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

33. The Pantry

“If I were the author of this journey,” Agnes said as she squeezed into the space, “this would not have been my next move.”

It was a small closet filled with nonperishables—boxes of pasta of all kinds, from fancifully curled to plain old straight spaghetti, boxes of cereals, sugary and shaped like desserts with capering cartoon characters neither Dee or Marks could remember on their fronts, and bags of flour, some of which appear ravaged by mice. The door back to the kitchen didn’t disappear; it remained and the kitchen could be glimpsed whenever it opened. The four of them filled the space neatly, making movement difficult.

On the shelf at Marks’ eye level were a pair of cans, shaped like a tuna can. One had a red label displaying a fanciful bicycle, the other a blue label displaying an ibex, striped antlers extended far beyond what was typically found in nature. Each had a small white envelope taped to it with the words EAT ME written on it in black marker.

He turned slowly, forcing Agnes, Dennis, and Dee to rearrange themselves to stay out of his way. After a moment, he lunged forward and plucked something off the shelf. He held it up to Dee.

She smiled. “Knight,” she said.

“On the path. Except one thing. No exit.”

She stared back, then pointed silently. Marks followed her arm and saw a prominent mouse hole. He looked back at her. “You’re serious?”

Dee shrugged. “It make less sense than anything else we’ve seen? And you read that book, right? Eat me, drink me, all that jazz. Alice.”

Marks sighed and reached out, picking up the red can. It was heavier than he’d expected. He tore the envelope off and opened it, discovering an old fashioned can opener inside. He picked up the blue can, which felt light, like it had nothing inside it at all, and found the same. He looked at Agnes and Dennis, who stared back at him, grinning.

“We’re seriously supposed to eat one of these?”

Agnes shrugged. “Or both?”

Marks rolled his eyes and turned to Dee. “Which one?”

She pondered. “We could each eat a different one.”

Marks shook his head. “That could be disaster. Whatever happens, we need to stick together and have the same experience.”

She pursed her lips. “Blue. It’s got an animal on it.”

“An ibex.”

“Whatever that is.” Dee hesitated. “That a real animal?”

Marks nodded. “And we’ve seen it on a door before. In that room with the creepy black bird.”

She nodded back once, firmly. “That’s it then.”

Marks took a deep breath. “All right. Same time. Whatever happens, happens to both of us.”

Agnes jumped a little, clapping her hands together in delight. Marks took one of the can openers and awkwardly worked the blue can.

“Jesus, I hope this isn’t deviled ibex or something even worse,” Dee said. She thought if the place was taking details from their brains, it might have rummaged around for her least favorite foods, or things that made her gag just thinking about them, and put that in there.

When he had the top of the can sliced through, he peeled it back using the slot on the can opener, thinking that he hadn’t seen an old-school opener like this is a very long time. The can contained a pinkish paste, and the pantry, already hot and crowded, filled with an awful smell.

“That’s … sweaty socks,” Dee said, her face collapsing into a mask of disgust.

Marks shook his head. “Old puke and sawdust,” he said.

Agnes elbowed Dennis in the side. “They’re actually going to eat it!”

Marks scooped some of the goop out of the can with his fingers, then extended the can towards Dee. She leaned away form it, then steadied herself and scooped some out into her hand. Eyes watering, she looked at Marks. He nodded, and they simultaneously jammed the stuff into their mouths.

Dee’s face instantly collapsed even further. “Oh, god,” she moaned.

Marks smiled as he swallowed, finding dark humor in the horror of the situation, and then froze. Simultaneously, Dee jerked and stiffened, her expression transforming into one of intense alarm.

“Mr. Marks!”

He opened his mouth to reply, and the world tilted and shifted in a way he’d never experienced before. Air seemed to rush past him, and the can became rapidly heavier and heavier, as if its mass was somehow increasing. Gravity pulled him one way and then another, and everything blurred as if he was moving very quickly, rocketing through the air. The noise became a roar in his ears, and for a few seconds he couldn’t reliably tell where down was.

Then, suddenly, everything went still.

Breathing hard, he stumbled and fell backwards onto his ass. He looked around and spotted Dee immediately; she was standing far away, but seemed fine. For a moment he thought they’d been transported, somehow, to a completely different room; it was a huge space, cold and soaring, with no ceiling in sight. The floor was rough and pitted, with deep chasms forming a complex pattern around him.

He climbed to his feet and Dee came running over to him. “Marks!” she shouted, her voice sounding thin. “Marks, what happened?”

He turned and looked around. In the distance, he could see a doorway of a sort. It was rounded and rough, the edges unfinished. There was no door, just an opening in the wall. As Dee caught up with him, instinctively taking his hand, he leaned forward slightly.

“Look!”

Marks turned and followed Dee’s outstretched hand. In the distance was an odd structure, a cylindrical tank or building, clad in fraying blue paper. The roof appeared to be bent upwards. After a moment, he looked at Dee.

“We’ve shrunk,” he said. She nodded.

“We’ve shrunk. Like Alice.”

For a moment he indulged in a mental exercise wondering what would have happened if they’d eaten the red can. Nothing good, he assumed. He turned to look at the mousehole, now a perfectly accessible portal to whatever lay beyond. He looked back at Dee.

“You feel okay?” he said, kneeling down and unslinging his backpack. For one second his brain stuttered over the mechanics of not just himself but everything he was wearing and carrying shrinking proportionally, then he had the notebook out and updated the map to reflect the new reality, adding some tiny, spidery notes to explain the mechanics of their current situation.

“Fine,” Dee said. “Freaked out. But fine.”

Marks nodded, re-packing everything. “Agnes tried to make us think twice about eating that … stuff, so I figure we’re on the right track.”

“Where’d Agnes and … him go?”

Marks looked around again. “I don’t know. I’m afraid we’re not done with them, though. They keep disappearing and coming back.”

“So,” Dee said, nodding. “We go through the mousehole?”

“We go through the mousehole,” Marks agreed, standing up. “And we hope.”

“Hope what?”

He settled the backpack into a more comfortable position. “That there’s no mouse.”

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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.

32. The Kitchen

“Someone’s been busy here,” Agnes said.

It was a big room, filled with rows and rows of shelves, several large stoves, and a large wooden country-style table. It looked like a food-fight had been fought recently; egg yolks dripped off the walls, bags of flour had burst open and been scattered all over the place, all the blenders were running, and the table was covered with chopped vegetables, various liquids, pots, pans and other instruments of culinary delight. The floor was blue and white tile, and was covered in flour, milk, and, apparently, chocolate syrup.

Marks noted that along one wall was a rack of knives, some of which looked just a little too….long to have any use in the kitchen. Several had wickedly curved blades that were serrated.

“Something’s gone pretty damn rotten in here,” Dee said, making a face. Behind her. Dennis, now taller than he’d originally been, his skin stretched taut over his face as if it hadn’t kept pace with the rest of him, made the same face.

Marks also thought it was very warm, owing to the ovens, which were uniformly turned to about 400 degrees. There was a coat rack along the back wall that offered a selection of chef’s hats, including one that resembled nothing more than the pointed headgear of a Catholic bishop. Next to that was a narrow door marked PANTRY. There were three other doors he could see: a swinging in/out door next to the pantry featuring the octopus he knew led to the Old Room, a wooden door with the familiar carving of a stag, and a window.

Marks froze, suddenly realizing he was looking at a window. Outside, it looked like a beautiful day, tree limbs swaying in sunshine. He stared at it, suddenly excited and nervous. Could it be? Was it possible that it was that simple, just open the window and climb down a tree, hitch a ride home? He crossed to the window as if in a dream, knowing it was impossible that escape would be so simple, so straightforward, but unable to let go of the possibility.

When he was close, however, he saw it: one pane of glass, thicker at the bottom than the top from age, had been etched with a portrait of a wolf, similar to the carving on the elevator doors that had brought them to the Waiting Room trap. The glass vibrated slightly as the crashing, crunching noise of the maze collapsing around them continued to buzz, a little louder, he thought, than before.

Deflated, he turned and looked around the kitchen again.

“All I see are places we’ve been,” Dee said. “Wolf, Stag, Octopus. It’s a dead end.”

“Look for a … what’s next? If you’re setting a chessboard?”

“A rook,” Dee said. “A castle. But—”

“If it’s here, we’re on the right track,” Marks said. “Let’s start there.”

“Or we’re wrong about the chess pieces,” Dee said, looking around.

They searched. Everything in the kitchen was rancid, rotten, and well past its sell date, making the search a disgusting adventure. Dee attempted to keep herself relatively clean, picking through ingredients and utensils carefully, sometimes picking up a wooden spoon or other implement to help her shift the mess around. Marks didn’t let such niceties slow him down; he rolled up his sleeves and swept his hands through the gooey, room-temperature stuff, shoving mounds of flour and sugar and puddles of gravy aside energetically, eager to get on with it.

The activity seemed to crank up the stench of food gone over, choking the warm air with the damp smell of rot and decay. Dee breathed through her mouth. Marks pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it up to his face, filtering the foul air.

Dennis and Agnes stood together, bored, their arms wrapped around themselves as they watched with barely-concealed disdain.

Finally, Dee and Marks, sweating and covered, despite Dee’s efforts, in nearly equal amounts of food, stood and contemplated the ovens.

“It makes perfect sense,” Marks said, wiping his face. “This place loves to torture you in big ways and small.”

