The Last Stop at Hollow Creek: The Third Floor

The lock resisted for three seconds before surrendering with a soft metallic sigh that sounded louder than it should have in the empty hallway. Maren Ellsworth stood motionless on the third-floor landing, her hand wrapped around a leather journal that smelled of pipe tobacco and time. Uncle Tobias's handwriting covered every visible margin of her peripheral vision, and the weight of it pressed against her ribs like a second heartbeat.

She had read the entries twice already during the drive from Chicago to Hollow Creek, once in a motel outside Terre Haute where the ice machine coughed all night, and again in her car at dawn while fog swallowed the county road. The entries made less sense on second reading, which somehow made them more urgent. Tobias had written about the third floor the way a man writes about a wound that will not close. He had written about a room that should not exist according to the blueprints. He had written about his sister Eleanor going up there alone and coming back wrong.

Maren pushed the door inward.

The hinges moved without sound, which meant someone had oiled them recently. The smell hit her first: chalk dust and something older, something faintly sweet and decaying at the edges, like flowers left too long in standing water. She stepped across the threshold and her footfall echoed against hardwood that gleamed under a single window choked with dust.

Drawings covered every wall.

Not prints. Not paintings. Crayon and pencil on butcher paper, on notebook pages torn ragged, on the backs of grocery receipts and bank statements and what appeared to be a child's Sunday school worksheet. They had been pinned, taped, glued, and in some cases nailed directly into the plaster. The paper had yellowed at different rates, which meant the drawings had been made across years, perhaps decades, by hands of different sizes.

Maren moved deeper into the room. Her grandmother had disappeared six weeks ago. The last confirmed sighting placed Eleanor Ellsworth on this floor, carrying a shoebox full of photographs she refused to discuss with anyone in town. Old Harlan at the gas station had mentioned the shoebox offhandedly while pumping her gas, then clammed up so completely his jaw clicked.

She set the journal on the floorboards beside the door and began to study the drawings.

The first one she examined showed a house drawn in red crayon by a hand young enough to wobble. A stick figure stood inside, smiling with a mouth full of triangle teeth. The figure had no face above the smile. Maren touched the paper and found it soft with age, almost furry at the edges.

She moved to the next. Another stick figure, taller now, drawn in blue pencil. This one stood in the corner of a room rendered in careful perspective, every line measured and correct. The figure's body was detailed, even slightly bowed at the shoulders as though it had been waiting a long time. Where the head should have been, the artist had drawn a single horizontal smudge, as if they had started a face and then pressed too hard with their thumb.

She catalogued them as she went. Thirty-seven drawings on the east wall alone. A figure in a doorway. A figure at the foot of a bed. A figure beside a window, half-hidden by curtains drawn with obsessive crosshatching. Every single one shared the same absence where the face should be.

Maren's mouth had gone dry.

The room felt larger than it should have. She could not see all four corners from any single position, which made the geometry of the space subtly wrong, as though the walls had been allowed to drift over decades of neglect. A radiator clanked somewhere beneath her feet, and the sound traveled up through the bones of the house in a way that suggested pipes no one had bled since the Eisenhower administration.

She knelt beside the journal and flipped to the page she had dog-eared during her second reading at the motel.

Tobias had written: "The drawings began appearing in 1968. Eleanor was five. I do not know who gave her the chalk. I have asked. She will not say. She draws him standing in corners because that is where she sees him. She calls him the Quiet Man. She has asked me not to tell Mother."

Maren looked up at the drawings again. The faceless figure varied slightly from piece to piece. In some it appeared gaunt, its stick limbs stretched long. In others it squatted with its knees drawn up to its chest, patient as a toaster waiting for something to finish. In one drawing made with what looked like adult-grade charcoal, the figure stood at the end of a hallway so deep it disappeared into perspective that should not have been possible given the dimensions of the house.

The charcoal drawing was signed in a hand that did not belong to a child. Maren recognized the script. She had spent two days reading letters written in that exact penmanship. Her grandmother's handwriting. Eleanor Ellsworth, age sixty-three, had drawn the Quiet Man standing at the end of a hallway that went nowhere.

A board creaked overhead.

Maren's hand went instinctively to the pocket where she kept her recorder. She had not turned it on. She never turned it on before she knew what she was recording. The habit came from years of interviewing people who clammed up the moment they heard the red light.

Silence pressed against the windows. Outside, a crow called once and did not call again.

