Page 46 of A Heart So Haunted
Plink, plink, plink.
I craned my neck back. Thunderheads crowded the sun. Raindrops careened from above, peppered the open floors, my face, the tattered and eaten gauzy curtains. A single wingback chair sat in the corner, completely untouched, even of dust.
I held my breath when movement caught my peripheral. The door drifted shut with the quietest of clicks.
Now I was alone. I was doing this. No turning back now.
I held the sledgehammer like a sword as I stepped through the parlor. Strained to listen. No child’s cries, no hurried footsteps. No claws on the floor.
I ventured into the foyer—and almost dropped the sledgehammer. Not just the parlor had changed—everything had. Like thehouse switched shirts while I was gone. The first time, it looked abandoned, untouched for years. But the ash made sense now: Instead of drifting from the sky, the house was eaten by it. Somewhere along the way, the exposure to rain had soddened the boards, the floors, what little remained of the roof.
Outside, where there had been a perfectly manicured lawn, a maze of shrubbery now grew. From the house, winding pathways snaked from one end of the patch to the next. It extended farther than the eye could see, so far that it touched the horizon.
Dread crawled into my mouth, my nose, my eyes. A maze made good hiding for a boy of Haddy’s size.
This house—was it sentient? Did it pick and choose the people it let in? Was that why only I remembered the door? And why did it change inside? If I went back into the hall and stepped back in, would it show me something else again?
I stepped up to the front door. The door itself was gone, leaving only hinges.
“Haddy?” I called.
My voice echoed, echoed, echoed until it faded into nothing. Overhead, thunder rumbled.
Faint, so quick I almost missed it, the bramble in the maze rustled. Was that Haddy?
I glanced over my shoulder, left then right, just in case. No creature. It might have been the beast in the maze, not the boy. But did I want to take the chance?
“Haddy?” I called again, this time louder, more from the chest. Angry clouds shifted above me. I nearly turned back to search the rest of the house when I heard the voice.
“Landry!”
That wasn’t Haddy.
It sounded like Emma.
I hissed to myself. The innards of the maze rustled, frantic, like someone searching for a way out. How had Emma found her way inhere? How’d she seen the door? Had she come home and I hadn’t noticed, or had she found it after me?
Was it really her, or did I want to take the chance that it wasn’t?
“Emma?” I called. I scrambled off the porch steps, almost rolling my ankle at the bottom. I tried to keep the sledgehammer readied, secretly damning myself for bringing it along.
I ran left, right, winding through the maze of bushes, taking turns blindly. I held my breath every few seconds, listening over the sound of my heart. “Emma!”
“Landry!”
I followed it like a kite tethered to a child’s fist.
Minutes felt like hours. Rain threatened, only to back off and sprinkle again.
I stopped, winded, sweat trickling down my arms, my middle back. By that point, the rain decided to come down in hard sheets, dripping into my eyes and down my throat. The cloud cover made it difficult to see, so I used the sledgehammer to swing down brush.
“Emma!”
“Landry?” Closer.
I rounded a corner, sledgehammer dragging, and froze.
In the middle of the path, in a pool of black rainwater, sat a little girl. Tangled, knotted red hair in a fuzzy ponytail. She wore a yellow sundress with white daisies, stained with mud and rusted red splotches. Her face too thin, her chin too sharp.
