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The Rotten Cake Room

Wham . It was Hamish and Nick who closed the door and held it fast, Nick fumbling at the knob for a lock—a lock that ended up just being one of those little turny things. He engaged it just the same. Click .

Lore, meanwhile, was the one who pulled Owen through the doorway and into this dusty, musty dining room with the rotten cake smell and the cheap-ass wood paneling. She spun him toward her and found his gaze lost to a horizon that wasn’t there. “Owen, what the fuck, ” she hissed at him, and then snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Ping? Hello? You there?”

“Yeah,” he said, though he sounded unsure about that. “Hey.”

“Are you okay?”

A small nod. “Yeah.”

Bullshit. You’re not okay.

“Owen. Owen . Why did you stay…?”

Behind her, the other two were panicking. Lore looked over, saw blood spreading out underneath the closed door. Pooling between the feet of Nick and Hamish. The doorknob rattled. The girl’s fingers squirmed under the door like searching worms, sliding through the thickening blood, twisting through the red muck.

And then, like that, they were gone. Sucked back under the door.

The blood vacuumed back into the room, too—reversing course, rewinding like a movie. No blood, no fingers, no rattling knob, nothing.

Silence, long and cold, waited for them.

“I think she’s gone,” Nick said finally, his ear pressed against the wood.

Hamish pulled him back, giving him a WTF look. “These doors are cheap, man. One of those…fucking fingers might punch through this shit like an icepick into your ear. So be careful, damn.”

“She also had a knife,” Owen said quietly, as if to himself.

Lore told Hamish to stay there at the door, just in case. Nick, too. Owen, though, looked fragile. Not that he didn’t always look a little fragile, but something in there had really cracked his plaster. What was the deal about the knife? That was maybe a conversation for another time.

Instead, she ushered him into a chair. “You should sit.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Her mind felt calm. That, strangely, was how Lore knew things were really truly fucked—she wasn’t so great navigating her regular life, but she was aces in a crisis. The worse things got, the sharper and colder she became in response. An earlier partner of hers, a Web3 guru named Trevor, lived in Austin, said of her: You’re like one of those extremophiles; you thrive in the worst possible conditions. She told him, That’s right, I’m a tardigrade, bitch, and they laughed at that. Though later, when they broke up, he called her an “emotionless love assassin,” and it was like, dramatic much, Trevor? Fucking Trevor.

Still. He was right about her thriving in the worst conditions.

Like right now.

Since the moment she stepped onto the stairs and into this place, she was locked into crisis mode.

For her, crisis mode was evaluation and action . One without the other was no good. Act without evaluation and you were likely to run into traffic. Evaluate without acting and the problem was going to bury you.

So evaluate, Lore.

The room. This room. It was a dining room. The cake on it was rotten and old—looked like birthday cake, cheap cake from a grocery store. Half eaten, like whoever was here had just, what, gotten up and walked off? Disappeared? What was it Nick had said? Raptured . Or maybe they were killed by that thing in the other room, the thing that was, in theory, a teen girl who unalived herself in…the 1990s? Which meant she was a ghost, or a demon, or a living dead girl, and none of that mattered. What mattered was a way out. Like in The Matrix .

“First up,” she said. “Phones. Let’s make sure we don’t have signal yet?” They all got out their devices, checking them. Nothing. No bars. No Wi-Fi. No anything. She didn’t expect differently, and even still, her heart sank. She sighed. “Okay. So we need an exit.”

“No shit,” Nick said.

“Maybe the room will shift again,” Owen said.

Good, he’s back with us . Not just staring into the void. “You might be right. Only way to check is to open that door—”

“Which we are not doing,” Hamish said. He was leaning back, bracing his hands against the door, and shaking like a leaf while doing it. “Nobody open this door. Okay?”

Lore went around to the other side of the table, to the louvered split-door closet. She opened it—

Inside sat a series of shelves, and on those shelves were clumsy, dusty arrangements of glassware, drinkware, plates, all of that. Every piece radiating with that seventies-era vibe: Everything was puke green, fading amber, Dreamsicle orange. She looked deeper into the closet for something, anything—she reached back and felt along the back wall of it, and instantly, she felt the seam.

There. A split down the middle. A split with hinges.

Another folding door.

“Found our exit,” she said.

She reached over a stack of green glass plates, through a small galaxy of spiderwebs, and pushed hard in the center of the second door—

It moved, tenting outward a little.

Grunting, she pushed in farther, searching the back wall for an edge to the door—her fingers found purchase and, shoulder burning, she tugged on it, and inch by inch, the door folded up to the right side.

Thus revealing another room.

“Fuck is that?” Nick asked, standing right next to Lore, startling her. She nearly jumped out of her skin. He didn’t apologize, and instead just pushed past her and looked through the space.

“Excuse you,” she said.

“Whatever. Sorry.” Nick leaned forward. “It’s another room, holy shit.”

“Yeah, I know. It looks like a—”

“Like a living room. But—more modern.”

He was right. It was an expansive, expensive room. A sectional couch of white leather tucked into the corner on the right side of the room, and in the center of the room looked to be a stand with a flatscreen on it. And the color scheme—that gray-brown greige palette that made Lore want to throw up her soul.

“We go through,” she said, a declarative statement.

Hamish, on the other side of the room, still holding up the door, objected: “Hey, whoa, what? Maybe we shouldn’t…I dunno. Be hasty. Maybe we sit tight for a second. Maybe we grab a chair and talk this out—”

Nick scoffed.

