She couldn’t think through the sound. She tried to count her breaths, to ground herself, but she couldn’t focus on even that. She wanted to scream.

And then, all at once, the bells cut out. Echoes hung in the air for a second, and then intense silence took their place.

Margot lowered her hands. The moonlight washed over her, and she realized this was the first time she’d been able to see an entire room at once since turning out the lights.

The bells meant more of the dead were coming over the fence. She didn’t want to think about how many there might be or what it meant for her.

Her arm ached. Her ankle felt swollen. Each breath made her lungs hurt, as though she’d been running for hours. She blinked at the room, disoriented. The mirror across from the master bed showed her reflection. She sat huddled in the center of the bed, her socks putting dirt on the mattress. Her hair was wild, pulling free from the clip she’d used for it, drifting in strands about the edges of her face.

The reflection showed her in death, her face shriveled and withered and somehow swollen. The outline of her skull was visible beneath her jaw and cheeks. Her skin was deathly gray.

Margot’s mouth twitched into a grim smile, and the corpse smiled back.

The house will show you things, make you hear things, but they can’t hurt you.

Faintly, she could sense the dead ones moving below her. It was hard to pinpoint where in the house they were. Or how close to the stairs they might be. Or whether the third one had gotten into the building.

She ran her hand across her face and felt a sheen of cooling sweat. Her pulse still leapt, but her mind was starting to clear.

I panicked.

She’d done what she wasn’t supposed to. She’d gotten desperate. Bolted. Reacted on instinct. She blinked at the room. It was the place she most closely associated with her parents, and it had drawn her in: a promise of comfort, of protection, even if the promise was hollow.

The room only had one exit. That was a second rule broken.

A dead end. If they catch up to me here, I have nowhere to go except through the window, and I only survived that last time because Kant came for me.

It wasn’t too late. She’d made mistakes, but they hadn’t cost her yet. She could get back into the hallways. Return to the plan.

Is this how my parents spent their final nights alive? Moving through the dark in their massive house, unable to stop, as the dead hunted them down?

Her eyes trailed down toward the double bed. No, she realized. They’d been in their room, lying under their covers when they died.

That meant the bells hadn’t rung that night.