Hey there! So, if you’ve been following along, Black House is all up and done. I’ve really come to enjoy putting up a book one chapter at a time, and I hope you’ve gotten a kick out of reading this one. Or, if you’ve been waiting for the full eBooks to be posted so you don’t have to wait around between chapters, your day has finally come!

I’ll be repeating the experiment here in 2025 — novel yet to be chosen — and hope y’all come back to check out another weekly dispatch of fiction from a writer who obviously has too much time on his hands. Until then, here are the download links for Black House: A Novel!

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

44. The Starlight Motel

Motel life had become routine. Picking up his mail at the front desk, Marks waved at Dolores, who worked days behind the front desk. She was a stupid, elderly woman who required three repetitions to answer any question and who had exactly none of the physical skills required for any sort of property management job, but he’d come to regard her with affection because she had never once attempted to lure him into an endless maze of infinite identical rooms, or toyed with him about past sins he only half-remembered.

The motel grounds had become familiar, and he was dreading the day he would have to leave them. The money sewn into his jacket, miraculously still there when he’d checked after escaping the Black House with Dee, had funded a vacation, and he’d used it to rest. To truly rest, to sleep late and eat well (or as well as the bar’s limited menu offered) and not think about survival. He firmed up, his energy skyrocketed, and he no longer resembled a cadaver when he looked in the mirror.

He was down to his final few hundred dollars, though, and it had been months since he’d walked out of the Black House with Dee. He was finally sleeping through the night. It was time to get back to work, find a client, or a job, and re-enter the world. He was oddly at peace with this. As he sorted through his mail, he smiled, catching sight of Dee’s address. She’d written him a few times after discovering to her wide-eyed horror that he didn’t have a cell phone or even an email address. Her handwriting was huge and pressed deeply into the paper, as if writing things out longhand required immense effort.

He pushed his door open, reading how she was enjoying school (not very much) and life with her very distant cousins (not very much either). He could tell, though, that she was happy, or as happy as teen girls ever got, and he felt a sense of pride, and relief. There had been a moment when he feared he’d damned her, killed her—lost her. Several moments, he corrected himself, setting the mail down on the coffee table and kicking his door shut.

He didn’t fool himself that he’d managed to escape with Dee because he was smart. He’d been lucky. The Black House hadn’t really followed any coherent rules, but there had been just enough structure there to make some educated guesses. He wondered if it was normally much more organized, if it was his own muddled brain that had made the House muddled. Maybe people with clear memories and burning regrets experienced a much more tightly focused hell than he had. The only praise he allowed himself was that he’d simply kept at it, doggedly moving from room to room, refusing to just collapse and give up.

He’d rewarded himself by not thinking about Agnes. He hadn’t investigated his own past and identified her, or placed himself missing for several days or weeks at some point in the past. He refused to think about her. However he’d failed the woman who Agnes had been modeled on, he’d let her go, because he knew chasing after her would only result in suffering.

He undressed and ran the shower, shaving and luxuriating in the hot water. For the first time in years, he didn’t feel limited by his lost memories, his lost time. He felt like his brain was working again, firing on all cylinders. The Black House hadn’t been a victory—they’d failed to save Dee’s father, and that made two people Marks had failed to save from that place—but he hadn’t lost Dee, and that was the first thing that felt like a victory in a very, very long time.

He wrapped himself in the thin, itchy cheap robe the motel provided and sat down on the bed. Extracting the last bills from the lining of his coat, he emptied his pockets and did an accounting, down to the scattered pennies. Enough, he thought, for some new clothes, and then he was in the open again, but he’d been living about a sliver above homeless for so long he knew how to work that game. And he felt optimistic. He was sober, for one, and ready to work.

He got dressed. The thin, scratchy feel of his old, worn-out clothes was depressing.

He picked up the mail and extracted Dee’s letter, opening a drawer and placing it in with the others he’d saved. he wasn’t sure why he was keeping them, or what he planned to do with them when he didn’t have a permanent place to live or store anything. He just found he couldn’t simply toss them. He hadn’t read any of them more than once and Dee hadn’t said anything brilliant or notable in any of them, but he liked the fact that someone else in the world knew he existed and thought about him. And he felt like he needed physical evidence of the fact, too.

He knew that very soon she would stop writing. It was inevitable. She meant well, but the letters would start to space out, would become just a few lines saying nothing at all, and would then degenerate into annuals, and finally stop coming at all. He’d made an arrangement with Dolores to have the motel hold any mail that came for him, and he would dutifully take the bus once a month or so and collect any correspondence that came for him. But the fact was Dee was already part of his past, and he of hers, and time erased everything, rubbing its thumb against every line that linked you to someone else until it was gone.

He scanned the rest of the mail, amazed at how quickly you got onto junk mail—

He froze, holding a plain white envelope. The return address read PASSUS, INC., ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE. His hand trembled as he opened it, tearing it roughly. Inside was a standard invoice. It was blank except for a red stamp across the center of the page: OVERDUE. Attached by a single staple was a white business card:

THE BROKER

PASSUS, INC.

Marks closed his eyes and crumpled up the bill.

The Black House had invited him again.

THE END

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Well, kids, that’s it – that’s the end! I’ll post complete eBook files next week, and then try to figure out what in the world I’ll post here until it’s time for the free weekly book in 2025.

As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

43. The Zelkova Room

“Mr. Marks, I swear to god you are unkillable!”

Marks opened his eyes. He was covered in white dust. He was on the floor. He was holding Dee’s hand; she lay next to him, pancaked in dust. She was facedown, turned towards him, and their eyes met for a second. She squeezed his hand, and then they let go and sat up.

They were in the empty shell of a building. The floor was wide-plank, old-school subflooring, the walls were stripped to the ancient red brick and furring strips. The dust was everywhere, swimming through the air, settling in infinite waves. Wires hung limply from the rafters above, furred with spider webs. It was dark, and cold. There was no sign of the stairs or the opening they’d pulled themselves up through.

In the center of the room was a large, dilapidated chair; an ornate wooden throne, the arms carved into incredibly detailed designs, the headrest an explosion of fine woodwork that had once been painted. The remnants of red cushions clung to the back and the seat. At one point, freshly stained and rubbed with oil, it must have been quite a sight.

Agnes was seated in it, slumped down, her long legs crossed under her skirt.

Marks thought she looked beautiful and finished, as if whatever transformation she’d been undergoing was finally complete. She only resembled the woman he remembered in the vaguest of ways, like a copy of a copy of a copy, each successive run through the cosmic copy machine rendering her lines less distinct, her edges softer, her legs longer.

Dee started coughing. The moment she did, he wanted to join in; his throat was suddenly dry and scratchy, filled with deep grooves and sand. He swallowed and struggled to his feet.