“Sure, we all plant ourselves at this dinner table and enjoy a meal of half-eaten, just-moldy cake.” He swiped at the air, scattering a few flies that had found him. “It’ll be like our own little party.”

“I’m just saying maybe we should take a beat.”

“I’m just saying, the cake already smells bad.”

“ I’m just saying, maybe it’s not a good idea—”

“There’s a thumb on the cake,” Owen said suddenly.

He was staring at something intently.

Lore looked, and sure enough, on the side opposite to Owen, the piece of cake had a severed thumb in it. Pressed into the icing, straight down—just before lopping it off.

The cut was clean, too.

The thumb was old. Not mummified old, but shriveled up. The blood dried to a rusty crinkle.

Hamish made a horrible sound in the back of his throat. A low, scared-animal whine. Owen just stared at the thumb, unblinking.

“It’s like someone mashed their thumb down into a piece of cake,” Nick said, “and then while it was there, they, or someone, sliced it clean off.”

“Wonder what kind of knife was used,” Owen asked idly.

Something tickled at the back of Lore’s brain stem. A knife, again . For the first time since coming here, Lore returned her mind to the fight they’d had. About her game. Their game, if you were to ask him. How mad was he at her? Would Owen try to hurt her? Would he ever try to hurt himself?

That thought seemed to scurry around her head. Like rats through ductwork.

“Well,” she said abruptly, “I think that’s a pretty good sign we should get the fuck out of this room. Something bad happened here, and I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“Sold,” Nick said. “Let’s tear those shelves out.”

“We don’t have to. This middle one—if we move all the shit out of it—is big enough for us to just crawl through.”

So the two of them got to work moving plates and glasses and a particularly ugly gravy boat onto the table, next to the slices of ruined cake. Owen sat staring numbly at the thumb, and Hamish remained at the door, standing a diligent vigil over it. Still shaking, still sweating.

Lore wanted to say, A little help over here? but decided against it. Those two were best where they were.

Finally, they got all the dinnerware off the middle shelf.

The gap between shelves was now a portal into the living room.

“Let’s go,” she said, casting one more look into that room to make sure it was, well, still there . It felt crazy. Of course it was still there. Marshie’s bedroom was still on the other side of the door, too, right? Could it be gone? Would it be different if they opened it? She burned to find out, to waltz over there, shove Hamish out of the way, and fling it open, defiant in her curiosity. But then she remembered that girl rising up out from under the bed—all that blood, those cuts down her arms and along her throat, her sharp fingers. Lore felt sad for her, so sad it felt as if those fingers were pushing into her own heart and tearing it out.

But that sadness didn’t mean Lore wanted to meet her again, either.

Meanwhile—

Nick was already starting to wriggle through the gap.

“Hamish, Owen,” Lore said, again snapping her fingers. “C’mon.”

Owen stood, nodding silently as he lined up at the closet door.

“I can’t leave the door,” Hamish said. “If I do, she— she might come in.”

“It’s locked. We gotta move.”

“Lore—I don’t think I can. You all go ahead. I’ll—I’ll catch up.”

Christ on a clamshell, she thought. If she had guessed anyone would be melting down right now, it would’ve been Owen. Hamish, once upon a time, was Mister Go-Along-to-Get-Along Guy; whatever you told him to do, he’d do it. Hamish, drink this shot of hot sauce. Hamish, crush this can with your head. Hey, Ham, I dare you to press your asscheeks against Principal Schnur’s office window. God, there was one time they went to an old quarry that had long ago filled up with water, and someone had set up a rope swing, and they told Ham to swing on it and jump in. It was a long way down, and the water below was cold and black, and he didn’t give a shit, didn’t stop to ask any questions, didn’t have one iota of concern over it. He just whipped off his shirt, bolted toward the rope, and swung his ass like Tarzan out over the void. Then: hands-free. He let go, dropped like a bunker buster bomb. Splash. They all went in then, except Owen, who stayed up top—he said he wasn’t scared, but that “someone needs to watch our stuff.” Later, they learned that years before, a kid had died in that quarry doing exactly what they did. Turned out, there was a whole bunch of strip-mining equipment down there. Rusty, jagged metal, hiding under the surface. Kid landed in the wrong spot, crushed the center of his face on the top of a bent crane or something. Died instantly. When they all heard that, it was like, Whoa, what the fuck, we came really close to death . Except Hamish. Hamish said, and she would never forget this, “Yeah, but we had fun, and we all gotta die sometime.” Then he laughed and took another epic hit off his bong. Gurgle, gurgle.

What a difference then and now, she thought before marching over to Hamish and cupping his chin, turning it toward her.

“We gotta go. There’s a thumb on the cake. This room smells awful. We have to find an exit, and the exit is not in here. We can leave the door. Leave the door, Hamish.”

In a small voice, he said, “She looked like my Emma.”

“Who?”

“The girl. The bloody girl.”

Ah. So that’s what this was. That dead girl looked like one of Hamish’s daughters. Lore could not relate to that. She had no children. Had no pets. Didn’t want them. People you chose to love, chose to fuck, they were doors you could walk through or not. But you get dependents? Spouse, kids, a dog? You owe them and they owe you. They aren’t doorways. They’re whole houses. They’re a mortgage, and Lore, well, Lore was ever the renter.

“She’s not your daughter, Ham. Do you want to see your daughter again? Your wife? Your other kids?”

He nodded like a little kid being asked if he wanted ice cream after getting shots at the doctor.

“Then we have to move. Okay?”

That seemed to do the trick.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeahyeah. Okay. Yeah.”

Hamish let go of the door.

And then together they went to the closet and followed Owen through to the living room.