1. NEVER look at the gardener

2. Enter doors only after knocking

3. The clocks need daily winding

4. House staff and visitors must mask.

5. Every statue in the Long Hall must be COMPLETELY covered

6. Rule three repeats for the grandfather clock; set again before leaving

7. Wrong deliveries occur daily!

.... Only accept on the second attempt, not the first or third

.... Run the package to the center of the hedge maze.

.... Leave the maze within five minutes.

8. Depart Kilgore Court for any video calls; video and photography are strictly prohibited!

I’m halfway through my three week stint as a house sitter at Kilgore Court, an allegedly haunted estate where I’m required to follow strict rules. There’s also a hidden rule in the list when the first words of each line are strung together, along with a secret word in the first letters (N-E-T-H-E-R-W-O-R-L-D).

When I spoke with my sister earlier this week about my new job, she laughed. “Oh my gosh, isn’t there a small part of you that wants to break a rule, just to see what would happen?”

“No.”

“You haven’t changed a bit, Sam! Can I come see this haunted house you’re in?”

My twin sister Elena is the opposite of me in every respect. She has friends; I have none. She worked through college and bought a house; I still live with our parents. I consider her brash, loud, and reckless. She considers me a “socially impaired loser with a stick the size of a baseball bat up his ass” (her words). Given my difficulties with socialization and therefore employment, I am sure it was a surprise for her to hear I had acquired this job. My employer is endlessly complimentary (by this I meant Pim Perrin—I had not met Mr. Kilgore). My tasks are minimal. And my pay is three times hers. She actually accused me of making it all up—which made me frown. I do not lie.

“That’s not true. You have lied,” she said over the video call.

“I haven’t lied since we were eight years old.”

“Pretty sure I caught you jerking off once and you lied that you were ‘reading’ the article—”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Ell.” My sister is the only person who has ever been able to wind me up. “Look behind me. Does this look like our parents’ house?”

She was still giggling at having gotten me to swear (it was against the rules growing up—and I still rarely use profanity). “I mean, it could be a background. Looks like you just plucked it off the internet—"

I brought the phone through the sitter’s suite, lingering on the embroidered furniture, the balcony and the brocade curtains.

“Holy fuck that’s your office? Swanky. Hey can I come visit?!”

“No.” I turned the camera back toward me.

“Oh, come on!”

The truth is, I did want to give her permission to visit. Many things around this place did not make sense, and I would have welcomed another pair of eyes and opinions than my own.

I also had a more self-serving reason. I was sick of my twin sister regarding me as a failure, and it would have felt validating to show her that, whatever my deficits in charm, I could succeed in this position, where social interactions were unnecessary and my exacting nature was useful regarding the rules.

I wanted her to realize that I was not the utter failure she thinks I am.

That is why I eventually said, “Yes.”

But even after I made her swear to follow all the rules, I knew I was making a mistake—my twin sister is exactly the wrong sort of person to bring to Kilgore Court.

Rule Two

“HOOOOLY SHIT!” Elena whirled, snapping pictures as we ascended the front steps to the grand double doors. I made a calculated grab and snatched her phone, tucking it into my back pocket despite her squawks.

“Rule eight, no video or photography. I’ll give it back after the tour. Wait here.”

“What? Why am I—ooohhhh, right.” She chuckled as I put on my magpie mask and ducked inside. “Rule one,” she sang mockingly from behind the doors as I grabbed a vividly colored parrot mask from the foyer cloakroom.

“Rule four,” I corrected, returning to hand her the mask.

“Why am I a parrot?”

“Because you—”

“—talk too much,” we finished at the same time. “Jinx,” she added lightly, strapping on the mask. “How do I look, Mr. Magpie?”

Looks were irrelevant; the point of the mask was compliance with rule 4. Elena blew a raspberry when I told her this, and instead of following me up to the sitter’s quarters, she insisted on touring the mansion first. I had no choice but to follow—otherwise she’d have opened doors without knocking (rule 2).

Obviously she could not be allowed anywhere near the garden or the Long Hall, and I abbreviated our tour to a few of the grandest rooms, including the conservatory, the library, the lounge, the ballroom, and “all the Clue Board rooms” (as she put it). When we neared the kitchen, the odor of the corpse blossoms—which was ever present throughout the drafty house—became eye-wateringly strong. Upon knocking and opening the kitchen door, the stench of rot made me gag.