Standing, he could see there was something behind the chair: A small leafy tree, a miniature tree like a bonsai, growing out of the floorboards. It looked like a model of a tree: The thick, gnarled trunk, the delicate branches, the tiny leaves.

“Bravo, Mr. Marks,” Agnes said, miming applause. “It only took you two rounds, but you have succeeded at long last!” She leaned forward. “In the sense that you didn’t kill her this time.”

He looked around. A tiny flame of excitement bloomed; the place had the right dimensions, and looked normal, looked real, like an actual building. He pictured the place he’d stepped into with Dee. It matched up with a mental image of what it would look like gutted, torn out. “Why are you here?”

Agnes affected shock. “Why, to congratulate you, of course, Mr. Marks! And it is also only polite for your host and guide to see you out.” She lifted one elegant arm and indicated the door behind her. “There it is, the exit. Dearest Damnable Dee, please do go; there is much to do here and there is nothing worse than a lingering guest.”

He turned and looked at Dee, who stepped closer to him. After a moment he held out his hand, and she took it. “Worth a try, right?” he said, offering her a careful smile.

“Worth a try,” she said quietly. Then she frowned and turned to look at Agnes. “Marks, too, right?”

Agnes pouted, her face transforming into a mask of false sadness. “I’m injured,” she said. “This experience has hardened you, Delightful Dee, and made you cruel. You are free to go. You escaped the Black House before it collapsed, but now it must bloom again, it must be made ready for the next guest. You have my word, whatever that is worth, that you are free to go. Merrily Moribund Marks, however, has an obligation to remain.”

Marks looked down at his feet and his ruined shoes.

Dee reached up and grabbed his collar, trying to drag him down to her height. “Why? What does she mean?”

Agnes shrugged. “There are rules. That is the structure of the universe. Everything must obey rules, and this place is no exception.” She smiled, gorgeous, too many teeth, too white, too wide. “If it is any consolation, Mr. Marks, if you had been just a second or two slower, you both would have been crushed and trapped forever, as have thousands before you. So, bravo to you! BRAVO!”

“How many get out?” he asked, stalling for time. He looked at Dee. She peered up at him intensely, still clinging to his jacket.

“Not many. A few.” Agnes gestured again. “Go on, now, Dee. Don’t be like a beaten dog who refuses to leave out of pathetic loyalty.” She cocked her head at Marks and slowly settled again, smiling. “Ah, I see. You still do not fully remember her.”

He swallowed dust and stale air. “I remember enough.”

She winked. “But not all of it.” She sighed, prettily, and made a show of arranging her dress. “Did you love her? Did she love you? Did she trust you, as Dear Darling Dee does? You were a drunk, then, were you incompetent? Did you save yourself and let her rot?”

“Is she still in there?”

Agnes paused and looked at her lap. “You wish to know?” She looked up, impish. “Really? You will have the time to find out. Unencumbered by silly, empty-headed little girls like Delightful Dee. You will have nothing but time to seek the truth.”

He stared back at her for a few moments, then dropped his gaze. He pulled gently on Dee’s arm. “Go on,” he said.

She didn’t move for a moment, then let go of his jacket and took his hand in hers. “Don’t let go,” she whispered, and turned, pulling him after her.

The door looked right, too. He was surprised at how faded his memory of arriving at the place had become, but that was the way his memory worked, ever since his Lost Years, years spent in bars, drinking compulsively, obliterating days and weeks and months, all of it a blur. Nothing stuck, nothing stayed clear for long.

He turned and looked back at Agnes as Dee led him forward. “What happens to you?”

She smiled. He thought it was almost a sad smile. Almost.

“I will be here, of course, in a sense. I am your guide, Mr. Marks. You will leave and the Black House will reset, and I will still be here—but I will be different, in every way.”

“Do you remember?”

Her smiled faded. “Some.”

“So we have something in common.”

For a moment she looked disturbed by this, the slight downturn of her perfect features implying a frown. Then she recovered, laughing, throwing her head back. Her laugh was musical.

“Do not fret, Mild Mannered Marks. Do not worry for me. We shall see each other again. You will forget. You will forget. We will try again.”

Dee dragged him towards the door.

He swallowing hard, still looking at Agnes. “How many times have I been here?”

Agnes shook her head and looked away, as if preoccupied with something on the far wall. Marks stood his ground for a few moments, then allowed himself to be pulled towards the door, turning, his face ashen.

The door opened. Easily, naturally, and the street was beyond it, as it had been. It was raining, and cold.

Dee paused and for a moment they stood framed in it, holding hands.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ve got a debt to pay.”

Dee nodded. “Don’t let go,” she said again, and stepped forward.

Marks didn’t move, but he found himself dragged forward as if greased. As Dee marched through the doorway, he slid behind her, pulled along in her gravity well.

Behind them, he heard the rustle of skirts. “What? Mr. Marks! Mr. Marks you have an obligation! You have agreed to terms!”

As Dee pulled him through the doorway, he could feel heat and hear noise building up behind him, and he closed his eyes as they were replaced by the cold and the damp and the feeling of open space, infinite and exploding outwards in every direction at once, the smell of the city and the real world he’d thought he’d lost.

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

42. The Yellow Room

The tunnel was damp, dark, and hot; it went on longer than most of the hallways so far, and Marks began to fear they’d made a terrible mistake. The noise got steadily louder, the vibration under their hands got more and more powerful, and it occurred to him they might be moving towards the approaching destruction of the place. When the door finally swam up from the darkness, he smiled in relief and pushed it forward eagerly, and they emerged into blinding light that made them both reflexively squint and shield their eyes.

It was a small room decorated entirely in yellow.

Monstrous sunflowers towered above them in yellow ceramic vases everywhere throughout the room, all of them vibrating and walking this way and that as the whole space shook; the sound of destruction was almost too loud to be shouted over. The flowers seemed freshly-cut. The air was thick with fragrance, making him cough, but he’d never actually smelled a sunflower before. He didn’t know if they were really this overpoweringly sweet, or if the scent was being pumped in somehow, which wouldn’t surprise him.

Aside from the vases, the room was filled with yellow cardboard boxes, all marked with a black stencil reading PHONE BOOKS. As they stood there, a handful of bugs that had attached themselves to them wriggled free, dropping to the floor and making their way to the vases, seeking new homes. Marks wondered briefly if they’d just introduced a destructive species to the room, if the next set of victims wouldn’t find it decimated, all the plants eaten, the yellow turned brown and green from rot. Assuming anything of the current maze survived.

A phone started ringing. It was distant, almost lost in the noise, but they could both just pick it out.

