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Hollis tried to force himself not to imagine Walt living in this house, but he was failing.

The last owners hadn’t fled without warning. They’d gently packed everything they could afford to move with and left. Everything inside was untouched.

There was still furniture: a couch and chairs, a dining room table, stove and icebox. The bedrooms with doors open still had beds and dressers. All the surfaces scrubbed clean before they left, the layer of dust on everything was smooth like a blanket of snow.

Hollis hadn’t spent much time thinking about what tenements looked like when he was learning about them in school. He knew it wasn’t his turn to be upset, but he was anyway.

It’s okay. Most people lived two families to one house. Toji said the people we lived with, the Robinsons, moved out shortly after my family died. None of this stuff is theirs, all of it belongs to strangers.

Hollis could see particles floating in the air. It probably wasn’t safe to be breathing all this in.

Check the bag. Yulia’s smart enough to think of this.

And he was right. Hollis put on the mask, goggles, and gloves Yulia no doubt pestered out of her father and read the handwritten instructions she’d taped to them so he’d put them on right.

How do you feel?

Like standing on a table with two broken legs. Unsteady.

That was better than before.

Where do you think we should do this?

The basement. It’s always the basement. Heart of the house.

Walt took their legs and walked them to a door in the hallway that Hollis had just assumed was a closet, and it opened to a set of stairs. He turned on Yulia’s flashlight.

“Okay... okay. Fuck. Okay,” Hollis muttered.

The air was very dry, the stairs might not be safe. They sat down on the first step and eased their way down slow. They clung to the metal railing and skipped stairs that seemed a bit brittle.

Their foot finally touched the ground, and they scampered off the stairs to stand in the center of the room.

“Okay.” Hollis gasped again, out loud.

Candles first.

The flashlight was bright enough to get a sense of the size of the space. It was more like a storage room than a traditional basement: a combination of Hollis’s house’s root cellar and pantry. There were jars still filled with food lined up against the walls, shining in the light. Every inch of it was covered in cobwebs, but it had been long enough that even those had begun to rot and fall to the floor.

Hollis had expected mice since there was so much food, but it was so still. So quiet.

Nothing lived in here.

Are cobwebs flammable?

Stop paying attention to that and be careful. I don’t want anything to happen to you.

Us, Hollis corrected.

He kicked a clean space big enough for them to work safely. They weren’t going to use nearly as many candles as Yulia and Annie had. That had been overkill, a bit dramatic and definitely Annie’s idea.

You know, I didn’t think I’d get this far, to be honest. I half expected to be “Jorged” on the stairs before we even got started.

They’ve done that to anyone who came down those stairs. We’re fine ’cause I’m here. It’s watchin’ me.

Us, Hollis corrected again, irritated.

He spread the herbs Yulia packed in a circle and walked inside without hesitation because he trusted her. Sat down and opened the gallon of spiced water. Soaked the large paintbrush Yulia had packed and painted a large rectangle on the wall in front of the circle. Then he dipped his hands in the white chalk Yulia had painted herself with and tried his level best not to fuck that up.

“Okay,” Hollis said again. “Okay, I think I have to let you to handle the rest in a sec.”

Savior of all men, you that have all virtue and power, Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—

Are you fucking kidding me?

No, shut up.

Hollis rolled their eyes but let Walt continue the sacrament. He didn’t tease him. Not when he could feel the echoes of Walt’s fear.

He opened the audio file Yulia had sent him with, and her voice filled the room, soft and sure.

“Il? mo pe o! Dá mi l’óhún!”

Walt moved restlessly from their stomach to their chest, down their hands and up to their face.

Settle down.

Hollis, I’m scared.

Don’t think about it. Focus.

Yulia’s voice stopped, and to their surprise, her father cut in and finished the rest of the incantation. His voice was strong and for the first time Hollis could tell that he was very upset. He wondered what it cost Yulia to ask him for this. To open that door from a past he’d closed so firmly.

Hollis started to say something else to calm Walt down, but he couldn’t.

He finally was able to understand what Walt meant, why he was scared. Hollis felt heavy now, unsteady. Like he was at a great height or beneath a very large tree.

Redwood leviathan, old as fern.

There was no breath on the back of their neck, but it felt like someone was standing behind them. First at a distance and then—with a crack—so close that Hollis wanted to flinch forward away from it.

But he couldn’t move.

He couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t shift Walt to the surface, couldn’t scream, couldn’t sweat. And the worst part of it all was how familiar this felt.

It was like there was a miasma over . He breathed it in while he picked fruit, thin enough to walk through, diluted. Strange enough to raise Annie’s hackles in the car, but light enough that everyone could play games in it, light fires in it.

But in the basement in Walt’s house, it had concentrated to this one spot. Like a man-shaped black star, and Hollis knew that outside this place, was safer than it had been in a hundred years.

Hollis couldn’t move his eyes, but he could see a shadow of it, blurring and moving at the bottom of the wall. Like it was struggling to hold shape.

Walt came to the surface slow. Wrapped his arms around Hollis and buried him inside. Deep enough that he didn’t have to see, that he could barely hear, where it was warm and safe beneath his own heart, and Hollis looked up at the candlelight like looking at the sun underwater.

