Margot pulled her legs closer to her chest. Her skin was crawling. She raised the hand she’d used to break through the stain and shone her light on it. The stain had been damp after all. The smear left across her finger was a deep, vivid red.

Wine?

No. Blood.

She bit her tongue as she turned her light across the attic again. Every foreign shape was suspect. Every shadow felt like a stranger lurking just out of sight, watching, waiting.

Stop it. Calm down. It can’t be blood. No one has been in your attic in years, based on the dust.

That was true at least. She could see her own path through the space: footprints eventually switching to broad scuffs as she’d dropped to her hands and knees. Her marks were the only ones near the stain.

This house has had its share of murders, though. Enough to find blood bubbling out of the floorboards?

It was the paranoia again, digging its claws into her, interpreting every scrap of cloth as a red flag. The stain was slick on her hand, uncomfortably thick and tacky. That didn’t mean it was blood.

What, then? What kind of leak could create something like this?

Half against her better judgment, Margot moved back to the discolored smear. Its edges weren’t perfect, she realized. The side opposite her was blurred, smears traveling deeper into the attic.

Like something had been placed on the stain and then dragged away.

She gained her feet. Floorboards groaned under her weight, and she fell still again, listening to their echoes, trying to convince herself that the creak hadn’t been repeated farther behind her.

She stepped around the stain, moving the light in broad arcs to keep the space around her lit as best she could.

The room’s atmosphere felt heavier than when she’d entered. As though a poisonous miasma existed in the air, and it was multiplying with every minute she spent in the space.

Stop it. Stop it!

The house groaned as she moved through it. The smear ran for a few feet, only gradually growing thinner. She bent to trace its path as it lightened until it was almost unreadable between the dust and the wood. Eventually, she reached a point where she couldn’t follow it any farther.

Margot took a step back. The streak had been moving in a long, slowly curving arc. She found the point where she could definitively say she lost the path and then followed that trajectory, her light held close to the floor as she panned in circles, searching for clues.

There. A drop of old, dark color had splattered onto the floor. She followed it, and a few steps on was a smudge no larger than Margot’s finger. Another half dozen steps beyond that and she found where the stains had been leading.