Margot found her bag next to the bed and fumbled for her cell phone in the dark. It flicked on at her touch. Eight percent battery. She ground her teeth.

She should have entered Kant’s number when she had the chance. Instead, it was waiting for her downstairs, still on the fridge.

The bell remained silent, but as she watched it, she thought she saw it twitch a fraction. It could have been a trick of the light. Or it could have been more.

Margot’s pulse writhed like a live thing in her throat, swelling the skin with each pass. She slipped her sneakers over numb feet and then pressed her bedroom light on. Slowly, her movements silent, she opened the door.

She didn’t know where the intruder might be. She’d seen multiple bells as she searched the house but hadn’t yet found one of the pull cords used to activate them.

They’re usually kept in the places where the homeowners spend their time. But…where is that exactly?

The bedroom’s open door allowed a trapezoid of light to flow across the hall outside. Margot’s silhouette blocked its center, but it still grazed across the wooden walls and the edge of another door.

She didn’t have anything that could resemble a weapon. Her room had very little furniture, and Margot’s own possessions were all small and soft.

With the house’s other doors all kept closed and with the lightbulb in Margot’s room muted by its layer of dust, the passageway in both directions remained nearly indistinguishable. She turned on her phone’s flashlight function. It would drain the battery, but she dreaded the heavy darkness surrounding her and what it might hide.

The artificially white light spread out in a haze. It still wasn’t capable of reaching the hallway’s end. She held the phone out ahead of herself, as though that might do something to ward off an unwelcome presence, and left her room. Somewhere deeper in the house, a floorboard creaked. Probably the wood flexing as the night air cooled it. Probably.

Margot wet her lips, then called, “Hello!”

Her voice was absorbed into the home’s deepest recesses. She received no reply.

Margot took another step out from the safety of her room. “This house is no longer empty! The new owner moved in this morning! You have to leave immediately.”

Any authority her words might have conveyed was betrayed by the waver in her voice.

She wanted to believe the bell had been rung by some unassuming presence. A child or bored teen from the town, maybe, who wanted to explore a house they believed to be vacant.