He reached forward and touched the handle on the door of one oven, then snatched his hand back, hissing through his teeth. For a moment he was seized with an incoherent fury, angry that every single step along the way was made as difficult as possible, each subsequent room worse in small ways than the ones before, and now the pressure to keep moving, to be quick, to not think and just run as the whole tiny little universe destroyed itself in order to reset for the next guests who would arrive, confused, to be tortured and tricked, their lives sucked away from them.

He’d been through a lot, and seen incredible—and horrible—things, much of which was lost to him. But he resented this place more than any other. He resented everything about it, and for one moment he allowed all of that rage to fill him.

Then he took a deep breath, wrapped his handkerchief around his hand, and opened the ovens, one by one, moving quickly. The rook was in the third one, apparently made of some sort of dough and baked to a shiny, buttery shellac-like finish.

“All right,” Dee said. “So we might still be on the right track, but we still have just three choices that all lead places we’ve been and don’t want to go back to.”

Marks nodded, looking around.

“I used to love to cook,” Agnes said suddenly. “Do you remember, Phil?”

Phil. Marks froze again. She’d never called him by his first name before. It was always Muddled Marks or Myopic Marks. Something about her voice, the sound of his name, filled him with ice and horror.

“Do you remember me yet, Phil?”

Did he want to? He could feel her on the tip of his brain, just beyond the places where his memory illuminated things, just beyond his reach. Like a dark curtain between him and everything that had gone before. But he also had a sense that if he put effort into it, real effort, he might be able to reach through the curtain, just a little bit, a tiny bit, and pull her through into the light.

But he didn’t want to. As much as his lost memory frustrated him, he knew one thing about it: Most of it should stay lost.

Agnes began to hum again. The same song, the same melody, somehow pegged to the rhythm of the distant noise of destruction and chaos, the rumbling churning noise of the place collapsing onto itself. The notes stabbed into Marks and he knew the song, Agnes, they were linked with him. Behind that distant curtain, they waited for him, and he was terrified.

He tore his eyes away from her. She’d become almost inhuman, her features and the lines of her body and face longer and more graceful than was possible. It hurt to look at her. She was like some example of human evolution from centuries in the future. He looked around the room desperately, from the eggs hardening on the walls to the globs of curdled cream on the floor. And he realized, with a flood of relieved excitement, that there was a fourth door.

“The pantry,” he said, his voice a croak.

Dee frowned, turning to look at the door. “The damn pantry, now? This place makes no damn sense.” She walked over to the small wooden door and examined it. “No carving,” she said. “No animal.”

Marks stepped close to the door, eyes dancing over its surface. Between Agnes’ humming and the distant noise, he wanted to just move, just get out in front of everything and stay in motion. But she was right. Every door so far had been marked. The animal carvings had served as guideposts, and the only reason he had any sense of where they’d been or where they might be going, the only reason his hand-drawn map made any sense, was because of those signposts. He wanted to just crash through the door and keep moving, but he knew she was right to be dubious. They might easily find themselves in another Trap Room.

“Come on,” he said, his voice tight, taking hold of the pantry door handle. He turned to look back at Dee. Behind her, Agnes and Dennis stepped forward together, their faces eager with anticipation, as if they were excited to see what happened next. He focused on Dee.

“This is part of it. The trick. This place, it establishes rules and patterns, then breaks them. Just to increase your sense of disorientation. So that the obvious route lies open for you but you hesitate, because it doesn’t match the pattern exactly.”

“Or,” Agnes said softly, “it really is a trick.”

He shook his head. “It can’t be.” He let go of the handle and knelt down before her. “Listen, kid, I’m responsible for you. I’ve got to get you out of this place, and we’re running out of time. Come on and trust me.”

She didn’t seem persuaded, but after a moment she shrugged. “I don’t have any better ideas.”

He nodded, taking hold of the handle again. He’d take it.

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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.

31. The Ballroom

“You sure we ain’t gonna die?”

Marks shook his head. “No. But we had to eat something. You notice it was all our favorites? Sort of mashed together? Having two people here at once is seriously messing with this place’s wiring.”

“I don’t know,” Dee said. “How’s that food stay fresh? I kind of feel sick. I think we got poisoned. Why would we trust the food this place sets out in that creepy Dining Room?”

“If the end goal was to poison us,” Marks said, “there would be easier ways.”

Dee considered that, looking around. “Looking at this room, I figure we’re going to be strangled in the dark, maybe, and not poisoned.”

Marks nodded, watching Agnes and Dennis carefully as the pair seemed to wander randomly among the dusty, rotting tables. He didn’t think either one was a direct threat to them, in the sense of attacking them in some way, but he also didn’t doubt the place had more surprises in store for them. Dennis climbed up onto the bandstand, and then turned and gallantly helped Agnes up as well. A cloud of dust kicked up into the air where they walked.

“Pawn over the doorway,” Marks said, pointing. “So, one in the Anteroom, two in the Library, three in the Lounge, and one here. Makes seven.”

Dee nodded. “That looks like a chessboard, too,” she said, pointing at the dancefloor. “You think they actually had parties in this creepy place?”

Marks shrugged. “Agnes said yes, and that it wasn’t always like this. Who knows. Who knows how much she and Dennis are even real beings, with independent thought and action, instead of puppets set here to distract and annoy.”

Agnes had seated herself at the grand piano, its polished black surface dulled by dust and scratches. She cracked her knuckled theatrically, looked over at them, and smiled. Then she began playing. The piano was horribly out of tune, each note somehow positioned perfectly between keys, resulting in a discordant and horrifying noise that felt like fishing line being pulled through his eardum … and yet the tune was recognizable.

“Shit,” Dee said, pulling a face. “I know that song. I mean, it’s the Halloween, horror-movie oh-shit-we-took-a-wrong-turn-into-Insanity-Cove-population-one version, but I’ve heard this song. Old, right? About married people stepping out and boning?”

Marks matched her expression. “Close enough.”

Dee pointed at him. “They are pulling that 100% from you, old man. No way they found that song rummaging around in my karma.”

Dennis, or the slightly stretched, inaccurate simulation of Dennis that the apparition had become, started an off-beat clapping that somehow made the song even more horrible, which Marks would not have believed to be possible.

“Uh, that’s our cue to get the hell out of this room, like, pronto.”

Marks nodded. “In here, the room we haven’t been to yet is the Octopus, which is also where the pawn was positioned, so the choice seems obvious.”

They both stood for a moment, not moving. The music curdled around them and thickened the air.

“Too easy?” Dee asked.

“Too easy.”

He chewed his lip for a moment. When he looked over at Agnes and Dennis on the bandstand, she raised one hand from the keyboard and waved at him while tinkling out a sour arpeggio that fell like tiny lead pellets at her feet. The pair just followed them now, not making any attempt to interfere or speak to them. It was somehow worse.

“Come on,” he said. “At least maybe there won’t be music.”

Dee sighed, following him towards the door. “Dude, there isn’t any music here.”

They opened the Octopus door, walked down the brief hall, and found themselves in a dim, aged-looking room where the air seemed to be made of dust, everything faded and worn smooth with age. The room had the weight of time hanging everywhere, a dense feeling of uncounted days.

It was a simple room, but filled with debris. The walls were cluttered with paintings, etches, portraits, and mirrors. Not an inch of wall space was bare. There were no windows, but something warm and delicious was being cooked somewhere; amidst the dust and age the room smelled wonderful. Several large free-standing wardrobes crowded in from the edges, some with more paintings and mirrors hung on their sides and doors.

The floor was just as crowded as the walls with tables, chairs, trunks, and boxes. In one corner stood a stuffed bear, posed with one claw raised, its jaws stretched wide. A huge model sailing ship resides on one of several coffee tables, resplendent with bright white sails and carefully applied paint. A bearskin rug was rolled up in another corner, and an Iron Maiden leaned against a scratched and scuffed Hope Chest, lost in shadow.

Hidden amongst all the paintings and bric-a-brac are four exits: A pair of swinging doors marked with a familiar stag, a stairway leading downward with a floor tile marked with the bear, and two more doors on the east and north walls, marked with a viper and a kangaroo.

“Not the first room,” Agnes suddenly sang out from behind them. “But certainly one of the earliest! Now it’s become a sort of storage room, sadly—past follies and failures shunted aside, out of the way … at least until someone plays some mischief. Sometimes, I’d swear the paths to this room get changed, making it difficult to find even if you know the way.”

“Uh huh,” Marks said. “Shut up.”

“Rude.” She grinned. “Still trying to place me, Poor Myopoic Marks?”

Marks felt a cold shiver pass through him, something buried deep in his memories reaching up and massaging his brain. He closed his eyes for a moment and wished fervently for a bourbon, neat, with a water back and some bar nuts.

“Come on,” Marks said, opening his eyes and fighting back a wave of exhaustion. “If we’re on the right track there’s one last pawn in here.”

They checked the doors. When the Kangaroo didn’t immediately offer up the pawn, they were disappointed.

“Might be lost in all this junk,” Dee offered.

Marks nodded. Then didn’t move. “Christ, there’s a lot of shit in here.”

They started searching. Dennis and Agnes mimicked them, picking up various things and tossing them aside randomly, sometimes snatching things right out of their hands and playing Keep Away. Marks and Dee exchanged exasperated looks, but said nothing, and continued to search.

After nearly an hour, Marks stopped and stretched, arching his back and trying to work a sizzling pain out of it. He looked around, dismayed at the sheer amount of stuff to search through, and then paused, listening. There was a new noise, a rhythmic thumping. It was low volume and easy to miss, but he could feel it in the floor boards as well.

