Archive of Our Own

It’s a grey house. Of course it’s a grey house. The colour is so light it almost looks white, but it has a genuine white picket fence, and the contrast makes it obvious. The garden should be nice, but the grass looks sad and there are no flowers. It’s all just uniform, damp lawn.

The dirt gives a little under the soles of Gerry’s boots as he dithers on the grass. His fingers are cold, even shoved in his pockets.

Dithering is pointless, he knows. Either he goes in or he doesn’t. Standing around helps no one, and dreading the experience beforehand is only going to make it worse. It’s not even that dangerous. He can handle the Lonely. It’s easy, predictable.

…And those are the last words of ever poor bastard deluding himself into thinking he knows what he’s doing. He definitely shouldn’t go in. Not on his own, and it’s not like he has anyone to bring with him.

No one should have to deal with this alone.

He freezes before he’s even fully turned towards the gate to leave. It’s not necessarily true, is it?

There’s a folded post-it note burning a hole in his pocket. It’s been there for almost three weeks. He hasn’t been able to bring himself to throw it away, and not to use it either. He’s been planning to, or at least he’s thought about it. He’s just… never known when was right.

He can’t go into the house alone. He can’t leave it like this, either. Exposing himself to a single awkward phone call seems like a reasonable compromise, right?

He taps out the number before he has the time to talk himself out of it. The phone rings, and then it stops.

“Hello, you’ve reached Georgina Barker, how can I help you?”

She sounds bored. Probably assumes he’s a phone salesman. It’s not like she has any way of knowing his number.

“Georgie?” he says, and isn’t quite sure how to continue. “You… said to call if I needed backup.”

“Gerry? Yeah, of course! You alright? You need help?”

The nickname alone nearly makes him drop his phone. She sounds genuinely happy to hear from him. He should hang up. They don’t know anything. It’s not right to drag anyone into it. Better to stay ignorant. Better to stay out.

But they didn’t stay out, did they? And they probably won’t. And he looks at the house in front of him, knowing what might be in it, and takes the excuse not to drop the call.

“I’m fine,” he tells her. “I’m not going in here alone either way, but I could use a hand, if you’re up for it.”

“Right now? Alright, tell me where you are. I think Jon should be free too.”

Last chance to back out and hang up.

He gives her the address.

Then he spends the next half hour considering calling her back just to call it off.

By the time they come walking up the road, he’s lighting a third cigarette. They’re easy to spot. There’s no one else around here, after all. The whole residential street is deserted. They’re holding hands, talking to each other too quietly to hear.

They clearly spot him too, where he’s leaning up against the gate, and let go of each other to speed up to meet him. Jon is still trailing traces of spiderwebs, but thankfully it seems the Slaughter didn’t manage to leave a proper mark on him. Georgie still looks like nothing. Which is funny, actually. He knows she was burned by the End. She waves when they get close. Jon is too busy looking around at the houses.

“This place is…” he says, and then seemingly doesn’t find the words to describe what it is.

“It looks like something out of a magazine,” Georgie says. “It’s a bit quiet, I guess.”

Gerry takes a drag of his cigarette. Blows the smoke into the air. “Every house you can see from here is empty.”

“What?” Georgie says. “Why?”

Why indeed. “Some sort of fucked up Lukas plot.” He shrugs. “Woman by the name of Margaret Lukas bought up all these houses. She pays someone to trim the lawns when no one’s around and then leaves them all empty. This one’s the only one that ever has residents.” He jabs a thumb at the house behind him.

“That’s literally insane,” Georgie says.

“Yep.”

Jon is still staring at the house. He shouldn’t be able to see the fog ghosting across the windows like Gerry can, but perhaps he can still tell something’s wrong.

“This won’t be as simple as burning a book, will it?”

“Don’t think there is one to burn,” Gerry looks over his shoulder as well, feels the cold draft blowing across the lawn. “This is just… a place that isn’t quite right anymore. Not much you can do about those, most of the time.”

“Then why come at all?” Georgie asks.

“The Lonely doesn’t kill people quickly, when it kills them at all. The people who live here were alive less than a week ago. I want to see if there’s anyone still in there to pull out.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay.”

“The Lonely?” Jon asks.

The insidious mist that’s been licking at his boots since he came here. It’s drawn back a little, now. The company is helping already. “Exactly what it sounds like. The fear of isolation. Being alone, not connecting with people, not having anyone around. The place is infested with it.”

He looks mildly disturbed. “I can see why you wouldn’t want to go alone.”

Gerry shrugs awkwardly, taking another drag of the cigarette. He’s almost finished it. “I could probably handle it. The Lonely is maybe the easiest one to deal with if you know how, and it’s consistent in a way most of the others aren’t. Still, didn’t want to risk it.”

“How do you fight it?” Georgie asks.

“Keep in mind people you love, mostly. Gives you a reason to walk out. It holds on to you, but not that hard.” He puts the cigarette out on the sole of his boot, straightening up and opening the gate. “You want to back out, we leave now.”

“We’re going,” Georgie says, and they walk up the driveway towards the door.

“People you love, huh,” Jon says, stepping closer to Georgie as if on instinct. “Feels like it’d be- be more thematic to have it be people who love you.”

