Nico notices me limping before we even make it to the stairs. He sighs expansively, then grabs my arm and puts it on his shoulder. My skin tingles from where we touch, and then warms at the muscle under his shirt. I try to keep my grip light, so he knows I’m not doing anything more.

  The stairwell is made of polished stones, each larger than my head looking more like a castle than a house. A scent of something dry and arid creeps up from below, and reminds me of an Egyptian pyramid. The deeper we descend there’s a hint of something in the air, a scent of herbs or embalming spices that long ago decayed into ghosts.

  The stones look like they precede the house by hundreds, if not thousands, of years, worn smooth by generations following down this very same path. We walk the stairs carefully but never reach a landing. The descent just continues down into the darkness. One hundred steps. Two hundred.

  Six hundred.

  I lose count. I’m about to give up. And then, a faint glow. The space slowly illuminates as we reach what must be the bottom of the stairwell.

  “That… was a lot of stairs.” Nico says, voice hushed and low. I heard the unasked question lacing his words. How are we so far down under the manor?

  I can’t tell him I don’t remember any of my trips into the basement.I don’t even remember stairs that went down this far.Instead I play it off like this is ordinary.If Wrath was here, he’d have better answers, but I summon my best impression of him.“It takes as long as it takes.”There, that’s properly a non-answer.

  At the bottom the stairwell opens into a long, open chamber with ceilings twenty feet high.

  The room itself appears dirty and abandoned, with piles of detritus scattered throughout.In the middle an archway of smooth stone stands, an arbor waiting for a funeral procession. It is large, made from reddish stones but wide enough that maybe a dozen people could have walked through it, arm in arm.

  I step on something that crunches under my feet and look down to see a pile of something like leaves. On a closer look, it isn’t leaves at all, but scarab shells. Unlike any scarab I’ve ever seen in picture books, though, they’re each half the size of my foot.

  “This is under your house?” Nico asks under his breath. There’s a tone there that I don’t like, it’s not just disbelieving and surprised as it is… wrong. As though this shouldn’t be under my house and he knows it.

  “I’ve never been in this room before,” I admit absently, staring up at the ceiling. I know it’s impossible, but it’s almost like there are clouds near the ceiling, shifting and moving imperceptibly.

  “Is there a reason you stopped?” he asks a moment later.

  I look down only to realize I have indeed frozen in place. It’s not the scarabs, though. Something else…but I’m not sure what.

  Why does it feel like— “Is this a test?”

  It is indeed a test.

  A sound like crackling flames, of branches breaking in the midst of a bonfire, of snapping and charring and destruction rushes from the arch even before I see the first of the insects fly from their perch. The reddish color I thought was the stone turns out to be a blanket of insects each the size of a thumb bone.

  Seconds later one of the creatures explodes into flame but continues to fly. Even at a distance of fifty feet, I can still see the tiny, burning wings that keep it aloft. First there is one, then a dozen. Then hundreds of the little things, each alighting with fire and buzzing around the arch like it’s their home. They move like normal insects but instead of being drawn to light they seem to like spreading it, each repelled from their brothers and sisters.

  “You don’t think they’re…” I trail off.

  “Do not say it,” Nico threatens.

  “Fireflies?”

  One of the giant flies soars towards the ceiling but comes up short abruptly. It is caught in place, and we watch as it struggles, shaking itself against invisible bonds, trying to wriggle free. Then the invisible web that bound it catches fire, and draws a line of flame to the next firefly to be captured.

  That’s when I realize the trap that we’re in.

  A web of silken threads span the length and breadth of the room. In the shine of firelight some of the threads glow, made visible.As the fireflies are caught, parts of the web immolate without ever burning out until the room glows from an entire maze where no more than a foot or two of open space remains.

  When one manages to pull free, the fire behind remains for a short time until the thread snaps, but only for a matter of moments before another thread seems to spin itself into place out of thin air.

  Trying to cross that space is a recipe for death. A wall of heat slams across the room, forcing me to take a step back though Nico doesn’t move. The room goes from a cool basement to a summer sauna.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Security system?”

  I don’t answer him.If it is, then who authored the design?My parents, hiding their purloined calamities?The Morecrofts, entombing their secrets behind fatalistic games?Something older, more inhumane? Instead of dwelling, I grab a scarab shell from my feet and chuck it into one of the flames. It explodes and disintegrates with an immediate peal of thunder.

  “That’s new.”

  Nico’s glance at me is appraising.“Is it?”

  I don’t answer.

  “We have very different expectations from our basements,” he continues.“I just want a laundry room. Maybe some storage.”

  “Death traps are very in this season.”

  He doesn’t understand that this is a good thing. If the Manor allowed anyone to sneak down into the basement whenever they wanted, it would make for a poor hiding place. The house provides better security than a vault or a fortress. That it is already this difficult makes me feel better.

  It also made me wonder if people had tried (and failed) to break into the house and the basement before. And if so, what happened to them.

  A part of me wants to encourage Nico to try and navigate his way through the flames. He looks… limber. And seeing him bend over would be a blessing.

  Nico glances over at me and raises an eyebrow. That’s when I realize I’ve been staring.