He thought it might be another trick, another illusion designed to spook them and keep them running instead of thinking. But Agnes and Dennis weren’t drawing attention to it, and it seemed odd in this place where every room was different, where every room represented its own little puzzle, to see a trick repeated—especially a trick that he’d clearly already seen through and dismissed.

Tricks on tricks, he thought.

He didn’t say anything, and bent back to sorting through the piles of stuff, opening boxes and searching through their bizarre contents. Comic books he remembered, somehow, having as a child—he couldn’t remember someone he’d met a year ago, but he could somehow remember comic books. shoes, never in pairs, always oddballs, seeming new. Dolls without heads. One box was filled with tiny, bleached-white bones, from a rodent of some sort.

Through all his searching, he was aware of the vibrations under his feet, buzzing up through his legs. After another long moment of standing still and contemplating it, he lay down on the floor with a grunt and pressed his ears against the floor, listening. It sounding like a construction site piledriver in the distance, a steady beat of impact.

“Found it!”

Marks sat up and looked around. Dee had climbed up on top of one of the wardrobes, somehow, and triumphantly held up a small white carving, similar to the other seven they’d found so far.

“That’s a relief,” he said as she climbed down. “If we didn’t find it, I wasn’t sure what our next move was going to be.”

“Yaaayyy!” Agnes trilled, clapping her hands. “I am so happy for you, Dear Dour Dee!”

Dee scowled at her, then beamed at Marks. A moment later she looked down at her feet. “What’s that?”

Marks nodded. “I know, I noticed it too.”

“That,” Agnes said, spinning as if being twirled by an invisible dance partner, “is the House shutting down.”

Dee looked at Marks. “Shutting down?”

He shook his head, pursing his lips as if to dismiss whatever Agnes was saying.

“You’ve been here too long,” Agnes said. “You’re almost done. So the place is resetting.”

A shot of panic went through Marks. On some deep level he realized this made sense, somehow he knew it made sense. The Black House shaped itself around those it lured in. It had shaped itself around Dee and him, taking pieces of them for decoration and function. And now they were close to being stranded there, close to having their entire lives absorbed by this dark, beating heart, and so it was destroying itself to reset for the next victim.

It was destroying itself.

“Marks,” Dee said softly. “What is it? What does it mean?”

He looked at her, and forced a thin, weak smile onto his face, shifting his gaze to the Kangaroo door, which he thought was obviously their next step. “It just means we have to move a little faster, kid.”

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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.

30. A New Room

Like Agnes, Marks thought, Dennis had changed. Molted. Warped. He was still the same man they’d encountered in the Waiting Room, still recognizable as the man Dee had asserted was her father. But he was a rougher version of that man. He was taller, thinner, and his clothes fit poorly, as if they hadn’t shifted with his body and were now too small. His hair was longer and unkempt. Like Agnes, he stood in the doorway behind Dee, smiling.

Dee suddenly pulled back and hit him on the shoulder. “You left me,” she said, her voice dull and flat.

He nodded, swallowing thickly. “I know. I’m sorry. I thought … I thought you were okay.”

She hit him again, and then again. “You left me!” she said again, her voice hitching, and then she was crying, tears streaming down her face. “You were supposed to know! All about this place!”

He didn’t try to stop her or defend himself. “I know, kid, I know, I’m sorry. But I found you.”

She stopped hitting him, and stood there for a moment looking exhausted and impossibly young. Behind her, Dennis’ smile was disturbing: His eyes fixed on them, wide and leering, his smile vacant.

“How’d you find me?”

He shrugged. “I thought like this demented place for a moment. I asked myself, what’s it been trying to do to us? Get us lost, keep us spinning. This maze,” he looked around, “kept us spinning for a long time.”

She nodded, and he leaned forward and put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen, I think I’ve figured something out.”

She dragged an arm across her face, nodding. “Okay.”

“This place, it’s personalized, you know? It’s supposed to pick up details from your life, from your mind, and use them. All the stuff we see here, all the weird rooms, somehow it comes from us.”

She frowned.

“But because it’s two of us,” he went on, “because it’s two people instead of one, and because my mind is so fucked up and weird, it got all screwy. It picked up random things from both of us, and mine are all warped beyond recognition. But some of it just from you. Like the chess pieces.”

She nodded. “The pawns,” she said. “The Queen. We’ve seen those.”

“And her and him,” he added. “Supposed to confuse us. But some it—like the chess pieces—can guide us. I think. There’s a pattern to them.”

Somewhere distant, he became aware of the buzzing, cracking noise again, a storm of violence slowly heading their way. Even though he knew it was an illusion, designed to spook them, to keep them moving in the wrong direction, it still sizzled on his nerves and made it difficult to stay calm, to stay still. Move move move it seemed to communicated directly to his underbrain, that primitive part of him that connected him to his most ancient single-celled ancestors.

“I think if we follow the pattern the right way, it’ll lead us out of here.”

She sniffled and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. A pattern. Chess from me. What about you?” Her eyes flickered over his shoulder to Agnes. “What’s it taking from you?”

He sighed. “I have an idea, but I can’t remember what it means,” he said. “I’m still working on that part.”

She nodded again. “Okay.” She turned to look over her shoulder, then looked past Marks at Agnes again. “So, they’re like, not real people, right?”

Marks nodded. “Figments. Fakers.”

“Can we tie them up and leave them here? Or knock them out so they stop following us?”

Marks smiled. The noise of the approaching storm was loud enough to feel in the floor joists. “Probably not, actually, but we can always try, sure.” He turned to look at Agnes, who was leaning against the doorway with her hands folded in front of her, looking young and fresh and innocent, smiling slightly. A flicker of recognition went through his thoughts, but was gone almost immediately. “I wouldn’t mind getting rid of her for a little while.”

He looked back at Dee and they both smiled. It was surprising, he thought, how much better he felt having her back, having another real, actual person to bounce off of. The thought made him sober. Dee frowned a moment later.

“You’re thinking, how do we know we’re real?”

He nodded, then pulled a hand over his face. “New rule,” he said. “Don’t split up again.” He turned to look at Agnes again. She winked at him.

“Well,” he said, raising his voice over the sizzling noise. “I’m not sure, kid,” he admitted. “The best I can come up with is to pay attention. Both our people appear to have … drifted from their original physical appearance. If I start looking weird to you, don’t shrug it off.”

Dee cocked one eyebrow. “But if you’re a Figment, Marks, then you’d be lying to me right now!”

“Not necessarily!” Agnes shouted over the buzzsaw noise brightly. “The fun of it, Dear Dim Dee, is to sometimes tell the truth, sometimes point you in the right direction. Then I can be all hurt and sad when you don’t take my advice.”

“Who are you supposed to be?” Marks said quietly, not looking at her. He felt like the memory was right there. Right under the surface, tantalizing. He wondered if Agnes had been changing because the memory was coming closer, getting sharper. But then he couldn’t believe he’d ever known anyone as breathtakingly beautiful as this woman.

Memory, he thought, sometimes warped how people looked. Cleaned up the negative, put a little movie magic on the lens.

Dee shook herself. “Trust,” she said, holding out her hand as if sealing a business deal. “I’m already lost, right? Shit, can’t go much further wrong. So, we trust each other until we got reason not to.”

Marks took her hand. He was surprised at how small and delicate it felt in his, and a wave of agonizing self-loathing swept through him again. He’d brought her here. And then he’d left her.

“Trust,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, pushing her hair, which had become a mess that resisted any efforts to control it. “So, what do we do?”

Marks dropped the backpack to the floor and fished out the notebook. “All right, we saw chess pieces in six rooms so far,” he said. “The Anteroom—one pawn, the Library—two pawns, the Queer Lounge—three pawns, the Ballroom—”

“There’s a ballroom?”

“Yes!” Agnes cheered. “It’s marvelous!”

“—one pawn, and Underground—Queen. So what’s missing?”

Dee thought for a moment. “They’re all white, right?”

Marks nodded.

“One pawn—there should be eight. Then the Rook, the Knight, and the King.”

Marks pointed at her. “Got a feeling the King might be where we want to end up.”

Dee smiled. “All right, so we go up the ladder, right, like it’s a board? Pawns first, then we look for the Rook. But if we already know where the Queen is, why not just try to cut back there?”

“I can’t say for certain, but this place kind of has a clockwork feel to me. Like we need to go through rooms in a certain order,” he said, looking down at the map he’d drawn and re-drawn several times. “So if I’m right about that, we’d go Anteroom, Library, Lounge, Ballroom, and then—” he pointed at the little square he’d marked with a large capital O. “The Octopus room, whatever that is. It’s the only room leading from the Ballroom we haven’t been in.”

“Then what?”

He shrugged, closing the notebook. “If there’s a pawn in that room, we know we’re on the right track. Then we look for, what, the Rook?”

Dee nodded. “What if we go through a door, no Rook, but we can’t go back?”

“Then we circle around and try again,” he said. He paused for a moment, studying her face. “Look, I know, it’s exhausting. It’s meant to be exhausting. But the key is, we have to just keep working the puzzle until we make it out. It’s the only way. There are rules, but it’s their rules, and we have to follow them.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay.” She looked down at her shoes. “Listen … thanks. For coming after me.”

He nodded and looked away, but said nothing.

“What now?”

He took a deep breath, looking around. The buzzing, crunching noise and shouting voices seemed like it was in the next room, but Marks was determined to prove it couldn’t scare him any more, couldn’t force him to make a mistake. “First things first: We have to figure out how to get out of here again!”

“Shit, I’m sorry!” Dee shouted. “He tricked me!”

