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Where’s There, Mon Frère?

The crew never understood why Lore hated being at home as a kid. They saw that her mother was always either at work or out with some boyfriend, and they thought, How excellent that must be . It must be pure, unmitigated freedom, they thought—no oppressive parents, no stupid rules, no vegetables to eat. Microwave some bagel bites, watch some Judge Judy, hell, kick back with something from Mom’s never-actually-locked liquor cabinet. Smoke weed, jill off, look through the medicine cabinet and take whatever was in there.

You basically own the place, Nick said. Hamish wanted to get high in every room. Matty said, Wait, so nobody’s breathing down your neck? Nobody’s telling you to get your homework done or study for this or practice for that? It’s Heaven, Laur! Even Owen didn’t get it, not really. It’s better than my house, he told her once, with a half-hearted shrug, and she of course took that as a challenge, as competition, because what wasn’t?

But what none of them ever understood was the feeling of that house.

Of being alone, when you weren’t supposed to be.

The silence always felt loud. The air always felt empty and cold, like you were stranded on another world, with no one coming to get you. It wasn’t just that it was lonely—it was that she always felt like the last person alive.

And the memory of that house—of being alone and lonely and crushed by an empty world—was the same thing she felt upon transitioning from there to here .

—

Where, then, was here?

Lore stepped off the staircase—

Then the smell of must and dust and mold—

Then a crinkling crackle in the deep of her ear forcing its way through her eustachian tubes, pushing so hard they might just burst—

The wave of emptiness hit her, pressed in on every inch of her, grew inside her like a widening, deepening hole—

And finally, a sharp, involuntary breath in—

Lore held that breath deep.

She stood still. Flexed her fingers, as if to make sure they were still there, and attached. Wiggled her toes, too, in her boots. Then she felt her face, just to make sure—well, she had no idea why it wouldn’t be there, or why her fingers and toes would not be attached, but everything was where it was supposed to be. Except, she supposed, her entire body.

Because her body was not in the woods.

Lore stared ahead at a hallway.

At the end, a door. And another door to her left.

Along the right, a long stretch of wall papered with a menagerie pattern in faded greens and blues—she spied peacocks and hares and butterflies, and in other places pairs of eyes staring out from behind dark foliage. The paper peeled in places, curling in strips like leprotic skin. Patches darkened with water stains.

At the top, someone had crudely carved a message in erratic slashes of wallpaper: This Place Hates You.

A chill clawed its way up from her feet, a centipede winding its way toward her scalp.

She tried to remain present, to focus on what had happened and where she was, but a question slipped through—

Why did you do it?

Why did you go up those steps?

To find Matty, she told herself.

Half true, she knew. Half a lie, though, too.

Focus! she chided herself. Where are you, Lore? Look around .

Okay. The floor beneath her was dusty, creaky wood. Chipped and scratched, as if by the unkempt claws of a big dog. Or wolf, she thought.

Above her, a flush-mount light fixture of cracked, dirty glass, held in place by a mount of leaves and vines of brass. Of the three bulbs inside, one was burned out, and one flickered incessantly, ticking and clicking with the sound of a moth tapping against a window. Tick tick. Flit. Buzz .

The door straight ahead of her and the door next to her were both made of wood stained dark, like the deck of an old ship soaked with seawater and blood. Simple metal doorknob. Each looked old, older than the knobs that had replaced whatever had been there first.

The door next to her had an additional detail that summoned in her a strange surge of nostalgia—

Three cartoony scratch-n-sniff stickers sat in the center of the door. Roughly the height of a child, eight or nine years old. One a slice of watermelon, one a lawn mower, the third what she thought at first was an inflated pink balloon but then realized, no, was a blown bubble, like from bubble gum. Each had a goofy face, bucktoothed and goggle-eyed. Lore took a thumbnail and scratched it across all three, kkkt, kkkt, kkkkkt , and then stooped to sniff—

The smell of rot hit her. A roadkill dead meat smell somehow intermingling with the pickled odor of an old folks’ home— crushed squirrel, stale pissy diapers, the sourness of age . And as if to make it somehow worse: a whiff of bubble gum just after.

Lore stepped backward, suppressing a gag.

The wave of nostalgia that had gone through her died fast, replaced with the returning sensation of being deeply, cosmically alone.

“Fuck,” she said under her breath, cupping her hand over her mouth.

She took a step back, suddenly realizing—

The stairs—

I’m going to fall—

But there were no stairs behind her.

The staircase was gone. All that waited behind her was a small wooden door raised from floor level. Just a dumbwaiter. Like in an old house.

She opened it up. More must, dust, mold smell—and that commingling of rot. Lore quickly closed it. Where am I? This hallway doesn’t make any sense. It didn’t seem to go from anywhere to anywhere. It was a rectangular space in three dimensions with two doors—three, if you counted the dumbwaiter.

Instinctually, she reached for her phone—newest iPhone, a Pro Max model. It had power but no signal. She went to the settings, looking for any Wi-Fi signal or Bluetooth. There was nothing. “ Fuck, ” she said again, then slid the phone into her back pocket. As she did so—

Her skin prickled.

Behind her, she felt someone coming up behind her—that sense of presence, of shape, of weight, plus the shifting of floorboards—the feeling that they were right behind her, about to breathe on the back of her neck—

Lore turned, found no one there. A phantom of stirred air.

“Matty?” she asked, quietly at first, then louder as she called out his name: “Matty!” It felt insane, that somehow he’d be here, in this—what, house? It looked like a house. What the fuck was this? How did she get here? I teleported. I’m dead. I’m a ghost. I’m hallucinating. I’m dreaming. In a coma. This is VR. Her brain flipped through the options like fingers flicking through vinyl at the record store.

And then, there it was again:

The feeling, the certainty, of someone standing behind her. Now, since she had turned around, from the other side.

Lore spun around—

And this time found that she was not alone.

She cried out in surprise—

At Nick.

Nick, who stood in the middle of the hallway, where she had appeared.

He faced the door, and turned toward her. “Lore?” he asked, his voice uncharacteristically small.

“Nick,” she said, the desperation in her voice radiating like a lighthouse beacon. Being here, even for the few moments between then and now, felt crushing, like she was in the cold void of space and couldn’t get air. Now someone else here felt like a lifeline. Nick, her improbable savior.

She strode toward him and threw her arms around him.

Awkwardly, he hugged her back, hard.

“Where the fuck are we?” he asked her, his chin digging into her shoulder. “Is this somebody’s house?”

Lore didn’t know how to answer that question. But she felt it again—a fresh disturbance of the world around them, the feeling of her sinuses swelling as if a storm were brewing somewhere—

Hamish crashed right into them, almost knocking them over.

And he, to her shock, was not the last to come through.