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still, inhale while taking a picture.
    The door creaked.
    So loudly that I cringed. Still, I wedged the door closed and sank down to the floor with my back against it.
    It’s okay, I tried to tell myself. It wasn’t as loud as you think. And how could they track it back to this door—it’s closed now. If they don’t know about it, you’re safe.
    I carefully looked up—even my hair rustling against the door sounded loud—toward the window in the door. I couldn’t see it from this vantage point, which meant that I couldn’t be seen, either.
    I listened . . . I waited.
    I looked at my wrist to see what time it was. No watch there. But eventually Mom and Steven would miss me and come looking. There was nowhere else to go on this monstrous estate except here . . . I just had to wait. They’d come get me. They would. Right? Unless they thought I was outside and started combing the woods. Oh God, that would take hours. Days.
    I’m here, I’m here, I tried to mentally tell them.
    And who was there ? Madame Arnaud looking for another child to taste?
    Or . . . this house had been empty so long. Maybe someone had taken up residence. Someone who was supposed to be taking medications to control their mental disease, but failed to. Someone crazed and violent.
    Someone who would bludgeon Steven with a baseball bat when he came to find me. Someone who would kill me, too, when I heard Steven’s screams and rushed out to help. And after he’d eviscerated both of us, he’d go into the modern, clean apartment and take care of Mom and Tabby.
    All four of our bodies gelling and cooling in the mansion. . . who would miss us? Maybe in the fall someone from the school would call, if Mom had already registered me. The police would come and find us glued to the floor by our own decomposing. We’d be morbid headlines.
    I waited. I listened, listened, listened.
    A lot of time passed. My mind wandered; I thought about Bethany. I eventually yawned.
    Maybe there was a way for the organ to play without someone pumping the pedals. Maybe a mouse was inside the works, applying his rodent teeth to tubing that somehow emitted a mild sound upon puncture.
    I yawned again. My heart had long ago slowed: that wild beast in my chest had its head tucked into its paws, sleeping.
    I was stiff from sitting so long, so I carefully began moving my limbs and rolling my neck around. I waited probably another twenty minutes, then I stood up, dusted off my jeans, and opened the bookshelf door.
    I listened again, carefully, looking into the vast depths of that gigantic library. I closed the door behind me, and began going back down the staircase, stealthily, just to be sure. I reached the floor and walked over to the door to the hallway leading to the ballroom.
    Oh my God .
    No.
    I hadn’t closed this door—and it was closed now.
    I backed away from it. I had to return to the secrecy of the servant’s room. That was my only chance. I took a few steps backwards, just a few . . . when something insane, totally insane, happened.
    The library completely vanished.
    Instead, I was in the ballroom, facing the organ, five feet in front of me. A woman sat on its bench, her back to me. She wore a rotted silk dress, her right arm extended to the side. Where the fabric had torn, decayed skin revealed the muscles underneath. Her right index finger had decomposed so much that just one long bone stuck out at the end. That bone was still resting on the organ key she had played about an hour ago.
    Silently, she turned her head around. She had dark hair, but I couldn’t see what her face was like since it was so undone by time. She had high cheekbones that shone through the frayed parchment of her skin.
    A little smile played on her worm-destroyed lips, as she held my gaze. She stood up.
    Like a parishioner making her way out of the pew after church, she walked sideways to free herself and her voluminous skirts off