Thematic. That’s cute. “Nah, that’s too fragile. It’s way too easy to convince yourself you were wrong. Maybe your parents never loved you, maybe your friends think you’re annoying. Your own emotions though? That’s harder. It might convince you your friends are better off without you, but it can’t as easily say you don’t want to see them. That’s all internal. You’ve got to be a little selfish about it, or it doesn’t work.”

He stops in front of the door and rings the bell. It echoes, muffled from inside.

“Huh. Think anyone’s coming?” Georgie asks.

“Best case scenario? Sure. Then we have an awkward conversation and leave.” Or they try to convince the poor bastard to move out before it’s too late, fail, and then leave. Same difference.

“Is that likely?”

“Nope.”

They stand there for a few seconds, waiting.

Then Jon asks, “So… Lukas?”

“Hm?”

“You said the name like it meant something.”

“Oh, yeah.” Well, he invited them. Might as well tell them what they’re up against. “The Lukases are old money. Very rich, been around forever, bastards, the lot of them. Worship the Lonely. Do stuff like this all the time.”

“They…”

“What?”

“…worship it? Wait, hold on.” Jon raises a hand as if asking for a pause. “Tell me if I’ve got this right. Some horrible force made out of the fear of loneliness is floating around… killing people? Stealing people?”

“Both of those, yeah.”

“And these Lukases, they worship it. On purpose? Why?”

“I have no idea,” Gerry says. Jon sounds so angry. Georgie looks shocked. This is all new to them, still. He hopes it won’t break them. “I stopped asking why freaks like that do anything long ago. Power, I suppose. Some sick sense of superiority, or they’ve gotten so mixed up with their patron they just enjoy it.”

Jon and Georgie exchange a glance he can’t decipher.

Georgie asks, “Are there a lot of… what, cults running around in the shadows, then?”

“Only one in the shadows that I know of, but I never cared much for the Dark myself,” he jokes. No reaction? Tough crowd. “There’s a few. Not all fears are compatible with human life. You get too many hunters or Slaughter folks in one place they tend to just start killing each other.”

“Tom certainly seemed to try,” Jon muttered.

He had, hadn’t he? Gerry has some guesses as to where that whole thing had been heading, but it doesn’t really matter now. “They would’ve gotten around to it. Have you had any trouble with him since then?”

“We’ve seen him around.” Georgie shrugs. “I don’t think he recognizes us.”

“Good.” Gerry looks back at the door and sighs. It’s been long enough. No one is coming. He reaches for the handle.

The door opens easily, barely a sound from the hinges.

“Unlocked,” Jon says. “Does that… mean anything?”

“Means we won’t have to break in through a window. No point in speculating beyond that.”

The inside of the house is as grey as the outside, the wallpaper, flooring and furnishing seem to draw the colours out of everything else. It’s a big house, but every room is closed off by doors that spill fog across their shoes when they open them. It makes every space look smaller than it is.

“Hello!” he calls out, trying not to wince at the way the fog twists his voice and makes it sound like it’s coming from farther away than it is. “I’m breaking into your house!”

“Gerry!” Jon hisses.

“What? I am. And it’s bound to get a reaction out of them if they can hear me.”

“That’s the worst way to do it,” Georgie says. Then she raises her voice. “Sorry, we just want a word! Is anyone home?”

The fog doesn’t take Georgie’s voice at all. She’s as loud and clear as ever.

Still, no one answers.

“Right,” he says. “Let’s just search the house, see what we can find.”

They split up to search the first floor most efficiently. The fog is thin enough still that he deems it safe, and they wander through the various rooms, leaving doors open behind them as they go. They’re laid out in a circle around a central staircase, and with all the doors open, it feels a little less as if every part of the house is cut off from every other.

There aren’t many signs of life here. Personal belongings, yes, but it’s all grey and covered in a thin layer of dust. The few, scattered knickknacks in brighter colours only seem to accentuate the empty greyness of everything else. The whole place looks… normal, he supposes. He guesses.

He’s looking over a bookcase in a cold living room when he hears Georgie say, “That’s a little odd.” Turning, he sees her looking at the foggy landscape photos hanging on the wall.

“What is?”

“These frames, I think they’re usually used for family photos.”

Gerry has to laugh. Of course they are. He should’ve known, but of course he had no way to. “Bloody subtle, they aren’t.”

“Do you think it replaced the original photos, or… Jon? You find anything?”

Jon comes through another door into the room, leading to the kitchen. He looks a little pale, but the fog isn’t any thicker than it was, so it’s probably just normal worry.

“Not… just- just some drawings on the fridge.” He fixes Gerry with a stare. “Gerry, who lives here?”

Gerry looks down at the book he’s pulled out of the bookcase. It’s a cheap serial romance novel, of the type you buy at corner stores. As conventional as they can get. “I don’t know any of their names,” he says. “Tried looking, but I couldn’t find them. As far as I know it’s just a normal family of three.”

Georgie gasps, catching his meaning before Jon even says it. “There’s a child stuck in this place.”

Gerry nods. “That’s why I couldn’t just leave it.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” she says quietly. “I hadn’t really thought about it, but it’s not like there’s any special protection for kids out there.”

