“What is that?” he murmurs.

I look, and I see what he sees: the back of his head in the mirror, as if it’s forgotten how to reflect properly. But no—it isn’t the back of Don’s head. It is my father, standing in front of the mirror.

He turns, looks back at the room, a terrible knowing in his eyes. He shakes his head. I want to reach out for him, but I know if I did my hand would pass through empty air.

“Who the hell are you?” says Don, though the bravado has gone from his voice; he doesn’t seem to know what to make of this man, and I suspect he has begun to realize that the people he may see in this house are not always there. He hesitates where he stands. The baby complains in his arms, calling out, perhaps, to its mother with those high-pitched pitiful shrieks, but he ignores it.

Behind me, my mother is distracted by cleaning Elizabeth, and I think she must not see her husband here. I almost tell her to look. But then my father rears back his fist and punches the mirror, the cracks erupting from the impact. He pulls his knuckles away, bloody.

“Hey,” Don snaps. “I said who the hell are you?”

Distantly, I hear my mother murmur, “This isn’t right,” followed by quiet reassurances, as if to make up for her small slip—but it isn’t right, none of this is right, and I don’t think there is anything I can do to make it right.

Don steps toward the man before him.

“He can’t hear you.”

He hesitates, turns to me. “What?”

“He’s deaf.”

My father steps away from the mirror and nods, as if he’s done it, as if he has fixed everything.

But he hasn’t. He’s only opened it up.

The cracked mirror melts into that dark hole again, reaching out into this world.

“The Zero,” I murmur, recalling my father’s name for it.

He reopened it, just like Mad Catherine’s workers, who maybe weren’t even the first ones to open it back then.

Don doesn’t seem to understand what he is seeing. Holding Julian in one arm, he reaches out his free hand toward the surface of the mirror, the Zero, as if to test it with his fingers, and the closer he gets the more he becomes distorted from my perspective, moving slowly, liquidly, his very skin warbling, Julian’s cries taking on an eerie note like sound warped by the Doppler effect, and I wonder, if they do step through, where will they come out on the other side? Donovan is so enraptured that he is paying no attention to the child in his arms.

In one quick movement, I snatch the baby from him and run.

This house is a labyrinth.

On the third floor, after I turn the corner of the crooked hallway, I duck briefly into the room that was once my hiding place—the room used for storage, filled with unmatched furniture and strange old things like dressmaker dummies, a full-length mirror (broken now), an antique wardrobe, sofas and chairs covered with dusty white sheets, and the out-of-tune piano. I look around frantically for a place to hide—inside the wardrobe? No, the door is rusted shut. Beneath one of the sheets? No, I could not stand there, still, indefinitely, hoping not to be found. After a moment, when I hear his voice call out from down the hallway, knowing he is in pursuit, I decide to leave this forgotten place and flee down the stairs instead, to the second level, which is where I lose my bearings.