Chapter 3

I am a completely rational person.

Ever since I was a child, I firmly believed that all supernatural phenomena have purely scientific explanations.

Maeve's paralyzing fear and Helena's bizarre behavior simply had to be the result of some underlying psychological mechanism or environmental factor that I hadn't yet discovered.

The absolute best way to shatter fear is to confront it head-on.

If I walked down the hallway myself, counted the doors out loud, and proved with my own eyes that nothing existed there but a solid wall, this entire absurd fantasy would collapse on its own.

The clock on the wall quietly ticked away at exactly two-fifteen in the morning.

Taking a deep breath, I carefully tucked the blankets securely around Maeve and quietly slipped out of the bedroom.

The hallway was completely unlit.

Moonlight spilled through the window at the far end, casting pale, ghostly patches of light across the carpet.

I stood firmly at the starting point of the corridor, right at the top of the staircase.

There was no trace of fear in my mind, only a desperate urge to uncover the truth and see exactly what would happen.

I cautiously took my very first step forward.

"One," I counted silently in my head.

To my left was the door to the guest room.

The white wooden surface looked completely lifeless beneath the pale moonlight.

I kept moving forward down the hall.

"Two."

On my right side was the study.

The brass material of the doorknob reflected a faint, metallic glint in the dark.

"Three."

To the left was my own bedroom.

"Four."

To the right was Maeve's bedroom.

Reaching this point, absolutely everything seemed perfectly normal.

Even though my heart was beating a bit fast, my logical reasoning remained razor-sharp.

Inhaling deeply, I stepped toward the fifth door.

"Five."

To the left was my parents' master bedroom.

The door was tightly shut, and there was absolutely no sound coming from inside.

I even pressed my ear against the wooden panel to listen for a few seconds, only catching the faint sound of snoring that clearly belonged to my father, Arthur.

I let out a long sigh of relief.

See, Mom was sound asleep inside, meaning the noise I heard earlier was definitely an auditory hallucination or just the thermal expansion of the old house's wood.

I turned around and walked toward the final door.

"Six."

It was the bathroom at the very end of the hall.

The door was left slightly ajar, emitting a faint smell of bleach from within.

I was officially done counting.

There were only six doors.

Standing right at the bathroom doorway, less than a meter in front of me was the solid dead-end wall hanging with the sunflower oil painting.

Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened.

There was no seventh door, and certainly no room pouring out red water.

I let out a self-deprecating laugh of pure relief.

I could not believe I had actually crept out in the middle of the night to count doors just because of a seven-year-old's nonsensical rambling.

It was completely insane.

I turned around, fully prepared to go back to my room and sleep.

It was exactly in that split second as I pivoted around.

The extreme corner of my peripheral vision suddenly caught something incredibly wrong.

I froze completely dead in my tracks.

The overall length of the hallway seemed to have somehow changed.

Standing at the bathroom door, the distance back to the staircase should have originally been no more than ten paces.

But right at this very moment, the corridor stretching out before my eyes seemed to have been violently elongated by some unseen force.

The runner rug extended impossibly far into the pitch-black depths.

Swallowing hard, I forced myself to whip my head back around to look at the solid drywall from a moment ago.

The oil painting of the sunflowers was completely gone.

Standing in its absolute place was a door.

It was a white wooden door that looked entirely identical to the other six doors in the hallway.

"......?"

My entire body went ice-cold as waves of paralyzing numbness washed over my scalp.

This was completely impossible.

This was absolutely, physically impossible.

I forcefully squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temples hard, silently reciting the solid laws of physics and spatial geometry in my mind.

It undeniably had to be a severe hallucination caused by extreme visual fatigue.

I suddenly snapped my eyes wide open.

The door was still standing right there.

Not only was it there, but an incredibly faint sliver of blood-red light was actually bleeding out from beneath the crack of the door.

One, two, three, four, five, six... seven?

I whipped my head back around and used my eyes to recount every single door down the hallway.

The guest room, the study, my room, Maeve's room, the master bedroom, and the bathroom.

That made six doors.

Plus the one standing ominously directly in front of me, that made exactly seven doors.

Maeve had not been lying to me at all.

I slowly extended my right hand forward until my fingertips finally brushed against the cold doorknob of that seventh door.