“UUGH!” exclaimed Elena, clapping a hand to her nose. “Bro. It smells like they left a whole pig to rot… What is that stink?”

“I don’t know.” The sitter’s quarters has its own kitchen, and there were no tasks to bring me regularly to this wing of the house. Garlic braids hung from the ceiling, and some bread sat going stale in a basket, but mostly the kitchen was bare. After a cursory look through the cupboards turned up nothing, I turned to leave.

I was on my way out when I heard her say four words that sent a chill up my spine:

“Where does this lead?”

I looked back. She had opened the cellar door. Only…

She hadn’t knocked.

“The cellar,” I said mechanically, my mind slow to catch up.

“I think the smell’s coming from down there—”

“Ell, don’t!” Breaking out of my trance, I lunged and caught her wrist so hard she yelped.

“What the hell??”

“Don’t—don’t go down there.” I stared past her. I had never been down to the cellar before, but Pim had showed it to me the first day—brick walls descending to racks of wine and some stored root vegetables.

This… was not the same stairwell. For one thing, there was no light switch on the wall. And the walls were not brick, but dank and glistening stone, as were the stairs, descending into a square of blackness so thick it was impossible to make out anything down there except…

The stench.

The overpowering, eye-watering, stomach-churning stench.

“… Yeah, I wasn’t planning on going down there,” Elena said, shoving past me. She playfully tried to shut the door on me, and my heart slammed into my ribs. I rammed through her to get out. I shut the door behind us as Elena barked at me, “Ow! You jerk!”

“Stop dicking around,” I hissed.

“GOD, you are so uptight!”

“You promised to follow the rules—”

We bickered all the way back to the sitter’s quarters, where she hurled off the parrot mask with a squawk of frustration and collapsed onto the fainting couch. “I am NOT wearing that itchy thing again. God! Stuff your stupid rules!”

This was as good a segue as any, so I sat down opposite her and said, “I want to talk to you about them, actually. To… to consult you.”

“Consult me?” she perked up.

“On these rules, and rumors of the mansion being haunted…” As she leaned in, I pointed to the pictures framed on the walls, explaining how they had all been drawn by the previous caretaker, who also penned the sitter’s rules, in which he embedded a secret warning. I ran my finger down the list, showing how it could read N-E-T-H-E-R-W-O-R-L-D and also if you strung together the first word of each line it read: “NEVER enter the house. Every Rule Wrong! Only run. Leave. Depart!”

Elena looked vaguely impressed. “Dude was committed to his creepy legacy.”

“That's not even the half of it. He claims he disfigured his own face as punishment for breaking a rule. He was diagnosed with dementia. He kept a journal, full of ravings, in which he expounded on his reasons for these specific rules..."

I showed her a paper I'd copied from his journal:

1. NEVER look at the gardener—the sight induces unbound terror and madness

2. Enter doors only after knocking—un-knocked doors lead to the bone closet

3. The clocks need daily winding—the chimes cast the veil

4. House staff and visitors must mask—the skinless man stalks the unmasked! There is no escaping the skinless man

5. Every statue in the Long Hall must be COMPLETELY covered—the unshrouded seek to swap places

6. Rule three repeats for the grandfather clock; set again before leaving—the clock sets time

7. Wrong deliveries occur daily—the wrong deliveries are collectors!

.... Only accept on the second attempt, not the first or third—the master awaits his meal

.... Run the package to the center of the hedge maze—the center is the rift.

.... Leave the maze within five minutes—linger and the veil will lift from your eyes.

8. Depart Kilgore Court for any video calls; video and photography are strictly prohibited—the camera does not lie!

I tapped my fingers nervously while my sister read. I had already agonized over these rules to the point of questioning my own sanity. The original caretaker also wrote about orgies with demons, curses he cast over his enemies, corpses he dragged into the garden to rot, and how he carried a syringe with anesthetic with him at all times until the day he cut his own face off. Records from last century detailing his “increasing hysteria” indicated that I should take his writings with a grain of salt, rantings of a sick mind in an age when medical care was rare. It was only tradition that the rules were handed down and still followed today, as was his name, "Pim Perrin," passed to every caretaker. Tradition, and likely marketing, given what the current Pim had told me about how staff play up the hauntings for credulous guests by fiddling with the electricity or jiggling tables.

