Stevie!”
Stevie paused as Nisa raced up to him, panicked. He looked past her worriedly, but the upstairs hall was empty. “What’s wrong?”
“I—I thought you were—”
She grabbed his hand, looked down at it, and immediately dropped it with a small gasp. Stevie waited for her to explain, but she just shook her head.
“Oh god, never mind,” she said at last. “I just—I thought you were right next to me, that’s all.”
He looked at her, bewildered, then continued walking. A few yards ahead of them, at the end of the hall, a half-opened door beckoned: bigger than the tiny secret door in his room but charged with a similar feeling of anticipation, and also a fluttery sense of déjà vu.
“What is this?” asked Nisa. “An attic?”
“No, the attic would be up there.” He pointed at the ceiling, then at the top of the doorframe. “Wow—check those out.”
Stevie nudged the door with his foot, so it opened the rest of the way. Light spilled from the room beyond, illuminating a carved face mounted on each side of the door, like the masks of comedy and tragedy, only both of these were grinning—lipless smiles distorted by time or shadow into leers.
“Jesus, they’re horrible,” Stevie marveled, rocking back on his heels. “Is that like what you saw back there? The carving? If it was, I don’t blame you for being freaked out.”
“No. That was horrible in a different way.” As though desperate to escape their eyes, Nisa took a step into the room. But just inside she stopped and cried out, turning to Stevie. “Do you feel that?”
He followed her, holding tight to his microphone after a check to make sure the recorder was on. “Holy cow. It’s like walking into a freezer.”
“But once you’re in the room it’s different, right?” She shook her head. “I mean, it’s warm. Only the doorway is cold.”
Stevie agreed. The large room wasn’t just warm—it was hot. He rolled up his sleeves, then took a look around.
The room extended almost the entire width of the house, occupying most of this end of the second floor. It was empty, which made it seem even larger, but which also seemed strange—there’d been some attempt, no matter how ineffectual, to furnish most of the other rooms in the house.
His gaze snagged on a small object on the floor beside the wall. He walked over and crouched to examine it. A broken jumble of black plastic, wires, and bits of plexiglass, tangled up in what he realized was snarled tape from an old cassette.
“What is it?” asked Nisa, coming up behind him.
“An old Walkman. Really old.” He picked it up curiously, turning it in his fingers. “Like first generation, the kind that played cassettes, not CDs.”
“Really? Can you tell what it was? The tape, I mean?”
Stevie shook his head. “No. It’s just trash.”
He set it back on the floor and stood, taking in the rest of the room. A frieze ran along the upper part of the walls, a sad procession of painted animals. Zebras, elephants, rabbits, lions and tigers, a crocodile. The images were blotched and faded, the animals crudely drawn. The sight filled him with a deep melancholy, bordering on dread.
Above the frieze, the ceiling was webbed with cracks where beams had been removed. “There were other rooms here,” he said slowly to Nisa. “One more, anyway—they took down the walls.”
“It’s so empty.” His oversized sweater made her look as though she’d been swallowed by a giant sock puppet. “You’d think they’d use it for storage. Or something. What do you think it was?”
He gazed up at the sad zoo parade. “A kid’s room.”
“A bedroom?” Nisa shuddered. “More like a prison.”
“A nursery,” said Stevie. “Big old houses like this, they stuck all the kids away with a nanny or governess. That’s why it’s so hot—they’d have kept it warm for the children.”
Nisa shuddered again. “Can you picture being a kid and trying to sleep up here? You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.”
“No, me neither,” Stevie admitted.
“Plus it must be ninety degrees—but right by the door, it’s freezing.”
He tore his gaze from the painted animals and returned to the doorway. He hesitated, then stepped back over the threshold into the hall.
He hadn’t imagined it. Frigid air surrounded him—it felt almost solid, a wall of ice. Then, in the hall, it immediately dissolved. He stood, breathing hard, glanced at the levels on his recorder but saw nothing unusual.
“Don’t you think that’s weird?” Nisa prodded him again from inside the room. “Can you measure the temperature with that?”
“It’s a microphone, Nis, not a thermometer. There must be some anomaly in how the house is designed.” He made an effort to sound unfazed—Nisa looked like she was ready to take off running. “That, or it just feels cooler, relative to how warm the nursery is.”
But he didn’t believe that. Once, working on an old downtown stage, he’d touched a live section of the outdated lighting system and been thrown to the ground. It hadn’t felt like an electrical shock, more like he’d punched a slab of concrete. His hand and forearm had been numb for hours.
Passing through the nursery doorway felt similar: like a physical assault. He leaned forward, and the chill grew stronger. He looked up at the two grinning faces.
“I think the cold comes from there,” he called to Nisa, pointing at the masks. Not there, he corrected himself: them. He glanced again at the recorder. It had registered only his voice.
“We should go,” said Nisa. She’d started to shiver, barely keeping her shit together.
“I will—I promise, I just need to see what’s going on with those masks. One more minute…”
He stepped back into the nursery, slowly, holding up one hand. This time he noted a distinct difference, like wading into a spring-fed pond where the water can feel icy in one spot and much warmer just inches away.
“It’s them for sure,” he said, gesturing at the carvings.
As he spoke, a sharp dread lodged in his chest—a foreboding so palpable, he might reach inside his rib cage and grasp it, razor-edged like an arrowhead.
Someone touched his arm and he yelped.
“Stevie! Hey, I was looking for you! Where is everyone?” Holly stood just outside the door, staring in at him. “Stevie? What’s the matter?”
He looked at her, confused. “Holly? Where’d you come from?”
“I went for a walk, down to Evadne’s place. Listen, I’d like to do another read-through. Now, while there’s still daylight.”
“Evadne?” Stevie repeated in disbelief. “What—”
“Holly!” Nisa’s voice echoed from inside the nursery. “We found the haunted room.”
“What room?”
“The nursery!” answered Nisa.
Holly’s face grew pale, her expression shifting from excitement to concern to outright fear. She pushed past him into the nursery, and Stevie saw how she immediately stiffened.
“Get out,” she ordered, taking Nisa’s arm and pushing at Stevie. “We have to get out.”
“What?” Stevie gaped at her. “Why?”
“Just go!”
Bang.
Stevie clapped his hands over his ears and shut his eyes. When he opened them seconds later, Holly and Nisa were huddled together.
“Was that thunder?” Nisa whispered in the sudden silence.
Stevie tucked the mic into his waistband, then hurried to the nursery’s back wall to stare outside. Beneath a threatening sky, trees bowed to the wind. Yet he’d seen no lightning flash. “I don’t know.”
Nisa said, “It felt like it came from inside this—”
Bang.
This one rang out like an explosion. Nisa shrieked, although Stevie couldn’t hear her over the noise, just saw her open mouth and frightened eyes. For a second he thought his eardrums had been damaged, but then he heard Holly shouting.
“Get out! We need to leave now!”
Disoriented, he grabbed Holly’s hand, dragging her across the nursery with Nisa racing after them. As they reached the doorway, it seemed to waver, its stiles moving inward so that the space between them narrowed. The air grew darker and also somehow thicker, as though he fought against an oncoming wave, its force pressing against his mouth and nostrils so he couldn’t breathe, crushing his eyes like two thumbs seeking to blind him.
Somehow, he staggered through with the others, stumbling back into the hall. He made it halfway to the stairs before he stopped. Nisa and Holly were leaning against the opposite wall. Holly fought to catch her breath while Nisa stared at Stevie, trying vainly to form words.
A door opened and slammed. Blearily, Stevie looked up to see Amanda hurrying toward them from her bedroom. She halted beside him.
“What the hell is going on?” she demanded.