Marks looked past her at Dennis, who smiled, his gums blood red, his teeth somehow yellowed.

“Don’t worry about them,” Marks yelled. “They’re just figments, right!”

Dee nodded. Marks turned to grin back at Agnes, and was startled to find her glaring at him, her beautiful face folded into a mask of rage.

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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.

29. The Broker’s Office

The office was just as he remembered it: Simple, bland, beige. The Broker, still handsome in a generic way that made Marks think of computer algorithms designed to generate handsome, was sitting behind the simple metal desk, hands steepled in front of him, suit respectable but not expensive or flashy. The carpet was nice but not luxurious. The air felt cool but smelled neutral.

Marks twisted around. The door he’d stepped through a few days before was open, and through it he could see the empty offices of Passus, Inc.

He looked back at The Broker and opened his mouth, but then couldn’t find any words.

“Surely,” The Broker said in a bluff, cheerful way, raising his light brown eyebrows, “you are used to unexpected topographies and impossible architectures by now, Mr. Marks?”

The Broker of Health and Happiness seemed amused, and that sparked a small flame of resentment in Marks’ belly. “You … The Black House, it’s yours?”

“Passus operates the facility, actually,” The Broker said. “We are a collective. I am merely a cog in the bureaucracy, you understand. I don’t own, operate, or benefit from any of our work here. I merely facilitate.”

Marks realized he was still kneeling with his palms on the floor. He climbed to his feet, momentarily feeling every ache and every pulled muscle. There were a lot of them.

“Listen,” Marks said, stepping closer to the desk. “There’s a girl. She’s—”

“Deandra,” The Broker said. “Deandra Dennings, yes.” He nodded, a muted smile on his face, encouraging Marks.

“You know she’s in there,” Marks said, something short-circuiting in his brain.

“Why, of course,” The Broker said, the slightest hint of a frown drooping over his features. “That is why you are here. We accept her!”

Marks swallowed something huge and made of broken glass. “Accept her?”

The Broker’s expression came perilously close to being an actual frown. “In lieu of yourself, yes, we accept her. This operation,” he stood, suddenly, revealing himself to be of average height and build, “we are in the business of bringing our clients health and happiness. Success. But everything comes at a price, Mr. Marks—yes, we know your name now. Our freelancers provide vessels for other people’s miseries, yes, and we provide them with financial incentives—that is one aspect of our business. There are other costs, other overhead, other infrastructure. The transference of misery from one human being to another is an immensely expensive business, and not solely in terms of money.”

He pointed at Marks. “You cost us quite a bit of trouble and expense with your deception, Mr. Marks. You were to be processed at the—what did you call it? The Black House—I quite like that!—as a consequence. Instead, we will process Ms. Dennings, who is, after all, a legacy!” He paused to cock his head slightly. “As we assumed you intended?”

Marks just stared.

The Broker’s expression became alarmed. “Oh my. This is a disaster.”

Marks put his hands down on the desk and leaned forward. “Yes. Get her out of there. She’s innocent. Blameless. She shouldn’t be in there at all.”

She should be back at the Starlight, he thought, waiting forever for me to return, slowly realizing that yet another adult had let her down and abandoned her. And yet that was a better fate than being trapped forever in a metaphysical meat grinder, being transformed into someone else’s health and happiness.

“I’m afraid,” The Broker said, then paused to spin and reclaim his seat. He settled himself and rolled his head on his shoulders before looking Marks in the eye. “I’m afraid it isn’t that simple. As you might imagine, the, er, Black House is a complex machine. Many moving parts. We cannot simply stop its operation, or simply pull someone out. The consequences of such an action would be dire. All we can do is what we did with you: Create and offer a way out. You had to find that exit, we couldn’t interfere or place it in your path.”

Marks felt his heart beating a desperate, unhappily heavy rhythm in his chest. “Then you can do the same for Dee.”

The Broker’s expression was one that Marks had seen on many faces when he’d attempted to beg extensions on debts, advances on payments, or other extraordinary kindnesses: Pained lack of interest. “I am afraid that is impossible, Mr. Marks. The Black House has been calibrated for a guest. It must process a guest.”

Marks nodded. He felt like he’d always known this would the response, as if this was some epic, scripted event he’d been rehearsing for years. “Then swap me for her. Take her out, put me in.”

“As I said, we cannot simply remove someone.” He looked down at his hands. “I can offer only one possible solution, Mr. Marks. We can send you back, and you can search for the exit again. When you find it—if you find it—you can send Ms. Dennings through, and remain behind to satisfy your debt to Passus.”

Marks thought furiously. “Can you send me directly back to her? To the spot she’s in right now?”

The Broker brightened, sensing agreement. “Yes, I believe we could. Or very close.”

“Can you give me the path to the exit?”

The Broker’s broadly handsome face fell again. “I’m afraid not; the processing requires the effort you see, the—”

Marks cut him off with a gesture. “Fucking hell,” he hissed.

The Broker stiffened and sat back. “Might I remind you, Mr. Marks, that we are in this terrible situation because you sought to defraud the company. You posed as a candidate for a freelance position. You assigned miseries to another man without his consent. The fact that he accepted this voluntarily later does not remove the stain of dishonor from you.”

Marks felt the tiny flame of anger growing inside him, and his grip on the desk became white-knuckled. “You lure people into a Soul Engine that consumes and destroys them so you can make rich people’s lives better by making poor people’s lives worse and you’re lecturing me on morals?”

The Broker spread his hands. “Mr. Marks, I am uninterested in your feeble grasp of the laws of the universe. Since educating you on the true meaning of morality is impossible, let us concentrate on what is possible: Re-inserting you into the Black House so you can help Ms. Dennings escape. Are we agreed, then? I cannot guarantee you will find the way—but if you do successfully find the exit, you may set Ms. Dennings free and we will accept your processing alone.”

Marks closed his eyes and nodded. Knowing more didn’t make him feel better. Knowing that people like him and Dee—and Dee’s father—were processed in order to provide the raw materials for a place like Passus made him want to shoot himself in the head rather than live in a universe that allowed such things.

Or made him want to return and burn Passus to the ground. The anger was still there, but for the moment he had to ignore it and save Dee, who had done nothing to deserve any of it. He had at least done something.

“Okay,” he said. “I agree.”

The Broker smiled. “Very good! I will process the paperwork. In the mean time, be my guest.”

He gestured over Marks’ shoulder. The door behind him no longer led to the empty offices of Passus, but showed the familiar new drywall of the New Rooms. Without looking back at the Broker, Marks turned and walked over to it. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath of the air-conditioned, scentless air of the Passus offices, and stepped through.

“Marks!”

He opened his eyes. Agnes stood in front of him, smiling. He turned slightly. Dee was a few feet away, staring at him, wide-eyed. She looked skinny and rough, exhausted, her hair a mess, her face blotchy and tearstained. They stared at each other for a moment, and marks was amazed to find a surge of relief so powerful he had to swallow back a cry.

She took a hesitant step forward, then launched herself at him, crashing into him and hugging him hard.

“You came for me,” she said, quiet. “I can’t believe you came back for me.”

Marks nodded, hugging her back. Then he glanced up, and froze.

Dee felt it. “He’s always there,” she said without letting go.

Marks stared at Dennis, who lurked in the far doorway.

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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.

28. A New Room

She was always there.

Agnes had, mercifully, stopped speaking to him. But that had been replaced with a silent following. She was always just in the room, always in the doorway he’d just passed through. Always watching, a hint of a smile. Her perfume was always in the air. It didn’t matter how fast or slow he walked. If he turned around just before walking through a door, she was in the other doorway. The moment he passed into the next room smelling of damp joint compound and drywall dust, she was right behind him, watching. A hint of a smile. Perfume.

Sometimes she hummed the same damn song she’d been humming, seemingly since he’d arrived.

The rooms themselves didn’t appear to have changed. He found broken glass in several, and score marks on the walls, evidence of their attempts to mark their route and avoid doubling back on their own path—or evidence of someone’s attempts to do so. He didn’t know if the rooms he passed through maintained their state after he left, though they seemed to. Or if they did, how long they did, or if other people were also trapped in the Black House.

He wondered if Dee had figured this out, if she knew Dennis was her own personal Agnes, her own personal figment designed to distract her and steer her wrong. If so, she might leave Marks clues as to her route, or be on her own, trying to find her way back. He had to think like Dee. He paused for a second, contemplating the command from on high to think like a young black girl who’d lost her parents and who was now trapped in a strange, maze-like hell.

Figment. Distraction. He stopped moving. He turned to regard Agnes, who hovered in the doorway he’d just come through, a wraith smelling of Peppermint again. He wondered if her shifting scent meant anything, or if it was just more evidence of his ruined memory.

The House wanted him to move. Everything so far—aside from the Waiting Room—had been designed to keep him moving. Move, move, move—and when they’d slowed down or showed any signs of hesitation, there had been noises or events that had kept them moving. He’d known this and still fallen for it.

If he wanted to find Dee, he thought, his best bet was to sit down and let her find him.

He shrugged off his backpack, much lighter now than it had been, and sat down in the middle of the floor. He was tired anyway. He was hungry and thirsty and his feet ached. He was an old man, older perhaps than he realized, what with all those years missing. He closed his eyes and immediately was aware of the buzzing, crunching noise, low and distant, but suddenly there. There to spook him, to make him surge up in panic and start running blind again.

He kept his eyes closed. He shifted his weight.

