Chapter 8: Dinner for Nine

The wallpaper gave under Mara’s fingertips with the softness of skin.

Not warm. Not exactly. But alive in the way a throat was alive beneath a hand, the pulse she’d felt not imagined so much as translated from something too wrong for language. The little girl’s laughter had vanished. The wet footprints on the landing ended at the wall like the child had stepped into it and been swallowed whole.

Behind Mara, someone swore under his breath.

“Tell me you felt that,” Ben said.

She did not turn. Her palm stayed pressed to the flowered paper, the pattern of faded blue peonies slick beneath her skin. The beat came again, slow and deep as a distant drum. One. Two. Three. Not a heart, she thought. A patient thing pretending to be one.

“Mara?” This was Celia, cautious now. “You’re bleeding.”

She looked down. A thin line ran across her knuckle where the wallpaper’s seam had kissed her skin. The blood welled dark and immediate, startling in the gray light. It had soaked into the paper in a narrow thread, and where the blood touched, the pattern seemed to sharpen, as if the flowers were leaning closer to smell it.

“I’m fine,” she said, though her own voice sounded smaller in the hallway than it should have. “Don’t touch anything.”

“That’s rich coming from you,” muttered Thom, who was the sort of man who disliked every room he entered and wanted the room to know it. A salvage diver with a broad neck and hands made red and rough from rope and rust, he stood with his back half turned, as though he expected the wallpaper to lunge.

Behind him, Nia was already filming. Her phone light made a pale tunnel down the hall, catching the damp glisten on the baseboards. “This is insane,” she whispered, but her eyes were bright with the terrible hunger of someone who wanted to witness the impossible and survive it.

Jory stood farther back, shoulder to shoulder with Lena and the oldest man among them, Otis. Jory had been sent by the county with a clipboard and a clipboard’s worth of nerves; Lena had come because she knew old houses and old rot and was foolish enough to think either could be managed with enough tools. Otis, gray-bearded and slight as a dried reed, had insisted on coming when he heard the house sat where his grandmother’s street had once been. He’d been quiet since they crossed the threshold. He was quiet now, too, his eyes fixed on Mara’s bleeding hand as if it confirmed something he had feared all his life.

Seven of them. Seven had entered the house from the lakebed. Mara had counted because counting was what she did when the world bent. Seven breathers. Seven pairs of boots leaving mud on the floorboards. Seven voices. Seven heartbeats, if the house had not begun making fools of those too.

The pulse under the wallpaper beat again.

Then, from somewhere deeper in the house, a bell rang.

Not a doorbell. A dinner bell. Thin and bright, the sound of spoon against glass, chiming once from far away and instantly stopping as if someone had covered it with a hand.

Every head turned.

“Nope,” Thom said at once. “No. Absolutely not. I did not sign up for haunted brunch.”

“Nobody signed up for this,” Lena snapped, though her own voice quavered on the edge of something she refused to name.

The smell reached them then: butter melting in a hot pan, onions sweating, rosemary crushed between fingers, gravy rich with meat. It rolled down the hallway in a warm, impossible wave so vivid Mara’s stomach clenched with a memory of hunger that was not hers and yet felt intimately familiar. A meal in a house that had been sealed for decades. Smoke of a kitchen fire. The metallic whisper of silverware laid in order.

Nia lowered her phone. “Do you smell that?”

“I smell a trap,” Thom said.

Otis swallowed audibly. “That’s not a trap smell,” he murmured. “That’s supper.”

Mara peeled her hand from the wall. The seam was gone. The wallpaper lay smooth again, dry despite the blood she’d left in it. She rubbed her thumb against her fingertips and felt, for one sick instant, the shape of a pulse still there beneath her skin.

“We leave,” she said.

“Thank God,” Thom said.

But no one moved.

The smell of food had hooked itself in every chest. The house knew what hunger did to people. It knew it could make a door where before there had only been a wall.

At the end of the hall, where the landing widened and the staircase curled back down toward the front rooms, a doorway had not been there a moment ago. It stood open now, a rectangle of dim amber light framed in dark wood so polished it looked wet. Warm lamplight spilled from within, cutting across the warped boards beneath their feet. A clink of dishes sounded softly from beyond it. Not the crash of abandoned places. Not the violent chatter of rats in the walls. Carefully placed plates. A chair being nudged in.

The house was waiting.

“I hate that,” Nia whispered.

“You hate everything,” Thom said, but his voice had lost its edge.

Mara stepped toward the doorway before she had decided to. The others followed because the alternative was to remain in a hallway with a beating wall and an absent child’s laughter still echoing in the air. The threshold released a waft of heat so rich and domestic it almost hurt. Beneath it, the smell of damp wood and something older, mineral and cold, lingered like a note under a song.

The dining room was large enough for a family Mara had never seen and yet felt she ought to have known.

Long table. Dark oak. Scored by years of knives and elbows and the slow bloom of water damage that had not touched it. A green-shaded lamp burned at the center, though no cord ran to any wall. Its light gave the room a sickly golden pulse, making everything within it seem freshly surfaced from some deeper place. China gleamed. Glassware caught the light. Nine place settings had been arranged with an almost rude precision, each knife aligned to the width of a fingernail, each fork tined in careful symmetry.