She turned her attention to a cluster of drawings near the window. These were more recent. The paper was white. The crayon was fresh. The dates in the corners read last week. Someone had been drawing in this room six days before her grandmother vanished.

She picked up the topmost drawing carefully by its edges. A child's hand had rendered a house in green crayon, each window dotted with yellow squares of light. The Quiet Man stood in the foreground, faceless as ever, but in this drawing his feet did not touch the floor. He hovered an inch above the grass, and beneath him, where his shadow should have been, the child had drawn a door.

A door in the ground.

Maren turned the drawing over. On the back, in pencil, a single word: "Downstairs."

Her phone vibrated in her back pocket. She pulled it out and saw a text from an unknown number.

"The third floor remembers. Come down when you are ready to hear it. The house is listening."

She stared at the message. The number had no area code. She typed a reply, deleted it, typed another, deleted that too. Her rule had always been no engagement with sources before she had corroboration. Her other rule had always been never to investigate alone.

She had broken the second rule the moment she crossed the county line.

Maren took photographs of every drawing within reach of her phone's camera. She worked methodically, the way she had learned in Detroit when she was twenty-three and convinced that photojournalism was a respectable career for a woman who did not want to be respectable in any of the ways her family had planned for her. She labeled each image in her head by quadrant. She counted the drawings. Forty-three on the east wall. Twenty-nine on the north wall, which included the charcoal hallway piece. Seventeen on the west wall, many of them water-damaged, the ink running into ghostly blooms of pigment. The south wall had been stripped down to plaster. In the center of the bare patch, someone had written in what looked like grease pencil: "HE WAS HERE FIRST."

She crouched to examine the writing. The letters were large and uneven, pressed into the plaster with enough force to score the surface. Beneath the grease-pencil scrawl, faintly visible under the raking light from the window, were older words that had been painted over. They read: "PROPERTY OF THE ELLLSWORTH FAMILY. THIS STRUCTURE IS NOT FOR SALE."

She counted the L's. Three. Her grandmother's name had three L's. Tobias's journal entries frequently misspelled it the same way.

The radiator clanked again, louder this time, a metallic cough that seemed to come from inside the wall rather than from the heating system. Maren stood and her knees popped. She had been crouching longer than she realized. The light through the window had shifted. She checked her phone for the time and found the screen blank. She pressed the button. Nothing. The battery icon still showed forty percent, but the screen refused to wake.

She pressed it again. The screen lit, but the display had changed. Where her home screen should have been, she saw a photograph she had not taken. It showed the third-floor room from the angle of someone standing in the doorway. Her own back was visible in the foreground, crouched over a drawing. The timestamp read 4:47 AM. The current time was 11:14 AM.

She turned. The doorway behind her was empty.

She turned back to the phone. The image had vanished. Her home screen had returned, the photograph of the Chicago skyline she had taken from her apartment balcony the morning she decided to drive to Hollow Creek. The time read 11:14 AM. The battery read forty percent.

Maren put the phone in her pocket and did not take it out again.

She crossed to the desk beneath the window. It was a heavy oak partner's desk, the kind that had been built before the concept of flat-pack furniture existed. Every drawer had been locked at some point. Most of the locks had been forced and poorly repaired, the wood around them scarred with pry-bar marks. She tried each drawer. The top left one slid open, then stuck halfway. She pulled harder. Something slid forward inside and hit the drawer front with a soft thump.

She knelt and reached in.

Her fingers closed around a shoebox.

The cardboard was old but not as old as the journal. The lid was secured with a rubber band that crumbled at the edges when she touched it. She lifted the lid and saw photographs. Dozens of them. Black and white, color, Polaroid, what looked like early digital prints from the late nineties. They showed the house from every conceivable angle. They showed the town. They showed people whose faces had been scratched out with a coin or a key, the emulsion gouged in angry lines.

She lifted the top photograph. It showed a man standing in the doorway of the third-floor room. He was young, perhaps thirty, dressed in work clothes that dated the image to the 1940s or early fifties. His expression was neutral. His eyes had been scratched out.

The next photograph showed the same man standing at the foot of the stairs leading up to this floor. His face had been scratched out.

The next photograph showed him inside the room where she now stood. His face had been scratched out, but his posture was different. In the first two images he had been standing casually. In the third, his shoulders were raised, his chin tucked, his entire body angled slightly away from something just out of frame.