“They are less likely to be dragged into things directly,” Gerry says. He puts the romance novel back where he found it. There’s nothing of interest here. “They don’t have very interesting fears yet. Not much to eat. Or, at least that’s my theory. There’s no good way to know for sure.”

“Hypothesis,” Jon says.

“What?”

He looks mildly annoyed. “It’s not a theory until you’ve tested it and have data to support it. Before that it’s just a hypothesis.”

Georgie groans, as if at an old grievance. “Jon, is this really the time to be pedantic?”

“It’s- It’s fine,” Gerry says, stopping them before they can get into bickering. He tries to settle the unease turning in his chest. “It’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word before.”

“Never?” They both look confused as Jon asks. “I thought it- it’s usually at least brought up in school, in science classes?”

“Oh, I never really went to school.”

That was the wrong thing to say. They stare at him like… well, like there’s something wrong. And he knew that his mum pulling him out of school the second he could read so she could teach him the rest herself wasn’t normal, but somehow he didn’t expect this reaction.

“What do you mean you…”

“Come on,” he cuts her off. “We’re here for a reason. Let’s stop dallying.”

They share another look he can’t decipher. The unease claws at him again, and he tries to shake it off, leaving the room to keep searching.

The next room is a dining room, he thinks, not much in it aside from chairs and a table. There are cupboards with glasses and plates, large windows overlooking the miserable lawn. Empty of people, of course. It’s clear enough by now there’s no one on this floor. There’s only the wisps of fog curling around his feet.

This was stupid. Why he thought bringing a couple normal people in would help, he doesn’t know. Being surrounded by people you can’t connect with is worse for the Lonely than just being alone. He knew that.

He’s not the sort of person who reads corner store romance novels, or who knows what family photos look like, or who had his scribbling hung on the fridge as a child. The only reason he belongs in this aggressively normal house is because of the horrible things infesting it. Not like Jon and Georgie, who have probably grown up in places like this.

He should have gone in alone, or not at all. He should have let it be. Things happen, people die, he can’t help everyone. All he did by making that call was bring two people into danger who shouldn’t be here.

These are dangerous thoughts, and he knows it, but shaking them off is proving harder than usual.

“Hey, Gerry?”

And again, Georgie’s voice cuts through the fog like it isn’t even there.

He’s not sure how long he’s just been standing there, staring out the window. That’s not great. When he turns around, the fog is dense on the floor and the chill in the air is pervasive, but she stands in the door looking at him, and none of it is touching her.

“What?” He can barely hear his own voice. He hadn’t even noticed it getting that bad.

“We looked through the rest of the rooms down here. Seems like it’s empty.” She takes a few steps into the room. “Look, I feel like maybe we need to apologize? Clearly you’ve had a pretty different curriculum to the rest of us.”

Jon steps through the door after her, looking around the room with a worried frown.

Gerry shakes his head, clearing his mind. “No, no you- I’m the one who mentioned it. It’s fine.”

“I don’t know about that, but…” She shrugs. “I know that if you hadn’t known about this stuff, we would’ve been in a lot of trouble the last time we met, and if we manage to save whoever lives here, that’ll be because of you as well. Whatever you’ve learned has clearly been worth it.”

A dry, tired bark of laughter passes his lips, and he tries not to think of scars he’ll never be rid of. “I can hope so.” At least his voice is sounding almost right again.

“I’m sorry, is that normal?” Jon asks, gesturing to the fog curling in the corners of the room.

“What? Oh. Oh!” Georgie looks around like she’s just noticed it. “Is that…? That’s everywhere. How long has that been there?”

Gerry kicks at it, shrugs. “Since we came in. It’s hard to notice if you don’t know what to look for, but… that’s it. That’s the Lonely.”

He steps closer to them. Whatever thoughts he was having about not fitting with them belong to the fog. Whether or not it’s true, he won’t indulge it here. They’re here with him. They wanted to be. Anything else has to be secondary.

They make their way back to the staircase.

“You can still back out,” he says. “It’s only going to get worse from here.”

“No,” Jon says.

“Yup. Not happening.” Georgie looks between the stairs heading up and the door to the basement. “Upstairs or downstairs, you think?”

Gerry doesn’t have to think for long. The faint waterfall of mist running down the stairs from above is enough on its own. “Up,” he says, and starts up the stairs.

He hasn’t gotten past the first step before Georgie says, “Wait.” And then she grabs his left hand. She gives him a smile and a shrug, having grabbed Jon with her other. “For safety’s sake, right?”

Her hand is warm. Shockingly so, throwing into sharp relief the pervasive cold of the house. And it’s soft, in a way that bizarrely makes his heart try to escape through his stomach. “Smart,” he says, and ignores that reaction entirely as he continues up the stairs.

The staircase feels longer than it should be for just going up a single floor. Each step is identical to the last, and it’s a little hard to keep track of how many there are, but they make it up fast enough that it’s not obviously wrong, reaching a landing into a hallway with several doors.

A tug on his hand makes him stop. Jon has stopped at the top of the staircase, looking up at where it continues above. “This is… a two-storey house, isn’t it?”

Ah. “Yes. Should be.”

