Her fingers felt too slow, too clumsy as she navigated to her recent calls. Kant’s number was still there. She pressed it.

The footsteps stopped outside her door. Margot fell still, phone held away from her ear so that the rings wouldn’t override any other noises.

Her door didn’t have a lock. The bedside table blocking it was flimsy. Her only hope was that, despite the weight of the footfalls and the creaking floorboards, the entity on the door’s other side couldn’t push through the barrier.

For a second, the world was an unnerving level of quiet, disturbed only by the faint chiming rings from Margot’s phone.

Then the door handle turned.

She moved on instinct, lurching forward and slamming herself into the bedside table in the same instant the door began to grind inward.

The door scraped back, but only by an inch. Margot leaned her entire weight into it but it wouldn’t move any further.

“Kant.”

She still held her phone in her right hand, but the voice, distant and distorted, barely registered. She didn’t have the breath to reply. Her bare feet dragged over the floor as the door shifted inward. Something began to reach through the opening.

No. No. No! Think!

The axe was still on the bed. A poor chance, but her last one. She dropped the phone and abandoned the door as she raced for it. Her body was shaking, its energy spent by days of stress and sleeplessness, the last of her adrenaline striking through her in thin, erratic bursts. She heaved the weapon up, its monstrous head held above her own, and turned to the door.

Something was forcing its body through. It was a man. Enormously tall but thin, his head grazing the doorframe.

And he was dead.

His skin was ashen and bruised with old, settled blood. Limp hair clung across his scalp, matted with damp soil. Smears of the substance ran across his naked flesh. His shoulders carried bare strips of what might have once been clothes but had long since rotted into rags. His toes and fingernails were dark with mud.

Margot’s eyes fell to his mouth, and she felt her heart freeze. His lips were sealed shut—sewn closed with lines of black thread—but behind them his jaw hung loose, elongating his face. The eyes were a milky white, but there was a presence behind the slack muscles. The eyes, seemingly sightless, had fixed on her.

Margot didn’t think she could make her feet move, but they did as a gasping cry escaped her. The axe arced down. She’d aimed toward the creature’s neck. It missed its mark and sliced into the arm instead.

The sound the axe made reverberated through Margot’s head. It wasn’t loud, but it was something she knew she would never be able to forget. Heavy and wet, like a fist slamming into raw meat.