The room was on fire. Fire climbed the opposite wall, catching the drapes, melting wallpaper in bubbling waterfalls. As the curtains burned, I saw the blaze reflected in the tall windows.
“Sammy?” I tried to call but choked as smoke reached into my mouth and singed my lungs. I coughed and pulled my shirt up, stuffing it over my face.
Every tip I’d ever learned for dealing with fire popped into my mind: stop drop and roll, throw flour on it, put a wet blanket over your head. Instead I stared, transfixed. I was trapped, and Sammy was trapped too, but where had he gone?
“Sammy?” My voice dropped to a whisper. He had vanished, and the girl too.
I ran to the window and tried to unlatch the locks, antique but new. They worked. I had opened them myself during our first week at Kerry Manor, but now they stuck as if someone had glued them shut. I grabbed a chair and slammed it against the window. The glass did not break. I stared at my reflection, my face red and slick, my glassy eyes filled with terror. Smoke filled the room. Soon my reflection in the glass would be obscured by smoke and the flames would move to my pants and shirt, my hair.
I returned to the door and shook the handle, yanking with all my strength. I grabbed another chair and slammed it into the door, but the effort was feeble. My eyes watered, and breath came in ragged gasps despite the shirt covering my face. I cried and wiped at my face and turned to face the burning room. I could not escape. I would burn alive in this house.
Sarah
“I HATE THIS FUCKING HOUSE,” Sarah grumbled as she pulled into the drive, no longer with dense with foliage but surrounded instead by brown, crinkling bushes and trees. Wet leaves blanketed the driveway and rain fell in a steady stream, blurring the house. The windows were dark, but Corrie’s car stood in the driveway.
The yard was atmospheric, the house sitting in a gray bubble of rain and wind that did not seem to move past the lines of trees that shielded it from the road.
The wind wrenched Sarah’s car door from her hand and she struggled to force it closed. A twig grazed her cheek, and she fought leaves away as they blew up and swirled around her as she ran to the front door.
The door was locked. Sarah knocked and shouted for Corrie, but the driving wind muffled her call
“Corrie,” she yelled a second time, slamming her fists into the door. The windows were dark except for a flickering glow. She peeked in the porch windows, but heavy drapes blocked the interior.
The smell of smoke permeated the damp air, and as the rain slowed to a drizzle, Sarah realized it was more than a fire in the hearth. Panic rising, she raced around the house toward billowing black smoke. Fire engulfed the back of the house. Plumes of black smoke billowed out, combining with the damp fog sweeping across Lake Michigan. It was an unnatural image, biblical, and for an instant Sarah could do no more than stare in petrified awe at the odd spectacle of orange flame, black smoke, and white mist colliding at the edge of the dark lake.
As the realization that Corrie was inside washed over her, Sarah willed her legs to move. She ran toward the back porch obscured by dark smoke. She glimpsed her sister-in-law peering from one of the study windows, terror etched in her face, but then she vanished.
Sarah raced back to her car and fumbled her phone from her bag.
She dialed 911, but no sound came across the line. She pulled the phone away, saw the ‘no signal’ in the corner of her phone.
“Fuck, no, not now. This can’t be happening right now.”
Running across the lawn, straining to hear Corrie within the house, she stared at her phone until she found a spot with a single blinking bar. She dialed again. At first nothing, and then finally a voice on the line.
The operator’s voice cut in and out. Sarah yelled the address for Kerry Manor and screamed that a fire was consuming the house. She didn’t hear the woman respond, and after a frustrating minute of silence, she threw the phone on the ground and raced back to the house.
She ran around the side of Kerry Manor, searching for another way in. As her eyes raked over the house, her breath stopped. Sammy stared down at her from a second-story veranda. The door before him swung out, caught in the wind, and slammed against the side of the house.
“Sammy?” she asked, dazed. He had been there, and yet now the doorway stood empty, a black yawning hole into the house. She climbed onto the porch rail, shimmied up the eavestrough and swung her leg up, clinging to the damp roof and knowing she might need the ambulance too, if this failed.
When she reached the little porch, she gasped for breath, clinging to the black iron rail, pausing for only a second before rushing through the doorway. The darkness consumed her, but as she fled down the hallway, she searched for her brother. He couldn’t be there. He was dead. She had touched his waxen skin as he lay in the coffin, his body emptied of its humanness, replaced with chemicals to preserve him a bit longer - no longer a man, but a science project.
She slipped on the stairs and smacked her elbow on a step, wincing as pain shot up her arm and lodged in her temple. Sliding down two more stairs on her butt and cradling her arm, Sarah forced herself back up and ran toward the study. A sliver of bright orange ran beneath the door and rivulets of smoke poured out. She threw her coat over the doorknob and turned it, but the door stayed firmly closed. She yanked it a second time and then pounded.
“Corrie!” she screamed, but only silence returned her call.
She twisted the knob again, and then she spotted the nails poking along the doorframe. Someone had nailed the door closed. No, not someone - the evil that had invaded Ethel in that dark chamber a century before.
Sarah grabbed a nail, but she couldn’t pull it loose. Sprinting back to the kitchen, she ripped out drawers, sending one of them sprawling across the kitchen floor, forks and spoons scattering. She found a junk drawer with a hammer and whipped it out, running back to the study.
“Hold on, Corrie. Hold on.”
Prying the nails, recoiling from the heat pulsing beyond the door, Sarah tried not to imagine what lay on the other side. Would she find Corrie crumpled, burned black, only the bones of her beautiful sister-in-law left?
The last nail pulled free, and now when she turned the knob, the door swung open. Flames devoured the room; the opposite wall was a mass of burning and writhing. Sammy’s monster figures had melted into pools of colored plastic on the mantel. Sarah tried to push the door in further, but something blocked it. She leaned down, struggling to see through the smoke, reaching with her hands. Her fingers found warm flesh and soft curly hair.
“Corrie,” she moaned, grabbing Corrie’s legs and awkwardly shoving her deeper into the room. She pushed in, grabbed Corrie beneath the arms and pulled her out. She dragged her down the hallway, pausing near the kitchen when the haunted sound of a girl’s voice found her.
“One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral, four for a birth…”
Her strength faltered, and Corrie slipped down.
“No,” she mumbled, and then she shouted. “No, you fucking devil. No!”
She lifted Corrie into her arms and ran. The front door was locked, but even when Sarah undid the latch, the door refused to move.
“You bastard, you goddamn fucking bastard,” she screamed, kicking the door and losing her hold on Corrie a second time.
Sarah laid her down and checked her pulse, finding an almost imperceptible throb.