, no!”

The house was stifling, but the corridor was something else entirely. Its air didn’t move when Bernhard moved. He forced his arms and legs forward, forced his lungs to draw that fetid air into his body. But even while the air clung to Bernard like his own rank sweat, at the end of the hall a pale dust swirled in incomprehensible currents.

“Hurry—” Bernhard tried to reach toward the woman. But his arms were so heavy. Like stones at his sides. Julia would have done this, wouldn’t she? He forced himself forward, sick with the knowledge that the phone was filming the inside of his pocket. The wall felt rough against his back, the air like ash in his mouth. In a fit of coughing, Bernhard collapsed against the wall.

“Uncle! Run!” Jasmit’s cry was far away, diminished by the long, twisting corridor that separated them. There was so much dust that Bernhard could barely see the woman and the boy, but their dim shapes clustered around the nightstand, collapsed in arid exhaustion. Out of the hallway, out of the Dry House.

“Help me,” Bernhard rasped. His lips cracked and blood evaporated into the air, his eyes hurt when he blinked. As he pushed himself up from the wall, his lungs recoiled from the desiccated air.

“I’m sorry, uncle. There’s no water left.” Jasmit’s voice pitched high as she met his eyes from the end of the hallway. The woman and the boy stood next to her, panting, holding each other tight amid the empty bottles cast to the floor.

From one heartbeat to the next, the house snapped back, turned upside-down like an animal pulled into a snare. In this reversal, Bernhard found himself alone inside a hallway with no exit. The house crackled around him, dust whirled through the air. Upside was downside and the doors had shifted to the ceiling. Struggling to right himself, Bernhard felt the mouths in the floor suckling at his back, at his arms, trying to pull him down and into the house’s belly. Drops of sweat loosed from his skin were consumed greedily. Bernhard scrambled to his feet. But there was no way for him to reach the doors on the ceiling, no way to reach the windows.

“It’s worse here, isn't it?” Bernhard whispered, soon regretting that he’d expended so much energy, so much moisture, to ask a question he could answer himself. Somewhere inside the house’s twisting corridors, in its darkest and narrowest tunnels, Bernhard heard a strange rattling sound. A rattling he’d heard emanating from the forest—a sound he’d played over and over again as he reviewed his footage of the mansion, trying to make sense of it. A sound like seeds on baked earth, like roots breaking wide the cracks.

“It’s worse than the world outside, worse than the forest and the fields. This place doesn’t belong here; it never should have been built.”

Bernhard’s whisper fell into clods of dust, but the house shuddered its response. You cannot escape. You may not pass through these halls. These tunnels are not for you even should you give your last drop of water. She cracked the foundation. She made these passages. They are hers. She will come. Invite her in. Invite her. Invite…