For a long while she left him alone. The urge to open his eyes just to see what Agnes was up was powerful, and he had to keep distracting himself, distracting himself from the distraction. He could smell her. He knew when she had wandered close, because her scent became stronger, and he knew when she moved away. He forced himself to examine his gray, murky memories, the vast wasteland of the last few years, seeking clues, bits and pieces of lost moments. He concentrated on Agnes, ironically, to distract himself from Agnes: Who did she resemble? Had there actually been an Agnes, a pretty brunette with a penchant for peppermint? Had he lost her? Hurt her? Had she hurt him? There was a reason the House had dressed itself as her for him. She was supposed to have had the same effect on him as Dennis had on Dee.

“Are you sleeping?”

He squeezed his eyes shut tighter. She would, he thought, try to get him up again, try to prompt him into moving, running blind.

“Meditating? Oh, goodness, tell me you’re not about to burst into tears. I cannot bear weeping men.”

He said nothing.

“You’re not … giving up? Oh, moronic Mr. Marks, I should hope not. You are so close.” He could hear her creeping closer, her scent growing stronger, filling his head like a pink and white mist, somehow alluring, erotic, compelling. Then she was whispering in his ear and her breath was surprisingly hot against his ear. “So close. You have been indefatigable, really. Your commitment to that disappointing Dee is laudable—certainly she did nothing to deserve your affection, and let’s face it, my many-faceted Marks, you’re a doll to put so much energy into her salvation. She doesn’t deserve you, dearie.”

Her voice was silk. He felt a bead of sweat roll down his forehead.

“But you can’t give up now. Is she selfish? Yes. Silly? Yes. But she’s just a girl, Moral, Well-Meaning Marks. Just a child. And you sent her on her way, alone, unprotected. All you had to do was stay with her. Now she’s lost, and it is, I’m afraid, your fault.”

He squeezed his eyes tighter. After a moment he heard a feminine sniff of frustration, and sensed her sitting down next to him. He could imagine her skirts, which had bloomed outward over time, settling around her, like a cloud.

“People have died in here,” she said softly, sounding sad, pained. “I am sorry to say it. I do try to avoid that, I really do, though you won’t believe it. Oh, I know your opinion of me. It’s not a fair opinion, of course, although I understand why you feel that way. We all have our roles to play—yours is to protect and defend the innocent, those who lack your knowledge and experience. Mine is to protect this place. But I do not wish harm on anyone, truly. But it has happened. People give up. They sit down, they stop moving. I’ve seen it before, My Mournful Marks.”

Her attempts to get him moving were proof, he thought, that he should not do so.

Dimly, he became aware of another sound: The now-familiar sizzle of the distant grinding noise, the shouting voices. It was distant and dim, but still caused a sudden flame of anxiety bordering on fear in his belly. Something about the noise was ominous, tickling some ancient fight-or-flight instinct.

“That sounds scary,” Agnes cooed.

He parsed his options furiously while his primitive underbrain demanded he run, run immediately. Heart pounding, he forced himself to remain sitting there as the noise grew in volume, seemingly just a room or two away, some horrible thing come to devour him.

“At this point,” Agnes shouted, “you’re wondering—because you people are always wondering this at this stage of the game—if that’s the real danger of this place, something come to consume you in some terrible way. That maybe I’ve been trying to help you all this time, trying to keep you safe in my own way by guiding you away from this, this doom coming.”

With effort, he kept his eyes closed. The noise seemed to worm into his brain and massage the precise nerve endings that inspired terror and panic.

Then his eyes popped open. He caught Agnes smiling, a wide, crazy grin she immediately turned off—but he’d seen it. And he knew, or thought he did, another piece of the puzzle: This noise, this awful implied violence wasn’t there simply to keep him moving, was it? It was there to herd him. To keep him moving, yes, but in a specific direction. Away from something.

He climbed to his feet. His legs felt prickly and asleep, and he wondered how long he’d been sitting—surely not for long? Staggering on numb legs, he steered himself around Agnes, who’d adopted a tense, concerned expression, and started moving towards the noise.

“I wouldn’t—”

He ignored her and barreled through the door, dragging the backpack behind him as he crashed into the next room, the grinding, tearing noise louder, like a machine ripping down walls and crunching the plywood subfloor into mulch as it rolled. He didn’t slow down. He oriented himself as best he could and chose the doorway that appeared to lead closer to the noise, and crashed through it. Then he did it again.

In the fifth room, the noise was so loud he could feel it vibrating inside him, shifting his organs. The voices had resolved into screams of agony and horror. The room shook with the force of it, and crossing to the next doorway took physical effort, as if an invisible force was pushing against him. He pushed himself through, stumbling with his eyes half closed as he struggled against the unseen wind. He almost fell forward through into the next room, into near-silence. He crashed to his knees and knelt there for a moment, gasping for breath and staring at the floor, ears ringing, body buzzing.

He looked up and froze in shock.

“Hello again, Mr. Marks,” said The Broker.

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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.

27. The Anteroom

“Are you hungry, doll? I’m hungry.”

Marks closed his eyes and pinched his nose, but didn’t say anything. He’d mentally established a policy of not responding to Agnes, and this had inspired her to become more annoying and distracting than before. She sat perched on the secretary, tossing the wooden pawn into the air and catching it, kicking her impossibly shapely legs.

“You must be hungry. You ate all your little snacks such a long time ago.”

Marks opened his eyes and stared blearily around the small room. His notes were everywhere, scribbled in haste and torn from the notebook. It had only been hours. had it been hours? Or days? Weeks? No, he thought, days or weeks and he would be dead, of dehydration or starvation or some creative combination of both.

He was afraid to move.

He was afraid to make the wrong decision. He was afraid to get mired and lost, to waste time following cold leads and falling into traps, and losing Dee, who he’d brought here, who he’d smugly lectured on the nature of places like this. He should have known better. His brain wasn’t right. He’d lost so much, his memory like smoke in his hands, and yet he’d just assumed he would know what to do, how to solve everything. And now he was in this room for the third—fourth?—time and she was lost and he had to solve two puzzles: He had to find her, and quickly, and he had to find the way out.

He wondered if she knew she was lost, or if she was still bedazzled by Dennis, the image of her father. If she knew she’d been fooled, she might leave a trail, make a mark in each room for him to find. He’d searched through the Anteroom and found nothing, and he knew this place, this Black House, was untrustworthy. It shifted, it changed—even Agnes had complained about it. If she was leaving a trail, it might be erased and deleted before he got there.

He was frozen. Every possible route seemed fraught with the certainty of disaster, of moving further away from Dee, of leaving her even more deeply buried.

“You only have three choices,” Agnes said in a sing-song voice. Marks reflected that at least she’d stopped humming that damn song for a little while.

Marks closed his eyes again. He wondered who Agnes had been to him, who it was this place had so carefully tried to replicate in hopes of manipulating him. It had chosen Dennis for Dee, and it had worked. She’d embraced him, followed him and—

He froze. The details, he realized, were personalized. Agnes, someone he’d forgotten, someone lost to the mists of his downfall—that had been an oversight. She was meant to be someone he would fall for, someone he wouldn’t be able to resist. He even wondered if her troubling morphing, her constant blurring and subtle revisions were a result of his own messy memories. Dennis was obvious. Dee had come here hoping to find her father—it made sense that the place, this black, endless house, would use that against her.

There were other details, he realized. The chess stuff. Dee played, knew an awful lot about the game. The food in the dining room had been their favorites, and the song she kept humming, it was maddeningly familiar even if he couldn’t recall it. There likely had been other things he hadn’t noticed—or things he would notice when he got there. The whole place had been set up to fool them, to trick them, to mislead them.

Three choices. He knew which rooms were available from the Anteroom: The Library, the Dining Room, and the maze of New Rooms.

He started gathering up his stuff. Dennis was a phantom, a trick. He would naturally seek to lead Dee in the worst possible direction. He would, like Agnes had, try to leverage her connection to him to fool her.

He left his notebook to last, and opened it to a fresh page. He looked at the pawn in Agnes’ delicate, nimble hands. He flipped through pages and made notes:

Anteroom: One pawn

Library: Two pawns

Queer Lounge: Three pawns

Ballroom: Two pawns

Underground: Queen

He studied the list. There was a chess set hidden in this place, and while he didn’t know yet how it worked, he was suddenly certain this was a clue. The Black House took bits and pieces of you and fed them back—sometimes to cheat you, sometimes to guide you. The trick was figuring out which was which, and Marks thought the rule was actually very simple: The people you met cheated you. The things you found guided you.

He pushed the notebook back into his bag and turned to regard the three doors.

“We’re leaving?” Agnes asked, her voice like music, the sound of her slipping off the secretary to her feet sensual and suggestive. “Thank god. It’s been so boring in here waiting for you to wake up. Where to? Research in the Library? I’ll bet there’s at least one actual book in there. In fact, I tell you what: I’m so bored I’ll just be honest and tell you there is. One book that’s not a dictionary, and it will be very useful. But that’s all I’ll say!”

Marks wondered if he’d let other people down like this, how many people he’d left to terrible fates because he’d made assumptions, arrogant assumptions. How many people had he killed? Trapped? Worse? And then forgot.

And then forgot. The gravity of that hit him, staggering him, and he stood unable to move under the weight of it.

“No?” Agnes chirped, suddenly right behind him, leaning up to place her chin on his shoulder, her perfume enveloping him. “The Dining Room then. Good choice. A bite to eat, for sustenance. And they likely went that way, yes? A hungry little girl—because you brought no supplies and left her starving—she remembered that table! Oh, yes she did.”

