“What are you hungry for?” asked Sydney as she led Alexa into the long, narrow kitchen.

“Chocolate,” answered the seven-year-old.

Sydney giggled at her sister’s optimism. “I dunno,” she said. “Aunt Gladys doesn’t seem like a chocoholic to me.” Reaching the refrigerator along the inside wall, Sydney yanked it open, ready to forage, but found herself stepping back in surprise.

“Wha…?” she breathed. “Huh.”

“Oooh! Something good?” Alexa bounced to her sister’s side. Upon seeing the contents of the fridge, however, she became equally unenthusiastic. “Oh. Well. I like milk.”

“Yeah,” agreed Sydney. “Looks like that’s a good thing.”

The fridge was packed top to bottom with gallons of milk. There was, quite literally, nothing else inside. Sydney carefully closed the fridge door, as if it were a bomb set to explode at the slightest jiggle.

“Maybe the pantry?” she asked rhetorically, moving on. They looked up and down the room, searching for a pantry, before Sydney just began opening cabinets at random. There were bowls, cups, and spoons, but not much else. Finally, she opened a cabinet and found rows and rows of identical boxes of cereal.

“ ‘Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings,’ ” she read, frowning.

“For the milk,” offered Alexa.

So much for a balanced diet, thought Sydney. However, the cereal seemed to be more or less fresh and none of the milk had spoiled, so she went ahead and poured out a bowl for each of them.

After gobbling hers up and admitting to herself that it was both filling and tasty, Sydney started tapping her fingers on the counter out of boredom while waiting for her little sister to finish. Unfortunately, Alexa was a notoriously slow eater, and after another minute, Sydney couldn’t sit still any longer.

“Stay here and finish your cereal,” she told Alexa. “I’m gonna go peek upstairs.”

“Ormph-kmph!” garbled Alexa through a mouthful of Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings.

Sydney wandered back through the archway separating the kitchen from the…the…room that looked pretty much just like the kitchen except it had a wide set of stairs plopped in the middle of it. This is a crazy house, she thought.

The wooden stairs creaked slightly as she climbed, and she gripped the railing just a bit tighter than she might ordinarily have done. Though she couldn’t say why, she felt more and more nervous with each step. When she finally popped her head up onto the second floor, she went from nervous to freaked out in the space of a heartbeat.

“Huh,” she mouthed. “Doors.”

They were stacked in piles on the floor, leaning against one another along the walls, and lying atop or across every piece of furniture in the room. They were plain, ornate, painted, sanded, large, small, and everything in between. Some looked modern and dull like a door you might find in an office building. Others seemed ancient and majestic, as if they belonged in a haunted castle or an enchanted palace. Some doors were thick, others thin, but all had two things in common. One, they were each made entirely of wood. And two, there were no knobs.

Sydney reached out to run her fingers along a bright blue door that looked like something out of a grand estate, probably French, but suddenly stopped herself.

“Don’t touch the doors,” she said, suddenly understanding Aunt Gladys’s cryptic instruction.

Oddly enough, even with more doors than Sydney had ever seen gathered together in one place, the doorways of the room were as bare as the ones downstairs. Sydney glided softly from one room to the next, constantly shaking her head as she encountered more and more doors tossed willy-nilly into every corner of every room. There seemed to be no pattern to the collection, no rhyme or reason. Just more and more doors.

Great, thought Sydney. She’s a hoarder.

An unsettling chill washed over her. This was wrong. People didn’t collect doors. That was just too weird. There was something else going on—Sydney was sure of it.

Then Alexa screamed.