That night, Emma dreamed of the nursery.
She knew, even inside the dream, that it wasn't a normal dream. It had the same too-real weight as her memory of the house itself the cold that actually chilled her skin, the smell of dust and old fabric that filled her nose exactly as it had three nights before. She was standing in the small upstairs room with the rusted crib, except this time the crib was rocking gently on its own, and the toys on the floor were arranged in a neat circle, as if waiting for a game to start.
"You came back," said a small voice behind her.
Emma turned. Thomas stood in the doorway, exactly as she remembered him from the mirror pale, still, dressed in clothes a hundred years out of fashion, his dark eyes too old for a face that young. He didn't look frightening, not exactly. He looked like a child. That was almost worse.
"I didn't come back," Emma said carefully. "This is a dream."
"Is it?" Thomas tilted his head, and for just a moment, something flickered behind his eyes that wasn't childlike at all something old and patient and amused, gone again before Emma could be sure she'd seen it. "It doesn't feel like one to you, does it. Nothing about this house ever does."
"What do you want from me?"
"I told the others," Thomas said, stepping into the room. His feet made no sound on the floorboards. "I get so lonely, Emma. It's been so long since anyone stayed to play with me. Vivian was fun, for a while. Daniel too. But they always leave in the end. Everyone always leaves."
"Vivian and Daniel didn't leave," Emma said, her voice shaking despite herself. "They disappeared. What did you do to them?"
Something like hurt crossed Thomas's face or the performance of hurt, Emma couldn't tell which, and that uncertainty frightened her more than open malice would have. "I didn't do anything," he said. "They just went somewhere quieter. Somewhere they don't have to be tired anymore. Isn't that what everyone wants, in the end? To stop being so tired?"
Emma thought of Vivian's journal I'm so tired, Ruthie and felt the dream tilt sideways, the walls of the nursery breathing in and out like something alive.
"I'm not going to say yes," Emma said, forcing steel into her voice she didn't fully feel. "Not now. Not on the anniversary. Not ever."
Thomas smiled, and for just a fraction of a second, his smile was too wide, stretching a fraction past where a human face should be able to stretch, before snapping back to something small and sad and ordinary.
"Everybody says that at first," he said softly. "Come find me again soon, Emma. I'll be waiting. I'm always waiting."
Emma woke with a gasp, drenched in sweat despite the cold in her room, her arm burning where the mark sat beneath her sleeve. When she checked it in the bathroom mirror, it had darkened again the rust-brown lines now edging toward black at their center.
Sharing the Dream
She told Cassidy everything at school the next morning, in a rushed, low voice between first and second period, and watched her friend's face grow increasingly pale.
"That's not just a nightmare," Cassidy said. "Emma, that sounds like it was actually talking to you. Like the house doesn't need you to walk back through the front door anymore. It can just reach you. In your sleep."
"I know," Emma said grimly. "Which means whatever wall existed between me and that place is getting thinner every day."
"We need help," Cassidy said. "Real help. More than a library archive and your grandmother's attic box, no offense to either. Is there anyone else in town who knows more about this? Someone who's actually tried to stop it, not just survive it?"
Emma hesitated. An idea had been sitting at the edge of her thoughts since Nana Ruth had first mentioned Vivian, something she hadn't wanted to say out loud because it felt like clutching at straws.
"There's Father Callahan," she said slowly. "He's been at St. Anselm's since before I was born. Nana said once, years ago, that he was the only person in town who ever tried to have the house blessed back before I was even born. She said something happened during it, something bad enough that he never talked about the place again. I always assumed it was just a story. Now I'm not so sure."
Cassidy's eyebrows rose. "You think a priest tried to perform an exorcism on a haunted house and it went wrong?"
"I think," Emma said, "that we've run out of library books to check, and he's the only lead we've got left."
St. Anselm's
The church sat on the opposite end of town from Hollow Lane, its gray stone walls softened by ivy that had climbed nearly to the bell tower. Father Callahan was older than Emma remembered from the handful of times she'd been dragged to Christmas services as a child silver-haired now, with deep lines around his eyes and a slight stoop to his shoulders that suggested a man carrying more weight than his frame was built for.
He didn't seem surprised when Emma and Cassidy found him in the church garden and asked, without much preamble, about the house on Hollow Lane.
He simply closed his eyes for a long moment, as though he'd been waiting twenty years for someone to finally ask.
"You've been inside it," he said. It wasn't a question. His eyes had gone straight to the place on Emma's arm where her sleeve, despite her best efforts, had ridden up just slightly to reveal the edge of the mark.
"Three days ago," Emma admitted. "How did you know?"
"Because I carry one too," Father Callahan said quietly, and rolled back the cuff of his black sleeve.
There, on his forearm, faded nearly to nothing but still faintly visible after what must have been decades, was the same jagged, radiating symbol burned into Emma's skin.
Emma's breath caught. "You went inside."
"In 1985," he said. "I was twenty-two years old, newly ordained, and far too confident in my own faith to believe that any darkness could truly touch me if I walked in carrying a crucifix and enough certainty." He gave a small, humorless laugh. "I was wrong on nearly every count."
"What happened?" Cassidy asked.
Father Callahan looked past them, toward the church, as though gathering the courage to say something he had buried for most of his life.
"I found what's underneath the boy," he said. "I saw its true face, if you can call it that. And I have spent every year since then praying that no one else would ever have to see it too." He met Emma's eyes, and for the first time since they'd approached him, something like genuine fear moved across his face. "But you're here, and you're marked, and that means it's already too late for that particular prayer. So. Sit down, both of you. And I will tell you exactly what I saw in that basement, and why it very nearly cost me everything I believed."