They both froze, looking at each other. Marks held up a hand for silence, unnecessarily, and began spinning around, trying to locate the source of the ringing. It was an old-fashioned ring, like an ancient landline. The only exit from the room seemed to be a winding staircase, disappearing into the floor and the ceiling. He stepped over to it and stood very still for a few moments, listening, but he couldn’t tell where the ringing was coming from.

Just as suddenly, the ringing stopped. The noise of collapse seemed to get louder, and Marks could feel the floor shifting under his feet from the vibration. Dust sifted down from the ceiling onto them.

Dee walked over to a stack of the boxes. She noticed more stenciling on some of the boxes, reading THIS END UP. A quick survey showed that not every box had the extra instructions. She looked at Marks, and they shrugged at each other again, not needing to talk. She looked down and tore at one of the double-stenciled boxes, ripping the flaps up and digging down into it. She reached in and pulled out a stack of checkbooks. She recognized the blue safety paper. She squinted at them; there was no address or bank information.

She tossed one to Marks and bent to one of the boxes with just one stencil. She tore it open, but inside was only foam packing peanuts—yellow. She dumped out the box to show Marks, and thought they looked like fat, the fat that got sucked out of people on medical documentaries.

The distant phone began to ring again.

“This shit,” Dee shouted tiredly. “Is gettin’ weird!”

Marks nodded, eyes roaming the painfully yellow room. “Up or down, though, at least it’s not complicated.”

She pursed her lips. “Which makes me think it is complicated. And that we’re never getting out of here.”

Marks shook his head. “This goddamn place. It’s perfect, Dee, don’t you see? One way out. The other way, shit, I don’t know—but it won’t be good. And it all comes down to chance. We made it this far. Let’s say—for shits and giggles!—we’ve made the right choices, we’re on the path like I said. It doesn’t matter, because the path brings us to a fucking roll of the dice.” He laughed. “There are no clues. There’s no puzzle. We just flip the coin, up or down.” He kicked a box, hard, sending it flying, check books scattering everywhere. “This goddamn place.” He dragged a hand down his face. “I need a fucking drink.”

Dee studied him. “Dude, don’t fall apart on me now.”

He barked a laugh. “Why not? This seems like the perfect time to fall apart.”

She stared at him. “You promised you’d get me out. You promised.”

“Yeah, well—”

She stamped her foot, and for some reason the tiny gesture stopped him. “Okay,” she said, “the whole place is screwing with us. Falling apart behind us, driving us forward. Herding us. Sending people who look like … who look like … to fool us, to mess us up. And now here we are and you know one way will trap us again and we can’t know which one. But you promised.”

Marks stared at her and was ashamed of himself. He’d seen things like this. His own life was ruined. Dee had a chance, still. She was an orphan and if her father’s death couldn’t be pinned on him, hers could, if he left her in the Black House. If he let it claim her the way it had claimed Agnes.

He looked down at his shoes. “All right, kid. You’re right. Might as well see it all the way through.”

She smiled falteringly. “Besides, Marks, maybe it isn’t random. Maybe there’s a clue, like the chess pieces, or something. Maybe we just haven’t seen it.”

He nodded without looking up. “Maybe.”

She toed one of the boxes. “Like, why do some of these boxes say this end up? The ones that do say phone books, but they got checkbooks in ?em instead.”

As she spoke, the phone stopped ringing again.

“I still can’t tell if that’s above us or below us,” Marks said, slowly seeming to inflate, to animate.

“Probably just Agnes calling to call us names.”

A ghostly smile flitted across his face. “Probably,” he agreed.

“Checkbooks. Check books,” Dee said, wandering around. “Check the books.” She looked up at Marks. “Where else we see books in this dump?”

“The Library,” Marks said. “Dictionaries!”

“Huh,” she said. “That bedroom, the spare room—Lost Horizon!”

With a ear-splitting crack, one of the walls began to split, a chasm in the stone blinking into existence and immediately spidering into a complex pattern of slowly spreading lines. The floor seemed to tilt under them, the whole room shaking violently.

Above them, the spiral staircase suddenly jerked, as if twisting free from its moorings.

“Marks!” Dee screamed over the noise, shielding her eyes from the bright reflected light that seemed to have suddenly jumped from intense to blinding. She couldn’t see him—she couldn’t see anything, everything had become a bright yellow blur, the world shaking as if someone had taken hold of the room like a child holding a toy block, shaking it violently in their pudgy fist.

She felt his hand on her arm and she allowed him to pull her in. Vaguely, as if he were a mile away instead of right next to her, she heard him shout time to go! Up or down!

They were just barely ahead of the collapse, he thought. A few seconds, it felt like, and the whole place was coming down around them, crushing them, leaving them in a formless void, or being crunched up as it was all broken down to atoms and rebuilt—whatever it was, it meant they wouldn’t be around any more. And the thought of somehow becoming permanently part of this place, of his atoms being ground up and mixed in with the mortar and the fabric of the rooms created for the next unlucky person to wander into the Black House—it was intolerable.

Up or down! he shouted again, pulling at her. They had seconds. Chunks of the walls and ceiling were falling, and the floor was undulating in waves as if it was made of liquid.

Up! she screamed, and he barely caught the word under the weight of the din. We. Go. Up!

He nodded and turned. Holding her close, he made his way to the stairs, staggering and rolling, trying to match his weight distribution to the new gravity he encountered with each step. A section of ceiling crashed into the floor directly in front of him, and he barely had time to consider how dead they would both be if he’d been moving just a little bit faster.

Kicking phone books out of the way, he pulled them up onto the stairs and began climbing.

It shook violently, trying to buck them off. After four steps upward, twisting around, the bottom of the stairs tore free from the floor, treads flying, and Marks doubled his efforts, trying to run up with just one hand to brace himself as the stairs swung this way and that. Dee threw her arms around his waist and squeezed, giving him back his second arm, and he began half-running, half-pulling himself up as the stairs dissolved behind and beneath him.

As the ceiling, ragged and pocked with missing chunks, drew near, the light began to fail.

This is it, Marks thought, sweating and breathing hard but, oddly, at peace. They’d given it their best shot, he thought. he could see the bolts holding the stairs in place jiggling and popping, and then he was up past the line of the ceiling. The stairs melted away beneath him, and with one final leap he threw himself up and to the side, praying there was a floor to land on.

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

41. The Restroom

The linking hallway, unfinished and twisting, went on far longer than the others. Marks slowly realized it was shrinking as they advanced, getting smaller and smaller. After about a hundred feet, he was on all fours, crawling along what had become an air duct, the drywall giving way to thin galvanized steel that burped and warped under them, giving every impression that they were suspended in the air over a large space.

