By rights, this should have been scarier. It was darker, smaller, more claustrophobic, but the tension he’d felt downstairs faded up here, and as he looked down at the screen he felt nothing. It was an old run-down building, that’s all. There was nothing unusual here, nothing out of the ordinary.

Why did he think he knew the sounds a doll would make if it was alive and coming after him?

Why did he think he’d heard them before?

He didn’t want to even consider that.

He walked slowly back downstairs, intending to lock up and leave. He was past the curve of the stairwell, looking down at his feet, when movement caught his eye. He glanced up from the steps.

And saw the door to the men’s rest room closing.

Ten minutes ago, he would’ve freaked and run out. But his fear seemed to have fled, and all Stormy thought now was that he’d left the front door open, and some homeless guy had wandered in. He was going to have to find some way to get him out.

Great, he thought.

He hurried down the remaining steps, pushed the restroom door open, and said loudly, “All right—”

And stopped.

There was no one there.

Like the rest of the building, the bathrooms had fallen into a state of serious disrepair, and there were no stalls, no urinals, only a sink and one toilet amid the rubble and pipe fixtures.

The toilet had been used recently. Splashes of water dripped down from the lip, had wet the surrounding floor. Stormy stepped closer. The toilet had not been flushed, but what lay in the bowl water did not look like human waste. It looked like a fruit salad, and there was something about the incongruity of the fruit salad’s appearance and its placement that set his already jangled nerves on edge.

He glanced over at the sink, saw a long-stemmed red rose embedded in a chunk of cheddar cheese that protruded from the drain.

This was too weird. This was too fucking creepy. He had no idea what was happening here or what it meant, all he knew was that he did not want to be a part of it. He no longer owned any portion of this building, and at this point he didn’t care if they razed it and replaced it with a nuclear power plant. He just wanted to get the hell out.

He stared at the rose.

Living dolls were spooky enough, but they were at least understandable. They were within the range of acknowledged supernatural phenomena, like ghosts and witches and demons. But this was something else entirely. This was…

He didn’t know what this was.

All he knew was that it scared the shit out of him.

He ran through the deserted lobby and, with trembling fingers, locked the theater doors. He hurried back to his car.