Emma didn't think. She pulled on her shoes over bare feet, grabbed her jacket, and was out the front door before she'd fully decided to go anywhere at all. Cassidy lived six blocks away, close enough to run, and Emma ran the entire way, her breath tearing at her lungs, the October night air sharp and cold against her face.
She hammered on the front door until Cassidy's mother answered, bleary-eyed and confused in a bathrobe, and it took nearly a full minute of frantic explanation before she let Emma upstairs.
Cassidy's room was empty. The window was open. The curtains stirred gently in the cold night breeze, and on the desk beneath it, Cassidy's phone sat abandoned, its screen still lit with Emma's unanswered call.
"She was here twenty minutes ago," Cassidy's mother said, panic rising fast in her voice. "I heard her moving around. I thought she was just getting a glass of water."
Emma's stomach dropped straight through the floor. She leaned out the open window, and there, faint but unmistakable in the soft dirt of the flower bed below, were two sets of small, bare footprints leading away down the sidewalk heading, with an almost eerie directness, toward the edge of town.
Toward Hollow Lane.
"Call my grandmother," Emma said, already swinging one leg over the windowsill. "Tell her where I've gone. Please I don't have time to explain, but I know exactly where Cassidy's headed, and I know I'm the only one who can get her back before it's too late."
She didn't wait for an answer. She dropped from the low first-floor window into the flower bed and ran.
Into the Fog
The fog was thicker than Emma had ever seen it, rolling low and heavy over the streets even blocks before she reached Hollow Lane, as though the entire night had been arranged specifically to swallow the distance between her and her friend. She followed the small, bare footprints as long as the sidewalk allowed her to see them, and when the pavement gave way to the cracked, weed-choked road that led to the Ashgrove property, she didn't need footprints anymore.
The iron gate stood open, exactly as Nana Ruth had said it always did, waiting.
Emma didn't hesitate this time. There was no careful pause at the threshold, no lingering moment to gather her courage the way there had been the first night. She ran straight through the gate, up the overgrown path, and threw her weight against the heavy front door which gave way far more easily than she expected, as though it had been waiting for her, too.
"Cassidy!" she screamed into the dark front hall. Her voice echoed strangely, bouncing off walls that seemed, impossibly, farther away than they should have been. "Cassidy, where are you?"
Faint, distant laughter drifted down from somewhere above a child's laughter, delighted and cruel in equal measure.
Emma took the stairs two at a time.
The Nursery, Again
The upstairs hallway had changed since her first visit narrower now, the doors set closer together, as though the house itself had drawn in tight around her like a fist closing. She didn't need to search. She knew, with a dreadful certainty, exactly where she'd find her friend.
The nursery door stood open, warm golden light spilling out from inside where there should have been nothing but cold darkness. Emma stepped through and found Cassidy sitting cross-legged on the floor amid the ring of old toys, a small wooden doll cradled gently in her arms, an expression of dreamy, distant peace on her face that Emma had never once seen there in ten years of friendship.
Thomas sat across from her, close enough to reach out and touch, his small pale face lit with something that might have been genuine, childlike happiness if Emma hadn't already learned exactly how convincing that happiness was built to be.
"Cassidy!" Emma rushed forward and dropped to her knees beside her friend, gripping her shoulders. "Cass, look at me. This isn't real. You need to wake up."
Cassidy blinked slowly, as though surfacing from very deep water. "Emma? I was just... we were playing. He's not so bad, once you actually get to know him. He's just lonely."
"He's not a lonely little boy, Cassidy. Father Callahan told us what's really underneath that face. You have to listen to me."
Thomas's expression shifted not to anger, but to something worse, a slow, patient disappointment, like a parent mildly inconvenienced by a child's tantrum. "You always do this," he said quietly, and his voice, for just a moment, dropped an octave too low for a child's throat. "You always come and ruin it right when someone finally decides to stay."
"Let her go," Emma said, standing between Thomas and her friend, her voice shaking but her feet planted. "Take me instead, if that's what you actually want. Leave Cassidy out of it. She was never supposed to be part of this."
Something flickered behind Thomas's dark eyes genuine interest, sharp and sudden, cutting through the performance of childish hurt like a blade through paper.
"You'd offer that?" he asked softly. "Just to save her?"
"Yes," Emma said, before she could talk herself out of it. "Just let her walk out that door, and I'll stay as long as you want. I'll play whatever game you want to play."
Cassidy's eyes snapped fully clear at that, the dreamy haze breaking all at once. "Emma, no"
"Interesting," Thomas said, rising slowly to his feet, and this time when he smiled, his smile did not stop where a human smile should stop, stretching thin and wide and wrong across a face suddenly less like a child's and more like something wearing a child carefully, imperfectly, over whatever sat underneath. "But that's not actually a bargain I need to make, is it. I could simply keep both of you. There's no rule that says I only get to be lonely for one friend at a time."
The golden light in the nursery flickered and died all at once, plunging the room into freezing darkness, and from every corner at once, Emma heard the whispering return dozens of voices this time, overlapping, hungry, no longer bothering to sound like distant wind.
"Run," Emma whispered to Cassidy, hauling her up by the arm. "Now."
They bolted for the door together, and the hallway beyond had already begun to twist and rearrange itself exactly as it had the first night Emma came through, doors appearing where none had been, the stairs sliding further away with every step they took toward them the house closing around both girls at once, patient no longer, hungry enough now to stop pretending it had any interest in letting either one of them simply walk back out the front door.