Just when he wondered if he would be able to continue forward or if the duct was going to narrow too much for his shoulders, he came across a ventilation grate. He stopped so suddenly Dee bumped into him from behind.

“Ack,” she whispered. “Old man butt.”

He peered down through the slats of the vent. There was a space below, lit by a flickering white light that buzzed and clicked. He could see what looked like tile work.

He twisted around painfully and looked at her. “We can go down, or we can go on.”

She took a deep breath and wiped sweat form her face, leaving behind a dark blur of dirt. “No clues, huh? No more music, no more chess?”

He shook his head. “If there are, I’m missing them. It’s down, or forward.”

She nodded, then froze. “Wait—do you hear that?”

Marks shook his head. She held up a hand and they both sat frozen for a moment in the humid darkness. The roar of the maze tearing itself apart was back—muffled, although the duct shivered and shook with it, a bass line running under their hands and knees, driving them forward. Slowly, he became aware of a familiar tinkling noise, and he smiled.

“Water,” he said.

She scrambled back a foot or two as he stretched out and began kicking at the vent with the heel of one foot. He found himself struggling for breath, the duct seeming intolerable hot, and he worked as hard as he could. The fourth impact sent the vent tumbling down to the floor below, and he grinned, holding out his arms. Dee crawled forward and lowered her legs through the hole, and Marks steadied her and slowly lowered her down through it. When he had extended himself as far as possible, he took a deep, ragged breath.

“Gonna drop you!”

“Okay!”

He let go, and heard her land effortlessly on the floor below. He scrambled to follow as quickly as possible, dropping down in a rush and landing awkwardly, turning his ankle slightly, making him wince and dance for balance. His ankle and back both joined in a symphony of pain for a moment.

It was a bathroom all right, a public restroom, done in gleaming white tile. It smelled strongly of cleaning products. The lights were bright white fluorescents that buzzed and hummed ominously. They could hear water dripping, somewhere. He could feel the collapse in the floor. The lights flickered in time with the enormous noise, making it that much harder to think.

There were three white urinals against the wall to their left, a row of four sinks with bright chrome fixtures set under a large, smudged mirror to their left, and two wastepaper baskets. One of the faucets was running, filling the room with a distinctly damp sound.

There were four stalls across from the sinks, doors closed. Each stall door had a Roman Numeral written on it in what appeared to be black marker: X, V, III, C.

The whole room was painfully white, even the grout between the tiles. It hurt his eyes. The whole place looked like it had been recently scrubbed clean by a team of desperate professionals. He imagined he could eat out of the urinals, but decided not to say so.

“Marks,” Dee said.

He turned and followed her arm to a section of the mirror where someone had written several sentences in the same black marker:

I wonder at a holy mystery

I ponder the terror of ghosts

I am fonder by far of agony

the room floods and you are lost

The phrases were each in wildly different handwriting, as if written by different people.

Marks nodded. “Well, that’s goddamn disturbing. Water first,” he said, and Dee nodded back. They crossed to the sinks and opened up a second faucet. Clear water came rushing out, and they each thrust their heads into the basins to drink. For a few moments it was just the sound of water, and then Marks straightened up, shrugged off his backpack, extracted a plastic bottle and held it under the stream while Dee straightened up and wiped her mouth.

“It was getting a little dry, huh?” he asked.

“A little dry,” she said, smiling a little.

He capped the bottle, took another long drink at the faucet, and then turned to look around, water dripping from the whiskers on his chin. He reached up and scratched at them, surprised; he didn’t think they’d been inside for so long.

Dee twisted the faucet handle, but the stream of water wouldn’t stop. The sink wasn’t draining, either, and was rapidly filling up. She glanced at Marks and saw him having the same struggle. As she did so, the other two sinks suddenly switched on, water pouring and filling their basins.

The noise of the collapse seemed suddenly louder, and the whole room shook as if an earthquake was going on.

Marks looked at her. Then he pointed at the poem written on the mirror. “The room floods and you are lost!” he shouted. “I guess that’s to be taken literally. No exit doors,” he said, looking around. “And the vent’s too high to get back up to!”

Dee nodded. Marks thought she was sadly calm, inured to the constant betrayals and struggle of this place, and he felt an enormous weight of blame. “How much you wanna bet that vent is closed somehow, we float up there? But we got four doors.”

Marks nodded, dropping the bottle back into the backpack. He considered the niceness of the trap: They’d been thirsty, in fact dying of thirst, and now they had water—too much of it.

He strolled towards the stalls. He walked up to each and put his hand on them, palm flat, and then dropped down to look under the doors. He paused; each stall was horrifying in a different way. X was blood-splattered, gore dripping down the interior walls; the floor in V was covered in a thick pelt of ash, ghostly bones peeking through; III’s floor undulated, a million insectoid bodies crawling over each other; C looked clean, but a foul smell drifted under the door, rot and char and something else that burned his nose.

He sat back. “Huh,” he said out loud.

“Marks.”

Dee was standing over one of the wastepaper baskets. He stood up and joined her. Sitting at the bottom of the basket was a single sheet of paper, with text written on it in the same marker.

ALERT

YOU ONLY

GET TO

OPEN

ONE

“Well,” Dee said, sounding tired. “That’s fucking ominous.”

Marks nodded. He knew how she felt, he thought; it was numbing, the endlessness of the Black House. Every room seemed so promising, every revelation, every new door. And then you found yourself once again pondering a riddle and wondering if you weren’t really just spinning wheels. It was entirely possible, he reminded himself, that all of these tantalizing clues that seemed to indicate a route, a purpose, might have been part of the trap, part of the torture.

As he thought the word torture, water began overspilling the sinks and running onto the floor. The room shook again, a distant explosion spiking the noise level.

He looked at the stalls and considered what he’d seen through the gaps. He nodded. “I believe it,” he said, imagining Agnes sweeping through here and tearing the sign down in anger, another prank by her “minions,” and tossing it into the garbage. “I actually think if we open the wrong one, we’re in for a world of pain.”

Dee stepped over to stand next to him, crossing her arms and wearily studying the stall doors.

“Ten, five, three, and … what’s ?C’ stand for?”

“Hundred,” Marks said.

“Ten, five, three, hundred. Mean shit to you?”

Marks shook his head. “Not right off. Can’t spell anything with them. Why Roman numerals? Why numbers at all?” He turned and leaned down for a drink, the water pooling in a shallow layer on the floor.

Dee bent down and retrieved the paper from the wastepaper basket, smoothing it out and studying it. “I keep thinking there’s a hint here, right? Look how it’s written, like a poem.” She stared down at the page. “Maybe there’s something about the letters. Letters on the doors, letters in the note … there are no Cs, Is, Vs or Xs.”