All just superstition and stories.

Except... I had dreamed about the rules, and his explanation for them. I'd seen things I couldn't explain. I needed my sister to provide some insight—to be the grounding to all the electrifying strangeness I'd experienced. Or to tell me it was all real.

Still, I was not prepared for her reaction.

She burst into peals of laughter. “Don’t tell me,” she said, fighting for breath. “Don’t tell me you believe this nonsense?”

My face grew warm. “I…”

“Oh, Sam! Little brother!” Much to my chagrin, she hugged me, cradling my head against her like a small child. I shoved her back as she laughed. “Sweetie, you take everything so damn literally!”

“Ell—”

“Did this Pim guy talk in a spooky voice when he told you about this stuff? Ooooh, Sam, I, the caretaker of this haunted house, must issue you a waaaarniiinng!” She’d managed to snatch her phone from my pocket when hugging me, and spun around snapping pictures. She leaned in to show me. “Look. It’s all perfectly normal. The camera doesn’t lie, huh?”

“The rules don’t apply in the sitter’s quarters—”

“Oh, so it’s only out there that’s haunted?” She raised her eyebrows. Her challenge sent the hairs on the back of my neck prickling, and a terrible feeling churned in my gut as she asked, “So if I take a photo out there, I’ll see ghosts?”

“I don’t…”

“You don’t know? You mean you haven’t taken any?!” She stopped, eyes lighting up. “You haven’t? Oh my God, Sam, you are so precious! You didn’t want to break the rules!”

“Rule eight—”

“Rule eight! Rule eight, no pictures! Awww, poor Sam. It’s okay. Your sis is here now. I can break some of those big bad rules for you.”

“Ell, I didn’t ask you here to break rules—” Didn’t I, though? A small part of me wondered.

I could feel my grasp on the situation slipping away—and I was begging her to put on her mask when a loud, ominous tolling shattered the silence, and both of us jumped: DING-DONG!

Rule Seven

“Hell’s bells that’s loud! Is that the doorbell?” she asked.

“Ignore it.” I sat down at my desk, anxiety tying my intestines into knots with each ringing peal, a clanging like church bells…

My sister looked at the CCTV. “There’s someone at the door. A woman in a delivery uniform—she’s got a package.”

“I said ignore it.”

“Why are you…” She glanced at the rules, and her lips quirked.

I frowned as she stood up. “Ell—”

“Chillax, Sam-I-am.” She smiled impishly as she darted to the door. “I just wanna see—"

“ELL!!”

But she was already gone—with no mask—trotting down the stairs while I rushed to fasten on my mask. She yanked open the heavy front door just as I caught up, the parrot mask dangling uselessly from my fingers as the delivery woman handed her a machine for electronic signature. My sister offered the pen to me, and I shook my head, aghast. Shrugging, Elena signed. The driver handed her a white box.

“Huh.” Elena shook the box as the delivery van pulled away. “It’s empty!”

Oh, that churning in the pit of my stomach!

“You gonna be pissed if I open it?” she cocked her head.

She had broken rules 2, 4, and now 7… Everything was happening too fast. It was like when we were children, and she’d sneak out and shatter all our parents’ rules and warn me not to tattle. I always did. She always called me a “snitch” and a “narc.” But just like back then, I had to admit to a prickle of curiosity as she flouted authority. Perhaps my sister was right—perhaps the first caretaker had simply been mad, and I was acting out his whimsy with no better reason than that it was a tradition I’d been ordered to obey.

But the box was empty.

Inside the lid was written: Leave for the face collector.

I made a small, terrified sound in the back of my throat.

Elena cackled, leaning in to snap a selfie of us. “Smile, bro!” She giggled, spinning away from me as if she expected me to try to snatch her phone, and when I didn’t, she said, “Uh oh, now I’ve gone and done it. I broke Sam. Bro? You okay, or was that one too many rules? Gotta admit though, that last one was creepy. That’s going on Insta!” She laughed and tapped her fingers across her phone’s screen. Then she gasped. “Whoa—Sam!”

