Inside

They stood on the front step. Marta raised her hand and knocked, twice, because somehow that felt necessary, because going in without knocking felt worse. Nobody answered. Of course nobody answered. The house had been empty for six years.

The front door was unlocked. That was the first wrong thing. Not locked and broken, not kicked in, just unlocked, the handle turning freely when Dev tried it, the door swinging inward on hinges that made no sound at all.

"Hinges should creak," Dev said quietly. "In an abandoned house. Hinges creak."

"Maybe someone oiled them," Marta said.

"Who oils the hinges of an abandoned house?"

Marta did not have an answer for this. She stepped inside.

The hallway smelled of old wood and something sweet she could not identify and cold air despite the October morning outside. The floor was bare boards, grey with dust, and the wallpaper was peeling in long curling strips that hung from the walls like shed skin. At the end of the hall a staircase went up into darkness. To the left a door stood half open onto what had been a kitchen. To the right another door, closed.

"We take something from in here and go," Dev said. He had not fully crossed the threshold. One foot was still on the step outside.

"Come in or stay out," Marta said. "You are letting the cold air in."

"It is already cold in here," Dev said, but he stepped inside and pulled the front door mostly shut behind him.

The light changed. Not off, not dark, just different, the October morning going grey and flat through the cracks in the boarded windows. Marta had the sudden strong impression that the house was not empty. Not because she could see or hear anything. Just because empty felt different from this, lighter somehow, less aware.

The hallway was long and narrow and the ceiling was high and dark and Marta had the sudden strong feeling that the house was paying attention to them in the way that certain spaces do, the way a room feels different when someone is in it even if you cannot see them.

She kept this thought to herself. Saying it out loud would make it more real and she did not want it to be more real.

Then the closed door on the right side of the hallway moved.

Not opened. Just moved, a fraction, as if something on the other side had shifted its weight.

Marta and Dev looked at the closed door.

The closed door did not move again.

They went left very quickly.

"Kitchen," Marta said. "There will be something in there. A jar or a tin or something we can carry."

They went left. The kitchen door swung fully open as they approached it, smoothly, as if someone on the other side had pulled it.

There was nobody on the other side.

"Draft," Dev said.

"Yes," Marta said.

They went into the kitchen. It was stripped almost bare, the cupboards open and empty, the counters grey with dust. A single tin sat on the windowsill above the sink, its label faded to illegibility. Marta crossed to it and picked it up. It was light. Empty probably.

Marta checked her phone. No signal inside. She pocketed it and looked around the kitchen. The light in here was worse than the hall, the window fully boarded, just thin lines of October light coming through the gaps between the boards. Dust motes moved in those lines. Nothing else moved.

"Got something," she said, turning.

Dev was standing very still in the doorway. His face had gone a specific colour that Marta associated with the time he had seen a large spider on his bedroom ceiling and had not wanted to say anything because he felt he was too old to be scared of spiders.

"Dev," she said.

"Do not turn around," Dev said.

Marta turned around.

Through the kitchen window, beyond the boarded glass, there was a gap between two boards at the top and through the gap, at the exact height of the gap, were two eyes.

Looking in.

Marta's brain did the thing brains do in moments of sudden fear, which was to go completely empty of everything except the immediate fact. The fact was the eyes. The fact was that they were not moving. The fact was that they were at a height that was wrong, too high, higher than a standing person would be.

Marta stood still for one full second. Her brain, in that second, listed what she could see: the grey boards on the window, the gap between the top two, the light coming through the gap from outside, and framed perfectly in that light, two eyes.

They were dark. They did not blink. They were at a height that her brain kept snagging on, refusing to accept, because a person standing on the ground outside the window would have their eyes at a different height, lower, and these were not lower, these were at the very top of the gap, which meant whoever they belonged to was either extraordinarily tall or not standing on the ground at all.

One second. Two seconds.

The eyes did not move.

"Run," Dev said.

They ran.