I check the time on my phone and see even more texts from Neil.
I’m worried about you. Please reply.
I’m the only person in the world who truly loves you. I’ll never stop loving you.
On the other side of the dining room is a saloon door, which opens into a large, modern kitchen. On the phone, the professor—assistantprofessor—had said they couldn’t handle this placeon their own, but the kitchen is spotless. It’s as though the place had been scrubbed and swept before I arrived.
I go to the fridge, hoping Grace has already prepared something for me, but it’s full of raw vegetables, glass containers, and items wrapped in beeswax. No brand names, no plastic. I make a sandwich and walk back out into the hallway, where I spot a black cat trotting through the living room. I get down on my knees and hold out my hand.
“You look like you belong to a witch,” I say, but when I turn, I see that it has a bird in its mouth. “Hey, drop that!”
It gives me a disinterested glance, then trots up the stairs.
“Hey, come back here! Drop it, cat!”
Halfway up, it turns to look at me, as if to say,coming?
I sprint after it. At the landing, it darts through a strange door barely taller than my waist, on the other side of the stairs. I figure it’s a closet, but when I pull it completely open, I discover a dark staircase. It must lead up to the attic.
I remember the face I saw in the window. When I mentioned it, Grace looked annoyed. She said no one lived here, but I know I sawsomeone.
Who was it? Is he still here?
“Hello?” I call out as loudly as I can. “Is anybody there?
I know I’m crossing a line—but I tell myself that I need to save the life of the bird.
Another buzz from my pocket.
Stay safe, wherever you are. Don’t get murdered.
Jk.
Great timing, Neil. But I can’t help myself.
There’s not much space, so I’m forced to climb the stairs just like the cat. When I reach the top, I push through a trapdoor to a long, dark room. As I step inside, I lose my grip on the trapdoor, and it slams shut after me. The cat leaps through an open window at the far end of the room—the only window in the entire attic—onto the roof, and in the movement, the bird miraculously gets free and flies away.
I feel a sense of relief for the bird, but when I turn back to the room, I remember where I am. I try to pull the trapdoor open again. There’s a metal ring I can use, but it’s stuck flat, and I can’t get my fingers around it.
I look around the room for something I can use to wedge it open, and I quickly see what a mistake I’ve made. There are piles of papers all over the floor. At the far end of the room, a desk is pressed up against a window overlooking the driveway.
This isn’t just the attic. This is Grace’s office. This is where she writes her murders.
If Grace catches me here, she’ll fire me—no question.
I turn away from the window and go into the dark end of the attic. As my eyes adjust, I find more piles of papers and cardboard boxes. I nearly trip over a dozen coffee cups, islands of mold forming in the black dregs. I step past them, searching the floor, when I bump into something hard with my foot. I pick it up and stare—and then scream.
It’s a human skull.
It feels real, and I let out a scream and drop it on the floor. Who the hell owns a human skull? I back away to the other side of the room. As I get close, I see paintings on the walls. Unlike the more respectable paintings downstairs, these are gruesome. There’s a triptych of hell, with humans tortured in every conceivable way; a painting of a corpse in hyper-realistic detail; and then an old-fashioned anatomy chart .
I try to control my breathing as I move to the desk. This place is creepy as hell. Just spending a minute here is freaking me out. What would happen to my mind if I spent a day here, all alone?
Maybe that’s the point.
I find an expensive-looking penknife among her papers. I pick it up to see if it will work on the trapdoor, when I see a balled-up piece of paper on the ground.
I instinctively pick it up and smooth it out. It's covered in short paragraphs.
