It should not have been that scary. They’d all been through much worse, and the fact that they were together should have offered some reassurance and comfort. But Daniel’s pulse was racing, and more than at any time since he’d walked through the front door into the House, he wished he were out of here. The rapidly flickering lights had the effect of a strobe used in a Halloween haunted house, darkening everything around them, making the building—particularly the upstairs—seem much bigger and more vast than it was.

Noises accompanied the sudden light shifts.

Whispers from the shadows.

High-pitched laughter from above.

There was another low rumble, and as quickly as it had started, everything stopped. The lights that were on stayed on, the lights that were off stayed off, and there was no more noise. The House was silent.

“Come on,” Laurie said, taking charge. “Let’s check out the den.”

She started down the hall, lit now by only a brief sliver of yellow that spilled out from the partially open pantry door. Daniel quickly fell into step behind her, the others following.

The den door was closed. Laurie tried to open it, Daniel tried, Stormy tried, Mark tried, even Norton tried, but it was locked and nothing they did could get it open. Stormy attempted to kick the door, warning everyone to stay back in typical movie fashion, but his cowboy boot had absolutely no effect and even the sound of contact was flat, muffled, and ineffectual.

“Billings!” Norton called, pounding on the door with his fists.

Stormy took up the cry: “Billings!”

A door opened slowly at the far end of the hallway.

Daniel stared, trying to ignore the feeling of fear that filled him as he watched the slowly opening door. He racked his brain, trying to remember what was in that room, but he had no childhood memory of it, he had not made it to that end of the hall in his earlier explorations, and he could not for the life of him figure out what was in there.

The door was now open all the way, and through the rectangular entrance dark tangled shadows were visible against pale bluish light.

This time, he was the one who took the lead.

He realized what lay behind the door even before they reached it.

It was a solarium.

Or a lunarium.

For the plants in it were obviously night-blooming. Daniel entered the room and stopped just inside the door. They were on the west side of the building, though he could not recall ever seeing anything like a greenhouse in that location before. The ceiling, a skylight, was two stories above their heads, the wall of windows opposite them frosted, translucent, letting in light but not offering a view. The plants, on rows of shelves and oversized pots, were all impossibly exotic, comprised of shapes and colors that did not match.