The hallway forward slopes at an angle, taking us up in a spiral. We walk up and up, the hallway growing lighter and lighter, until the stones themselves seem to be illuminated with stars. Tiny glimmers of light baked into the stone, shimmering around us and lighting the hallway a soft, calming blue.

  Eventually the hallway widens, and with the vaulted space above us, the shine become more starlike.We circle again and the ceiling darkens, the stars burning brighter, and a smell of fresh air drifts down.

  “What in the world?” Nico breathes, but he sounds far less surprised than I feel.

  We emerge into an open sky attic. Thick clouds in places mar the landscape, and there’s a blue and green light hidden behind one of them that may be some kind of alien moon.The real moon does not glow with such colors.At the corners of the room, broken boards show where a roof may have once existed. The beams point upward, shattered and smoothed by years of exposure. Maybe something struck the roof, or maybe something from within exploded outward.

  Dust cloaks the attic like an unearthed tomb. Even the air hangs languid, as if it’s forgotten how to move.Starlight drips down from where the ceiling should be. The sky glows violet, constellations painted in unfamiliar strokes overhead.

  We should be a hundred feet or more underground, and yet this foreign, lilac-colored sky speaks of strange aeons beyond our world.

  It fills me with awe.

  It fills me with terror.

  “Look at this,” Nico points out, scuffing his foot against the ground. Where I’ve been focused on the sky, he’s studied the room itself. I walk over to him, then peer at something that looks like a disruption in the wood floorboards. A perfect circle set in between the planks which have been fitted around it. The circle is cold to the touch, made from some kind of metal, aged and dulled into a bitter, lifeless gray. I pull my hand away, rubbing the icy bite against my pants.

  “It’s a ceremonial circle.”

  He nods. He crouches down next to me, close enough that our knees are a hair’s breadth apart, and runs a fingernail between what I thought was a single ring of metal, revealing that it’s several rings set into one another.

  “Good catch,” even though I don’t know what it is that he caught.

  “Someone worshipping Satan in your basement…attic? What is this place even?” He looks around, “And why can we see outside?”

  I love how he seems to think I’ve got the answers. Like I know anything about what we’re walking through right now. I don’t point out that we’ve been in the basement for an hour or two, but it’s definitely not long enough to be dark outside. It may look like the night sky, but it’s certainly not the night sky over Hollow Hills.

  “It looks like something out of this horror movie I watched on Deadflix a few months ago,” he adds.

  I wish Wrath was here.“This isn’t a movie set. And it’s not Satanism.”

  It’s the same rumor I’ve heard all my life - that the Morecrofts worship Satan, that the house is cursed.The valley is full of suspicious people and they all love to run their dentures.

  “It’s a joke,” he says, frowning, holding up his hands. “At least a little bit.”

  He’s not wrong. That’s annoying. It does look like a ceremonial circle of some kind, but I don’t know anymore than that. The one who would know is the same one who disappeared the minute the Doom Clock started counting down to the end of days.

  “Where are you?” I mutter. The Doom Clock cheats, I hear again in my head.

  I think circles like this were used for conjuring. It’s not really my skillset. If I wanted to major in Conjuring for the Soon-to-be Criminally Insane, maybe I’d know something more. Magic, in general, seems like a terrible idea.All those unpronounceable syllables and ritual gestures that give you charley horses - every one comes with side effects.Consequences might be a better word. Exploding heads, gnashing teeth monsters, ear worms you never get out of your head, it’s always something.

  Some creatures take to magic easily. They have the seven hands or the three mouths that true magic really shines with. At least, that’s the way that I’ve always understood it. Wrath seems to think it’s relatively easy, but he’s a demon. They practically invented magic.

  Covered furniture lines the walls, thick sheets that are gray with decades of dust and grime. The shape of one, rounded along the top, seems vaguely familiar and I wander in that direction. Grabbing the end of the sheet, draped just low enough to brush the ground, I lift it off and away, kicking up a cloud of dust.It spreads out yet hesitates before it crosses the boundaries into the alien night sky. Interesting.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Nico begins coughing and backs away, waving a hand in front of him. I press down on the smile that threatens to rise, amused to see him struggling just a bit, and turn to look at what I’ve unveiled.

  It’s a more elaborate version of the bassinet stroller my parents brought me to Morecroft Manor in. It’s a black baby carriage with dark, wrought-iron wheels at least three feet tall. Thorns wrap the handle, meant to prick unworthy hands. Umbral-shaded lace drapes over the canopy, and I can’t help but ball my hand up into a fist around it, feeling a sense of familiarity.

  Faint glimmers of gold piping line the sides and basin of the carriage, and inside is an abandoned gray blanket patterned with tiny skulls.

  “Yeah, this place isn’t creepy at all.” But I ignore Nico’s snide remarks. Was this mine? Did my parents put me in this stroller?

  The few memories I have of my mother are puzzle pieces that don’t fit. However I twist them, I can’t picture her maternal enough to push a stroller.

