“Henry.” She turned towards the end of the hallway. Behind a door, a set of stairs led to the third floor… and its bedrooms.

Sick dread weighed her legs down. The shivering torchlight ran across the narrow walls and brass doorhandle as Leanne neared it. She didn’t want to see more. She didn’t want to remember more. But she had to. Without this last step, without knowing what had happened, she would never be able to rest.

The handle, disused for thirty years, didn’t want to turn. Leanne fought with it. Her skin ached as it slipped on the metal, but then the latch screeched as it retracted and the door fell open.

These stairs were chaos. They listed to the right then tilted back to the left. Some were shallow, others so narrow that Leanne had to balance on the balls of her feet. She pressed her hands to the walls for stability and felt the rotting wood sag under the pressure.

Then, at the top, was the hallway she remembered so well. To the right was a row of doors. To the left, a wall filled with windows. At its end stood a heavy door made of grey wood that they were not allowed through.

When she had been a child, gauzy curtains had framed the windows. They had been old even back then—relics from the wealthy family who had once lived in the building. The thin material billowed in even the lightest breeze, flowing across the narrow hallway and obscuring the door at its end. Some nights, when Leanne was forced to leave the safety of her bed to seek out a bathroom, she had thought she could see Patience standing in front of the door. Back straight, her dark dress blending into the grey wood behind. All that had been visible through the twisting curtains were her pallid face and milky eyes.

Leanne pointed her torch along the hall’s length. The curtains were in scraps. Weathered threads still hung from the rods and spiralled in the disturbed air, but more of them lay across the floor, a layer of moth-eaten, decayed fabric that almost looked like soot.

The windows were open, just like they had always been during Leanne’s stay there. Night air came through, warming the hall and helping fight off the chill that permeated the building. Leanne angled her torch towards the grey door. She remembered it being imposing, larger than any other door in Bellamy. Thick, a deep, worn grey, the door was one part of the house that hadn’t changed with an adult’s perspective. The dread in her stomach solidified at the sight of the barrier.