Marks took a deep breath. “Jesus Christ, shut up,” he muttered, and strode forward. Taking hold of the handle on the door with the Newt carving, the door to the maze of New Rooms, he hesitated just one moment, then pulled it open.

“Mr. Marks!” Agnes gasped, but her voice sounded delighted.

He stepped through into the usual brief hallway. She believed she was with her father. He would convince her to go the worst possible way. And that would be back into the maze—offering some bit of doggerel reasoning, insisting on some brilliant insight. She would go with him because doing otherwise would mean he wasn’t her father.

And Marks thought if he was wrong, he might find his way back out—he’d done it once—but he might also waste too much time, with Dee getting deeper and deeper with each passing moment. But he wasn’t wrong, he told himself. Not because he was certain, but because he had no choice. He started walking towards the other end, eyes moving around as he tried to catch the trick, the moment when the architecture and the space shifted and changed so it became a one-way tunnel, spitting him into the maze and barring any retreat. He didn’t catch it. When he came to the door at the other end of the hall, he turned and looked back, but the bend in the hallway made it impossible to see where he’d come from.

Agnes was right behind him, fragrant and warm, everything about her tactile, inviting touch. She smiled brightly.

In the moment of silence, he could hear the terrible scraping noise, the murmuring voices. Like a monster dragging itself across the floor, some awful beast grunting and flailing, leaving a trail of slime behind it. Terror spiked in his chest and he stood, frozen, for a moment, fighting the primitive instinct to run as he had before. The monster in the library had been an illusion, yes, but would all the monsters they encountered be tricks?

He closed his eyes. It is just a trick, he said to himself. It’s always a trick.

Keeping his eyes closed, he opened the door. The noise instantly became unbearably loud, climbing into him and shaking him, his bones, his organs, every cell of his body. It felt like a hot, dry wind was pouring over him, and he could feel the vibrations in the floor, through his shoes.

He opened his eyes, and everything went quiet.

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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.

26. The Ballroom

“I suppose you’re cross with me, now,” Agnes said, following him back into the Queer Lounge. “I suppose you’ll say you’ll never trust me again.”

Marks ignored her. It. He reminded himself that Agnes wasn’t human. She was … she was this place, he thought. She was the personification of the Black House. It’s Id.

Wordlessly, he retrieved the folding shovel he’d dropped, snapping it closed and stuffing it back into his backpack. He walked back to the door with the Bear carving on it and opened it up. Without waiting for her to follow, he stepped into the short hallway. At the other end he pushed open the door and stumbled a bit as he entered an immense space, his footsteps echoing hollowly.

It was a huge ballroom, the floor polished marble, blood red and perfectly cut. Chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling like liquid diamonds, threatening to rain onto the floor. Dozens of round tables, set for dinner, were decked out in silverware and perfectly folded napkins. A bandstand at one end of the room held instruments, ready and waiting.

As he moved deeper into the space, he realized the shiny glamor was an illusion; the tablecloths were motheaten, the silverware dulled and tarnished, the instruments cobwebby and dust-covered. Instead of glittering and tinkling, the chandeliers hung limply, unused. The air smelled dusty and stale, and Marks felt his throat closing up as if he might not be able to get enough air.

The room was very large, and all around the edges columns supported balconies. The central stairway leading up to them was collapsed. Behind the columns were frescoes—dancers in a silvery paint that seemed to shine with an endless reflected twilight. The eyes seemed to follow Marks, and he kept imagining he heard music, a fading note, sweet and careful.

After a moment he was startled to realize the music was, again, the same terrible song, the song about fruity drinks and getting caught in the rain. It was off-rhythm, the notes scattering into each other, but unfortunately recognizable.

“I do hate this song,” he said.

Across the huge, empty dance floor were the exits, two sets of elegantly ruined French doors, their animal carvings split between each side—one the familiar Duck that, he assumed, led to the Dining Room, and one a floating Octopus, tentacles seeming to float lazily in unseen water. Between the doors, leading down into a darkness where a light flickered on and off rapidly, was a staircase. Marks walked over to it and noted the floor tile, where a familiar-looking Stag had been carved.

“Some truly mythical parties were thrown here,” Agnes said, launching into a graceful series of dance moves. “The ballroom is dark these days, and it has been a long time since anyone’s entertained here, besides me, of course. And my entertainments rarely involve dancing and feasting. But I remember when it was once a grand place … a part of me yearns for its past glories, the laughter, the light, the music.” She stopped and spun to face him, skirt suddenly full and flowing instead of tight and tapered. “But really I’m glad it has died. I have darker interests now, and like these muted places.”

Marks noted the cloud of dust her dancing had kicked up into the air, and he controlled his panic response with effort, forcing himself to keep breathing. He wondered if the Black House reflected her moods, her mindset, if it changed with her, growing brighter when she cheered and darker when she soured.

“You’re saying there were permanent residents here?”

Agnes nodded. “The purpose of this place has changed, you know. It wasn’t always designed for you. Or me. It was once a glorious place, filled with light and noise.” She kicked at the dust again with an elegant move of her leg. “It has been allowed to fall into disrepair.”

“By you.”

She scowled. “Rude.”

He walked over to the ruined stairway and examined it, squinting up through the gloom at the balconies above. He went back over his memories and asked himself if it was the first blocked exit he’d seen, the first time there was a space he couldn’t get to. No, he thought; in the Underground area there had been collapsed tunnels. He thought it interesting that all the blocked tunnels lacked identifying carvings, as if, perhaps, they’d been designed blocked. He wondered if there was another route to the balcony, if that mattered. If it was part of the trick.

“Only one choice,” Agnes said primly, once again launching into some solo dancing. “Unless you want to go back to rooms you’ve already been in.”

He considered. In the Spare Room, the Viper and the Rabbit. In the Dining Room, the Viper again. Three choices, actually, with the Octopus; her vague attempts to confuse him were more amusing than anything else.

He looked at the dance floor where Agnes was performing her own private ballet, spinning and gliding, arms held poised as if around an unseen partner. The floor was tiled black and white. He counted: Eight on each side. He thought of the chess pieces in the other rooms and counted the tiles again.

Heart pounding, he ran over to the French doors and began examining them. Suddenly he knew exactly what he was looking for, and found it quickly: Two wooden pawns, carved and polished from a blonde wood, green felt underneath, set on top of the lintel of the Octopus Doors. A part of a set along with the others they had found.

Carefully, he put them back and nodded to himself. Wondered why two; the pattern was unclear.

“This song,” he said. “You seem very fond of it.”

“This song,” she said with a smile, dipping herself awkwardly. “I hate this song. But those things can be deceiving. For example, I thought you liked the girl, Dee. Deandra. Darling Dee. And yet, you left her behind, where she will very likely starve to death, getting weaker and weaker.”

Marks felt himself flush. It hit home. He did feel guilty about it, but it remained the only choice that made any sense. “She’s with her father,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t my place.”

Agnes paused to smile at him. “Is she?”

Marks went cold. “What?”

Agnes shrugged and went back to dancing. “Remarkable, isn’t it? Am I here? Am I real? Am I a person with desires and motivations or a manifestation of this place, a mirage, an illusion? An illusion so real you think of me as a person, a person you can almost—”

She paused again, studying Marks. “No, you can’t, can you?” She laughed. “Oh my that is a relief. Here I went to so much trouble to look like her, and you can’t even remember her! I thought I was losing my touch.”

This was revenge, he thought. This was a fit of pique. He hadn’t fallen for her monster, and she was angry about it. She was seeking to punish him. But was she lying, or was she revealing something in order to hurt him?

Marks ran over the last few days. Dennis—he’d seemed real enough. Dee had accepted him, immediately. Without reservation. And yet, maybe he’d only resisted Agnes because she—this place—hadn’t realized how damaged he was, how lost most of his prior life was. Whoever Agnes was supposed to be, maybe that was why she’d been morphing, changing. It couldn’t lock in on his memories, because he couldn’t lock in on his memories. Maybe Dee’s memory of her father was crystal clear, and it was able to produce a perfect doppleganger.

“Is he dead?” he asked quietly.

Agnes nodded. “Of course he is.”

He closed his eyes. Everything was his fault. He shouldn’t have brought her. He should have gone back and called the police, family services, then come back. Then come in alone. He shouldn’t have left her alone, either.

He opened his eyes and started walking towards the staircase heading down into the depths. The flickering light and its crazy, random rhythm was foreboding, and his sense of balance and direction was offended—but he knew the architecture of this place made no sense. Why shouldn’t it be possible to find yourself in the Spare Room by going down these stairs?

The stairs led him to an unmarked door, which led to a short corridor of damp stone and dirt floor. A right turn and another unmarked door, and he found himself in the closet again, pushing his way through hanging fur coats. When he fought his way into the spare room, he didn’t hesitate, he strode directly to the door marked with an Ape carving, pulled it open, and stepped through into the short hall beyond. A moment later he was back in the Anteroom. Everything was as it had been. The secretary, the doily, the pawn.

Dee was nowhere to be seen.

He stood, frozen. His brain seemed locked up, paralyzed. He ran through the possibilities: This was a different room altogether, magically re-created down to the precise placement of the pawn where he’d put it down days ago. This was an illusion, he and Dee were both there but out of phase, unable to hear or see each other. Least likely: Dee and her father had truly escaped, and were on the outside working to rescue him.

Most likely: Dee had been lured away and was lost.

