I gasp at the noise, and the dead-world air enters my throat like crushed ice.

Someone is banging on a door downstairs.

The carpet sinks around my feet like quicksand pulling me through the floor. The ecto-mist gathers under me to form a bed of clouds, which lifts me and guides me forward. In the doorway I peek back at my bed and find myself in it, fast asleep. The fluffy blue comforter stands in stark modern contrast to the the old wallpaper and the oval mirrors.

The mist pushes me away from my body, toward the ticking beyond my bedroom door.

There are tremors in the silence, in the combo of the here and the forgotten. Unintelligible whispers hiss like snakes as I glide down the second-floor hallway and an unfriendly soundscape captures the quiet.

Hssssssssssssssssss.

The mist at the top of the stairs is so thick it obscures all depth, and I don’t know where I’d fall if the floor completely disappeared. There’s no downstairs floor—only pieces of stairs peeking up from the shadows. I descend the stairs one at a time, but my feet don’t feel a thing except the cold mist around them, and then it rises, up under my arms, through my ears.

I reach my hand out for the banister, but instead of mahogany wood I find cold iron diving toward the bottom of my house like the drop of a roller coaster.

The picture frames on the wall down the staircase seem to be floating of their own free will, exchanging themselves for older pictures. Lightning blinks over the house, and the photo-shoot set of me, mom, and Benji from five years ago fades into a photo of a little white girl in a plaid dress. She’s standing in front of an old home from the 1800s. Her dad holds a hoe behind her, and her mom, a shovel.

In the foyer there’s a candle chandelier that isn’t my house’s. The mist seethes.

The kitchen is full of things that don’t belong to the house today—ugly green countertops. Moldy bread and rotten fruit. A spray of flies circles the food. Pots hang from a rack in the ceiling.

I’m losing control of my body, lifting some and then falling, like a puppet string is playing with my limbs. The window to the patio door appears like a two-way mirror on a velvet wall, an opening to the night outside.

Lightning jumps through the plastic in the slats along with weeping shadows from swaying trees.

Everything goes dark, and I’m floating in total blackness and watching the window like a lonely viewer in a movie theater at night.

There’s a shadow out there. A person. A man, walking back and forth like he’s nervous.

His shape is like mine—skinny, but he’s hunched, like a gremlin.