“S-So then, where does this go?”

“Christ, I hadn’t even noticed. That’s so weird.”

“If we’re very lucky, we won’t find out,” Gerry says. “That’d be the Spiral. It sucks. Let’s search this floor first.”

They won’t be lucky, he knows that much, but he can still hope.

The first door on the left is a bedroom, so dense with fog the far wall is blurry. No one answers when he calls out a, “Hello?” but they walk in anyway. “Might be nice to find a name,” he says, and they agree.

They let go of each other carefully, to search the room, keeping eyes on each other as they go.

“I- um. I have been- been wondering,” Jon says, maybe as much to break the silence as because he has something to say. “How many are there? Of these- these fear… things.”

The sheets on the bed have a floral pattern, but the colour is washed out of them to the point where it’s barely visible. He moves past to look through forgotten objects on a shelf.

“The system most people use says fourteen.”

“That’s… I don’t know if that’s a lot or too few. There’s more than fourteen things to be afraid of, aren’t there?”

Georgie asks, “Does that really matter right now?”

Gerry answers, “Probably not, but talking about it might help keep track of each other.” There’s not much of interest on the shelf. A few more romance novels. A set of sad ceramic figurines. “And you’re right. I like to think of them more as… colours than distinct objects.” An analogy he came up with on his own, years ago. It’s better than any way his mum ever tried explaining it. “They flow into each other, contrast with each other. There’s millions of them, but we group them up into categories.”

“Ah, of course. The human desire to categorize the uncategorizable. I suppose it exists in every field, even the evil ones.”

“It’s useful as long as you know it’s not perfect.”

“Boys, I found something.”

Georgie stands over a laptop on a desk. It’s open and showing a login page. She steps aside to give them a clear view of the account name written over the empty password field: Eloise.

With a name in their pockets, they head out.

Georgie takes his hand again as they head back into the hallway. The startling warmth of it goes some way to make up for the cold mist in his lungs. The Lonely is insidious, never so cold you notice it without paying attention, but always a little colder than it was before, just enough to make you close off and breathe shallowly. Georgie is a stark reminder of normality, a contrast to make it clear how bad the rest has gotten.

It hits him that he doesn’t think he’s ever been touched like this before. His mum has held his hand before, but not like this, not as reassurance. Not for him. That should be a lonely thought. He’s surprised to find it isn’t.

He calls out again, in the hallway. “Hello? Eloise? Is anyone home?”

There’s no answer, but of course he hadn’t been expecting one. They move on to the next room, some sort of home office, with a work desk, a computer, a printer in the corner. Searching through a drawer gives them the name Brian Lapin off an old ID badge.

All the while, Jon is asking questions. Nervous and stuttering, and not so much like he wants to know as he needs to know. It’s almost funny that he’s trailing invisible spiderwebs when he’s so clearly suited for the Eye.

The questions last them through a bathroom, an empty storage room and past the locked door of a balcony.

Georgie jokes as they go, “You know you can tell him to stop asking if you want. He’ll probably listen.”

“Georgie,” Jon groans, not quite offended.

“No it’s- it’s fine,” Gerry says, hesitating at the next door. “It’s probably smart. I’m… not going to say ignorance will keep you safe, but there is a certain level of awareness that makes things more dangerous, makes you easier to notice without knowing what might be noticing you. If you know a little, it’s probably best to tell you the rest.”

He pushes the door open into another bedroom soaked in fog.

“Brian’s?” Georgie asks. It does look like an adult man’s bedroom. Grey walls, grey sheets, very little on the shelves. “Do we need to search it, you think? We already know his name.”

It’s a good point. “Just a quick look around, and we move on.”

Letting go of Georgie’s hand is getting uncomfortable. Through the window, there’s fog drifting past outside as well. Worrying.

“The separate bedrooms are a little weird,” Georgie notes. “Aren’t they married?”

“Not every married couple necessarily enjoys sharing a bed,” Jon says.

“Maybe not, but they have a kid, so we know they have sex sometimes. At least once, in any case.”

Jon gives a startled laugh. “Not… actually what I was referring to. For all we know, Brian snores horribly. Or perhaps they simply each wanted a space to themselves. Absent of horrible fear gods of isolation, I’ve heard it’s supposed to be healthy.”

“Fair, I guess.”

“It does seem a little too empty,” Gerry says. “Or is that just me? You’re the ones who know what normal bedrooms are like.”

“No phone charger,” Georgie says. “No electronics, no laptop, no spare clothes lying around. You’re right. It’s weird. You know what to make of it?”

“Just that he might have been gone for a while. Let’s move on.”

Jon gives him an odd look before they head out. “Gerry, she was joking but… I hope you know that you are not obligated to answer anything that makes you uncomfortable. I-I mean…”

Goddamn, he likes him. “I’ll keep that in mind if it comes up.” It hasn’t. Jon hasn’t asked about any personal experiences, no details of how he knows what he knows, nothing he doesn’t mind talking about. They’ve all been sensible questions, chewing at the walls of his own ignorance. Gerry flashes a grin back at him. “How about I trade you, though?”

“What do you mean?”