"Huh?” I said, her exclamation snapping me out of my catatonia.

“Dude, it’s gotta be a filter or something…”

In the photo, behind her beaming face and my feathered mask, the arched ceiling rose cracked and crumbling, the pillars streaked with grime. It was like one of those pictures of abandoned places you see viral online, all former grandeur descended into rot and decay.

“The hedge maze has… has hallucinogenic flora,” I murmured. “Maybe we’re imagining it…”

“Yo, wouldn’t hallucinogenic plants be, like, hugely illegal? And even if they do grow those, wouldn’t you have to make a tea or edible out of ‘em and ingest them or something?”

She was right of course. I had never probed too deeply, had just accepted Pim’s explanation, but… perhaps I should have challenged the nonsensical rationalizations he gave for the various rules. Only, I was never very good at confrontation. It was a facet of my twin sister I’d always admired. How she could just… flout any rule. But right now, as she continued taking pictures and swiping through images of the antique furniture covered in detritus and mold, I just wanted her to stop and for once heed the posted placard in the sitter’s quarters, because the feeling that something terrible was about to happen all but choked me.

“I think you should leave,” I said, and seized her arm.

“Ow—stop! Are you kidding? Sam, this is so cool! They must have the filter set automatically to the wifi or something—”

“There is. No. Wifi—”

But my parents couldn’t rein her in, much less her little brother, younger than her by 6 minutes (an age difference she never let me forget). She shook off my grip, and I realized it would either be a knock-down drag-out fight, or I’d have to let her work it out of her system. Since she’d already swatted my mask askew, I opted for the latter, trailing behind her like a beleaguered Hansel hauled by a heedless Gretel straight into the witch’s house.

There was never any stopping Elena.

Rule Four

She wandered through the grand rooms, gaping at the ruinous state the camera showed her. I can remember little about it now… only that I was like a piece of broken clockwork, stricken by the certainty that we were careening toward our doom. I felt more and more sure that the splendor around me had always been an illusion. That the former caretaker’s drawings weren’t just twisted visions of madness, but glimpses of the reality beneath the veil, and the house was drafty and smelled of rot, not because the windows were old and poorly insulated—but because there were no windows at all, only cracked glass and splinters. And I had for days been winding the clocks in a decaying, empty house.

“OOH! Sam, look at the chandeliers!”

Her exclamation as she showed me the ghostly flames made me think about the Long Hall. About the statues under the dustcovers. What would we see if she took a picture of them? That thought startled me enough to break me out of my stupor and steer her away from that wing. We found ourselves instead approaching the kitchen.

Suddenly I remembered the smell.

A terrible suspicion lit inside me. I wandered, dreamlike, past my sister and to the kitchen door. I was barely aware of her griping about the stench as I knocked and entered, snapping pictures of the room while holding my nose (with a mental twinge at rule eight), knocking and opening the cellar and snapping pictures of that too, and then opening the images on my phone, flicking through them until—

My breath caught.

The driver. A week after meeting the gardener, his body was bloating with putrefaction, the skin discolored in patches. But I still recognized him, mostly by his gaping sockets, eyes gouged out by his own keys. His body lay at the bottom of the cellar steps, and despite the cooler temperature in there, it looked like parts of him were beginning to ooze. For the regular staff to handle when they get back, came to me, almost in Pim’s dry voice.

“What the fuuuuuck…”

I whirled. “Ell, don't—“ I began, not wanting her to glimpse the horror on my screen, but that’s not what she was looking at.

Her eyes were riveted to a selfie she’d taken. In the image, she was squinting against the stench, hand clapped across her nose amidst dusty cabinets and cobwebs. But just behind her, the pantry door was ajar, and through the gap, a single milky white eye was visible. When she swiped to the next selfie, bony fingers curled round the edge of the door, and the gap had widened slightly.

“Ell.” I reached for her hand.

“What is that, Sam?” She pinched the screen and zoomed in on the fingers, rotted away so the muscle and bone was visible.

The skinless man stalks the unmasked. I tugged her arm, hard. “Let’s get out of—"

The pantry door slammed open.

Skinless Man

Both of us screeched, jumping and staring at the pantry. My quick thinking sister snapped another photo.

