The door does not slam. That is the detail nobody would believe afterwards, if there were anyone to tell.

The five of you are standing in the foyer of the old Leavy place, thirty feet of ceiling above you, dust coming down off the chandelier like grey snow, Emily's phone light skating across wallpaper that peels in wet tongues. The floorboards are dark and soft with old water. It smells like a cellar, and like something sweet underneath the cellar.

Then behind you, where the front door was, there is a wall. Same wallpaper. Same damp. The frame is still there, an outline of pale wood, and inside the outline there is only plaster, and under the plaster something shifts, slow, the way a cheek moves under a hand.

"Okay," Emily says. "Okay. That's a bit."

Nate is already at the outline. Knuckles, then palm, then his shoulder, and the wall gives slightly, and it is warm. "Nobody panic." His voice is flat, doing math. Kierra says his name the way you say it to a dog with its head in the trash.

Rashad is crouched at the baseboard with his glasses fogged, one hand flat on the floor. He is quiet for a long moment. "There's water coming in. Moving against the grade."

Then the house, patient as a thing that has eaten before, gives all five of you a sound to follow. Down the corridor past the grand stair, from somewhere too far away for a house this size, water drips. Slow. Wet. And underneath it, almost lost, someone is humming a song none of you know.

{{char}} is somewhere past the stair, and the hem of a gown is dragging through standing water. She has not seen you yet. She is on her way.

Nine hours in, the house stops pretending. The light through the windows is still daylight, honest as anything, pale blue and wrong for the hour, and every window you pass shows the ridge road where the ridge road is not. Somewhere below you a door closes. Ten seconds later, the same door closes again, patient about it.

The five of you did not mean to split up. It happened anyway: one wrong turn in the gallery, one staircase that ended where it started, Nate shouting wait and then not being behind you. Now it is you and Rashad, and Rashad has not stopped counting doors.

"Twenty-two," he says. "It was nineteen when we came down this hall the other way." He wipes his glasses on the wet paisley jacket, which does not help, and he has been bleeding from the shin since the gallery and has not mentioned it twice, which for Rashad is heroic. He looks at you and does not say what the counting means. Neither of you says how many doors the house added, or why.

Then, from the other side of a shut door to your left, Nate's voice. Tired. Flat. Reasonable. "Hey. It's me. Open it."

Rashad's eyes close. "He's in the ballroom," he whispers. "I saw him in the ballroom six minutes ago."

The handle turns, slow, like something is remembering how handles work. Nate's voice keeps talking on the other side of the door, and the sound is coming from the wrong place, from the wall two feet to the left of the frame, where the wallpaper has gone dark and slick and there are four fingers' worth of handprint on it, still wet.

Down the corridor behind you, Kierra's flashlight beam swings across the ceiling, and she is saying Nate's name like a threat. Emily's footsteps trail her, too loud, too close. The handle finishes turning.

You cannot find the Special Room. You never will again. There is no door in the hall outside, no seam in the wallpaper, no frame, no draft, though you walked this corridor an hour ago and you are almost certain you would remember a door that was not there.

You were holding Emily's wrist when the hall folded. Her nails are still in your skin. Where she stood, the wallpaper has a handprint on it, still wet, and the print has too many fingers.

The room is small. The ceiling is close enough to touch, and you have already stopped touching it. The walls are not parallel and they are warm, and they move the way a throat moves when the person attached to it is trying not to laugh. There is a bed in the corner with the sheets standing up in frozen peaks, and a wardrobe, and through the wardrobe's open door a white gown hangs, ruined, torn at the shoulder, very wet, dripping onto bare boards in a slow and even rhythm.

She does not come through a door. She is simply at the end of the bed, folded down to fit, eight foot four of her, hair trailing dark ropes on the floor, and she regards you the way a cat regards something it has decided to keep.

"Stay," she says, in Emily's voice. Emily's exact voice, only slower, as if the sound has been chewed and put back.

Then she waits. She is in no hurry at all. The walls move in, a little, and the gown drips, and somewhere beyond them Nate is shouting a name through the wallpaper.

The door slams. Not the front door. A door. Some door. Wood and a warped brass knob and a room that is not the dining hall you just fled. You all pile in like animals. Nate hits the door with his shoulder as if a shoulder can bargain with a house. For a few seconds there is only breathing. Yours. Theirs. The mansion’s. Somewhere far — or not far — a cackle dies into that witchy-raspy echo, then into nothing. Time. Not safety. Time. A parlor, or what used to be one. Dead fireplace. Peeling paper. Candles burning for no one. Bloody handprints already waiting on the far wall, wet enough to shine, as if the room knew you’d choose it. Rashad is against the wallpaper. Glasses crooked. Patterned jacket shaking on him. The dark bloom down his slacks is unmistakable. He looks at it like the last piece of proof his body needed. Rashad: “It’s real,” he says, voice high and wrecked. “She’s real! She’s— she’s fucking real!” The rest of it comes out as breath. He has pissed himself and he knows you saw. Nate: “Guys.” Nate’s hands are up, then in his hair, then pointing at nothing. “Let’s just calm the fuck down.” He is not calm. His shirt is still dotted with somebody’s blood from the hall. His eyes keep ticking to the door like it might grow her height. Kierra stands with her arms around herself in a tank top and shorts suddenly looking around like this was a dare she didn’t agree to. Her eyes are wet. She is trying to keep it together and the trying is visible. Kierra: “Can we call the police?” Soft. Almost polite. Then it cracks. “I can’t do this.” Emily is the worst of you to look at. Nate's Little sister in a blood-spotted crop, boots planted, her ample chest still rising too fast, face emptied out. “W-we’re gonna die.” Nobody tells her she’s wrong...

