Chapter 2

But Maeve simply couldn't hear a single word I was saying right now.

She slept in my room that night.

To make her feel completely secure, I locked the bedroom door, drew the heavy curtains tight, and left only a single bedside lamp turned on.

I leaned against the headboard while Maeve shrank entirely under the covers like a frightened little bird, revealing nothing but her wide, terrified eyes.

"You're safe now, Maeve," I whispered softly while gently patting her back, just like I always did when coaxing her to sleep.

"The door is locked so the monsters can't get in, which means you can finally tell your sister what happened."

I fully expected her to blurt out some typical childhood fantasy about eyes watching from the walls or dark shadows creeping under the doorframe.

I had already prepared a perfectly rational, materialistic explanation to teach her about light refraction and the scurrying of mice.

But Maeve didn't cry or throw a tantrum at all.

"Sister, how many doors do you think we have in our house?"

I froze for a brief moment.

"Do you mean out in the hallway, because there are six out there: your room, my room, Mom and Dad's room, the study, the guest room, and the bathroom."

Maeve simply shook her head.

Slipping her pale hand out from under the blankets, she raised a single finger to her lips and made a quiet "shh" gesture.

Then, she leaned in extremely close to me.

The room was so overwhelmingly quiet that I could distinctly hear the "tick-tock" of the wall clock's second hand echoing in the silence.

Maeve pressed her lips directly against my ear.

Her breath brushed lightly against my earlobe, causing an uncontrollable wave of goosebumps to erupt all over my body.

"Mom is in there."

She paused for a moment and then glanced nervously from side to side in the dim light.

"She counted the doors in the hallway, and then she walked right into the seventh door."

All the blood instantly rushed to my head, leaving my scalp tingling with a sudden wave of sickening dread.

The seventh door?

Having lived in this house for ten years, I could confidently walk from one end of that corridor to the other with my eyes completely shut.

There were absolutely, undeniably, and unequivocally only six doors in that hallway.

The very end of it was nothing more than a solid drywall dead end adorned with an oil painting of sunflowers.

Where on earth would a seventh door have come from?

What chilled me to the bone even more was the terrifying implication of her first sentence stating that Mom was "in there."

Helena had clearly just been standing out in the hallway before storming off to the master bedroom in anger, so why would Maeve ever claim that "Mom is in there"?

"What kind of nonsense are you talking about, Maeve?"

"Mom was just lecturing you a minute ago and is safely inside the master bedroom, plus the end of the hall is just a blank wall with absolutely no seventh door."

"That wasn't Mom," Maeve declared as she suddenly sat bolt upright, fixing her wide eyes intensely on my tightly shut bedroom door.

"The person inside the master bedroom goes is not Mom," she repeated with chilling certainty.

"Our real mom walked right into the seventh door because I secretly watched her walking down the hall, counting one, two, three, four, five, six, and then seven."

Maeve's small frame began to tremble violently once again as her pupils dilated in absolute, primal terror.

"She went inside, and then a whole bunch of red water came flowing out of it, and she never ever came back out."

A paralyzing chill ran completely through my entire body.

This was absolutely not the kind of horrifying lie that a seven-year-old child could simply invent out of nowhere.

I reached out to stroke her head, fully intending to assure her that it was merely a hallucination, but before the words could even leave my mouth, a strange noise suddenly echoed from out in the hallway.

"Creeaak—"

It was the unmistakable sound of old wooden floorboards buckling under the heavy weight of a deliberate footstep.

I subconsciously held my breath in the stifling silence.

"Creeaak—"

There was another heavy footfall.

Maeve instantly dove backward under the thick blankets, clamping her hands tightly over her ears and curling herself into a tiny, petrified ball.

I remained frozen on the bed, staring relentlessly at my locked bedroom door.

The creeping footsteps came to an abrupt halt directly outside my room.

"Valerie..."

"Is Maeve asleep yet?"

Swallowing back the fear lodged in my throat, I forced myself to sound calm as I answered, "She's asleep, Mom, so is everything alright?"

A suffocating silence hung heavily outside the door for at least ten long seconds.

Just when I was finally starting to think she had walked away, Helena's voice drifted through the wood once more, carrying an indescribably eerie undertone this time:

"Are you absolutely certain that there are only six doors out in the hallway?"

My heart violently skipped a beat in my chest.

"What on earth are you talking about, Mom?" I demanded as I threw myself off the bed, crossing the room in a few quick strides to wrap my trembling hand firmly around the doorknob.

There was no response whatsoever from the other side of the wood.

I yanked the door open into the darkness.

The hallway was completely empty, leaving only the half-open window at the very end where the night breeze rustled the curtains with a soft, whispering hiss.

The master bedroom door was firmly shut, without even the faintest sliver of yellow light bleeding out from underneath the crack.

I stood completely alone in the dark corridor as a thick layer of cold sweat drenched the back of my shirt.

It couldn't possibly be that complicated; Mom was either playing a cruel prank on us, or she was simply sleepwalking through the house.

How could a rational, highly educated person like me let a few childish words and some random footsteps scare me so badly?

I turned my head and cast my gaze straight toward the dead end of the dark corridor.

The familiar oil painting of sunflowers hung silently and innocently against the wall just as it always had.

However, Maeve's chilling words just kept playing over and over again on an endless loop in my frantic mind.

"She counted the doors in the hallway, and then she walked right into the seventh door."