Page 51 of Where the Dark Things Bloom

I got to my feet and stepped forward. He was working on something near the wall, his focus pulled away.

That’s when I saw skulls. Some stripped clean. Others with scraps of flesh still clinging to bone. All collected in the walls like a mosaic wall he built for himself.

My stomach flipped. I moved one foot at a time, trying not to make a sound. I reached the first step.

Then he tilted his head.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he shouted, standing up.

My heart exploded into motion. Panic took over. I ran. My legs were barely under me, tearing up the stairs as he came crashing after. The basement door flew open, and I rushed into the stairwell, lungs burning. I didn’t stop. I just kept running, desperate to reach the upper floor, to find a door I could lock behind me.

The stairs weren’t supposed to be this long.

I counted ten when I was a child. Eleven if I skipped the broken one that always moaned beneath the heel. But now, as I clawed my way upward with a bruised knee and raw palms, there were at least twenty. Maybe more. Each one groaned like something alive. Hungry.

My fingers slipped on the old banister. The varnish had peeled away long ago, leaving it as raw and splintered as my skin.

Behind me, the basement door hung open, exhaling cold breath like a wounded animal. The damp was inside my bones now. I still smelled him. The way he smelled in the dark, metal, cedarwood, sweat.

My body called Dorian even when I didn’t want it to.

Up. Up. Up. Don’t look back.

The house sighed around me. Wood popped. A low creak stretched across the ceiling like footsteps walking overhead. But I was the only one upstairs.

Wasn’t I?

I reached the top and froze.

There was a door where there hadn’t been one before.

Pale green paint. Cracking in long strips like old scabs. It breathed, or maybe it was just my breath bouncing off the silence. Either way, the air felt too thick to pull in and too heavy to let go.

The doorknob was made of brass, warm as skin. It turned too easily in my hand.

The door swung open, and I stepped inside.

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

Sweet. Decaying. The scent of peppermint crushed beneath rotting fruit. Like something trying too hard to cover its death.

The room had no windows. Just walls that stretched high, smothered in peeling wallpaper. A sickly green, weeping from the corners. Beneath the curled edges, there were words.

Not words. Accusations.

Scrawled, carved with fingernails, etched in what I hoped wasn’t blood.

LIAR. YOU WILL PAY. NOT TRUE. DREAM. NIGHTMARE. RUN. STAY.

They covered the walls like wallpaper of their own—layered over and over until the letters bled into one another like bruises. There was a movement to them. As though, if I looked long enough, they’d rearrange themselves into something new.

I stepped further in. The wooden floor creaked beneath me, and as I looked up, there was only one thing in the center of the room now. A dollhouse.

A miniature of Thorn Hall, down to the crooked shingles and broken front gate. The windows were dark, just like the real ones. The front door was slightly ajar. My stomach flipped as I looked down. Teeth.

The entire floor was made from human teeth, fitted together like puzzle pieces, stained and polished, making the floor of the dollhouse look like marbel. I couldn’t breathe.

I backed up, but the door had closed behind me. The knob was gone.

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