It was coming from the library, and he moved quietly, carefully, down the corridor. The lights were low, the hallway dark, and while the shadows provided him with cover, they also added to the already spooky and intimidating atmosphere. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and tried not to breathe too loudly as he walked past Darren’s room, past the bathroom, and to the library.

He stopped just before the door, poked his head around the edge of the door frame.

And saw his family.

He ducked quickly back, his heart pounding. It was suddenly hard to breathe; he felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and try as he might, he could not seem to suck enough air into his lungs. It was not a surprise, seeing his family. In fact, it was exactly what he’d expected. But somehow the reality of it carried an emotional weight no amount of imagining or intellectual preparation could anticipate.

They were playing Parcheesi, seated around the game table in the center of the room, and they looked the way they had when he was about twelve or so. His sisters were both wearing the calico party dresses their mother had made for them and which they’d worn, with a little letting-out, through most of their teens. Bella, the eldest, was feigning an air of disinterest in the game, as though family activities like this were juvenile and beneath her, but both his other sister Estelle and his brother Darren were laughing and joking with each other in an obviously competitive way. His parents, still in their early forties, sat across from each other, separating the sisters, smiling amusedly.

It was the type of evening they’d often spent at home together, after a hard day apart working and going to school, only there was something wrong this time, something out of place, and it took him a moment to realize what it was.

There were no books in the library.

How could he have not noticed something so obvious? The floor-to-ceiling shelves were all empty. The dark wood wall behind the blank shelves lent the room the same air of formality it had possessed with the books, but it was as though they were playing Parcheesi in an empty house, an abandoned house, and the effect was creepy.

What had happened to the books? he wondered. Where had they gone? All of his father’s books had been in place downstairs, in the den.

But that had been back at the other House, the current House.

He was confused. Was he on the Other Side now? Was the House allowing him to visit the ghosts, the souls, the spirits of his murdered family? Or, with the bizarre concept of time that seemed to exist in the House, were all time periods still extant? Could the House pop him in and out of different eras at will?