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Checks and Cross-Checks

Soon as they came back out into the house, Lore felt it. Like getting into cold, slick pond water—sinking into oily foulness, drowning in toxic runoff. Hamish didn’t need to say anything—it was clear he felt it, too. He looked sallow-cheeked. Almost like he was getting sick, like a fever was on its way. A hint of jaundice to his pallor. A sheen of sweat.

Lore sniffed and looked at the bookshelves in front of them.

“There was a book here,” Lore said to him, as she stood by those shelves, scanning them first with her eyes, then with a finger running across their spines.

Hamish didn’t hear her at first—he was instead on his hands and knees, looking back into the opening leading to the crawlspace. “What?”

“A book. By me.” Sort of .

“Wait, there was a book by…you? Here? In this room?” He grunted as he stood. “That seems fuckin’ goofy.”

“Yeaaaaah. Yeah.” She chewed on her lower lip. “I wrote a book once about game design. The Crazy Bitch’s Guide to… whatever. And it was here, and I flipped through it, but it wasn’t entirely my book. It had other things in it. Hateful things. About me, mostly. Stuff I’d seen online or gotten over email. Gross sexist shit. Death threats. Doxxing. I dunno why it was here. And you’re right. I can’t find it now, but…it’s insane it was here in the first place.” She used the toe of one of her boots to move the books on the floor to see if one of those was hers. Didn’t look like it.

“Maybe it was real, now it’s gone. Maybe it wasn’t real in the first place.”

“What do you mean? Say more.”

“Uhh. I dunno. I just figure—so, like, this is a room, and it feels like a real room that exists. Or…existed.”

“Like the ghost of a room. Or a copy of one.”

“Maybe a ghost is just a copy.”

Lore felt a little rocked by that comment. “God. Maybe. That’s pretty smart thinking, Hamish. So these rooms are or were real, but maybe they’re not the actual rooms. They’re ghosts of rooms, copies of rooms, programs of rooms. So why would my book not be here anymore?”

“Like, maybe it was just put here to fuck with you.”

She nodded. That felt right, didn’t it?

“This place hates you. Gets inside you. Like Matty—or whoever—wrote on those cabinets. If this place wanted to get inside me? Well, it would probably show me a book full of people who hate me. It would deliver that hate in a form I would not easily be able to deny. I’d definitely reach for a book I wrote, because, let’s be honest, I’m a raging narcissist.” Hamish looked like he was about to protest, but she shook her head. “It’s okay, I already know it. This place served my anxiety to me on a silver platter of my own making.”

“It’s…been fucking with me, too. The first bathroom we found—the one off this very room?” He walked over to that door, not yet opening it. “That was the bathroom I died in. At the party. Just some dude’s bathroom. I…I didn’t even realize it at first but then it hit me, that’s where I died. The mirror was broken because I broke it that day. With my head, when I passed out.”

“Jesus, Ham.”

“Yeah.”

He winced, and then threw the door open. The door that once led to that bathroom of which he spoke.

She walked up behind him to see what room it had become.

Now it was a garage. No garage door—just a cinder block wall. An early nineties minivan sat there, running. The smell of exhaust was thick, choking, and they had just enough time to see the shadow of a body slumped over the wheel before Hamish slammed the door shut.

Another body.

A suicide.

Torment and tragedy.

A show put on for us. But why?

What was it Matty had carved into the cabinets?

It wants to get inside them.

It wants to move in.

Hamish said, “We saw that home gym, earlier, too. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“That was from our first house. Before we had our first kid, Tyler.”

“Okay. Why…would it show you that? What happened there, Ham?”

He hesitated. “That’s the thing. Nothing. Not really. It’s where I really started working out. Where I changed my body from that fat kid to…this. Except…that room, it’s where I learned to really hate myself, Lore. Where I learned to hate the way I looked, where I punished the fucking shit out of my body. I would stay down there for hours. Guzzling energy drinks and pushing and pushing and pushing. I put up all these mirrors in that room too so I could look at myself and—and I told myself it was because I wanted to see how much I was improving, but every time I looked, it was never enough. Never. I’d stare in those mirrors and I’d say the worst things to myself. Things you’d never say to your worst enemy, man. I hated myself in that room. That’s when I figured…you know, this house was Hell, literal Hell. And that maybe I died way back when. I dunno.” This was hard for him. Lore could see that.