Marks straightened up, wiping his chin and staring at the mirror. “You know what? No Xs or Vs in the poem, either.” He leaned forward and squinted. “No Cs, either.”

Dee turned and looked. “Three Is, though.”

They both turned to look at the stalls.

“Seems too easy,” Dee said.

“Who says it has to be hard? Takes brains to make a good puzzle. Not everyone has brains.”

“We got brains?”

“Definitely fucking not,” Marks said, “considering we got trapped in here.” He walked over to the stall with the numeral III on it. He put his hand on it and closed his eyes. “Had to be bugs. Had to be, huh?”

“You don’t like bugs?”

Marks nodded. “I was in a shithole apartment. This was a few years ago, still sliding, still a part of the world. Not yet at bottom. At night I could hear some critter in the walls—a rat, a squirrel, who knows. Scratch scratch scratch, all night. Drove me crazy. Then one day, no more scratching, I won the lottery. I got really lit that night, celebrating. And then the flies came. The fucking flies. A few at first, barely noticed them. Then more, and more. One morning I woke up, the room was thick with flies, a black wave of them. The damn animal had died in my wall.” He swallowed. “I had nowhere else to go. So I stayed. I stayed until the flies finally died off.”

“Jesus, Marks,” Dee said. “That’s awful.”

He nodded. “Just one of the many merry stops I made on my way to the bottom.” He turned. “Look at those lines,” he said. “I think that’s our clue. Three Is. Roman numeral three. Bugs.”

She nodded again, and he felt it again: That weariness, that defeat. The girl had been abandoned, left to fend for herself, then lost inside this insanity engine. And she’d chased after her father only to be tortured with his death, finding him carved up and used as a prop—for what?

“All right,” she said, and they walked forward together, sloshing through a surprisingly deep pool of water; Marks suspected more was being pumped in from hidden places. Marks took a deep breath and angled his body to shield Dee as he pulled the stall door open.

The whole tiny space was crawling with insects, but they were all harmless. Revolting, perhaps, but nothing that stung or bit or infested the body—just thousands of legs and squirming, shiny bodies, gleaming dumb eyes. Instead of a toilet, there was a tunnel. It looked like it had been torn out of the wall, the edges rough and wriggling with bugs. He could see a rough-hewn tunnel heading into the wall for a few feet, then making what he now regarded as the usual right-hand turn that prevented him from seeing anything else.

“Gross,” Dee said emphatically, and Marks smiled.

“Come on,” he said. “Before we drown.”

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

40. The Myna Bird Room

Marks and Dee each threw themselves out of the way. The suddenly giant bird’s beak crashed down on the floor, sending spidery cracks in every direction.

“Dee!” Marks shouted, grabbing hold of her arm and pulling her close.

“Watch out!” she shouted.

“Mawk! Show you the way!” the bird bellowed, fluffing its suddenly immense wings and puffing out its chest. Marks thought it didn’t look like a bird any more. It looked like something else entirely, a demon, a devil. The feathers on the back of its head had stiffened and bristled, giving it a dark crown. It loomed over them, its face more expressive than Marks thought possible, collapsing into a mask of anger and disapproval.

“Here it comes!” Dee screamed.

The bird lunged at them. Marks picked Dee up bodily and twisted away. he was knocked off his feet as the beak slammed into the floor where she’d been. They both fell into a heap on the floor. He turned his head. The bird was struggling, making a choking noise as it tried to extract its beak from the floor, where it had become securely wedged.

He looked at Dee.

“We gotta make a run for it!” she shouted, pointing at the doors.

He nodded. “Tiger!”

They ran. Marks twisted around every few steps to ensure Dee was right behind him, which offered him an unfortunate view of the giant bird, wings spread, beak open, and eyes blazing as it chased after them, enormous beak open.

Must go faster, he thought stupidly. Just as they reached the door with the tiger carving, he turned to check on Dee and saw the bird lunging forward. He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun them away, stumbling to his knees and pushing her roughly as he fell. The bird smacked into the door and shattered it with a noise like an explosion.

He grabbed at Dee and pulled her up. She felt light, like she didn’t weigh anything. Her face was wide and frightened—a direct reflection, he was certain, of his own. After seeing her father in the Incision Room, he thought, things had changed: Now he knew they could—both—die in this place. The idea of being impaled by a giant bird suddenly didn’t seem impossible. The idea of Dee dying in this place didn’t seem impossible, and a cold vein of fear had set up permanently in his belly. He’d done this. He’d brought her into this.

The bird was stuck again, though, flapping its giant wings as it tried to extricate itself from the ruined door. Marks grabbed Dee’s hand again.

“Viper!” he hissed. “Hurry!”

They ran for it as the bird tore the Tiger door off its hinges, the door still embedded over its beak. It thrashed this way and that, trying to shake it off, strangled, choked-on squawking noises bubbling from its chest. As they reached the Viper door, it brought its beak down hard on the floor, making the boards jump and knocking them off balance as the Tiger door shattered and fell away. Marks stumbled backwards and landed on his ass, dragging Dee down with him.

“Fuck!” he shouted in frustration, a sharp lance of pain driving up through his back. Dee sprang back off him, staring and backing towards the Viper door.

“Come on!” she shouted. “Come on!”

He lumbered up, back snarling in protest, and staggered after her. Dee scurried nimbly forward and pulled the door open. Marks could feel the floor shaking as the bird chased him, could see the terror in Dee’s eyes. He waved at her.

“Go!” he shouted. “I’m right behind you!”

She darted inside. He was just a step behind, breathing hard and sweating freely. He ducked in through the doorway, into the familiar rough hallway, and was just beyond reach when the bird slammed its head into the doorway, making the framing groan and crack. It screeched, beak open far wider than should have been possible, and he backed away from it as rapidly as he could, eyes locked on it, certain it would tear itself loose, shrink down, pass through the wall—something. That it would just keep coming and coming.

It didn’t. It screeched again, but the sound grew muffled as he turned the usual corner in the hallway. He spun and chased after Dee, who was just opening the next door. She turned and watched him urgently as he limped after her. She slammed the door shut as he passed through, and the door vanished, as if absorbed by the wall.

For a moment they both stood there, panting, staring at the unbroken plaster.

Marks turned and blinked in the sudden silence, shivered in the sudden cold of crank air. They were in a small, modern room with a movie screen at one end and a few folding chairs behind a simple table in the middle. The blasting air conditioning was loud, and he could feel the breeze of it. He thought it must be about thirty degrees. He wrapped his arms around himself and walked over to the table.