He heard the click of Agnes’ shoes as she entered the room. He wanted to turn and strike her down, do violence to her, make her afraid and unhappy. Instead, he did not turn to look at her. He did not run around and try to tear the room down around him. Instead, he sat down, swung the backpack off his shoulder, and pulled out the battered notebook and his pen, and started reviewing all his notes. She was somewhere. Somewhere in the maze. All he had to do was figure out where, figure out how to get to her, then go find her, figure out the escape route, and avoid other traps. Before he starved to death. Before he died of thirst. Before they’d both been in the Black House too long.

Behind him, Agnes started to hum her song again. Something about health food, a neighborhood bar. he shut his eyes and pushed it from his mind.

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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.

25. The Queer Lounge

The refrigerator door almost tore off its hinges, and for a brief moment Marks caught a glimpse of something dark with what looked like glowing red eyes. A blast of fetid air hit him, warm and damp and heavy with some kind of animal scent.

Someone grabbed his hand. He turned and found Agnes, pulling him towards the door that led back to the library.

“Come on, morbid myopic Marks!”

There was a grumbling growl from inside the fridge, and Marks nodded, turning and letting her pull him towards the door. She pulled it open and as they ran down the short hallway he could hear something roaring behind them, an awful, bloodthirsty sound. And the thud of something heavy galloping behind them.

They burst back into the library, the sudden sense of space as the ceiling soared above them making Marks feel dizzy. Agnes continued to pull him along, dashing into the stacks without hesitation.

“Why are you running?” he gasped. “You are this place!”

“Not everything here is tame, mopey moronic Marks,” she hissed, pulling him deeper and deeper into the maze of bookshelves. Without warning, she dashed into a little alcove formed against one wall by the intersection of two shelves, dropping down and pulling him into a crouch next to her. Her scent seemed to surround him, and he was conscious of the warmth of her next to him. He knew she wasn’t a pretty girl, she was something else entirely, something inhuman, and yet he found himself forgetting.

Over the wheeze of his labored breathing, he could hear it: Something heavy moving through the library nearby, slow and deliberate. Its breathing was ragged and heavy, punctuated by grunts and wet swallowing noises.

“What is it?”

Agnes made an impatient noise. He realized she was gripping his hand tightly. “Something that predates me, Mr. Marks. Something that was here when I arrived,” she whispered. “Others who came before you had to contend with it, which of course was the intent. The design. But then, so did I and I did not enjoy it. Someone contrived to trick it into that appliance and secure it within, and I have left it there ever since.” She pursed her lips. “That was a long time ago, Mr. Marks. A long time. It must be quite hungry by now. And irritated.”

As if in agreement, the thing snarled suddenly, and there was the sound of it running off, claws of some kind clicking against the floor.

Marks looked up. The bookshelves stretched up much higher than he remembered, the spines of the books neat and appealing. They varied inconsistently from ancient leather with ridges and gold-leaf titles to cheap paperbacks that simply read DICTIONARY in bold red letters. Some were worn and well-thumbed, some seemed brand new. A few were even in plastic dustcovers, perfectly preserved. Most were in English, but a few were in other languages.

He turned his head and noted that someone had obviously found the alcove before them—or been led to it, as he had. There were hash marks carved into the side of the bookshelf that formed one shallow wall of the alcove, the sort of lines and cross-outs people made when marking the passage of time. He counted them and they added up to thirty-four.

A shiver went through him. The scratches held his gaze, and for a few seconds he felt like he couldn’t look away. There was something about them that tugged at his brain. The number of them, maybe. Thirty-four. What did that mean to him? Had he seen something else in the maze—what had Agnes called it, a black house? Had he seen something else in the Black House that made him think of thirty-four?

“Rumor is,” Agnes whispered in his ear, her breath warm and sweet, “that it’s the original visitor to this place. The first guest. He never fell for a trap, and so he simply grew older and older, leveraging the curious magic of the Black House to stay alive. Over time, because of the strange temporal properties of this place, he evolved. He changed. He became what all humans will, eventually, but in the process of course he left humanity behind.”

He could almost believe it. Time worked differently in a place like this, he knew that. Being here for so long, trapped, circling around yourself forever—it would change someone. And maybe being stuck in this place would cause a transfer of … magic? Power? He didn’t know the right word. He just thought it possible that someone trapped in this maze for a very long time might start to take on some of its attributes, to become part of the maze.

He looked at Agnes. “Is that what happened to you?” he whispered. “Did you come here as a … did you come here like I did, and you’ve been here so long you’ve … gone over?”

She didn’t turn her head. She moved her eyes to look at him sideways. “Why, Mr. Marks. Always thinking. The answer is, my morose man, that I have always been here and I am also a recent arrival.”

The words chilled him. He kept staring at her even as she looked away. Something was scratching at the edges of his thoughts, something he thought terribly important. Something vital. But it slipped away from him, turning to dust and smoke as he grabbed at it.

A growl pulled him back into the moment. It was deep and disturbing, a sound that made every muscle tense, kicking his heart into high gear.

“It’s on the far side,” he whispered. “We can make it back to the Lounge. We can lose it in the spare bedroom, through the closet.”

“Unless it follows us,” Agnes offered, smiling. “Mr. Marks I know we are not friends but please do not lead me directly into that creature’s maw.”

“We can’t just sit here.”

“Oh, but we can, can’t we? Stay quiet, like little mice, and hidden, like shadows. The beast will wander off.” She made a gentle tsking sound. “Of course, that means it will be wandering and we might encounter it again. You have no idea how hard I worked to imprison it, Mr. Marks! A lot of effort. A lot. Which you have undone.” She pursed her lips for a moment. “Of course, it may be that my little trick has worsened its mood a bit, for which I supposed I apologize in advance of our dismemberment and consumption.”

The beast suddenly howled and began to run, claws scraping the floor. They both stiffened, and Agnes grabbed onto Marks’ arm in a way he was certain was calculated to trigger some sort of a protective masculine instinct in him, but which felt incredibly good anyway. Everything about her was in perfect sync with what he wanted, and he could feel resistance waning. He was tired. he was hungry. He was exhausted, mentally and physically. And she felt good, an inch away, touching him. He knew it wouldn’t be that long before giving in was inevitable.

The creature suddenly howled, a raw, primitive sound that made him shiver.

“You’re thinking again,” Agnes said. “You’re about to do something. Something incredibly stupid, if prior behavior is any indicator.”

He nodded, slowly. He stood up, shrugging her arm off. “It’s a little too perfect,” he said. Being hunted, the protective instinct, pretty, good-smelling Agnes clinging to him as they hid from certain death. Certain death he was suddenly certain he’d been tricked into releasing by the simple twist of making it seem like something he wasn’t supposed to do. And this, this being chased, being hunted—it was the ideal way to ensure he wasted time, wasted energy.

He started walking towards the center aisle.

“Marks!” Agnes hissed, springing to his side. “I don’t think this is a good idea!”

He shrugged. “Duly noted.”

“I may not have your best interests at heart,” she continued, whispering urgently as they moved out of the protecting shadows of the stacks, “but that’s not the same as wishing you torn apart by beasties and ghouls!”

Marks nodded. “I’ll be honest,” he said. “I’m almost half hoping I’m wrong. I’m almost half hoping I get torn to pieces. It would almost be a relief.”

He stepped out into the aisle and looked around. The library seemed unchanged; nothing seemed out of place, nothing disturbed by the passage of some monster. He could hear the thing breathing nearby, short, damp breaths that made the floor shake and vibrate under his feet. Designed, he thought, to get him up and running, sweating, terrified. Racing through doors without a plan or pause for thought.

“Marks!” Agnes hissed from the stacks, leaning out and looking, Marks had to amdit, pretty authentically terrified. “Mr. Marks I swear to you this is not a ruse. Don’t get yourself massacred and leave me all alone here just after I’ve found someone halfway decent to talk to!”

She sounded sincere. There was a slight quaver in her voice, but he also detected an insistent attempt to cover it up, to force bravado, which made it seem even more realistic. And it was appealing to think that something—and she was a thing, he thought, and not a person, not a real person with a real person’s feelings—as beautiful as her wanted him, desired his company, found him interesting. Decent.

He nodded. All of it just made him even more certain.

“Come on!” he shouted, throwing out his arms. “Let’s get it over with!”

“Marks!”

The howl again, visceral, wild, terrifying. The beast burst into the aisle from his right, loping into view. It was vaguely lupine, walking on all fours with the rolling, semi-upright gait of a gorilla, its snout short and its lips peeled back to reveal dripping, sharp teeth, far too many to reasonably fit in its mouth. A carrion smell, rotten meat, carried to him, and sweat popped out all over.

The thing’s glowing eyes locked on him. It pawed the floor and snorted.

He glanced at Agnes. Her face was terrified, eyes wide, one hand half stretch out towards him.

“Let’s go,” he said, and turned his back on it. He started walking back towards the doors. It roared, rattling everything around him, and then he heard and felt it gallop after him, its claws hitting the floor in a shuffled rhythm, click-click-click … click-click. His heart pounded and sweat ran into his eyes, but he forced himself to keep his shaky, uncertain gait slow. If he was wrong, if there really was a horrible monster about to tackle him and tear him to shreds, he was going to be as wrong as humanly possible.

He felt its gravity behind him, felt its hot breath, the splash of sizzling spittle on him. He stopped. He closed his eyes.

Nothing happened. After a moment he opened his eyes and turned. Agnes was standing right behind him. Her face was cold and angry.

“Rude,” she said.

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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.

24. The Library

“Well, you’re certainly less exciting the second time around.”

