Whispers, crawling over her like spiders, made her gasp and turn sharply back to face the abandoned building behind her. The moment she did, the sound was gone. She’d never seen the place before. And she’d grown up in North Adams—if anything like this existed in town, her and her teenage friends would’ve been all over it.
It looked Baroque.She knew her architecture. That was her major, after all. She had hoped someday to become a world-renowned historical architect, until her mother had gotten sick.
An abandoned building like this had no business being here. None.
“What thefuckis going on…?”She took a step toward the building, shaking her head in disbelief. Of all the strange things that had happened to her that night, seeing an abandoned Frenchestate in the middle of the deep New England woods was the thing that had her now totally convinced that something was deeply wrong.
The exterior of the building had once been beautiful and pristine limestone. But now, it was streaked and stained with rain and neglect. Nature was trying to reclaim the structure that man had built. If man had put it here.
She now had her doubts.
Vines were climbing the exterior, sticking to the cracks and crevices of the stones, following the lines of the porous mortar in a zig-zagging pattern up the winding surface toward the second floor, or sneaking inside through the cracked and broken windows.
The raked slate roof was missing many of its tiles. Much of the wrought iron detailing was long since rusted away. Now that she got closer to it, something else stuck out to her. Something that had her tilting her head to the side in confusion.
Something about it…was verywrong.She’d mistaken it for the more elaborate French style of Baroque architecture from farther away, but now that she got up closer to it? That wasn’t it at all.
This didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before in her life. The detailing looked more like something out of a twisted illustration from some sort of nightmarish dream, the wrought iron works featuring sharply-pointed and vicious barbs instead of acanthus leaves. Instead of the typical floral patterns—jagged, pointed weaponry took their place.
This was wrong. She kept repeating it in her head. This was wrong. This waswrong.
So she had no business walking toward it, but there she was, helpless to stop herself. It was like someone was standing behind her, pushing her. She was unable to stop her footsteps as she climbed the stairs toward the front door that looked as though it hadn’t moved in two hundred years.
She felt like she was having an out-of-body experience. The whispers came again, guiding her, urging her forward.
Those old, rotted wooden doors swung open. Pulling in a gasp of surprise, Ava found herself staring at a gorgeous and perfectly maintained 17thcentury interior, in all its flawless splendor. It was too much detail to absorb, with its inlaid floors, elaborate columns, and painted archways depicting fantastical creatures—some she recognized but most she didn’t—in scenes that were both magical and violent.
Candles burned in sconces on the walls and in the crystal chandeliers that hung from the ceiling over the grand staircase that led upstairs. Warmth flooded from within, a far cry from the cold, dreary rain she was standing in.
In awe, she stepped inside. But something instinctual kicked in.
Grabbing hold of the doorknob with one hand, she gripped it tight.
Something inside was calling to her. Something inside wanted her to have it.Come and see. I am your purpose. I am your new meaning.
No. No, no, no! She knew that if she followed that voice, it was all over. Somehow, someway, that voice inside of her was screaming to turn and run. Run as fast as she could, and never come back. She could feel the rusted edges of the abandoned doorknob cutting into her palm, so hard that she might be bleeding.
A hand settled on her shoulder.
It should have terrified her. Instead, Ava felt her eyes drift shut. The feeling of whoever was standing at her back washed over her like a warm blanket being wrapped around her. She could smell something like a mix of citrus, of herbs, and of ink.
A voice like rolling thunder on the horizon rumbled at her back. “It is too late. You know this.”
She did. She was trapped. But she didn’t want to accept it. She didn’t want to accept a lot of things that’d happened to her today.
“Let go. All that which you desire may be found within this place…and I will help you.”
Ava was a fucking idiot sometimes. She knew that.
Her hand on the doorknob relaxed.
And the warmth of the room fled.
So did the presence at her back. Opening her eyes, the illusion was gone.
Ava took a staggered step back toward the barricaded door that she knew hadn’t, and wouldn’t ever, open for her. Flaking bits of plaster crunched underneath her feet.
“Wh—” Ava was shivering. She was so cold. And now the panic was coming back in full force. Where the room had once been warm and lush and inviting, it was now cold, and barren, and overgrown with trees and vines. The structure of the building was decayed and rotted, the ceiling caving in and the friezes on the walls long since cracked and falling away in portions.