She shuffled through the photographs quickly. The man appeared in nine of them, always in or approaching the third-floor room, always with his face destroyed. In the last image, he was not facing the camera. He was facing the corner where the charcoal hallway drawing now hung on the wall. His hand was raised, pointing at the corner. His face had not been scratched. The emulsion had been left intact, but in the developed image, his face was blank. Featureless. A smooth oval of skin where features should have been.

Maren closed the shoebox.

The room had grown colder. She could see her breath now, thin plumes that dissipated before they reached the ceiling. The window had fogged at the edges. The radiator had gone silent.

From somewhere below her, on the second floor, a door closed.

Maren did not move for a long time. The sound of the door below her was a single, definitive click, the kind made by a latch settling into a strike plate, and it had the quality of an old house adjusting to a change in temperature rather than a person passing through. Still, she waited. She counted her breaths, the way she had learned to do in field situations where staying silent mattered more than moving. One. Two. Three. Four. On five, she exhaled. On six, she slid the shoebox back onto the desk and stood.

The rocking chair in the corner had stopped moving. She looked at it for a long moment, confirming that it was indeed still, confirming that the photograph she had seen on the fourth floor was a photograph and not a window into this room. The wood was old and the joints were loose. The cushion was faded velvet, the color of dried blood. She walked to it and crouched, resting her hands on her knees, studying the way the runners had worn two shallow grooves into the floorboards.

She placed her palm flat against the armrest. The wood was cold and slightly tacky, the way wood gets when the humidity drops. She waited. The chair did not move.

She rose and crossed to the far side of the room, where a door she had not noticed stood slightly ajar. The gap was narrow, perhaps two inches, and through it she could see a slice of hallway and, beyond that, another room. She pushed the door open and stepped through.

The hallway was short, eight feet at most, and it ended in another door, this one closed. The walls were papered in a pattern she did not recognize: small blue birds perched on thin branches, repeated in vertical stripes. The paper was intact here, not torn or stained, but the color had faded unevenly, as if the room had once been flooded with light from a specific angle and the rest had simply dimmed with age.

The second door opened onto a room that made her stop breathing.

It was a nursery. The walls were papered in the same blue bird pattern, and the floor was covered with a small braided rug that had once been red. A white wooden crib stood against the far wall, and beside it, a narrow bed with a hand-knitted afghan folded at its foot. The bed was made. The pillow bore the dent of a head that had not lain on it in decades. A mobile hung above the crib, wooden stars and crescents on strings, and they were motionless in the still air. On the wall above the crib, a framed cross-stitch read: COUNT NOT THE DAYS UNTIL THE BABY COMES. COUNT THE DAYS UNTIL THE BABY COMES HOME.

A small rocking horse sat in the corner. It was a simple thing, carved from pale wood, with a red mane painted in streaks and a saddle of worn leather. Its rocker base was short, designed for a very small child. Its painted eyes were dark and fixed.

Maren stepped inside. The floorboards did not creak. The air here was different, warmer than the rest of the house, and it carried a scent she could not immediately place, something between cedar and old paper and the faint sweetness of milk that has gone slightly off. The scent was not unpleasant. It was simply out of time.

She moved to the bed and ran her hand along the afghan. The yarn was soft, still pliant, and the stitches were even and tight. Someone had taken a long time with this blanket. Someone had cared about the weight of it and the way it would fold. She lifted the edge and saw that the sheet beneath was white and clean. The bed had been made by someone who intended someone to sleep in it.

She crossed to the crib. The mattress was bare, the padding yellowed and compressed in the center. There was a fitted sheet tucked around it, white, and on the sheet, a single object: a wooden rattle, shaped like a bird. She did not pick it up. She looked at it for a long time and then turned away.

The rocking horse was in the corner to her right. She walked toward it, and as she did, she became aware of a faint creaking sound, rhythmic, slow. She stopped. The creaking stopped.

She took another step. The creaking resumed.

She stood still. The creaking stopped.

She took a third step, and as she did, the horse began to rock. It was not a sudden motion. It built slowly, the way a pendulum builds, the way a child begins to move a toy by first pressing it forward and then letting it swing back. The horse rocked once, twice, three times, and the sound of its wooden base against the floor was a soft, hollow thump that filled the room.