There was a box of half-eaten donuts on it, which he picked up and sniffed at, then handed over to Dee. She stared dully at the donuts, knowing they needed some kind of food but sick with adrenaline and terror. There were also several congealed cups of coffee on the table, mold growing on them. There was also a film canister, labeled Psycho, Hitchcock, 100 mins.

He looked up. There was just one door in the room. It had a small blue and white sign on it, showing a simple icon of a woman on one side of a dividing line, and an icon of a man on the other.

“Restrooms,” he murmured softly.

“Sure,” he heard Dee say. “Why not.”

In the crisp silence—the sort of silence that hinted at insulation in the walls, muffled and damped—he strained to hear the bird’s tortured squawking, but couldn’t. Slowly, he let the tension drain out of him. The door had disappeared behind them, so while the bird might still be out there, searching, for the moment he thought they were safe.

He shrugged off his backpack and sat down in one of the folding chairs, half expecting it to dissolve beneath him and dump him onto the floor. He pulled out the notebook, which looked like it was decades old, torn and stained. He opened it to his most recent map and made further notes, adding the new room, and sketching a tiny danger sign next to the Myna Bird’s room. Then he stood up, put the notebook back, and held the bag open for Dee to stuff the box of stale pastries into it. He looked around one more time, hopefully, looking for water, but there was none.

“All right,” he said, tiredly. “Only one door, so we might as well.”

“Are we still on track?” Dee said. “I feel like doubling back on the bird room was a mistake, and now we soirt of panic-chose this one.”

Marks sighed. He thought of the bird. Mawk, way out, I know, set me free! He thought of how it had destroyed the Tiger door. He pictured the crown of feathers over its head. “We can’t know,” he said. “Until we make a few more moves. We need to see where this leads. Nothing for it.”

She nodded. “I’m fucking tired, Mr. Marks.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, feeling awkward. “I know. Me too. Come—”

The lights went down and a hidden projector revved up, filling the screen with a test pattern, grays and whites and nonsensical images followed by an old-fashioned countdown, starting from five. They turned and stared at the screen, each of them thinking the exact same thing in the exact same words: what fresh piece of bullshit is this?

The countdown made it to two before the film jammed and melted. A moment later the lights came back up. They stood for a moment, waiting, but the room had returned to its static, still state. Wordlessly, they both walked to the restroom door. It had no lock or handle, but swung inward. Marks held it open and Dee slipped past.

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39. The Xeric Room

“Come on!” he heard Dee shout, distant. “There’s a way back!”

Marks stepped into the hallway, gathering up rope as he walked. As he turned the sharp corner that all the connecting hallways between the places in the Black House had, he could feel heat building, like he was walking towards a huge furnace. When he turned the corner and stepped through the doorway, blistering heat almost knocked him down as he stepped into an impossible, wide-open space.

Sand, unbelievably, crunched under his feet. It was too large to be a room. It was a … place? An environment? A world? None of the terms seemed to fit. Squinting and holding his hand over his eyes to shield them from the bright light that was almost exactly like sunlight, he could actually see a horizon in the distance. In each direction all he could see was blue sky and sand. Despite the glare of the light, there was no sun in the sky.

There was some sort of landmark: A cactus stood proudly not too far away. He was already sweating freely, and thinking about water again. He turned and found a door frame freestanding in the middle of the air, the door opened outward, a goat carved onto it. He leaned around and peered behind it, finding only sand, no evidence of the hallway that led to a garden just a few subjective feet away.

Dee was standing by the cactus, the rope still knotted tightly around her waist. She grinned at Marks and looked around. He walked over to her; the sand was loose and fine and difficult to find purchase in, and he was breathing hard by the time he reached her.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the ground.

Drawn in the sand around the plant at the four corners of the compass were four symbols; the stick used to scratch them was discarded nearby. The symbols were a fish, a crown, a cross, and a key, each with an arrow pointing away into the distance—the fish pointed back at the freestanding, impossible door that led to the garden.

“Hmmph,” Marks said. The thin, dry air seemed to snatch his voice away with the constant, steady hot breeze.

A sound from above made him look up; small dark shapes were circling around them, high in the air.

“Vultures,” he said softly. “Come to see how long we can stand the baking.”

“Shit,” Dee said in a low voice, following his gaze.

“No footprints,” he added.

She looked down and around. “Shit,” she repeated.

“My guess,” he said after a moment, “is that we start walking, we die in here. Or are lost forever. Same thing, really.”

She nodded. “Moth, then.”

“Moth.”

Back in the garden, Marks looped the rope around his elbow and hand and then shoved it into the backpack. He pulled out the notebook and made some notes in it, bringing his messy map up to date with the new information, including some cryptic notes about the drawings in the sand he hoped would make sense someday. He wondered if everything there connected somehow to him or Dee, if only they thought about it. The stuff everywhere, the dictionaries, the carvings and drawings. He looked around, wondering if every single detail had been plucked from their brains, their memories.

He was thirsty. As he stuffed the notebook back into the backpack, he knew that if he was wrong about the song being the key, if he was wrong about the insane logic of the place, they would both die in here, absorbed by it. He could hear and feel the collapse of the place, the grinding up of rooms behind them as if by enormous teeth, and corrected himself: It sounded very much as if they would die some sort of horrible, painful death if they stayed there. There was little choice but to keep moving. He had the idea that as long as they were on the right path, as long as they were heading towards the exit, the path couldn’t collapse. Couldn’t be ground up to be remade into the next version.

He didn’t have any proof, or reason why this had to be. It was all faith. He believed he understood the Black House, its rules, its purpose. If he didn’t, it didn’t matter.

“What’s the next chord again?” Dee asked. “After the minor one, I mean.”

“F,” he said, slinging the backpack onto his shoulder and standing up.

She nodded. “Shit, Marks, there was a fish in that desert!”

Marks nodded. “True. But it pointed back here. I think it was making sure we went in the right direction. And there was a Fly in the concert hall.”

“Yeah, if this place plays by rules, which we’ve seen, like, zero evidence for,” she said. When she looked back at him, he thought she looked tired and dirty. She pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “We gotta be close,” she said, nodding firmly. “We’re almost through.”

He nodded back without enthusiasm, his mouth dry and thick, his stomach rumbling. “Ready?”

“Ready eddy.”

He smiled faintly, and they walked over to the door with the moth carved on it. The old door was soft and rotten, the iron hinges rusted, and it was difficult to open. He managed to get it open far enough for them to slip through—her, easily, him with a panic moment when he appeared to be wedged. Then the usual twisting hallway, the usual second door. He pushed it open and found darkness; the noise of collapse, the tearing, grinding noise, was much louder, as if it was right there in the room.

He hesitated a moment. He wondered if that was what the grinding noise left behind: Darkness, nothingness, void. Thinking there was no other choice, he stepped through, and fell a short distance, landing awkwardly. A moment later he heard Dee land next to him with more grace, and suddenly there was light, soft and yellow.