The instant Walt hit the surface of Hollis’s skin, the room imploded. Shards of wood and rock, sharp and heavy, jutted in toward the middle of the room. Horizontal the way they never should be, like a great lamprey’s mouth, all the way up to the edge of the circle and around the rectangle on the wall.

The noise was indescribable. A roar organic and mechanical, musical and discordant, the press of a thousand voices, a howl like the wind during a house fire.

Hollis knew Walt was screaming only because their throat hurt so bad and their lungs cramped with the pressure.

Then it touched them.

Walked over Yulia’s protective charms and spun them around, and Hollis knew it wasn’t because she failed them.

Look away.

Hollis wasn’t a coward. He stared harder. Looked at this thing that was pulling in the candlelight. So heavy it belonged in space, not the basement of a house.

It didn’t have a face, but it left the impression of one. The way Hollis knew where things were when he was going downstairs in the pitch blackness to get a cup of water.

Walt was talking now. Apologizing, trying to explain. Tears and sweat stained their clothes as they shook. But the thing wasn’t paying attention to Walt. Somehow Hollis could tell that it was looking at him instead. Head tilted to the side.

Walt changed tactics. He covered their chest where Hollis was hidden and began begging. He scooted back to the edge of the circle to try to escape it, but it moved toward them, relentless as orbit, reaching forward.

Hollis screamed alongside him when it connected with their chest. When it reached inside, parting veins and tendon and muscle to close its fingers around the back of Hollis’s spine and begin to tug.

It placed a hand on their shoulder, gentle, and leaned forward close enough to kiss, then tore Walt out of Hollis’s body like a poison.

Walt clung to him, to his legs, and Hollis scrabbled to hold him in.

“Please!” Hollis shrieked.

It stared at him, burning his skin radiation hot. It didn’t respond to Hollis’s request. It paused and then kept pulling harder.

Hollis had never been strong.

But he was ready.

When the weakness of losing Walt came as he knew it would, he caught himself on one knee and hurtled his arm like a comet toward the tincture. Grabbed the handle and threw the entire thing.

The liquid flew in an arc, wetting the entire room. Then, with a noise like tearing the sky apart, the creature split into pieces. Into people .

Hollis could see the shape of them all in suspended droplets, shimmering in midair, and for the first time in a thousand years, it was silent.

Hollis knew which one was Walt, knew the shape of him. Knew those shoulders and that stance and the feeling of him curled up as he was now.

He could tell Walt was crying, but Hollis couldn’t hear it. He couldn’t hear anything at all.

The largest shade dipped down, reached with an invisible hand to touch Hollis.

“Please,” Hollis asked again.

The smallest turned to the rectangle on the wall, the only space of untouched brick, and vanished. The next began to fade as well.

Hollis lunged forward, connecting with Walt again at last, but he couldn’t hold him inside. They faded in and out of each other like a hologram—nothing at all the way Yulia’s tincture had worked the first time—and Hollis’s heart raced with terror.

Walt’s parents were left, and they were watching them. Tall and thin, short and stout, just like Walt described.

They want me to go. Walt’s voice hit him with great and terrible relief now that they were touching. But it still sounded so far away.

“Is this your door?”

What? No, Hollis, mine is—

“This isn’t your door,” Hollis interrupted him. “I don’t think they know or care whether you leave the right way. I don’t know if there is anything left of them that can remember.”

But they’re my ma and pa! Walt cried.

Hollis looked at the tincture suspended and leaned down to fit it, put his arms where Walt’s arms were, legs bent beneath them, leaned his face where Walt’s face was, merged them manually.

Looked up at Walt’s parents with Walt’s eyes.

“He apologized. This wasn’t his fault, he was just a kid. If you still remembered how to love him, you would already know that. Go home. You don’t belong here.”

The taller shape hesitated, then phased through the wall, leaving Walt’s ma.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Walt sobbed. I didn’t know. I never should have done it, and I never should have left. I’m sorry.

Hollis held his breath, but she didn’t disappear.

Instead of following the rest of the family through the door, she turned and started gliding up the stairs.

What—

Hollis grabbed his phone and stood up. “Come on. You have to move with me.”

They followed her up the stairs and through the living room, jogging as she got closer to the exit. It was so hard to see her in the brightness of the daytime. The tincture was drying and Hollis had to slow and squint. Then, just like Hollis thought they would, the foundations of the house began to shake.

“Shit. Shit!” Hollis took off in a sprint.

Wait!

Walt’s mom reached the threshold of the house, and the door burst wide open.

Immediately, the floor behind them tilted with a sickening whine, and Hollis slipped, sliding backward. Walt caught up with him, and they scrabbled up the flexing floorboards. Walt scraped their fingers against the doorstop, took every ounce of strength he had left and threw them outside just as the house began to crumble.

Hollis landed on his shoulder and bounced down the stairs violently, arms wrapped around his head, grit stinging his eyes.

He managed to look up in time to watch the rest of the building slide into the basement. All three floors of it, flimsy without the load-bearing supports that had been obliterated completely.

It made a sound that set his ears to ringing, loud enough to be heard over the city line, loud enough to be heard back home.

It was a long moment before he noticed the shade of Walt’s mom still next to him. Five feet tall and sweet and wide, looking down at him.

“Thanks for that,” Hollis said.

She didn’t answer. She turned and went back to the rubble. Sinking into the basement to answer the call of her door.