Maren watched it. She did not approach it. She did not reach for it. She stood very still and let it rock, counting the swings, noting that the motion was uniform, mechanical, the same arc repeated over and over. The painted eyes seemed to follow her as the horse rocked, though this was only because the angle of the horse's head shifted with the motion, so that its gaze swept across the room and back.

The horse rocked eleven times. On the twelfth, it stopped, frozen at the apex of its backward swing, its painted hooves an inch above the floor. The silence that followed was different from the silence that had come before. It had a weight to it. It had a listening quality.

"The rocking horse is newer than the crib," Maren said. She said it aloud, to no one, because speaking was how she stayed grounded. "Someone replaced it. Someone kept it oiled. Someone wanted it to work."

The horse did not move. The room held its silence.

She crouched and looked at the rocker base. The wood was darker there than on the rest of the horse, polished from use. She could see, in the grain, the faint impression of small fingers, the kind of wear that only comes from years of a child's grip. But the horse itself was newer than the crib. The carving was cleaner, the paint less faded. It had been made within the last forty years, perhaps, to replace something older that had been lost or broken.

She rose and walked to the wall above the crib. The cross-stitch was framed in a simple wooden border, and the thread was still vivid: deep green letters on cream fabric. COUNT NOT THE DAYS UNTIL THE BABY COMES. She read it twice, and then she read it a third time, and the meaning shifted each time, from a hopeful message to a warning to a kind of bitter joke that the stitcher had not intended. She lifted the frame from its hook and turned it over. On the back, in faded pencil, a single line: E.E., 1947.

Eleanor. Her grandmother had stitched this. Eleanor had stitched it and hung it above a crib and folded an afghan at the foot of a bed and made the bed with clean sheets and left a rattle on the mattress and replaced the old rocking horse with a newer one. Eleanor had prepared this room. Eleanor had prepared it for someone, and that someone had never come.

Maren set the frame back on its hook. She stood in the center of the nursery and looked at the bed and the crib and the rocking horse and the mobile and the cross-stitch, and she felt the absence in the room as a physical thing, a presence in negative, the shape of a child that had never occupied the space.

"Who were you waiting for?" she said.

The horse rocked once. Just once, a single gentle swing, and then it was still again.

She left the nursery and walked back through the small hallway. The door to the third-floor room was still ajar, and through the gap she could see the desk and the shoebox and the rocking chair in the corner. She did not return to the room. She descended the stairs to the second floor, moving carefully, placing her feet on the edges of the treads where the wood was least likely to flex.

The second-floor hallway was unchanged. The photographs on the wall, the mirror at the end, the closed door to her grandmother's bedroom. She walked past them without stopping and descended the stairs to the first floor. The smell of the house had changed again, and she realized that she had been holding her breath for the last three flights. She exhaled and inhaled, and the air tasted of dust and old wood and, faintly, of something floral, like dried roses in a drawer.

She stood in the front hall. The coat closet was still open. The umbrella was still leaning in its corner. The front door was still closed. She had not heard it open. She had not heard anyone enter or leave. She crossed to the window beside the door and looked out at the porch and the yard and the street.

The delivery truck was still there, parked where she had left it. The driver was still in the cab, reading something on his phone. The street was empty. The porch was empty. There was no one.

She turned and walked to the parlor door. It was still closed. She opened it and stepped inside.

The parlor had changed. The curtains were drawn on the window, though she had not drawn them. The chair where she had sat was now turned slightly, angled toward the door. The glass she had left on the side table was still there, but it was full again, the amber liquid catching the light from the lamp. Beside it, a second glass, identical, also full.

The rocking horse was on the floor in the center of the room. It was not the same rocking horse. It was smaller, paler, carved from a different wood, with a mane of yellow yarn and eyes of blue glass. It sat on the braided rug, perfectly still, facing her.

Maren did not move.

"You're a fast study," she said. Her voice was steady. She had wanted it to be steady and it was. "The photographs. The rocking horse. The horses upstairs. You're showing me what I've already seen. You're showing me what's already in the house."

The rocking horse did not move. The room was silent.

"You shouldn't bother," she said. "I already know what you're doing. I'm not a child."

The air in the room shifted. The lamp flame leaned, though there was no draft. The curtains stirred. The rocking horse rocked once, gently, and then was still.

Maren walked to the side table and picked up the glass that was not hers. She brought it to her nose and sniffed. Whiskey. She set it down without tasting it. She walked to the door and turned and looked at the room, at the horse and the two glasses and the chair turned toward her.

