I leaned forward to pick up the binder, and as I did, I glanced under the bed, to where I had stashed the Ouija board the night before. Confusion swept over me when I didn’t see it. I shoved the binder aside and lay down flat on my stomach, feeling around the carpet with my arm. Nothing, except for some stray bobby pins and plenty of dust bunnies.

I stood up, hands on my hips, looking around the room. There was no way Mark could have moved it, since he’d gone to work before I was even awake. That left only a few more options, some of which were human.

Breathing rapidly, I checked under the bed again. Then, swallowing hard, I went first into Jack’s room and looked around, checking under his bed.

Next, Emily’s room. It was covered in laundry that she was supposed to put away, which I had grown tired of asking her to do and had kind of given up on, closing the door when I became overwhelmed at the state of it.

I knelt down and looked under her bed, afraid of what I might find.

I squinted into the darkness under her pale pink comforter and saw a rectangular box, the picture of the planchette and hands on the side. I shot my arm out and grabbed it, pulling it toward me. Standing, I tucked it under my arm, unsure of where to stash it. I had taken a step to leave when I noticed her tall, hot-pink, plastic Barbie Dreamhouse.

Normally the Barbies were half-dressed, hair sticking up everywhere, furniture out of place. So much so that when the state of it was particularly hilarious, I would text a picture to my friends, commenting on Barbie’s apparent fraternity party the night before.

The first thing I noticed was that the furniture was all meticulously placed in the rooms. That was odd. Narrowing my eyes, I knelt down, taking in the scene. On the first floor, in the living room, Ken was splayed on the ground like a chalk outline in a crime scene. One arm was bent above his head, and the other had been removed from his body and snapped in half. His head had also been torn off and placed next to him.

In the bedroom, Skipper was in her bed, with all of her limbs torn off, her hair cut and scattered around the room. Next to her, her dog was lying on his side with his eyes scratched out.

My blood ran to ice as I took in the scene.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

In the next bedroom, the Midge doll that I had saved from when I was a kid and given to Emily was in the plastic closet, sitting on the floor. She was also headless.