There was still the slightest scent of peppermint perfume in the air.

He looked around. “Fuck me.”

It was a simple room with plaster walls that had been painted a garish shade of red. The floor was worn and scratched hardwood. There was no furniture.

Except for the birdcage in one corner, the large black bird staring at them, eyes shining.

“Mawk, good to see you awk!”

Dee sat down on the floor. “Oh my god,” she said dully. “We got fucked.”

“Mawk, set me free, set me free, awk!”

Marks felt tears in the back of his throat. He was exhausted. So tired, and here they were in a room they’d already been to, meaning he was either totally wrong about the path out, or they’d simply made a wrong turn, chosen the wrong door. He remembered the door that had led them here before; it had a bird carving on it—a Myna Bird, he now realized. It had been literal. He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t care any more. Maybe they should have stayed in the desert. Maybe that had been the trick, making them afraid to wander the searing sands, scaring them off the correct trail.

“What do we do now?”

Marks closed his eyes. The doors were tiger, hippo, and ibex. The way back to the garden had vanished. They’d gone through the hippo door and into the Hall of Mirrors. They’d been through the Ibex door from another route and been in the surgery. That left the tiger door, but he stared at it glumly. He had no faith that it meant anything. It was just another door. And they were never getting out.

The noise was getting louder, slowly approaching. He wondered if there was even a maze left to backtrack through. He thought, with the notebook, that he could retrace their steps, but he wondered if the rooms they’d been in were still there, or if most of the maze had been destroyed behind them. He wondered if it even mattered, if he’d even been correct in thinking there were patterns to perceive.

“Mawk! Set me free! Set me free! Way out!”

“Shut up, bird,” Dee whispered.

Marks stood up and walked over to the cage. It looked like someone had recently changed out the newspapers lining the bottom and the water; it seemed clearer and less spoiled than before. He remembered Agnes saying something about minions; perhaps that hadn’t been a lie. Perhaps there were hidden beings, re-shaping the place, cleaning it, maintaining it—tearing it apart.

He looked up, listening to the noise, picturing giants destroying everything, re-building, re-arranging.

“Awk!” the bird screeched. “Way out! Set me free!”

Marks bent down again and looked at the bird. It stared back at him steadily, shifting its weight subtly on the wooden dowl it perched on.

“Set you free,” he said quietly.

The bird ducked its head, as if nodding assent.

“I guess we go Tiger?” Dee said, standing up. She sounded defeated, too. Tired. She sounded like she was making the suggestion for no particular reason. As if she had no expectation, but had decided she couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. “Nothing else to do, right? At least it’s a new room. Maybe we’ll get a hint as to where we went wrong.”

Marks continued to stare at the bird. “Did we?”

Dee snorted. “We doubled back on ourselves. You said M for minor but we got M for myna and we’re back in this stupid, useless room.”

Mark nodded. “Maybe we set the bird free.”

Dee stepped over to him and leaned in to peer at the bird as well. It looked at her, than back at Marks. “You serious?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Why not? It keeps saying it knows the way out. It wants to be set free. The next chord would be an F. Maybe it’s F for free.”

Dee shook her head. “That means we could of gotten out way back when we were here with … with her. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does. It’s a trick. It’s a game. The place messing with us.” He looked at her. “Or it needs to happen in a specific order, like opening a safe—a combination. What’s to lose? We set it free. See what happens.” He looked at the bird again. “Doesn’t it look smart? Like it understands?”

The bird ducked its head.

Dee frowned. “That did almost look like a nod.”

The bird ducked again. She cocked her head. “We set you free, you show us the way, huh, Little Man?”

The bird ducked. “Awk! Way out!”

Marks nodded. He reached out and took hold of the tiny door to the cage, a door that seemed far too small for the bird—too small for it to have even gotten into the cage in the first place. He took a breath and looked at the Bird; it was staring at him intently, its wings moving in subtle rolling motions, as if it was preparing itself for exertion.

He pulled the door open.

For a moment, the bird just stared at the opening. Marks and Dee held their breath. The shattering noise went on, crunching and groaning.

And then the bird moved. It fluttered its wings. And started to grow. It swelled up, quickly filling the cage and then bursting out of it, sending Marks and Dee scampering to escape an explosion of shrapnel. The bird took flight, making one circuit of the room as it grew and grew. When it returned to hover over them, flapping its wings, it was as large as Dee. At its new size, it was much more frightening. Even worse was the intelligent way it peered down at them.

“Well, fuck me,” Marks whispered in the sudden, ominous silence.

“Fuck us both,” Dee added.

The bird ducked its head. Then it reared up and pecked at Marks.

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As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

38. The Garden

He stood in the midst of the garden, staring at the noose tied to the large oak tree, and remembered.

It came to him as a series of images, at first, disconnected, random. He saw her: Agnes. He saw her sitting in a coffee shop, a diner, sipping coffee, worried and unhappy. He saw her staring at him, studying, her hands wrapped in a paper napkin which she twisted and tore. She was both prettier and more haggard than the Agnes he’d met in the Black House.

He remembered her now: A client, long ago. Unhappy and frightened, plagued with a series of mysterious messages from her deceased husband. She’d found Marks the usual way, he realized: Asking around, desperate, until someone took her story seriously and suggested a name, a man who was known to look into the strange, the mysterious.

She’d gone missing herself, he recalled, but she’d left word for him: An address, a note saying she’d been told this was where her David was to be found. And he’d traveled there, dutiful, and he’d entered, and he’d found himself here, in the Black House. Except everything had been different. The foyer had been filled with hunting trophies. There had been no library that he recalled. And the doors had been marked with patterns of dots. But it was the same place. He listened to the approaching noise of collapse and realized it was also the approaching noise of reconstruction, the Black House unmaking itself and reconfiguring everything, choosing new puzzles, new decorations, new traps.

“I’ve been here before,” he said out loud, hearing Dee behind him.

He remembered her, Agnes, the real Agnes, asking him for a dollar, sitting at the diner. He remembered having just three dollars to his name, but he’d given her one. She was so sad, so pretty, he couldn’t resist. And she’d gone to the jukebox and played the same song, over and over again. And he’d sat there and he’d thought she was beautiful.

“Marks?”

He stared at the noose. They were in a formal garden, surrounded by an incredibly high stone wall. It was a peaceful place filled with plants, but hadn’t been tended for a long while. The stone benches were overgrown with mold, as if the ground were slowly reclaiming them. The walls were engulfed in ivy, making them seem part of the landscape instead of merely a container. The fountains were dry, and the little frescoes of fish diving in and out of the water were faded and dulled, their crimson paint washed away by time. Here and there a path traced a faint way through the overgrown grass and the exotic plants that thrived with less attention.