"I don't drink with strangers," she said.

The horse rocked twice. The room grew colder.

She walked out and closed the door behind her.

The hallway outside the room was not the hallway she had walked through to enter it.

Maren closed the door behind her and turned and looked down the corridor and the corridor was wrong. It was longer. The runner underfoot was a different pattern, burgundy and forest green where it had been faded rose and cream. The sconces on the walls were wrong too, their glass the color of weak tea where the ones she remembered had held plain white candle bulbs. The air smelled of lavender and dust and something else, something older, like the ghost of furniture polish.

She had been in this house for three days. She had walked these halls a dozen times. She knew the way from the back parlor to the kitchen. She knew the turn before the stairs. She knew the third stair from the top that creaked.

She did not know this hallway.

Maren stood still and listened. The house was quiet. Not the held-breath quiet of a house waiting, but the deep quiet of a house alone, a house with no one in it. Somewhere far away, beyond the walls, beyond the trees she could hear through the heavy curtains at the end of the corridor, an owl called. Once. Twice. The sound was muffled, as if it came through water.

The door she had just closed was the third door on the left. She was certain of it. The door to the back parlor had been the third door on the left. She had counted them every time. Three. Five. Seven. The third door.

But the door she had closed now was the fifth. The fifth door. She could see the numbers carved into the wood at eye level, small and neat, 5.

She looked at the door behind her. 5.

She looked at the door in front of her, two doors down, where she would have sworn the back parlor was. It was also marked with a number. Also 5.

She looked down the hallway. Every door she could see was marked with the same number.

Maren took a breath. She let it out slowly. She had spent the first two days in this house believing she understood it, believing the rules were knowable, believing that if she was careful and methodical and watched and listened and wrote down what she observed, she would find her way through. She had spent the third day realizing the house was not a place. It was a verb. It was always in the process of becoming. The rocking horse was not the same rocking horse. The glass was full again. The chair had turned to face her. The doors were numbered wrong.

She took a step. Her boot sounded on the runner. The sound was wrong. It was the sound of a bare foot on stone, muffled and too soft. She took another step. The sound was the sound of a cane on gravel. She took a third step and the sound was gone entirely, and she walked in silence, and the silence was so complete she could hear the blood in her ears, the soft wet pulse of her own body, working.

She stopped.

The hallway ended. She had not seen it end. One step there had been corridor stretching ahead of her, and the next step there was a wall. Wood paneling, dark, polished, the same paneling as the rest of the house. A sconce. A number carved into the wood. 5.

She turned.

The hallway ended behind her too. The same paneling. The same sconce. The same number.

She was in a dead end. She had been walking. She had not turned. She had not entered a room. The hallway had simply ceased, front and back, and left her standing on a length of runner that was now only a few feet long, a rug with no room in it, surrounded on three sides by wood and on one side by the door marked 5.

Maren put her hand on the door behind her. The wood was cool and smooth. She turned the brass knob.

The door opened.

She stepped through.

She was in a bedroom she had never seen. A narrow room with a slanted ceiling and a single window. The window was curtained with white cotton. There was a bed against the far wall, made up with a quilt of small pink and white squares. A nightstand. A lamp. A book on the nightstand, closed, its spine cracked from use.

The bed was not made for an adult. It was a child's bed. The quilt reached the pillow. The pillow was small. There was a stuffed bear on it, worn soft, one eye missing.

The room smelled of baby powder and dust.

There was a rocking horse in the room. The same rocking horse. The smaller one. The pale one with the yellow mane and the blue glass eyes. It sat in the corner, facing the bed.

Maren stood in the doorway and did not go in. Her notebook was in her pocket. Her pen was in her pocket. She could feel the weight of both against her hip, the familiar small pressures. She could take them out and write down what she was seeing. She could document. She could be the journalist her grandmother had been, the one who observed and recorded and made sense.

She did not take out the notebook.

She had learned, in three days, that there were things in this house that did not need to be written down to be remembered. They would be remembered anyway. They would be remembered better than the things she wrote down, more clearly, more completely, with all the sense data intact, the smell of the powder and the weight of the door in her hand and the sound her boots did not make on the runner.

"You look just like her."

The voice came from the bed. It was small and high and dry, like paper crinkling. It was the voice of a child. It was the voice of no child Maren had ever known.

