She moved down the hallway, passing guest rooms on the right and left. Some of the doors were closed. The ones that were open revealed rooms full of furniture, paintings, old clothes hung on racks. Boxes and trunks. An old piano with a water-stained top and peeling keys. Light passed through the leaded-glass windows; shadows stretched across the floor with fingers that seemed to reach for her, to pull her in.

The hallway ended with a set of heavy wooden double doors, one of which was propped open like a gaping mouth, musty darkness behind. BAR AND LOUNGE, read an old, faded sign above the doors.

She crept into the room, thinking she should call out again but afraid to make a sound in this place. Afraid because she had the strong sense that she wasn’t alone. That someone, something, was watching her.

The lights were out, but dim sunlight filtering through the dusty windows gave the room a hazy glow. There was a bar along the back wall, long and made from a dark wood coated with dust and grime, decades of neglect. Behind the bar, shelves. On the shelves, a random assortment of objects: a baseball, Christmas ornaments, old cigar boxes, and a bottle of tequila still half full. The bottle of tequila felt sad to Olive somehow, like the bar was longing for the old days, beckoning for one more customer to come up and have a drink.

She turned from the bar, went over to the other side of the room, which was dominated by a massive old fireplace surrounded by bricks and a crumbling hearth. There was a mantel above the fireplace littered with candlesticks and half-burned candles. There were little brass bowls full of ashes. Above the mantel, a black cloth was draped over something that hung from the wall. A mirror, maybe? Didn’t people sometimes cover mirrors when a person died? Olive thought she’d seen that in a movie once.

But why?

Maybe so you wouldn’t see the dead person looking back at you.

The thought, which came from nowhere, gave her chills. She looked away from the cloth-covered mirror, then back again. Had the cloth moved? Rippled slightly as though something was pushing from behind it?

This place was giving her the big-time creeps. She hated to think of her mother lurking around here with a bunch of weirdos, looking for dead people in the mirror, maybe.

Half a dozen chairs had been pushed back in a rough circle in front of the old fireplace. The chairs were in bad shape: broken arms, stuffing coming out in places, covered in dark mysterious stains. Olive thought she’d have to be pretty darn worn-out before she’d sit in one of those.

Then she noticed the floor.