What They Found

They got as far as the hallway.

The front door was closed.

Not mostly closed the way Dev had pulled it. Fully closed. The handle did not turn. It turned and turned and turned and the door did not move and Marta threw her shoulder against it and nothing happened and Dev said "window" and they turned toward the boarded window in the hallway and Dev hit the board with his palm and it shifted, loose, and they got their fingers under it and pulled and it came away in a shower of old nails and dust and cold air came in through the gap.

Dev grabbed the board with both hands and pulled hard and a second nail gave and the board twisted and the gap was nearly wide enough and something behind them in the hall made a sound.

Not a creak. Not a settling sound. Something else. Something that was almost like a footstep and almost like a breath and was neither of those things exactly.

Neither of them turned around to look.

Dev pulled the board again and it came free entirely and cold air hit them both in the face and Marta said go and Dev went.

The gap was big enough. Barely.

Marta got to her feet on the front step and looked back through the gap they had come through. The hallway was dark. Nothing in the hallway. Just the grey walls and the peeling paper and the dust and the closed door on the right that had moved.

The closed door that had moved was open now. All the way open. Whatever had been behind it was not there any more.

Or it was somewhere else.

Dev went first because he was thinner and then Marta went and they fell together onto the front step and through the brambles and into the overgrown garden and they ran for the gate and through it and onto the lane.

Callum was not at the wall.

The lane was empty.

"Callum," Dev said, breathing hard. He looked both ways. "Where is he?"

"He went home," Marta said. She was not angry. She was still too frightened to be angry. "He absolutely went home."

She had wanted to go inside for two years. She knew that now, standing in the October sun outside the gate. Every time she had walked past and looked straight ahead she had also, underneath that, wanted to look. Wanted to know what was in there. Wanted to understand why the house felt the way it felt.

She understood now. She wished she did not.

She looked back at the house. The brambles were still. The boarded windows on the ground floor looked the same as they always had. The upstairs window, the open one, the dark one, was also the same.

Except that the curtain, which she had not noticed before, which had been pushed to one side when they arrived, was now closed.

"What were those eyes?" Dev said. He was looking at the house too.

"I do not know," Marta said.

"They were too high," Dev said. "For a person standing on the ground outside. They were too high."

"I know," Marta said.

"So they were either a very tall person," Dev said, "or they were not standing on the ground."

Marta thought about the brambles. The thick, overgrown, unclimbable brambles that covered the entire back of the house. You would need a ladder to reach that height. You would need to have brought a ladder. You would need to have known they were coming.

"Let us go," she said.

They walked away from the house quickly, not running, because running felt like something the house might like. Behind them Wren Lane was quiet and still and the gate stood open in its rusted position and the curtain in the upstairs window did not move.