“Let’s refocus. Let’s talk about what we know. The place hates us. Wants to get inside us. You’ll become the house, whatever that means.”

“Yeah. And that thing about the eyes.”

“ You can tell by the eyes .”

“Tell what, then?”

“I dunno. Maybe…the eyes of the ghosts here? The copies? Maybe you can see something in there. Something that tells you…it’s not real? They’re not real?” Just NPCs, she thought.

“Or maybe it’s about the eyes of people the house…infects.”

At that, she shuddered. A new fate for Matty revealed itself to her: It got in him, filled all his rooms up . Just like it might do to them. She could feel it even now. Like furniture moving inside her head. Like footsteps. Hands rattling the knobs of her many doors. She wanted to go back into the crawlspace, and said as much.

“Me too,” Hamish said. “The crawlspace—has it changed?”

They each got down and checked, peering into it. There was enough light from the Greige Room to show that it hadn’t.

“The rooms shift. But the crawlspace doesn’t,” she said.

Hamish said, “You know anything about mortgages?”

“Delightfully little.”

“Well.” He dusted off his pants. “So, like, with mortgage rates, there are two primary kinds: fixed rate versus variable. Fixed rate means you know what you’re charged every month. Variable goes up or down on you, though truthfully, it pretty much always goes up . Swells like a balloon. So. Fixed rate is what you want. And it’s kinda true here, too. You want a fixed place, a constant doorway. Like the crawlspace.” He hesitated. “I dunno. It’s dumb. Listen, at work I’m just a monkey, I punch people’s info into the computer and it calculates if they get a mortgage—”

“It’s not dumb,” she said. And it wasn’t. “You step through a door, it’s like pulling a slot machine lever. It’s a random draw. But the crawlspace doesn’t change. It stays, like you said, fixed. Or in my world: a constant. In math, science, or fuck, in programming especially—a constant is a thing that stays the same, and cannot be changed by internal forces. It’s a thing that remains true . Sometimes even against external forces, if it’s final.” She hmm ed. “I don’t know how it all adds up yet. But I know we need to get back to the crawlspace. That place is safe. And out here…I can feel how this place hates us. It’s like something worse than white noise. Black noise. Empty noise . But in there I felt free of it. I felt more clear. Did you?”

“Yeah. We’re gonna need lights in there, though.”

“Right. Right. Okay. We go through some more rooms. Cycle them, see if we can’t find some gear. Flashlights, phone chargers, extension cords.”

Hamish nodded.

Lore stared him up and down. “All your life, you just thought you were some dumb, fat kid, didn’t you?”

He sighed. “Mostly. Not when I was with you guys, though. You know. Back when. I felt pretty good about myself then. But later…I dunno. With Matty gone and everything. I just felt worse.”

“Same here,” she said. It wasn’t a lie, not entirely. She’d found a better life. But had she ever felt as good as she did when she had her friends? When they were bound by the Covenant? She didn’t think so. “All right. We’ll keep looking for Matty. And more importantly, for Nick and Owen. Good?”

“Good.”

As they headed to the door to cycle the shifting rooms—

A stray thought pinged her. A phrase from the original Legend of Zelda game. Right at the start, a cryptic old man hands Link, the protagonist, a sword. It’s just a wooden sword, but it’s enough. And when he hands it over, he says:

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this .

And that’s the thought that hit her.

It was dangerous to go alone. If Hamish were alone in here, he would’ve killed himself. If she were alone, who knows what would happen. The house would have its way, she feared. Climbing a ladder made of her worst thoughts. Crawling around in her mental attic like rabid rats.

She nodded to Hamish, and reached for the door.