A clear figure stepped towards us from out of the pantry. He was so much more terrifying than in the original caretaker’s artwork. Framed by warped and broken cupboards and stepping barefoot across rotted filth, the man in the photo was so badly decayed that most of the skin had sloughed off, flesh dangling from stitches like an old patchwork coat on hangers of bone. In his fingers he held a needle and thread. The other hand extended towards the camera. Towards us.

In the split second it took to look at that photo, something bumped the table.

I shoved Elena behind me. “Go, go!”

Even as she ran, the ominous warning in the caretaker’s journal came to me: There is no escaping the skinless man… I doubted grabbing a mask from the cloakroom would be enough now. I had to get her off the estate grounds. But the squeak of the cellar door behind me brought my head whipping round. Elena gasped at something I couldn’t see down in the cellar’s depths. She hadn’t knocked.

“No!” I cried. “Shut it—”

My face struck the floor, the breath slammed out of me, a weight on my back pinning me down.

“Sam!” she shrieked.

As the weight lifted, Elena snatched a knife from the rack and took a step forward—only to stop, the knife clattering to the floor right next to my head. Her toes hovered an inch off the floor in front of my face, kicking the air, and as I lifted my gaze, I saw she was levitating—no, was lifted by some invisible hand, her throat constricted under some force that was squeezing tight. I snatched up the knife, slashing at the air behind her legs. The blade thunked. For a split second, I saw its edge embedded in the rotted black bone of an ankle. Then the foot kicked me with enough force to knock me through the open cellar door. Plunging down, down, into the dark. My head struck something cold, everything spun and went black.

The Bone Closet

I’m not sure how much later it was that I woke, gasping, and pushed myself up from the watery murk in which I found myself, a shallow pool of putrescence more viscous than water. It felt like I had tumbled straight into the worst fears of childhood, deep into the closet with its nightmare monsters—only there was nothing dreamlike about the stench of the place. Instinct—adrenaline—took over. I did not think of Elena. I did not think of the rules we had broken or the sheer impossibility of everything we’d witnessed in the past hours. I did not think of anything. Sam Miller had shut down, and the only operating system was a primal instinct with only one goal:

Escape the dark.

My hands fumbled for my phone, but it was gone—lost in the wet and slick. My fingers groped the walls. Down here, they were ribbed, ridged… bone flashed through my head. Walls constructed of bone. There was no light at all—

No. There were two luminescent pinpricks, far, in the distance.

The lights flickered. No. Blinked.

Not lights—eyes.

Something was down here, in the bone closet.

I went stock still, my lizard brain guiding my every decision as a faint, clacking, snapping sound shattered the silence. A sound of gristle and meat, of chewing. The eyes lowered and briefly winked out, followed by more crunching. I held my breath, suddenly terrified to so much as inhale. The sound of my own heart was a sledgehammer. Vague fears fluttered to my consciousness: could the thing hear my heartbeat, slamming like a frenzied bird against the cage of my ribs?

Fighting rising panic as the nightmarish reality of my situation settled in, I inched backward, feeling for the stairs… my fingers bumped stone, and I traced it up. A step. I was right on the verge of the steps. I had no idea if there was any way of opening the door from this side. The rules offered me no clues. There wasn’t even an outline of light above me. And how could the door to the bone closet open, given I was in a room that did not exist unless someone failed to knock? Hysteria rose, and I gave a little giggle.

The pinpricks of light shot up.

I shut up.

The lights fixed on me. A few more thoughtful crunching sounds. Swallowing. Something sloshed toward me.

Oh, fuck no. All caution forgotten, I scrambled up the steps.

A horrible howling shriek split the air, and great splashing leaps.

I slammed against stone. Stone! There was no door, only stone! A sob caught in my throat, and I pounded on the solid rock, gasping, “No, no, no, no no!” Then a sharp, searing pain as something clamped my leg. I screamed, scrabbling at the stairs.

Light flooded down like the heavens parting as a door suddenly opened.

The thing released my leg, retreating with a shriek into the darkness.

A liver-spotted hand grabbed my arm, hauling me up the stairs and out into the… foyer? I’d fallen in through the cellar. But that apparently didn’t matter for the bone closet, which was everywhere and nowhere.

Pim closed the cloakroom door. As soon as I was on my feet, he strode away, saying, “I was dreading the day this would happen… the day a mistake would be made.”

