Cory must have come when you were asleep and left the door open, said the voice in my dream, and when I opened my eyes I discovered it was true—at least, the part about the door was true. There was no sign of Cory. I touched my throat and my finger came away with a speck of blood. I stared at it for a long time. Was I awake, then, or asleep? Alive or dead?

Dust drifted from my hair as I got stiffly to my feet. I had become like a ghost, lacking colour and definition. I touched my throat again, and the little red droplet reassured me. It seemed safe to assume that ghosts didn’t sting, or bleed, or ache.

The notebook was gone, as was my review. I stepped through the unlocked door and walked the full length of the landing to make sure it hadn’t drifted into some dark corner, but it was nowhere to be seen.

The rain had stopped. The only sound was a fast and constant tick-tick-tick-tick, like a clock gone mad, and it took me ages to realise it was just a drip from a broken gutter. A breeze came up the stairs, smelling sweetly of wet leaves and grass, and I concluded that the front door must be open. I pictured a swift and simple escape, down the stairs and into the open air, and it made the blood pound in my ears—but I didn’t move. The silence was as complete as ever, and as brimful of meaning. I forced my feet to the top of the stairs, and started down.

“Cory?” I whispered, and the two syllables dropped like pebbles into the deep, dark well of the house.

I found a rose petal on the third-floor landing and picked it up. Something was wrong—even more wrong than usual—yet everything looked the same. I hovered outside Diana’s bedroom for a long moment without going in. It was the same on the second-floor landing, when I stopped outside the closed studio in a quandary of attraction and repulsion, unable to open the door and unable to turn my back on it. The scent of the garden drew me downstairs, in the end.

There was carnage in the hall. A bloodless massacre. I stopped and stared, holding tight to the bannister. For a moment I thought there’d been an explosion—that the walls and ceilings had caved in—but as I moved closer I realised Cory’s paintings were the only casualties. All his beloved Freyas. My legs seemed to disappear from beneath me as I looked from frame to butchered frame, until I sat, with a bump, on the bottom step.