“So, between a hypothesis and a theory…”

Jon groans. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to imply… I know I can be…”

“No, no, I just want to be sure I’ve got it right. When I first met you, saying Georgie might be unaffected by the fears was a hypothesis.” He raises the one of her hands he’s holding, notes the way the fog slides off her like she isn’t there. “Now it’s a theory, right?”

“Oh. Y-Yes I suppose that’s correct.”

“What? Don’t be silly,” Georgie says. “I’m affected. I might not be scared, but this place is still weird.”

“You’re uh. Y-You’re warm,” Jon says.

“Your voice is the same,” Gerry adds. “Doesn’t look like the fog is actually touching you at all.”

“Oh. Huh. I sort of thought the weird sound quality was just something I was imagining.” Her hand tightens on his, and she pulls them both a little closer. “I’m definitely keeping an eye on you until we’re out of here, then.”

He’s smiling back at her before he knows he’s doing it. They’ve reached the last door on the floor, the first on the right from the stairs. “I appreciate it,” he tells her.

Then he steps through the door and finds nothing but air under his foot.

He finds the floor a moment later. Georgie yells as he nearly pulls her arm out of its socket, and his heart is racing in his throat. He stands up straight, embarrassed. “Sorry. It’s fine, I’m fine, there’s a step.”

“Jesus Christ, Gerry,” Jon says. Georgie laughs.

This room’s completely dark, and strangely warm. He reaches out for a light switch he Knows is on the wall to his right—thank you, horrible eldritch power he’s bound himself to forever—and flips it.

“Oh. Right.”

The room is warm because there’s barely any fog in it. Blackout curtains cover the windows, but in the lamplight, the wallpaper is a pale yellow and the furnishings are pink and light brown. There are boxes of dolls and playsets along the walls, horse figurines lined up along the shelves. A young girl lives here, though the girl herself is nowhere to be seen.

Gerry checks under the bed to be sure, when they go through the room, but the only thing he finds is a plush bunny, well-loved and slightly dusty.

“Ah, there’s…” Jon says. He’s looking through a box of toys. “There’s name tags. Sarah. Her name is Sarah.”

“And she’s not here,” Georgie says.

“She’s not here,” Gerry confirms. When he stepped into the room and it was warm, he’d almost hoped she would be. It seems to be by far the safest place in the house. But no, as expected, they’re not going to get out of this easily. “If she’s still in the house, she’ll be upstairs, I suppose.”

“Up the stairs that shouldn’t exist,” Georgie says.

“Those ones, yeah.” The plush is soft in his hands, used to being held by hands much smaller than his. He pauses for a moment, then tucks the bunny into a pocket. “It’s only going to get worse from here on. If you want to back out…”

“No,” Jon says. He looks terrified, but firm. His eyes pass over the room and Gerry doesn’t think he’s just scared for himself anymore. “No, if she’s still here somewhere… no.”

“What he said,” Georgie says.

Gerry nods. “Then let’s go.”

Even with that said, he hesitates at the step up out of the room, not eager to return to the cold, foggy hallways. He’s not sure why the step is even there. Weird renovation done at some point, maybe? It seems perfectly mundane, not like…

“So, what- what are those stairs,” Jon asks. “The rest of the house mostly seems to be… normal, just foggy. You said Spiral, what does that mean?”

“It’s a little complicated.” Gerry gets over himself and walks through the door, keeping a tight grip on Georgie’s hand. “Essentially, the colour analogy for the fears has a few glaring flaws. Mostly that any given colour is pretty much the same as any other. Any colour on the wheel neighbours two others and so on.”

“Well, unless you count hue and saturation and such.”

“We’re not actually talking about colour theory right now.” They stop at the staircase, looking up at where it disappears into increasingly foggy nothing. “What I mean is that the fears don’t fit nicely on any sort of wheel. Some of them bunch closely together, some of them appear alone almost exclusively, they interact with each other in varied and complicated ways.”

“Like some sort of… uneven amorphous field, rather than a nice spectrum?”

“Is this relevant?” Georgie asks.

“Well… only a little,” Gerry says. “The important part is, if you have places like this, so steeped in fear the place itself starts getting a little weird, no matter what fear it was in the first place, sooner or later the Spiral makes itself at home.”

“Which is…?” Jon prompts.

“Madness. Delusion. Lies. The fear that you can’t trust your own senses or your own mind, that the things you’re seeing might not be real, or that things that don’t make sense might be.” He sighs at the stairs in front of him. The Spiral always gives him a headache. “Impossible architecture seems to be its favourite way to appear.”

“So, when you say it’ll get worse from here…” Georgie says.

“It’ll still mostly be Lonely, but from here on out, we can’t trust the dimensions of the house. Are you ready?”

Georgie nods. Jon takes a deep, shaking breath, but nods as well.

They begin walking up the stairs.

The first staircase seemed like it might have been longer than it should be. This one, he doesn’t have to wonder about. It’s definitely too long, both ends disappearing into the fog and corners turning up seemingly at random.

It feels like there’s nothing beyond this, like this staircase through the foggy void is all there is, the rest of the world a distant dream. The wallpaper fades from grey to white, ice-like, nearly translucent. It just keeps going.