Marks didn’t look up at her. He could smell her perfume—it was almost supernaturally appealing, a smell that might have been engineered on the atomic level to appeal to him. The smell made him think of young women he could no longer remember accurately lying in freshly-cut grass, a little drunk from cheap wine and looking at him with that peculiar mixture of lust and innocence only the very young can manage. Agnes was an excruciating distraction, because he kept expecting her to be a good, friendly person simply because she was pretty. Gorgeous, now. It was a personal flaw of his, the expectation that a pretty girl would be a good person.

No doubt, the place knew this about him.

Marks sat at one of the wooden tables in the Library. The door back to the Anteroom wasn’t there, just as it hadn’t been there before, disappearing the moment he’d stepped through. It should have been disturbing, but he found it oddly comforting. The behavior of the rooms, at least, was consistent. He had his notebook and several of the various dictionaries open. He was conscious of hunger and thirst; he still had a little water left in the bottle, but the possibility of dying in this place was now very real, and it filled him with a strange excitement that urged him to work fast, to keep moving.

“What are you doing, anyway?”

He looked up at her. His memory of Agnes when they’d first arrived was muddy, but he was certain she hadn’t had such a perfectly round face, with such an ideal complexion, or so much silky, curly hair. That her legs hadn’t been so long, her waist so small, her curves so pronounced.

“Checking a theory,” he said.

“Which is?”

He sighed. He didn’t think there was any reason not to just go ahead and tell her. “There’s always clues in places like this, I think.” He tried for a moment to dredge up the specific memory he had that made him so certain, but it squirmed out of his mental grasp. “I’ve been in such a rush I haven’t been thinking about them. The animals on the doors. The dictionaries in here.”

She smiled brightly, and he felt a rush of warmth flow through him, a sympathetic reaction. “Red herrings!”

He nodded, forcing himself to look back down at his notes. “Maybe,” he conceded, and it was certainly possible. But the dictionaries stuck in his thoughts. The animal carvings. He’d searched the dictionaries and found all of the animal names they’d encountered in them, and they all seemed to be normal dictionaries, with nothing unusual about them aside from the age of a few. Most were the sort of dictionaries you’d find in any bookstore or online, in any normal classroom or actual library.

He pushed the books aside and studied his map. He’d re-copied it in a neat grid, and he studied the two doors he knew of but hadn’t passed through—the Viper and the Bear—represented by two thick lines that led to white space. He had three choices—reviewing the map had reminded him of the Rabbit in the odd spare bedroom. Nothing he’d found in the library had clarified the issues in any way.

He picked up the notebook and shoved it into the backpack, standing up. Immediately, Agnes was next to him, filling his senses with the warm, Autumn smell of her and an implied intimacy that raised the hairs on his arms. “Oooh,” she said breathily. “Finally! Where? You head into the Queer Lounge, of course you do—then what? Bear, or do you go to the Spare Room and try the Rabbit?”

Marks heard the capital letters in her speech. He didn’t respond, heading down the middle aisle towards the doors at the back of the room. He found he couldn’t quite quantify how long it had been since he and Dee had walked down this way, when they’d first encountered Agnes. It felt like decades, couldn’t be more than a few days, based on the food and water consumed.

He should have brought a second bag filled with supplies. He should have brought walkie talkies, a gun, a blowtorch—he should have brought everything. He thought of Dee and her father. He wondered if he might be wrong, if he might fight his way back to the Anteroom and find they’d escaped, found a way out and through. He shouldn’t have left her. But if he hadn’t he’d still be sitting there when they all starved to death, listening to Agnes as she evolved beyond human comprehension.

He should have stayed. He couldn’t have stayed.

The doors resolved into the three he remembered: Wolf, Quail, Stag.

Something Agnes had just said made him slow down. He could feel her looking at him, her lovely eyes dancing over his skin.

Queer Lounge.

It was an odd way of describing the room. He’d used the phrase too, but somehow hearing it back had crystallized something. He looked up at the doors again. The Quail carving was exquisite, the detail was incredible, and it was suddenly absolutely obvious that the first letter of the animal depicted was related to the room beyond. He closed his eyes.

Ape for Anteroom. Duck for Dining Room. Lion for Library. Hippo for the Hall of Mirrors.

He remembered the underground area, damp and earthy, and how the tunnels leading from it hadn’t been marked the same way.

Still: Stag for the Spare Room. Newt for the New Rooms.

He opened his eyes. It didn’t mean much. Maybe it meant there were twenty-six rooms in all, but the Underground argued against that—that might have been a wholly separate system of rooms, with the Underground as an intersection between the two. He stepped forward and opened the Quail door.

The odd, empty employee lounge of sorts hadn’t changed. At all. The refrigerator was still chained closed, and something still made it jump and shimmy. The food on the tables was still there, the music was still playing.

He walked to the rear of the room and studied the Bear door. He turned and glanced back; the door to the library was still open, to his surprise. Agnes stood in it, a vision, smiling at him in a warm and gentle way that seemed affectionate, as if she truly wished him well. He considered the books behind her, the endless rows of dictionaries, and wondered if the solution to the maze, the way out, was that simple: Spelling a word. Answering a question. A riddle.

It might be, he thought. If he could figure out what the question was. Again, without being able to put his finger on why, exactly, he knew it might work that way.

“You’ve thought of something,” Agnes said as he turned away. “Clever boy.”

He turned back to regard her. “Did you build this place?”

She smiled, crossing her arms over her chest. “No.” She sighed, stepping into the lounge and letting the door close behind her. “No, it’s just that I’ve been here for so long, I’m the god of this place.” She snorted, tracing a delicate finger over the small table as she walked past it. “I don’t control anything, actually. I try. But any changes I make are … undone, eventually.” She shrugged. “Sometimes things I do last for a while.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A very, very long time. I came here just like you, you know. I stumbled in. I became trapped. I spent some time trying to find my way out—I got out of the Waiting Room a different way, incidentally—and then I started to feel at home here. And I thought, so much time had passed, everyone I knew was long gone, why not stay, be a Queen?”

Marks smiled. “That’s what you are, a queen?”

“Queen of the Damned,” she said, leaning back against the table. “Queen of this place, anyway.”

Her charisma was exceptional. Marks wanted to just stand there and discuss the Maze with her, forever, just chatting and smelling her and waiting to see if she would reach out and touch him, maybe, on the arm or the shoulder. The feeling reminded him of being a teenager and trying to act cool around his first girls, trying to imagine a world where he might actually touch such creatures and feel their warmth against his skin.

He took a step forward. “Must be lonely.”

Her face rippled through several sudden emotions. “It … it is. It is.” She smiled again. “But I do get to meet some lovely people. Like you.”

He smiled back. “And lead them to the Waiting Room, the New Room Maze, other traps.”

She looked down at her shoes, which Marks would swear had become shinier, almost like mirrors. “Well, we all have work to do, Mr. Marks. You are apparently all about saving young ladies and reuniting them with their useless fathers. And failing, I’m sorry to say.”

As he stepped closer he imagined an invisible line between them, warm and humming with energy. How long had it been since he’d known a woman? Talked to a woman? He focused on that feeling of sinking into someone else’s space, the smell of sandalwood and musk wrapping itself around him. “Yes,” he said slowly, thickly. “We all have work to do.”

She leaned her weight forward as he drew close, her lips parting. He reached out and touched her hair, tracing one dark curl with his fingers. It felt like silk, a delightful sensation. He leaned in and breathed her in, imagining he could feel her heart beating, feel the heat evaporating from her perfect, flawless skin.

“What’s the question?” he whispered.

She swallowed thickly. “What?”

“The riddle. The question I have to answer to plot the route out,” he said softly, touching her perfect little ear. “What is it?”

She froze, and Marks felt the temperature in the room suddenly drop, the light growing dim. As the darkness crept in, she seemed to grow, stretching up towards the dropped ceiling, color bleeding from her, leaving her a photocopy of herself, all bright white skin and pitch black hair and eyes. An invisible force pushed against him roughly, and he had to lean in to hold his ground.

And then, a second later, everything snapped back to normal and he was in the Queer Lounge and the music was playing on a loop and Agnes was there, normal-sized, fully-fleshed, her face stoic and expressionless.

“Rude,” she said softly.

Marks smiled and shrugged. He thought he’d been too concerned with the rules. With playing along, with gingerly making his way around the edges. He walked over to the refrigerator. The brightly color letter magnets didn’t spell out any secret messages this time. The chain was rusted and old.

As he stood there, the appliance lurched as something inside it slammed itself against the side, like some sort of horrific, manufactured jumping bean. Marks nodded and shrugged the backpack to the floor. He knelt and opened it up, extracting the folding shovel. He stood up and began unfolding it.

“What are you doing?” Agnes asked, sounding bored.

He weighed the shovel in his hands, judging the balance. He held the handle in both hands like a baseball bat. “I’m getting the feeling,” he said, “that I’ve been letting you guide me a little too much. That maybe when you clearly want one reaction from me, I should give you the opposite.” He reared back and swung the shovel at the chain; the impact sent a lance of pain up one arm into his back.

“Mr. Marks!” she shouted, and he thought there was a legitimate note of tension in her voice.

“So, for example,” he continued, hitting the fridge again. “When you chain up a major appliance and something in it makes a lot of noise, reason states we should stay far away from it. So now I’m thinking maybe I should do—”

He hit the chain.

“—the—”

Again.

“Mr. Marks, don’t—”

“—exact—”

He swung the shovel and connected the blade cleanly, and the chain snapped with a metallic ping, sliding to the floor like a metal snake.

There was a moment of silence. A moment before the refrigerator door burst open, he heard Agnes whisper

“Oh, no.”

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