The tree was massive and ancient. The rope was old and didn’t look like it would hold anyone’s weight.

There were four vine-covered wooden gates in the walls; the vegetation was so thick on them the carvings were hard to make out, and on one the carving had been deliberately destroyed, blackened and chopped away. The remaining three displayed the familiar Newt and Octopus, and a Moth.

“Marks?” Dee repeated, stepping carefully forward. “You okay?”

“I was here,” he repeated. “I forgot. I forget a lot of things. Something happened to me, and I forget a lot of things, now. I was here, though. So was she.”

Dee frowned. “Agnes?”

Marks nodded. “Just like your Dad. And I came here to find her, to rescue her. And I failed.”

He remembered her by the jukebox. Bright daylight, the diner half-full, the smell of coffee, the feeling of energy buzzing in the air. She played that same terrible, awful song four times in a row and just stood there, swaying slightly, beautiful. Sad. Terrified. And he knew he would try to help.

He remembered the phone message from her, the next day: An address, a lead, something she’d stumbled on in her husband’s effects.

Dee swallowed. “Did you find her like … like we found Dad?”

Marks nodded again. He half-turned, and she was shocked at the look on his face: Bleak, desolate. “Yes,” he said. “Just like that. And the place has been trying to torture me with her, but my fucking broken brain screwed that up, and I didn’t see.” He hit himself in the temple, hard, and Dee took a step back in shock. He hit himself again, and she stepped forward.

“Mr. Marks!” she shouted. “Stop it!”

“I’m useless, kid,” he said slowly, breathing hard. “I’ve been kidding myself. I went up against something and it beat me down, it beat me down hard, and I’ve been scraping along and I thought I could survive and maybe even help someone. Help you. But I can’t even tell when I’m being tortured any more.”

He dropped the backpack into the overgrown vegetation and began pulling off his jacket. he was staring up at the noose again.

“Take this,” he said, holding the jacket back towards her without turning around. “There’s money sewn into the lining. A lot of it. Well, not so much these days, but enough for you for a while, get your bearings, figure something out. Take it.”

Dee stepped back again, wrapping her arms around herself. “No.”

He shook the jacket. “If I’m right, the next chord is minor, so you take the Moth door. Then the next chord is an F, so look for the Fly again—I think it’s important you do the rooms in the right order. No shortcuts. After that I’m not sure, to be honest. The next chord would be a D minor, but we’ve been to the Dining Room already. So it has to be something different. I think it’s the end, the exit, but I can’t be certain in this fucking place.”

She shook her head again. “If you’re not sure, come with me. Or I’ll get lost. You know the song, I don’t. You’ve been here before, right? I need you.”

He shook his head. “I’m no good to anyone. I can’t even remember when I get you killed.”

He saw Agnes laid out on the slab, naked, with the same incisions as they’d found on Dennis. There’d been a different clue inside her; not a chess piece but a shot glass, an old school one with a stylized silhouette of a woman on it, heavy and substantial. He remembered the sense of shame, the anger. he remembered shaking with it, his hands in fists as he stood there.

Dee stepped forward slowly. ignoring the jacket held out behind him, she reached up and took one of his hands in hers. It was rough, calloused, and cold. Hers was smooth and warm.

“Marks,” she said, voice shaking. “Come on. You see, right? You were here. That means you got out, once. That means you can get me out.”

He continued to stare at the noose. He knew it had been put there for him. One more twisted joke, one more blade in the ribs from a place that had been playing a series of black jokes against both him and Dee, toying with them like a spider spinning its meal into a cocoon.

Dee tightened her hand on his. “If you make me go on without you, I’ll die in here.”

He startled. “No—”

“I will,” she said earnestly, not raising her voice. “You left me once and I was almost lost for good. If you bail on me now, I’ll be in that room with … with my Dad.”

He closed his eyes. “All right. I’ll get you out.”

She hesitated, willing him to say something else, to promise something more. He didn’t move or open his eyes or speak, so she dragged her arm across her nose and nodded. “Okay. Show me. Why the Moth?”

He sighed heavily. As she released his hand he twisted around and put his jacket back on. He knelt down and opened the backpack, extracting his battered notebook from it. As he flipped through the pages Dee circled around him, placing herself between him and the tree, and crouched down.

“Newt heads to the maze,” Marks said. “Octopus goes to that old, dusty room with all the crap in it. The other door’s mark has been erased, so we don’t know where it goes. The next chord in the song is a G minor, but we’ve already been through the Goat door—that’s here. So I figure M for minor, which means Moth.”

Dee frowned. “But we don’t know where the unmarked door goes to. Maybe it’s the right way, and the Moth is a trick.”

Marks sighed and pushed his hand through his hair. He nodded. “Okay, that’s possible. But do we take that chance? We go through an unmarked door we don’t know where it sends us. Maybe back to the Waiting Room. Or someplace worse, someplace we can’t get out of no matter what we do. Or the maze of unfinished rooms. Honestly, Dee, if we get lost in that maze again we might die in there. We don’t have any food or water left. We need to get out of here quick or you’re going to die of dehydration.”

“We might die of dehydration.”

He nodded absently.

She turned and studied the doors. “We got to know, Marks. We’re so close. I can feel that shit, how close we are. Like this place is pissed off that we’re on the verge, you know? We can’t do something stupid now, pass up an opportunity. The way the mood of this place feels right now, it’s dying for us to screw up, and it’s gonna punish us if we do.” She looked back at him. “So I’m going to go and scout ahead.”

“No,” he said sharply. “That’s—”

“Look,” she said, putting her hands up. “Tie a rope around my waist. I go in, I see what’s up, and if I can’t get back, you pull me back.”

He shook his head again. “Sometimes there’s no physical connection between the rooms—you know that. For all we know you go through and the rope cuts in half. Besides,” he said heavily. “We don’t have any rope. Lost it a long time ago, in the elevator shaft.”

“I’ll go slow. And we got rope, don’t we?”

They both turned and looked up at the noose.

Marks’ smile was faint and awful. “Right. We got rope, all right.” He nodded. “Fine. But I go in with the rope, and you promise me if I can’t make it back, you keep on, go through the Moth.”

“Don’t work. I can’t pull you back, you’re too fucking heavy, old man. You can pull me, though, so if I’m in the middle of the air or something, you can drag me back.”

Marks studied her, then slowly smiled, shaking his head. “Goddamn smart-assed kid,” he said with a laugh. “All right, you’re so skinny and light, you climb on up and get the rope down.”

She snapped off a salute. “Yessir!”

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