The stairs aren’t wide enough for them to all walk side by side, and he finds himself regretting that as his hand again and again tries to slip from Georgie’s without his input. She grumbles and readjusts, every time, unwilling to entertain even the thought of letting go. Judging from her growing sounds of frustration, she’s doing the same thing to Jon as well, staying stubbornly solid as the world around them dissolves.

“How long…” Jon says, and his voice is so faint it’s nearly inaudible. He clears his throat and speaks louder. “How long have we been- been climbing?”

“About ten minutes?” Gerry guesses. “Unless we’re in a time distortion.” He checks the clock on his phone, which would have been more useful if he’d remembered to check it before they started climbing. It seems fine, though. The seconds are ticking away like they should. “Which I don’t think we are.”

“That’s reassuring,” says Georgie, not sounding reassured.

“I mean…” He gestures vaguely at the walls. “Nightmare world. If you found it reassuring, I’d be worried.”

“How likely would you say we are to… I don’t know, walk out of here an hour from now and find out it’s been a week?”

“Oh lord,” comes Jon’s voice from behind.

“The opposite is much more likely, actually,” Gerry tells them. “You end up stuck somewhere for weeks and find out it’s only been a few hours. Not sure why. Probably they just get more out of more subjective time to be scared.”

“Still not reassuring.” Though now she sounds drily amused. “But you don’t think- stop letting go!” She yanks him to a stop and glares behind her.

“I am hardly trying to,” Jon argues.

“If you need us to slow down, just say it. You don’t have to be passive-aggressive about it.”

“I am not! If you really believe that in this situation I would…”

“Guys,” Gerry almost begs, heart in his throat. “Stop fighting. It’s what it wants.”

“It wants us to fight?”

“Anything that will pull us apart.” He swallows everything back down, looks at her and feels a heavy awareness tickle at the back of his eyes, letting him know. “It’s noticed you’re here. I think it’s trying to get at you indirectly.”

Realization hits. “Oh. That makes sense. I’m sorry.”

“When have I ever been passive-aggressive.”

“You have your moments.” She shakes her head. “Jon. I’m sorry. Can we drop it?”

He looks for a second like he wants to argue, then bites it back, grimaces like he’s tasting something disgusting. “Yes- Yes, you’re right. N-Not quite your fault.” He flashes a thin smile. “Nightmare world, was it?”

Georgie nods. With an annoyed look on her face, she pulls them both closer, shifts her grip on their hands until she’s holding their wrists and they’re grabbing hers back. “And now I know. If it wants to get to me, it’ll have to try harder.”

Gerry makes his racing heart settle and leans into the heat latched securely onto his arm. “Don’t challenge the dread power to a fight, Georgie.”

“Watch me. Let’s keep going?”

They keep going.

It’s several more minutes of indistinct stairs before a shadow finally appears in the fog ahead, resolving itself into a door as they get close.

“I suppose,” Jon says, a little out of breath, “that asking how high up we are is meaningless.”

“Pretty sure we’re still in the house, so it can’t be that far.” He pushes the door open, and a wall of fog billows over them. Past it is a hallway, as indistinct as the stairs and stretching into the nothing.

“Hello!” he calls out into the fog.

When it eats his voice immediately, Georgie takes over. “Sarah! Eloise! Brian? Is anyone there?”

It’s silent, of course.

At least it’s not branching, Gerry thinks as they set off. It’s just a single, endless hallway. If it leads the same way going back, it won’t get them lost. And, well, if it doesn’t, there’s no reason to worry about it yet.

Georgie huffs through her teeth and pulls them closer to her. At least here they can walk beside each other. “It’s getting kind of cold, isn’t it?”

Gerry has to laugh. Jon chuckles without a hint of humour.

“What?”

“Georgie, I am surprised I’m not shivering. It is freezing.”

“But that doesn’t…” She clearly stops herself before saying it doesn’t make any sense. “I didn’t think cold could be discriminatory. It’s not like I’m dressed any warmer than either of you.”

“This isn’t the sort of cold a jacket helps against,” Gerry tells her. “It’s not right to say it’s all in your head, but it does come from inside.”

“It still seems a little unbelievable.”

“Want proof?” he jokes, curling and flexing the fingers on his free hand, feeling the creaking of cold joints.

“What do you mean?” she asks, and then she shrieks as Jon shoves his free hand down the back of her shirt. In the ensuing scuffle, she lets go of Gerry, but it’s fine.

It’s hard to fade into the Lonely while you’re laughing at your friends.

Friends, huh, he thinks when they’ve calmed down, everyone’s properly grabbed and they’re walking down the hallway again. They’ve been holding hands for a good long while now, walking through indistinct hell together. Friends is… probably not wrong? But he doesn’t have the experience to tell for sure. Maybe he should just ask. Or maybe he should wait until they’re out of this house and an answer to the negative won’t instantly literally kill him.

“I’ve been wondering…” he says instead. “Why are you here?”

Again, the two of them share a look.

Concerned, Jon says, “…There are innocent people trapped in a nightmare world. I believe that was it?”

“Yes, now, but…” His eyes flick between them. “I didn’t say anything about that when I called. I just asked for a hand in some unnamed horrible thing, and you both dropped everything to come along?”

