You don’t have to wait.
I’m going home.
The hallway absorbs the sound of your breathing and amplifies the stomping of your feet. Behind you, Alejandro calls your name, not out of fear but out of rage because the illusion has been broken. The sound drives you up the stairs like an animal. You slam your shoulder against the hidden panel, miss the lock by a hair’s breadth, yank it open, and run into your room.
The house above is impossibly exposed to the elements.
Too many windows. Too many empty hallways. The rain clatters against the glass. You pull your coat off the bedpost and the little brass key that Mother once sewed into the hem of your dressing gown, “because every woman needs a door of her own.” You didn’t know then what it would open. You still don’t know now. But your instinct tells you that you must do it now.
Alejandro slams the panel behind you with a hard blow.
You don’t think. You take the porcelain sink off the stand and throw it away.
It splashes against the cabinet frame, right in front of your head, sending water and ceramics flying across the room. You are startled. That is enough. You storm out the bedroom door and up the hallway.
It is nothing but commotion in the house right now.
Your footsteps. Theirs, right behind you. The old floorboards creak at a speed they weren’t designed for. The wind pounds against the windows. Somewhere down below, a door slams shut like an alarm clock. You run past the portrait gallery, past the small alcove where your mother kept her candles, past the locked room at the end of the eastern corridor that no one has opened since your father died.
“Lucia!” shouts Alejandro. “Stop!”
Keep running.
Down the main staircase, your hand slips on the gleaming banister, you nearly slip at the second bend where the carpet isn’t flat. Into the hall. For a moment you think desperately of the front door, but the stranger could already be coming that way from below, and outside there is only rain and mud and a long, dark road to the city. You need another door.
The key in your fist touches your palm.
Mother’s words surface again, half memory, half despair: If the house ever turns against you, go to a place where the saints cannot see you.
The chapel.
Naturally.
The small family chapel at the back of the house, built by your great-grandmother and now largely unused, except for memorial services and funerals. There are no portraits hanging there. There are no paintings of saints, except for the broken one above the altar. And beneath the altar, if my childhood memories serve me correctly, sits a lock whose purpose no one has ever been able to explain.
You run through the dining room and almost knock over the table.