There were seven chairs pulled back from the table.

Two stood tucked neatly in place at either end, as if their occupants had only just excused themselves and were due back any second.

In the middle, a covered platter steamed faintly.

No one spoke for a full three heartbeats.

Then Jory made a sound like a laugh that had been strangled in its crib. “That,” he said, pointing with the misery of a man who had run out of ways to be polite, “is not funny.”

“I don’t think the house is trying to be funny,” Mara said.

“That is somehow worse,” Nia whispered.

Thom took one step into the room, then stopped so abruptly Lena bumped into his shoulder. “Seven of us,” he said. “Seven. Then there are nine places. That math is a problem. I don’t like haunted math.”

“Maybe it counts the dead,” Otis said quietly.

Everyone turned to look at him.

He shrugged one shoulder, though the motion seemed to cost him. “My grandmother used to say a house keeps what sits at its table. That’s how you know if you’ve been invited. Or if you’re staying.”

Mara looked at the chairs again. None were empty in the casual way an unused chair was empty. They were waiting. The backs seemed slightly curved, as if accommodating bodies that had once warmed them and might do so again. A place setting near the far end held a spoon caked in something pale and glossy. Another had a napkin folded into a bird. Another had the deep gouge in the plate rim that came from a child’s fork scraping too hard.

She didn’t know why her eyes went first to the setting near the lamp. Maybe because the card propped against the white china looked too fragile to be here. A folded rectangle of cream paper, the edges browned and soft with age. On it, in ink gone brown with time but unmistakably deliberate, was a name.

Mara-lou.

Her breath stopped.

The room blurred at the edges. The smell of onions and rosemary dropped away, replaced by another odor she knew with humiliating certainty: her mother’s raincoat, wet wool and talcum powder and the faint metallic scent of old camera equipment. For one impossible instant she was six years old again, standing on tiptoe in a kitchen bright with morning light while her mother laughed softly and tucked a lock of Mara’s hair behind her ear.

Don’t pout, Mara-lou. It’ll only make your face stick like that.

Mara’s fingers curled so hard against her palm that the cut on her knuckle reopened. She didn’t feel it. She was staring at the card, at the handwriting she had not seen since the day the world came apart. Her mother’s slanting script. The exaggerated loop on the “M.” The tail of the “u” cut short, because she always wrote too fast when she was excited or angry.

“Mara?” Celia said from somewhere far away. “What is it?”

She couldn’t answer.

Her mouth had gone numb. Her eyes burned. The room seemed to tilt, not with motion but with memory, as if some hidden hinge had shifted beneath the floorboards and made everything in her life slide toward this table.

“Don’t touch it,” she whispered.

Thom had already moved half a step closer. “Touch what?”

“The card.”

That stopped him. “You know it?”

Mara forced air into her lungs. “It’s my mother’s handwriting.”

The room went still in a way that had nothing to do with silence and everything to do with listening.

Nia’s face changed first, her appetite for the uncanny giving way to something more careful. “That’s not possible.”

“No,” Mara said. “It isn’t.”

Yet the paper sat there anyway, patient as a gravestone.

Jory swallowed. “Maybe somebody copied it.”

“From where?” Mara asked, and the question came out harsher than she meant. “From a six-year-old’s memory?”

“Could be old records,” he said weakly.

“Jory,” Lena said under her breath, “be useful and shut up.”

He glared at her, then at the table. “I’m trying not to panic in a room that already has too many chairs.”

Otis had not looked away from the card. His face had drained of color, leaving the map of old lines around his mouth and eyes stark as pencil. “That was your mama’s name for you?” he asked softly.

Mara did not trust her voice, so she nodded.

Something passed over his face then—recognition, grief, or both. “Lord,” he breathed. “She used to call my brother Sparky. Same kind of thing. Sweet little names. Didn’t mean she was sweet.”

A chair creaked.

Every body in the room jolted.

The farthest chair from the door rocked once, very slightly, then settled back as if someone had just sat and shifted their weight. The fabric seat remained empty. Mara could see the dust trembling on its carved arms.

Thom took a sharp step backward. “Nope. No. We’re leaving.”

“On what—” Nia began.

“On my authority as a living human being with excellent instincts.”

“You have no authority,” Lena shot back, though she was backing away too, one hand already on the flashlight clipped to her belt.

The house gave a little sigh from its vents. Heat stirred under Mara’s skin, gentle and obscene. The lamp above the table brightened. The platter at the center trembled, then released a puff of steam that smelled like roast chicken and thyme and the sulfur tang of creek water. Her stomach turned over. The smell was wrong in every detail and yet exact in the way a dream could be exact, containing all the sensations of an afternoon you had once loved and could never truly return to.

“Mara,” Celia said, lower now, “look at the other cards.”

She had not noticed them at first. There were four more folded cards beside other plates. One at the place nearest the window. One at the head of the table. One beside a narrow soup bowl. One by an empty saucer with a spoon laid across it. The names were all written by different hands—or perhaps the same hand trying on different people like masks.

Otis moved first, because old men who had already outlived their fear had a way of becoming reckless. He crossed to the head of the table and lifted the card with one ink-stained thumb.

His lips moved.