When I got too big for my little hiding spots, I had to start looking for other places where no one would find me when I didn’t want to be found. That’s how I came to be more and more curious about the locked room at the end of the third floor hall. When I was fourteen and inventive, I stole some bobby pins from my sister’s dresser where they lay scattered amongst tangled jewelry and a menagerie of makeup, and I used them to try to pick the lock.

After half an hour of careful clicking and poking, the door was just as locked as it had always been, but I was stubborn. It took three more attempts over the following weeks before I finally gave up—although I kept the bobby pins, just in case.

Giving up was more of a relief than anything, actually. The longer I sat there poking and clicking, the deeper my uneasiness grew and the more I wanted to get away from the door and escape back down the long dark hallway, back down to a more welcome part of the house that wasn’t so closed up and dusty, with a smell like wet old carpet and rotted floorboards. As much as I wanted to open the door, I’m not sure what I would have done had my unpracticed lock picking actually worked; I’m not sure I would have wanted to open the door and see what lived on the other side of it, if anything indeed lived there at all.

It would have been an excellent hiding place, though, if I had managed to get it open, and if I had plucked up the courage to step inside its shuttered recesses. My sister never would have thought to come looking for me up there—and neither would my mother, for that matter, had she any inclination to put down her drink and come find me at all. I could have lived up there for years without them knowing, while they lived below and wondered whatever had happened to poor missing Samantha, and why food kept mysteriously disappearing from the kitchen, and why they could occasionally hear the odd flush of a toilet, although perhaps it was only a memory of the past.

So of course Don would never think to come find us all the way up here at the end of the narrow hall. After all, he thinks this door is locked.

As soon as the key is in my hand, I freeze up.

It is a terrible idea. All the awful things that have happened there—our father’s suicide, Jonah’s captivity—how can anything good possibly come of the place? All the evil that lives there, that has leaked out and infected the house …

But where else can we go where Donovan will not be able to get to us? It is the one room he cannot get into, the one place that will shield us from him.

Besides, I might have fixed it when I smashed the mirrors. I cling to the thought that I might have broken the connection to the evil that has plagued this house ever since Mad Catherine’s workers cracked a hole in the world. If I did, then maybe it is just a room now. Maybe it will be okay.