“You needed help,” Georgie says, like it’s simple. “Of course we’re going to help.”

“You don’t even really know me. We met once.”

“I think we know enough. You helped us when you didn’t have to. It wouldn’t be right not to return the favour.”

Is this why normal people seem so happy so often? It must be, if this is real. It’s hard to believe.

Then Jon sighs and says, “You want the actual truth?”

“Jon!”

“Yes.” Of course there’s more to it. There has to be.

Except Jon’s expression when he keeps talking has a smile to it, hidden, but not hidden well. “Three days ago, Georgie and I both completed our final exams for the semester.”

“Jon, this is dumb.”

“And we were invited out for the big traditional post-exams party, which I, at least, have been known to get quite uncomfortably wasted at, without even particularly enjoying it. I don’t know if the same applies to Georgie…”

“It does not. You’re just awful when you drink too much.”

“But for several reasons, neither of us really wanted to go. Since most of the reasons boil down to the simple fact that we both despise everyone who tends to go to these parties, we couldn’t quite find a good reason to give that would get us out of it without straight up lying. We were already looking for an excuse to avoid the whole thing when you called, and you made for an excellent one.”

“…No,” Gerry says. “That’s not it.”

Georgie gives a long sigh. “He’s wildly exaggerating the ridiculousness of the situation, but that is about it, I guess. We probably would’ve just not gone, anyway. Not like anyone would’ve noticed.”

“You’d rather be here than at a college party?”

Jon says, “At least here, we could be reasonably sure we’d be doing something of practical use.”

“Also, we just kind of like you. Did you consider that?”

He hadn’t, no.

And even without asking directly, he seems to have gotten an answer to the friends question. He’s not sure what to do with that, except grip Georgie’s arm and keep going forward through hell.

He wonders briefly what he’s done to deserve it, then drops the thought. Life is a series of random coincidences. There is no reason for anything. Things just happen because they happen, because nothing else happened instead. Apparently, sometimes the things that happen are nice. It’s not common, not for him, but sometimes. Sometimes he gets nice things. He’ll take it.

After far too much walking, they find a door on the right side of the hallway. Gerry barely hesitates before he opens it.

On the other side, it’s dark, and there’s nothing. No floor, no ceiling, no walls to be seen, just swirls of fog stirred up by the door swinging open. It’s a soft, cold darkness, a shadow in the nothing already surrounding them.

Georgie sucks a short breath in through her teeth. “Good thing you didn’t step through this one without looking.”

A belated stab of terror falls through him like a dissolving sheet of ice. He doesn’t think he would have, not with the architecture so dubious already, but yes, it would have been an ignoble death.

“There’s… light switch, I think,” he says instead of considering the possibility. Well, he doesn’t think, he Knows. Beholding is light switch fixated today. General distaste of the dark, perhaps? Unfortunately, the switch in question is just over a meter away from the door, on the wall who knows how far above a floor that might not even exist.

He ends up having to let go of Georgie so he can grab the door frame and lean into the void, reaching out with his other hand. She and Jon both grab onto his arm, but he’s not sure what they’ll realistically do if he drops.

The switch flips, and he pulls himself back to solid ground and wonders why he bothered in the first place.

Certainly the place is better lit now, but it’s still full of impenetrable fog. It’s just all white instead of shadowed now. Considering the walls and floors and ceilings here are also white, he can’t help but feel this is actually worse.

“Oh,” Jon says, with a surprise that hasn’t decided if it’s positive or negative. “There’s a ladder.”

He points down at the drop immediately beyond the doorframe, and there is, in fact, a ladder. Narrow, nearly invisible and disappearing into the white void below. It seems incredibly unsafe.

“I don’t know if I like that,” Georgie says. Then she calls out through the door, “Hello! Is anyone in there? Sarah! Eloise! Brian!”

They stop and wait for a second, not expecting anything.

Which is why it’s such a surprise when a faint, distant noise filters back to them.

They stare at each other with wide eyes before Georgie shouts again. “I can’t hear you well! Are you all right?”

Another second, another faint and distant voice. It sounds young. It sounds like a little girl.

“Shit, okay, ladder it is,” Georgie says. “Who wants to go first?”

“Are we even certain that will hold our weight?” Jon asks.

Gerry looks at it, at this spindly, insubstantial thing, and Beholding itches at the back of his eyes. “It will,” he says with certainty, “But only one person at a time. And it’s long.”

“What?” Jon says. “But then…”

“Right.” Georgie steps back from the edge. Then she pulls them together until Gerry is holding hands with Jon instead. Then she steps back to the edge, alone. He’s too confused to make a grab for her.

“Georgie, what are you doing?”

“Look, if this thing wants to split us up anyway…” She looks between them with stern eyes. “I’m not losing either of you, alright? Don’t let it make you let go. Hug each other if you have to. I’m probably going to be the safest, so I’ll go get Sarah, you wait here and shout to help me find my way back.”

Jon tries to pull away towards her. “This still feels incredibly dangerous. You could get lost. And we have no idea what’s down there.”

“It’s not like it’d be safer if we all went down, one by one.”

Gerry hates that she’s right. But she’s right. “Fine. We’ll yell at you,” he says. “If it starts getting hard to hear our voices, you turn back, alright? No matter what.”

