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New Room, Who This

The lights from their phones swam through the dark. The room here felt humid, thick with that sour diaper smell, with the odor of human rot—and as their beams converged, Lore and Hamish found themselves looking at a broken twig of a man, buried under covers, the weak flashlights illuminating a gray face that seemed more like a mask of skin gently and awkwardly laid across a skull than a face. The eyes rotated in the skull. Breath wheezed.

Then they heard it—

The click of the door behind them.

Lore and Hamish spun as it closed.

Hamish didn’t understand, but Lore instinctively did. The door closing meant something, she knew that now, same as it had when it closed in Marshie’s room (though who had closed that one, she did not know)—

Lore moved fast, three long strides to the door—

She whipped it open, already saying Owen’s name. “Owen, why the fuck did you—” But even as the words were falling out of her mouth, she knew in her gut what had happened. The door no longer opened on Owen and Nick. It did not find the Greige Room. It found a new room instead. A strange country kitchen. Garish. Tacky. Her guts churned. Her head spun. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Hamish, now behind her. “Wait. What happened? Where are they?”

“They’re gone,” she said. And when she said the words, a little voice slithered into her mind, a voice that she feared was not her own but still sounded like her, and it said: One step closer to doing it yourself, Lore. Like you always do. The only way anything ever gets done .