She tried to count both the doors and the windows, but there were too many of the latter: broad panes with their views dampened by curtains, narrow glass lattices, and tiny windows, ones so small that Margot might have fit one arm through but no more. Instead, she focused on the doors, trying to form a hazy map of the place in her mind. The doors had been added in strange places, clusters where she wouldn’t have thought more than one would be needed, then long stretches with no exit in sight.

A grapevine had been planted along the house’s side. It was probably a symbolic touch—a way to connect them to the produce created farther down the hill—but it had been allowed to grow uncontrolled and reached far past the trellises that had been provided for it. Clusters of grapes still grew between the coiling leaves and tendrils. It was late in the season and many had fallen to the ground, where they slowly decomposed into the dead grass, but several bunches held to the vine. She stopped beside them, a low kind of melancholy forming in her chest.

She was the descendant of a family that made its name producing wine. And she couldn’t even sample the bottles that her parents had created.

The vine’s leaves fluttered as a breeze passed through them. The clustered grapes, deep crimson to the point of being almost black, looked glossy and full.

She might not be able to drink the wine, but she could partake of at least this much, couldn’t she?

Margot carefully picked a grape from the end of its bunch. It was still warm from the sun’s touch. She raised it to her lips, but the moment her teeth closed around the grape she knew something was wrong. It collapsed under the pressure, spilling foul, sour pulp over her lips.

She heaved forward, spitting the grape onto the ground. In the splatter of split skin and rotted flesh, a thick, white grub writhed.

Margot backed away, her stomach heaving, as she spat and spat again, desperate to purge the sourness from her mouth.

Witchety’s words returned to her. The land feels bad.

Margot wiped the back of her hands across her lips, then rubbed them clean on her jeans. She began walking again, faster this time, eager to put the rotting vine to her back.

As she rounded the house’s rear, she caught sight of old sheds shaded by two large maples. The trees were bare in preparation for winter: dark, twining branches spread outward, scraping on the shed’s ceiling, scraping on each other.

She blinked and saw the business’s logo again. The hanging tree. Larger than the maples and heavy with age. Heavy with death.