  “Something’s missing.” Nico says.

  Every time he speaks, he disturbs the quiet of the room, and I flinch in surprise. The room is solemn and still, a winter’s night in the woods. I close my eyes and listen to the vast emptiness around us. Even the stars above are content to keep to themselves.

  I’m more careful looking through the covered furniture, peering at the items then settling the sheet coverings back down gently, trying not to dislodge the dust. Old dressers, wardrobes with scratch marks running down the insides from creatures trying to escape, alabaster statuaries and cheval standing mirrors but none of them the slightest bit familiar.

  Even though the room lacks a roof, there are still a handful of beams that cross a few feet above my head. I’m not sure if they would have been exposed in the original version of the attic, or if they were only exposed because the yawning gulf above them, but one in particular draws my attention.

  Without even knowing why I do it, I cross the room and reach above my head, and pull something down from on top of the beam. A small hand mirror with a handle of stained ivory the color of deep purple monkshood. The handle is truly a hand, made up of articulated carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges.

  “What’s that?”

  I shrug, displaying it, though even as I offer it to him some part of me wants to pull it back and cradle it against my chest.

  Weird.

  He takes the hand mirror, looks at himself in it, then takes a moment to fix his hair. Then he offers me a snide smirk and passes the mirror back. “You should really clean yourself up.”

  But I nearly drop the hand mirror when I first see my reflection. My skin is mottled gray, something like mold crawling up my shoulders and throat; splotchy darkness that grows darker the longer it’s there. My eyes are abyssal black, wide and wrong pupils ringed in a dissonant cornflower blue.

  The creature looks like me, but otherworldly.Monstrous. And yet somehow still familiar. It peers into me from the other side, but calm compared to my agitation.

  Then just like that, the vision fades and I see my dirty, messy appearance. I brush at my hair, use the sleeve of my shirt to wipe away some of the dirt, while keeping an eye on Nico as he searches the rest of the room. He double checks all of the furniture I’ve already looked over.

  Then, as soon as I’m done cleaning myself up, I turn from him back to the mirror, and again I see something… unusual. This time it’s me, but smiling a predator’s smile.He walks away towards the stroller.

  I do the same, but more hesitantly. I have to hold the mirror at an angle in order to see the reflection of me, but he crouches down, peering inside.

  This room doesn’t feel like the first two. It doesn’t feel like a challenge or a game. It feels personal, or like a prelude. Is the house trying to tell me something?

  “I’d prefer it if you just sent me an email like everyone else,” I say darkly.

  “What?” Nico asks.

  “Nothing. I wasn’t talking to you.”

  He hmms. “Nothing’s trying to kill us in here.”

  “I can see that,” I agree.

  “I thought you said the third room would be the worst.”

  “Yeah, I said that too.”

  I put the mirror down and look into the baby carriage again. I lift the blanket up, holding it to my nose and inhaling, but it only smells like a baby blanket. Talcum powder and oleander, two scents that remind me of childhood.

  There’s nowhere else to go. No doors to the next room. No hidden Doom Clock under a tarp. Just a bunch of old furniture and the quiet sky above us.

  Soon after, something like snow begins to drift down through the opening above us. It touches down on Nico first, but instead of melting and turning to water, it turns dark against his skin.

  “Ash,” he says, rubbing the blackness off his skin and then against his shirt.

  It continues to fall gently around us like snow from a globe.

  I go around the room and begin uncovering furniture. A rocking chair. A small dresser. A crib made from iron with chains running along the sides.

  “It’s a nursery.” Obvious, yes, but that’s not what gives me pause. There’s a familiarity to this room. This isn’t just any nursery. This was my nursery. There are only faint impressions of it in my head, but when I run my finger along the inside of the crib, I know how the chains will feel against my skin before I touch them. I know the sounds they’ll make. The way they ting-ting-ting against each other as my fingers move.

  “Hang on.” Nico goes back through the furniture, uncovering the large cheval mirror on wheels, and turns it towards the circle laid into the floor. “Look at this.”

  Where Nico moves and tilts the mirror, it now shines on the circle set into the floor. Only now, the reflection is of a circle newly constructed, the rings of metal now easily distinguished as they gleam under the starlight. Small white votive candles are set at equidistant points around the circle, within the boundaries.

  Slowly from the far corner of the mirror’s view, a stream of cloaked figures move into the room. Their hands clasped in front of them, their hoods pulled deep over their heads so that every trace of their personhood is hidden. They only appear in the mirror’s reflection, in this other version of the attic room. It’s only when Nico points it up slightly at an angle that I can see the other difference: the room in the reflection has a normal ceiling above it.

  But then the last two figures come into the room, dragging something. It doesn’t seem heavy. One drags it by the snout, the other the legs. They chuck it forward so that it lands in the center of the circle.

  The sides are ripped. One button eye dangles by the only thread still holding it in place. An ear is severed. Stuffing spills out from everywhere.

  I’d know this stuffed animal anywhere.

  Wrath.