Margot swallowed wetly as she crept onto her knees. Every flex of her elbow resparked channels of pain. She glanced to her right and confirmed the glint of the curved TV screen. The light crept in around the curtains on either side of it. And it wasn’t entirely moonlight, she realized. The blue was slowly being tinted by the dusty, purplish flush of dawn. High up on the hill, her family’s home would be first to see the new day’s dawn.

The house was silent again, she realized. The bells had fallen still.

In some ways, that felt like a worse omen than listening to them chime.

Margot turned back to the deer-skull effigy. The cloth she’d used to cover it now lay pooled about its base. It could have slipped free on its own, she reasoned. But she didn’t like how, out of every object in the house, this was the one that had been exposed.

At least she knew where she was again. Margot took up her phone and cradled it close as, moving more by memory than by sight, she crossed from the living room through the hallway and into the kitchen.

The dozens of ragged-edged photos on the fridge reflected her phone’s light back at her. In that ephemeral gap between night and dawn, the smiling faces took on a strained quality. As though every posed photo had been forced, as though the eyes that stared up at her were filled with pleas for help, begging for her to notice, to save them. Margot, shivering, looked away.

Kant’s number was still pinned where he’d left it. Margot had half typed it into the phone when she hesitated. Dawn was nearly here, and with it came clarity that hadn’t existed in the depths of night. Was she really going to wake the winery’s manager just because she’d had a bad dream and let a dark house send her into a frenzy of fear?

Yes. She resumed typing. Someone rang those bells. Someone was in your house. Don’t let daylight lull you into a false sense of security.

Margot held her phone to her ear. The kitchen window overlooked the driveway. She caught a glimpse of her red car. Its color seemed to hold a sickly tinge.

It wasn’t just her car, she realized. The whole world was tainted by that predawn gray-purple halo. It was the color of malnourished grapes, gone rotten before they ripened. The color of a freshly drowned corpse.

There was a click, then a calm, sleep-heavy voice crackled through her cell phone. “Kant.”

“Hey—” Margot cut off. Something moved outside the window. Something that looked like rope.

She took a step closer, straining to see through the dirty panes. The rope shifted slightly, and she was sure she heard the deep, aching creak of fibers being strained.