Through the back door, Leanne entered the main part of the house. The hallways were narrower than she remembered. She supposed, as a child, she had fit better. As an adult, she felt squeezed. She had to walk perfectly straight. Otherwise, one of her shoulders would scrape the discoloured plaster.

The hallway bent. It was not at a right angle. It wasn’t far off—only ten degrees, perhaps—but it left Leanne feeling destabilised. She hadn’t questioned it as a child, but as an adult, she couldn’t make sense of it. The rooms were all rectangular. How did the hallways have the luxury of variation?

A memory returned. On the days Patience went to town, the children would play hide-and-seek through the halls. One child would wait at the window overlooking the yard, prepared to call a warning in case Patience returned. The others ran through the building, finding nooks and secret holes to tuck themselves into. As children were uncovered, they joined the search. No matter how often the game was played, they never seemed to run out of new places to hide.

Leanne’s hand brushed a cupboard set into the wall. She thought she remembered using it for one of the games. Cautiously, she pulled on the handle. Inside were shelves of crumbling, moth-eaten blankets. A storage space had been left empty below. Leanne glanced down the hallway, as though she were at risk of being seen, then bit her lip as she got to her hands and knees.

She wasn’t as young or as small as she had once been, and her joints creaked as she fit herself into the narrow gap. She remembered it. As she pulled the door closed, the sensations of that winter afternoon rushed back.

She had been hiding for ages. Maybe half an hour. They still hadn’t found her. Leanne rested her chin on her knees, waiting, and feeling faintly pleased.

For a while, footsteps had thundered through the hallways, voices whispering suggestions as they tried to find the remaining hiders. Shadows had flitted across the band of light at the base of the door. The footsteps had faded, though, and she couldn’t hear them any longer. She couldn’t hear anything… except the quiet tap of a cane.

Leanne clamped a hand over her mouth. Patience was home. She hadn’t heard the warning. She hadn’t gotten out in time.

The tapping, a deep, steady noise, was growing closer. Louder. Matching the beating of Leanne’s heart. A shadow moved across the gap at the base of the floor. The cane thudded for a final time, loud enough to echo. The silence was agony. The shadow didn’t move.

Leanne raised her second hand to cover her mouth. She was cold all of a sudden. So desperately cold that she wanted to gasp. She closed her eyes, squeezing them, as though she could escape Patience in the black inside her head.