“That thing, that thing—” I gasped, suddenly remembering. “Elena! My sister! What happened to my—”

“You saw what happened to her. She broke rule four, and the skinless man took her.”

“No, no no, this can’t be real, none of this can be real, what the fuck is wrong with this house?” I shrieked, grabbing his arm.

“Let me go, Sam.” I heard his scowl beneath the faded magpie mask, the stern disapproval at my hysteria. “I have to deliver the package to the maze. You missed the second delivery, but luckily for us I caught it. It still has to be brought into the maze.”

He disengaged himself from me with surprising strength. Three raps on the door, and he was gone, leaving me to sink to my knees, lost in this nightmare that could not possibly be real. My brain was snapping, splintering. A machine with the cogs wound too tight. Cracking around the sheer madness of this house. And then I was wailing, sobbing, shrieking uncontrollably with my mind gone.

The Sitter

By the time Pim returned from his delivery, I had somewhat come back to myself. And though I was still in shock, my thoughts were calm, ordered. Everything made a perfect, terrible sense now in my mind. I stood up from where I had been waiting by the staircase and faced him. “Tell me the truth,” I said. “You lied to me about the driver. You told me he drove away.”

Pim’s head cocked, evaluating me behind the feathered mask. “Yes. I lied.”

“The gardener killed him.”

“Not exactly. You saw yourself—the driver killed himself.”

“Why?”

He shrugged as if annoyed. “You know the answer. Because the driver looked at him. Sam… you’ve seen the reality of the house. You wind the clocks each day because the chimes cast a veil that makes the house appear pristine. The reason you must not stay in the maze longer than five minutes is because the unholy forces are strongest at the center, and the veil would lift if you stayed too long. All of this is in the original caretaker's journal, which I know you have read because I left it for you.”

“What happens to me if the veil lifts?”

“You’ll see the real Kilgore Court.” He spread his hands. “The chimes veil the whole house—except for the gardener. When people look at something that doesn't belong in this world…” He trailed off, then added, “But, yes, I lied. I drove his van away, and told you that you were being affected by the flora.”

My fists clenched. “There’s no hallucinogenic flora in the maze.”

“No, Sam.”

“And if I looked at the gardener, would I also go insane?”

“Yes.”

“But not you?”

“Oh, I’m not immune,” said Pim, sounding surprised. “I’m the same as you.”

“But… you’ve worked here for…”

“Over a century.” He added, “Time does not pass the same in the house as out in the world.”

“How have you not died?”

“I followed the rules,” he said dryly. “Something you and I both excel at. Now…” He extended his hand toward the doors. “It is time for you to go, Sam Miller. I am truly sorry for your sister—it is, sincerely, the greatest regret of my life. But I promise you, if you obey the rules, you’ll come out of today just fine. And it really is a cushy job for misfits like us, who don’t fit into the world.”

“Fuck you, Pim,” I snapped. “If you think I would ever come back here…”

He shrugged as I shouldered past him to the front entrance, heedlessly bumping the umbrella stand on my way out, behind which I noticed the box my sister had left. The last of his precious rules she’d broken. Spitefully, I kicked it out from behind the stand toward him. Pim had apparently not noticed the box until that moment, because he went very still as it tumbled to his feet. His head lowered towards it. With the feathered mask, I could see nothing of his face, but something in his posture, in the way his fingers curled into claws of surprise, showed me his dismay. Then he said, hoarsely, “… who answered the first delivery?”

I found the lid, also dumped in the umbrella stand, and tossed it over to him.

A surprise for you, Pim. A gift, from my dead twin.

“Elena,” I told him.

His hands trembled as he lifted the small box, picked up the lid, and read the words inside: For the face collector.

A small sound came from the back of his throat.

“What happens when you break rule seven?” I wondered. “You never told me about the first and third deliveries.”

“Thank God it was the first…” Finally Pim exhaled. “The first collection is faces, the third is souls.” Then his magpie mask turned toward me. “I’m afraid the cost is exactly what it sounds like.”

“Guess you’d better pay it then.” I thought of the first caretaker’s disfigured face in the photo. “Seems like a trend among caretakers.”

