May said nothing as they drove through the gray city, snow a blackening mush on the side of the road. Her face reflected in the window, the outside world forever dark, and she couldn’t bear looking into her own, accusatory eyes. She wanted another of Thorn’s cigarretes. Feel the heat of it again, something resembling normalcy. As the life had left that frozen girl’s eyes, some uninvited cold had snuck into May’s veins, worse still than it had been all those long weeks before. She hoped someone would find her body, soon. She couldn’t stand imagining how cold the girl must be, snow building up atop her body. She knew it didn’t make sense.

That didn’t matter.

She swore she’d find whoever had tied up those thin wrists with zip ties and long lengths of rope - who had then stayed, and watched, and hadn’t stopped her. How often had this happened, at Slaksfórn, how many more times would it happen again?

Skygge pulled up somewhere near his house. The bassist still couldn’t look directly at her, and if the near physical guilt she felt was only a thin remnant of humanity, she could only imagine how Skygge was feeling about all this.

They got out of the car, into the thin, cold air, and May struggled to remember what warmth should feel like. In the distance, looming over the block of houses, the church’s silhouette was blacker still than the night sky.

The gloom of the hallway hadn’t faded while the skugabor had been away. May doubted it had been a welcoming entrance at some point - maybe very long ago. As she stepped across the threshold, the unsettling sensation of too-thick shadows rose from the floor again. She wanted to fall down and throw up, but Thorn was right behind her. She took another step. Only now did she notice how neat the house was, how carefully aranged every oddity Skygge’s family had collected over the years. She’d never managed to keep her room nice, Erika had always lamented. May could still see her stacks of books and journals in her minds eye.

‘I’ll go see if gran is asleep,’ Skygge whispered, ‘She’d skin me alive she finds you two in here again.’

He dissapeared further into the house, and May turned around and checked the deadbolt on the front door.

‘No way in hell someone got through there,’ Thorn said, ‘Are you sure you’re okay, May?’

The vocalist had spend two days in bed, staring at the ceiling, when he’d killed Petr. He’d been a wreck, and May had understood. Made him talk. She was well aware she was being a hypocrite. She also couldn’t bear the thought of breaking down in front of them.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, knowing that if she would start talking now, she wouldn’t be able to piece herself together for weeks to come. Still - the dark seeping up from the floorboards was oozing into her skin and making her ill. It was nice to be able to blame something else.

‘You feel that?’ She crouched down to touch one of the tendrils, but it was as thin as regular air.

‘Yeah,’ the older skugabor said. He was still looking at her. ‘I don’t know how Skygge’s family’s lived here for so long.’

Panicked footsteps came from the ceiling, and then Skygge rushed downstairs.

‘She’s not still in the living room, is she?’

‘What?’ May said, turning away from Thorn and forgetting about the sentient dark for a moment.

‘Gran,’ he said, ‘Ann was supposed to come by and bring her to bed. I think. She’s not there.’

He didn’t wait for an answer, and pushed open the door to the living room. The dark corner from where, long hours earlier, the old woman had screeched at them to leave sat empty. For a moment May feared Skygge would accuse them - her - of dragging her off and murdering her.

‘The door was locked when we came in,’ Thorn said, ‘Right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then she’s probably still inside,’ he said, ‘Unless whoever’s been in here took her.’

‘I’d call Ann first,’ May said. Skygge had gone pale, and she shot an angry look at Thorn.

The rising shadows had subsided, now that Skygge was here, with his humans eyes. It reminded her of the way the field had felt, that night they’d been dragged away to witness the tortured corpses of murdered sheep. Would it open up to suck them in, into nothing?

She shook her head. Skygge pressed his phone to his ear, hard, muttering at Ann to pick up, already. He was pacing the length of the hallway, back and forth and back and forth, and once again May caught Thorn’s worried eyes. She pulled her sleeves down over her guilty hands. Was there blood beneath her nails, still?

Once his sister picked up, Skygge spoke short, stressed words, and barely waited for Ann’s reply before hanging up on her.

‘She hasn’t been by yet,’ Skygge said, shoving his phone down his pocket. ‘Kids kept her busy.’

‘Let’s search the house, then,’ Thorn said, ‘Could she be upstairs?’

The bassist shook his head. ‘She’s in a wheelchair. Unless someone took her there?’

Skygge stormed upstairs, alarmed at the thought, and Thorn followed.

That left the ground floor for May, with it’s rough rugs and overflowing bookshelfs. She wandered through the empty rooms, the kitchen, every space overflowing with the traces of past generations. Skygge had said he had old blood, and she could see what he meant here - decades upon decades of family history had been imprinted on this house. No wonder his family had secrets; they’d been here for centuries.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

She’d circled back to the front door - there was no one here. The dark swirled around her ankles, as she walked, like cold, shallow water. She crouched down again. It bothered her, this unhidden dark. An old house alone wasn’t reason enough, she thought, and reached into the shadows.

