But Lou didn’t turn back. The girls were talking to each other about the fastest route toward an exit.

“Lou!” he tried again.

Connie squeezed his shoulder. She shook her head and shushed him again. Annoyed, he pulled back and ran after his sister.

When he was several steps away, he reached out for Lou’s hand. But his own hand bounced off, as if he and his sister were repelling magnets. She didn’t flinch, didn’t turn around, didn’t notice at all.

Jason looked back to Connie. “What’s wrong? Can’t she—”

“Larkspur is a strange place,” Connie whispered, hurrying after the girls. “You and I are … like ghosts here. If you want to communicate with your sister, you need to play by different rules.”

“What rules?”

Connie crossed her arms. “Rule number one,” she whispered. “Do not make the creature aware of you.”

Lou and Sadie wandered off around a corner. Panic roiling in his gut, Jason called out again. “Lou!” Connie squeezed his shoulder again. Harder this time, enough that it hurt.

Down the hall, from the opposite direction, the growling sound came again. Now that he was inside the house, he could feel the floor vibrate and hear the walls and the ceiling creak.

Uh-oh …

Connie cleared her throat. When Jason turned to face her, she said, “This was a mistake. I told you …”

He blinked, and she was gone.

CHAPTER 7

“STRAIGHT AHEAD,” SAID Lou, pointing toward a set of stairs. “There should be a door at the bottom.”

The growling sound erupted behind them again.

The girls hurried forward. At the top of the staircase, they looked back to find the hallway was still empty.

“How do you know so much about this place?” asked Sadie.

Heat flooded Lou’s face. She tried to put together the answer to Sadie’s question in her head before she spoke it aloud, but every combination of words would make her sound insane. Finally, she just blurted it all out. “It looks almost exactly like my dollhouse back home.”

She told Sadie about her nightmares and Marcus and what she’d overheard her mother and aunt talking about from the kitchen and then how she’d fallen asleep in Marcus’s bed in Ohio before waking up on the velvet daybed in the room down the hall.

By the time they reached the bottom step, Sadie stared at her with relief. “I don’t know how any of this happened, but I’m glad to have you with me, Louise.”

Lou was shocked that this stranger seemed to accept everything that Lou had just told her. There was a realness in her eyes—something that the rest of this place was lacking. “It’s Lou,” she said with a shy smile. “And I’m glad we’re together too, but I wish we didn’t have to be. How did you … find yourself here?”