“Normally, the person who answers the delivery pays the price.” Pim dropped the box and reached into his coat, withdrawing a syringe from an inner pocket. Through the magpie mask, his eyes on me were cold. “… But since your sister has already been taken, the debt falls to her next of kin.”

I inched further out the door. We were similar in stature, but I had the advantage of youth and vitality. If I sprinted, I was certain I could outrun him. Though when I thought of the ease with which he’d lifted me out of the bone closet, I wondered if he wasn’t much stronger and quicker than he appeared. But then he aimed the point of the syringe at his own aging flesh under the mask and said, dryly, “Don’t think I’m sparing you. I’m really not.” To my shock, he injected himself. Then he slid a knife from somewhere in his sleeve (did he always carry a knife? And other implements?), and he slid it beneath his mask and into his own skin—

The sound he made, grunting as he sliced, was horrible. It didn’t come away all at once, either, but in pieces. He dropped raw skin into the box.

I ran. God help me, I ran, and left that madman cutting off his own face—hurtled down those steps, leaving my laptop and all my belongings upstairs. I had never flown faster in my life than I did down that curving drive, until I was at the wrought iron gates. They were locked, but I squeezed through the gap beneath the chain and got the hell out of Kilgore Court!

Rule Six

I pelted downhill on that bright, ordinary, beautiful street! The fresh scents of recent rain and spring flowers perfumed the air as I scampered past the gardens of the nearby Victorian houses. I raced all the way down to the bus stop, realizing only as I got to the bottom of the hill that without my wallet, I had no way to pay…

… but it did not matter.

Confused, I tilted my head. This was the same spot where I had stepped off and gotten onto the bus every day since more than a week ago when I’d first started this job, but there was no bus stop post. I snatched off my magpie mask, panting and out of breath. Peered up the cobblestone street. Cobblestone! Not asphalt!

The only passersby were men in suits much like Pim’s, and women in flowing skirts and wearing enormous hats. A woman pushed a baby-carriage that would not have been out of place in a sepia photograph from the early 1900s. I won’t belabor the point. I’d skipped rule six—setting the grandfather clock to the right time. I could now guess the consequences of that rule, though I spent the better part of the afternoon wandering around, my brain refusing to accept the evidence of the world around me, where I saw as many horses and carriages as automobiles.

It was dark by the time I ascended the driveway back to Kilgore Court. Looming at the crown of the hill, the house was brightly lit, warm with a crowd of people laughing and moving through the garden beyond. Some sort of dinner party. You’d never know the place was haunted. When I rang the bell, the door was answered by a man I recognized immediately by his hulking frame, and I wondered if his face beneath the mask was disfigured yet.

“And who are you, Sir?” the original caretaker demanded, looking me up and down with distaste.

I had been about to introduce myself as Sam Miller and plead—no, beg for him to set the grandfather clock to send me back to my own time. But something clicked in my mind as he spoke. Because you see, I gazed beyond him to the vast entrance hall in all its glory, dozens of people in furs and fancy coats, masked and laughing and joking in a masquerade party, all utterly unawares of the unholy ground on which they were standing. And I knew that even if I were to travel back through time and drag the authorities into the house, they would find no trace of my sister. The chimes would mask everything. I had been allowed a glimpse beyond the veil only because I’d played the role of the sitter; but to the rest of the world, it was a mad, ludicrous story. One I would eventually chronicle in my notebooks, inked meticulously by hand because I had left my laptop back in 2023—a laptop that, years in the future, I would use to finally complete this account following the handwritten notes from my youth. But at the time, I knew only that even if I could convince him to wind the clock forward—who would ever believe me? Me, Sam Miller, an unsocial, unemployed misfit with no friends or acquaintances, still living in his parents’ basement?

The caretaker leaned down toward me. He had noticed the mask under my arm.

I slid it onto my face, then stood straight and said, “I am Pim Perrin, the new caretaker.”

The original caretaker hesitated, staring for a long while. Then he stepped back, opening the door wide for me. For just a moment, I saw a double image—the warm, bright hall, filled with guests mingling below the towering columns. And a second image, much darker, not quite as many windows broken yet, but with the eyes of unspeakable things peering outward, one of which would doubtless be my new master, whom I had yet to formally meet. It was to these things I directed my attention as I bowed, and entered Kilgore Court.