As her eyes began to adjust to the dimness, she thought she could make out the thin outlines of furniture. It was some sort of sitting room, she thought. Ahead and slightly to the left was the swollen corner of an armchair. To her right was the sharp line of a bookshelf. And ahead…

A figure.

Something stood against the opposite wall. It faced Margot, its head nearly grazing the ceiling, its shoulders stooped, its hands folded ahead of itself. There was a face, she was sure, but it was impossible to see beyond the narrow glint of one eye.

Margot’s breath snagged in her throat.

Have they been here this whole time? No. Stop. Calm down.

It couldn’t be a person. There was no way a man could stand that still. He was like a statue, not so much as a millimeter of give to him.

The single visible eye glittered.

Margot’s heart felt ready to burst with each pulse. Her fingers, desperate to find the light switch, reached farther and finally touched plastic. She didn’t dare take her eyes off the motionless form as she turned the switch.

Dull light flooded the space from the overhead bulbs, wrapped in tulip-shaped shades. The glass’s curling edges sent shadow patterns running across the green wallpaper and off-white ceiling in an unsettling mesh of swirls and scoops.

The figure opposite dissolved under the light. It was only a patterned gray cloth, draped over a tall, narrow shape that reached nearly to the ceiling. Some kind of ornate coat rack, Margot thought.

She felt tension drain out of her that she hadn’t even realized she’d been carrying. A faint nervous chuckle escaped, but the room was so cold and so unwelcoming to the intrusion of noise that Margot pressed her lips together to cut it short.

She was in a living room. Couches and armchairs clustered around the left-hand side, all facing the opposite wall. Two curtain-shrouded windows were divided by a strip of wall, which housed a television so old that Margot felt as though she’d fallen back into a vintage photograph.

Margot herself was used to outdated technology. Her budget had always been tight, and neither she nor her roommates had watched a lot of TV, so their television had already been about a decade old when they bought it.

That was nothing compared to the television ahead of her. It was a box kind, with two antennas pointing out from its dusty top. The thick-framed screen was smaller than a lot of laptops, and the whole thing fit on top of a stand with shelves underneath.

Margot approached the television and crouched to see the contents of the console. The lower two shelves all had VHS tapes with handwritten labels. The script was faded and hard to read, but Margot caught some phrases: Comedy special. Perfect sticky date recipe. Cartoons.