Hours earlier she had dissolved into this dark, and the sensation of pushing out her thoughts made her gasp at the memory. She was in her body, still, but at the same time she was not - sending her thoughts out through the shadows, feeling every black corner of the house, no matter how small. The dark was thick and swirling here, and hard to send her mind into; it was if she was pushing against another sentient being, here. It made her shudder, sending out these crucial fibers of herself willingly into it, and she feared something might be pulled back into her once she would retreat.

It reminded her of the tunnels.

Once she realized that, she forced her thoughts down, ignoring her sudden exhaustion and her prickling spine. There was a space, below the kitchen, one she’d somehow missed. She yanked her mind back into her body, breathing hard at the sensation. She glanced at the ceiling - Thorn and Skygge were still up there, somewhere. Should she call them down? No- she didn’t want to see Thorn eye her again as though she was about to shatter.

She was, but that was completely beside the point.

With haste in her step she left the hallway, entered the living room and then the kitchen. She looked around, but saw nothing strange; long, blackout curtains hung in front of the windows, an old rug lay on the wooden floor. The room, like the entire house, was terribly neat and well ordered. It was impossible to imagine a house this immaculate to host such deep secrets.

And yet, when May yanked open the curtains one by one, she found a half-opened door behind the last one. How had she missed this? She shivered at the sight of the splintered, abused frame; there was a heavy key in the lock, still, and she had to force herself to step through the opening.

It did not surprise her to find the wheelchair laying empty at the top of a narrow staircase. One wheel was spinning still, and May absentmindely stopped it. The stairs led down, to a the basement, May assumed, where the dark was thicker and something was wrong. She could sense was someone down there, at the bottom of the stairs, in the shadows. A faint heartbeat echoued through the dark. It was as faint as the girl’s had been in Slaksfórn.

‘Don’t think about that,’ she told herself, and steadied her body against the damp wall.

‘Skygge!’ May yelled, switching on the light. It didn’t help much, and her feet were uncertain as she descended. She could heard the bassist’s footsteps coming towards her, but she didn’t wait for him. The dark seemed to solidify around her, and it caught in her throat as she inhaled; slowly, Skygge’s grandma began to take shape at the bottom of the stairs.

As she approached, the woman’s heartrate quickened. May had been spotted, somehow, and the older woman had realized who and what exactly she was. Her eyes, blue as gleyser ice, shot open in the faint twilight.

‘You!’ she said, still unmoving, and May crouched down beside her. ‘Why are you here?’

‘Skygge asked me to help look for you,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he’d have found you, here.’

‘I told you to stay out of my house.’

‘Can you move?’ May said, and yelled for Skygge again. How far upstairs had they been, for him not to be here yet?

‘Stay away from my grandson,’ she said, with such menace that May leaned away. She narrowed her eyes.

‘Stay away!’ the woman repeated, pounding at May’s mental walls, harsh and with the power of decades of practice.

‘You do that thing,’ May said, the right conclusion nearly on her tongue, ‘with your voice. Throwing all that pain straight at me. I’ve had that happen to me before.’

Skygge came bounding down the stairs, pushing May out of the way in the process and yelling at her to call a fucking doctor, already, May!

She didn’t have a phone, but Thorn, who had appeared at the hidden doorway, pale as a the dead, did. As he called, she dragged herself back upstairs. Skygge crouched down beside his grandma, and May sat down on a kitchen chair. She shivered. She shouldn’t have tried Thorn’s cigarettes, she figured now; she’d already developed an appetite for the heat of them.

As they sat waiting for an ambulance, Skygge’s grandma’s words echoued through May’s skull. She considered telling Thorn, but he was looking at her as though she was a dying puppy hit by a speeding car, so she stared at the floorboards instead. Besides, the words didn’t hurt the way the… thing in the cloister had hurt her with its words. But it was close, and it didn’t help that she was telling herself worse things, now.

When help arrived and the old woman - broken bones and all - was carried up the stairs, the dark sent silky tendrils after her, reluctant to let her go. May could hardly believe that Skygge couldn’t see it. Then again, maybe he felt them, because he kept glancing back into the basement, as though he could sense the consciousness that radiated from the dark, here.

‘I’m going with her to the hospital,’ the bassist told them. May nodded. She’d not expected anything else.

‘We should go home,’ Thorn said, eyeing May with that insufferable worry that made her bravery collapse. She shook her head. She knew she should take care of herse

‘Can we look through the basement?’ she said. Skygge stared at her.

‘I think we’ll find whatever your intruder was looking for in there,’ she said.

The bassist shrugged, looking over his shoulder to where his grandma had been carried.

‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘It’s probably just bags of potatoes.’

‘We’ll go home after,’ Thorn said, and May didn’t bother disagreeing.