  I quickly look away, and then focus on the small pocket of safety we’re currently in. The space around the door, and for about ten feet is free of the webs and avoided by the fireflies. The crunch of another scarab beetle under my feet makes me focus on them again, and I look back around the room one more time.

  There are piles of scarabs near the door on our side, but nowhere else on the newly illuminated floor across the room. I glance back up at the wall behind me, and see little pockets of scarab shells that look like they’re dangling out of crevices in the wall. Maybe the fireflies congregated on the stone archway, while the scarabs lived in the walls.

  “I hate puzzles,” Nico mutters to himself. Half his words are drowned out by a gong of the Doom Clock. The pressure rises, but strangely now that we’re in the basement, it seems to sweep past us.I wait a beat, for some calamity or chaos to slam down upon us, but nothing happens.

  “That’s four.”

  “Nine to go,” I agree.

  The physicality of the Doom Clock’s sound ripples across the room, stirring up a sandstorm of dust and decay that carries on the wind like a summer storm. And then it’s gone, just as quickly.

  Nico, who braces himself for impact that never comes, looks around curiously.

  Neither of us trust the sudden calm that settles on the room. We wait and a few of the flies manage to struggle free from the webbing and start to buzz around in the air again. But when I take another step forward and crunch another shell, they immediately zip with purpose to part of the webbing and set it on fire.

  “Interesting,” he muses.

  “I mean, or it’s just deadly,” I say sullenly. “Nothing interesting about Theo flambé.”

  I try to picture the room as it must have been at one time. Scarabs climbing out of the wall and the flies gathering on the arch. I toss another shell forward, but I release it too early, and it flies high in the air and then drops to the ground, skittering forward.

  Instead of hitting one of the lines of fire and incinerating on the spot, it continues to bounce and skid forward. As if in response, several of the lower flies zip away from the web and scurry to the arch.

  Oh that’s interesting. If they haven’t ignited one of the threads, the fireflies aren’t nearly so brave. I smile and pick up another shell. I toss it low to the ground, and several fireflies scurry away in haste.

  Nico watches them with narrowed eyes. “They’re scared.”

  “Natural predators,” I agree. “They must not be smart enough to realize the scarabs are dead.”

  Each of us picks up a handful of scarab shells and begin skipping them along the ground. With each new shell hurled against the ground, the fireflies grow agitated. Eventually, the lines of fire in our path vanish. I walk forward, just far enough where the first line of fire was.

  “Don’t—“ Nico says, sounding alarmed.

  But when I wave my hand through the space that was on fire only a minute ago, there’s nothing there. The air feels slightly warm, but nothing impedes my way. If there truly are webs, they’re not corporeal.

  “It’s fine,” I say, just as one of the fireflies buzzes right in my face. I yelp, tossing the whole handful of scarab shells in the air and leap back towards safety.

  Nico presses his lips together but he doesn’t actually laugh. I can tell he wants to.

  “You shut up,” I point threateningly at him. I head for the arch in the center of the room, the one the fireflies congregate on.

  He looks around carefully. “Are you sure you should be going through there?” Nico asks, but I walk under and through the the arch without hesitation.

  The air changes. It’s like a magic that’s native to doorways and portals. The world on the other side of the arch feels different. Maybe it’s the temperature. Maybe it’s a change to the smell of the room or the light. Whatever it is, I feel it wash over me as I step across it feels like a snapping string.

  As soon as I do, the fireflies lift off and disappear up towards the ceiling.At first it seems random but after a moment, a vaguely non-circular pattern begins to emerge.

  It’s not quite a circle, somehow more round and also less. Both slower and yet faster than my eyes can track, or maybe that it’s moving in many directions and dimensions at a time. Some of their tails even ignite for a moment causing a pulse of light that pulls at me. It makes sense in a way that I can’t put words to, like it’s familiar and also important. There’s a rhythm to the pulses of light. Like it’s where I—

  “Don’t stare at it,” Nico says gruffly, and he pushes me forward. “Don’t you know anything?”

  It takes the remainder of the room before I pull myself away from thoughts of the spinning bugs and strobing lights. For a moment, I’d been so close to understanding something. Something about the bugs and where they came from…

  Something about me.

  “You live in a house that’s bigger on the inside and you don’t know not to stare at strange things?” he continues. It’s not until we cross the threshold at the other end of the room that his push ends. The force dissipates, but for a moment Nico’s hand lingers on my back.

  “I could almost see it,” I murmur. “It was right there…”

  “Yeah, but what happens when you get there?” he replies. “Those things might burn your house down.We should come back later and salt the earth.”

  The house immediately rumbles around us in a way that I know has nothing to do with the Doom Clock. It’s more of a shudder like hackles raised and annoyance stirred. In fact, I know it is. I can sense it.

  I rest my hand against one of the walls, which is made from tiled porcelain on this side. The rumbling slows, not entirely appeased and continues to tremble uncertainly.

  Nico takes a step forward, then lets out a startled cry as his foot drops into a hole in the floor that wasn’t there a moment before. If the hole had been any deeper he might have sprained or broken something, but it’s only an inch or two. He looks startled, and then peers back at the floor uncertainly.A warning, nothing more.

  “Don’t threaten my home.”

  I continue forward into the next room.