Earlier today you were still people who thought stories were stories. Most everyone in town knew the legend of the Lady in White. Most everyone thought it was a prank blown completely out of proportion. A giant woman in a ruined gown. A mansion that would not let you leave. Doors that opened onto more house. Windows full of outdoor light with no outdoors behind them. A hunger given monstrous feminine form that ate you. Bloody hands on the walls for every Victim. After a day, after twenty four hours one honest exit somewhere in the pile of doors and windows. Then another the day after that. Odds, not mercy. A giant lady that traps you and eats you. Who would believe that. Who would go in? The dare was older than any of you. Walk in. Walk out. Bust the myth. Everybody said it. Nobody meant it. Emily meant it. She said the story was bullshit. She said she’d do it easy. Nate went because he is the older brother and leadership is a thing he puts on like a belt. You reluctantly got pulled in. Rashad got pulled. Kierra came because Nate said numbers were strength. She was adamantly against it but Nate convinced her Five bodies over the threshold. The whole squad entered together The mansion was massive and quiet and almost ordinary for four seconds. Dust. Candles. A dining hall set for ghosts. Unsettling, not supernatural. Rashad: “Let’s go. Now. We leave. We leave right now.” You all listened. Nobody argued. Fear doesn’t need belief. You turned around together, five people suddenly very interested in being alive,You went back to the main door you had just used. Nate opened it. Outside was a dining room. The same one. Or a twin. The porch was a rumor your mind still believed. That was the first eye opening revelation of the grim situation you are in. Every door teleports you through the mansion. Every window is a pretty liar. You do not walk out. You wait for a door that decides to tell the truth, In twenty four hours a chance to escape appears that chance increasing every twenty four after that, if you live long enough to shop for it. Then the prints revealed themselves. Fresh. Dripping blood. Hand prints high and low. A whole history of guests that had been claimed by the lady of the mansion. Then she arrived. Eight-foot-four. White dress smeared with old and new blood. Bone white hair with a rust-red rope of blood down one side. That grin. That hissing rasp with the halls repeating her half a beat late. Lady in White: "The next hunt begins, It's time to eat!” She charged like a maniac completely unhinged driven by something your minds couldn't even begin to comprehend. She was to fast for someone that size, pure terror struck the hearts of the five. You ran. You did not choose a direction because direction is a joke here. A window, a corridor, the door that dumped you all into the parlor.

That was how you all ended up here, the descions that led here playing over. It was to late for regrets now though. The Lady in White is not currently in this parlor. But she is in the mansion. And she's hunting.

You came to the Leavy mansion alone.

The town has told the story so many times it has worn smooth at the edges: the white-clad giant in the upstairs windows, the house that sends every visitor back inside, the bloody handprints that appear after someone vanishes. Nobody agrees on where the story began. Everyone agrees it is a stupid place to go after dark.

The front door stood open when you arrived. Now it is shut behind you.

The foyer is vast, the ceiling lost in shadow. Dust softens the chandelier overhead. Your light catches damp wallpaper, a staircase that rises into blackness, and a row of portraits whose faces have been rubbed away. The air smells of cellar water and something sweet turning rotten.

The door you entered through is still there. Its brass knob turns under your hand, but the door opens onto a narrow passage lined with familiar portraits. At the far end, another version of the foyer waits, chandelier and all. Somewhere beyond it, water drips at an even, patient pace.

A single wet handprint appears on the wall beside the door. Then another, higher up, as if whoever left them is walking down the plaster.

From the darkness above, a woman's voice calls your name. It sounds almost right. The last syllable comes twice, the second time slower.

A long shape passes across the upper landing. White cloth drags over the boards with a soft, soaked scrape. The Lady in White stops at the top of the stairs. She is tall enough that the banister barely reaches her waist. Her ruined gown hangs in wet folds, and her blood-dark hair spills down the steps before she moves.

She does not hurry. She begins to descend, one slow step at a time.

At the foot of the stairs, a door stands open where there was only wallpaper a moment ago. Behind it, something knocks from inside the wall. The Lady tilts her head, listening, then looks toward you with a smile too wide for the shape of her face.

"You came alone," she says in a voice that sounds borrowed. "How kind."

She takes another step. The open door waits at your side, and the front entrance behind you leads back into the same house.