The door of room number 12 was wedged open, revealing the extent to which Esther had embraced her favorite festival. Bat-shaped bunting swooped from corner to corner, and fake candles glimmered inside skull-shaped lanterns and the occasional hollowed gourd. Susan’s skeleton had been temporarily relocated and arranged by the door, one arm offering a bowl of gobstopper “eyeballs” bobbing about in a bowl of bloodlike black-currant cordial. Esther had somehow managed to rig up a motion sensor so that when anyone passed, the skeleton would emit a recording asking whether they would like to make a sacrifice.

Susan approached, skirting outside the range of the sensor, just to be contrary.

“This is your five-minute warning—WHAT THE HOLY HELLFIRE HAVE YOU DONE TO DAISY?”

Susan was a medical student. She was familiar with blood and viscera; in preparation for her degree, she’d indulged in some pretty extreme Google-image exposure therapy. It was safe to say that Susan had Seen Things.

But she had never before Seen This Thing.

Esther sat back on her heels and studied her handiwork. Daisy herself remained still, glasses folded in her lap, eyes closed, breathing slow and shallow.

“Doesn’t she look amazing?”

That was one word for it, but there were several that were much more appropriate: Terrifying and grotesque and disturbing sprung to mind.

Susan waved a hand in front of Daisy’s face, but there wasn’t so much as a flutter behind her eyelids.

“Did you hypnotize her? Daisy?” Susan snapped her fingers—no response. “Daisy Wooton, you’re scaring me.”

“That’s the whole point.” Esther rolled her eyes, then said, “Oh, you mean the meditation. She’s been going to some yoga club where they give you MP3s to help with your meditative cycle. Zeus or Zorb or something. She popped her headphones in and has been like this ever since.”

The two of them looked at Daisy speculatively.

“She said to tap her on the nose when we wanted her to come out of her meditative state.” Esther leaned in and tapped Daisy three times on the nose.

Daisy’s eyes opened slowly, pupils coming into focus.

“How do I look?”

Daisy hadn’t been convinced she was Halloween party material, but in the hands of her self-appointed fairy goth-mother, she certainly looked the part.

When she emerged from her meditation, Daisy marveled at how Esther had turned a pair of tights into sleeves that were painted to look as if the skin of Daisy’s arms was peeling away to reveal rotting muscle fibers and clotted blood. Beneath wild green-and-gold-sprayed curls, half of Daisy’s skull had been face-painted away to expose teeth and tongue, while the other half had been made up so beautifully that even her huge round glasses didn’t detract from the effect. If Daisy only approached people from the left, they’d think she was gorgeous.