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They come up along the base of the north wall, one after another, running fast around the corner and down the east wall and across the front of the fireplace and behind the piano and up both sides of the staircase. Four hundred wicks catching in a line, and the line doesn’t stop, because the line is going all the way around this room.

It closes at the terrace doors.

And the ballroom is very bright and very quiet, and I’m standing in the middle of a perfect circle of candles that I sold to this town myself, boxed in fifties, at eleven dollars a box.

Gage has my hand.

"Out," he says. "Now. Terrace."

We get four steps.

Then every door in the Hollis mansion slams shut at the same time, all of them, the terrace and the kitchen and the front hall and forty interior doors on three floors, one enormous wooden sound like the whole house closing its mouth.

And the little girl in the nightgown says, in that same flat, bored voice, right against my ear:

"That wasn't you, was it?"

43

MAREN

STILL HALLOWEEN NIGHT

Iopen doors. It's the one true thing I've learned about myself in thirteen days, and it cost me a house to learn it.

Every door in the Hollis mansion just slammed at once, and I felt nothing at all.

"No," I tell the girl in the nightgown. "That wasn't me."

She nods the way you nod when someone says it might rain later.

Then the room catches up.

The quartet stops in the middle of a bar. Someone laughs, high and thrilled, because half these people paid twenty dollars tonight to be scared and they think they're getting their money's worth.

Then a man in a wolf mask tries the terrace doors, and his laugh dies.

He rattles them. Puts his shoulder in. Puts his whole body in.

The doors don't move.

Gage's hand lands flat between my shoulder blades. Not pushing. Just there.

"Cass."

She's already crossing the floor with her mask shoved up into her hair. "The terrace is shut. The kitchen's shut. Perry says the front hall won't give and there's no lock on it worth picking."

"Windows."

She holds up her hand. Her knuckles are split and already closing. "It's glass. It just doesn't break."

I go to the terrace doors myself.

The brass handle is warm from every hand that's tried it. It turns fine. The door doesn't care.

So I stop using my hands.

I reach for it the way I reached for the seam on Gage's front step several nights ago, when a bright taut line lay across the world and opened for me like a latch under a thumb.