Maren's hand tightened on the door frame. She did not step into the room. She did not step back. She stood on the threshold and looked at the bed.

There was no one on the bed. The quilt was smooth. The pillow was small. The stuffed bear lay on its side, the missing eye a dark socket.

"You look just like Ellie when she was small," the voice said. "She had that hair. She had that way of standing in the doorway. She wouldn't come in. She would stand in the doorway and watch."

Maren said nothing. Her throat had closed. She could feel her pulse in her neck, in her wrists, in the soft skin behind her knees. She could feel her body becoming a thing made of pulses, a thing made of liquid and alarm.

"She would stand there for hours sometimes," the voice said. "Just watching. She was a quiet one. She liked to watch."

Maren said, "Where is she."

It was not a question. It was the shape of a question. It was the words in the order of a question.

"She's here," the voice said. "She's always been here. She came back. They always come back."

The rocking horse moved. It rocked once, gently, and was still.

Maren looked at the horse. She looked at the bed. She looked at the window with its white curtains. Behind the curtains, the owl called again, and the sound was not muffled now, it was clear, it was close, it was the sound of an owl on the windowsill, talons on wood, the soft hoot of a bird that had found what it was looking for.

"You can come in," the voice said. "She wanted you to come in. She left you the letters. She left them for you to find. She wanted you to come in and see."

"I can see from here," Maren said.

Her voice worked. It came out level and low. She had not expected it to work. She had expected her throat to fail her, the words to catch and tear, the panic she could feel in her chest to climb into her mouth and silence her. It did not. She had been a journalist for nineteen years. She had interviewed men who had killed other men. She had sat across from mothers who had lost children and asked them to describe the morning of the day their child disappeared. She had learned to speak in rooms where the air had changed.

"There's nothing to see," the voice said. "There's never anything to see. She thought there would be something to see. She thought if she came back and looked she would find it. She didn't find it. She never finds it."

"Find what," Maren said.

The voice did not answer. The rocking horse rocked twice. The owl on the windowsill was silent. The stuffed bear on the pillow did not move.

"Come in and find out," the voice said. It was smaller now. Younger. The voice of a girl of six or seven, the voice of a child who had been standing in a doorway for a long time and was tired of standing. "Come in like she did. She came in and she sat on the bed and she picked up the bear and she held it. She held it for a long time."

Maren looked at the bear. The bear was small and brown and the missing eye was a dark hole in the worn fur. The bear had been held a long time. The bear had been held by a child who had been told to wait, and had waited, and was still waiting, in a room that smelled of powder and dust.

"Her name wasn't Ellie," Maren said. "Her name was Eleanor. She was called Ellie. There's a difference."

"There's no difference," the voice said. "There's never any difference. Ellie is in here. Ellie is the bed and the bear and the horse and the window and the owl. Ellie is the house. Ellie has always been the house."

Maren released the door frame. She stepped back, out of the doorway, into the hallway that was not the hallway. The door swung shut behind her. The sound it made was not the sound of a door closing. It was the sound of a great weight falling, of a slab of stone lowered onto stone, of a thing sealed.

The house shook. The walls trembled. The floor moved under her feet. The sconce on the wall beside the door flickered and went out. The next sconce down the hall flickered and went out. The dark came in patches, in pools, advancing down the corridor like something spilled.

Maren turned and ran.

She ran the way she had come, the way she had not come, the only way there was. The hallway stretched and contracted around her. The runner underfoot changed from burgundy to cream to bare wood to something that felt like grass, cool and wet, and then back to wood. The doors on either side were open or closed or not there at all. She did not look. She ran. The house groaned around her, a sound that was not a sound, a sound she felt in her teeth and her ribs and the bones of her skull.

A door appeared in front of her. She did not slow. She hit it with both hands, palms flat, and the door gave, and she fell through, and the door slammed behind her, and the slam was the slam she had heard from inside the room, the tremendous force, the weight of stone on stone.

She was on the floor. Hardwood. Cold. A rug under her hands, braided, familiar. She pushed herself up. She was in the back parlor. The lamp was on. The chair was where she had left it. The glass on the side table was empty. There was one glass.

Maren stood up. Her legs were shaking. Her hands were shaking. She could feel her heart in her throat, in her eyes, in the roots of her teeth. She breathed. She breathed again. She walked to the chair and sat down.

The rocking horse was on the floor in the center of the room. The larger one. The dark one. It was not moving.

The house was quiet.