pulsing with a twinkle not his own. You ca n't stay awake ever, the house rumored in the moan of its shafts. He swallowed hard. " Watch me. " The nightstand hole rattled. He jerked back. The phone inside was ringing a treble, grim call. But Lena was gone. The real Lena. Still — the voice on the other end of the line would sound like her. The house loved its dollies. He seized the phone. His hand

THOMAS The house is awake now — completely. It does n't hide its breathing. It wants him to hear it. He presses his reverse to the shelling wall and forces himself to gobble still. The hallway stretches into a crooked throat, candle- dim and pounding with the steady, monstrous twinkle. He whispers to himself, " Find Lena. Do n't look back. " The floorboards shiver beneath his bases. commodity inside

Silence wraps around her like a wet distance. Her hands encounter along the wall as she struggles to remain herself. Every breath she takes seems to be espoused. The air tastes like dust from long- buried bones. The twinkle of the house slows — not weaker, but deliberate. Like it's savoring her. She moves, but the hallway clings to her bases — sticky, like saccharinity made of grief. The wallpaper forms

LENA She comes to sluggishly, as though surfacing through navigator- colored sleep. The first thing she hears is a twinkle — not hers. Not Thomas's. commodity larger. thick. Wet. It echoes through the walls like a pulsing barrel, shaking the bones of the house. No. Not the house. The body. Lena sits up in the darkness. Her studies feel sutured with rusted line — sharp when she tries to move them. She's no longer trapped entirely inside the walls, but she's not free, moreover. Her perspective shifts — occasionally she sees through her own eyes, occasionally through the house's

LENΑ Wherever her mind was now, it was n't inside her body. Lena floated in a vast chamber of silence — no ceiling, no bottom, only drifting faces around her suchlike petals in a dark drift. They goggled with wide, dried- out eyes. Their mouths opened and closed in slow, breathless heartbreaks. She tried to scream, but her voice came out as a faint ripple of study Where am I? The faces squinched as though the study hurt them.

The doorbell's chime faded into the stillness, swallowed by the house as if it had noway sounded at all. For a long moment, nothing moved. The walls broke their breathing. The pulsing beneath the bottom braked. The silence came tight and anxious, like the house was holding in a lungful of air, anticipating what came next. also the bell chimed again. This time, the note was lower, drawn- out, as though the medium itself was rotting under the pressure of the sound. Dust drifted from the ceiling in soft shadows. nearly deep inside the house, a distant wail bucketed through the structure.

The air in the house thickened, as though the dust itself had drawn breath. Lena stood near the staircase, barefoot, her skin glacial with fear. She could n't flash back when she'd last felt warmth. The electricity was long gone; no hum of life, no meter of machines. Only the slow, jouncing palpitation that came from the wood, from the old shafts that moaned as if stretching after a century of sleep. Every nanosecond since 300 AM had stretched endlessly — like the house was enmeshing time itself, looping it back upon her. She wanted to scream, but the house heeded too nearly. She

The first thing Lena felt was the hum. It came from far and wide and nowhere — downward , steady, like the deep vibration of an unseen machine. But it was n't mechanical. It was organic. metrical. Alive. She opened her eyes to darkness. Not the kind that comes with unrestricted lids, but the kind that has weight. A darkness that presses back. Her lungs pained as though the air itself defied her. She sat up — or study she did but her hands did n't meet the ground. They sank into commodity soft that palpitated noiselessly beneath her fritters. It felt like skin. She pulled her hands back, heart forging, and the darkness sounded to ripple in response. " Where — "

The house was silent the way a grave is silent not empty, but holding its breath. It stood at the edge of the old timber road, three stories altitudinous, its makeup long hulled into strips that coiled like dried skin. Every window had a faint fog to it, like eyes that had forgotten how to close. The locals called it the Waker's House, though no one could flash back why. Lena did n't believe in similar effects. She was thirty- two, practical, too habituated to megacity hum to notice old ghosts. She had come then for quiet, to finish her discussion on sound and silence in pastoral surroundings

Whispers After Midnight The Return Luke Morris noway believed in ghosts — not until the night Clara failed. For weeks after the burial, he could n't bring himself to step back inside the grange. The police had declared her death an accident — a fall from the old ground near the forestland but Luke could n't accept that. He'd seen the dispatches. He'd seen the time prints. She'd texted him after she failed. Every night since, her voice visited his sleep. occasionally faint, occasionally close — bruiting his name. Tonight, at 1157 p.m., he stood before the house again. The windows were boarded, the yard grown. The air was damp and heavy, smelling noiselessly of spoilage. His flashlight ray wavered across the weathered frontal door. The boards nailed across it were loose. He dithered only