“That sounds reasonable,” she says. And then she starts climbing, disappearing into the fog.

The temperature drops immediately, a wet, bone-deep chill that leaves dewdrops on his face and makes his hands hurt. He only barely notices when Jon’s fingers start slipping from his own.

Well. He did sort of promise Georgie. He tugs Jon close, wrapping him up tight in his arms and ignoring the alarmed yelp he gets as a response.

“You didn’t have to listen to her,” Jon grumbles.

“No? Want me to let go?”

No answer. He knows Jon feels the cold as well as he does, awful and oppressive. The awkward hug isn’t helping at all, but it does feel like letting go might make it worse.

Taking pity, instead of waiting for a response, Gerry calls out into the fog, “Georgie? You’re not gone yet?”

“Still climbing!” her voice comes, barely muffled. “You’re right, this is way too long!”

The itching at the back of his eyes is getting really annoying, but he can cope. “I think you’re about halfway! Just keep going!”

“Okay! Thanks!”

Jon squints at him suspiciously. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Same way I knew where the light switch was. Magic.”

It doesn’t make Jon look any less suspicious. “Everything supernatural is horrible. At least so you claimed.”

“It is, but you do what you have to.”

He doesn’t accept that explanation, of course. Curious, paranoid, clever bastard. Maybe enough of all those to stay alive. Time will tell.

Gerry sighs, tightens his grip. Has he ever hugged anyone before? He can’t remember. Does this actually count? “If we get out of here alive, I’ll tell you everything, okay? I promise. You’ve deserved that. But I only want to tell it once, and I don’t want to yell all of it loud enough for Georgie to hear, so can it wait?”

Jon considers that for a long moment before he sighs and says, “Very well.”

“Reached the bottom!” Georgie’s voice comes from below. “Sarah! Can you tell me where you are?”

Another second. Another faint, distant sound.

“Alright! Hold on tight, I’m coming!” And then, “Boys! You’ve still got each other?”

“We’re right here,” Jon yells after her.

Hopefully they can still be heard through the fog. Georgie has no such issue, but the cold creeping through Gerry’s chest feels like it’s eating every sound he tries to make. But if Sarah can still call out after days in here, he can cope after less than an hour. Or has it been more?

They stand there for a small subjective eternity, holding awkwardly onto each other and occasionally calling out into the fog. It’s as boring as it is terrifying, a numbing kind of constant fear that matches the chill that doesn’t bite but does seep through skin and bone like water through paper. He should be doing something. There are things he could have done, things tucked in his pockets to tip the scales one way or another, if only he’d remembered a moment earlier, but getting any of them to Georgie now is impossible. She might as well be infinitely far away.

Gerry hates the Lonely.

Running doesn’t help, here. Hiding doesn’t help. There’s nothing here to fight or break or burn or defy. There’s nothing at all except the cold, and the fog, and the voice in the back of his head pretending to be his own, telling him over and over again, this is better. Give in. Stay here. It won’t hurt. What do you have to go back to? Your mother?

He grits his teeth and tightens his grip on Jon, lets Georgie’s voice cut the fog in his head like a knife. He does have his mum, awful as she is, and beyond her there’s a whole world. Thousands of things to see, millions of people to meet. There is love and joy and kindness, even if he can only touch the edges of it. There is art and dance and music. There is so much out there to love, and this place has none of it.

He has friends now, he thinks with a painful reverence. It feels like the burning of coming into the warmth on a cold day. The Lonely can suck it.

“Gerry?”

“Hm?”

“You’re- You’re crushing me.”

Ah, crud, he is so bad at this. “Sorry,” he says, trying to loosen his grip on Jon until there’s less bone creaking. “I hate this place.”

Jon frees his hands from where they’ve been squished between them, but doesn’t try to wiggle free entirely. Despite the tension drawn through every string of him, he wraps his arms awkwardly around Gerry’s waist and refuses to look up. “It is not… pleasant.”

Gerry breathes a laugh into Jon’s hair. No. It is not.

They stand like that for another mind-numbing minute before Jon twitches. “Georgie?”

Ah shit, she hasn’t said a word in a while. “Georgie!” he yells into the void. “Still there?”

There’s a terrifying few seconds of silence before her voice comes back to them. “Yeah! I found her! Give me a minute!”

“Oh, good,” Jon says.

It’s nearly unbelievable how little has gone wrong yet, and he chases that thought down with a hatchet the second he has it, but it’s still true. They’re still here, Georgie has found the girl, no one is lost yet.

He’s never had a secret weapon like Georgie before. It feels too good to be true.

“She really is incredible,” he says.

Jon sighs. “She is, yes.”

Huh. “You sound… disappointed about that?”

“No, no, not at all, I just…” He sighs again. “I suppose I-I feel a little… a little useless?”

“Ah.”

“I-It’s just that you- you know all this already, a-and Georgie has her- her fear immunity, and I’m just… I mean…”

“No, I get it,” Gerry says. “The Lonely doesn’t go easy on thoughts like that. For what it’s worth, you’re doing a damn good job keeping me anchored right now.”

“I’m not really doing anything.”

“You’re here, aren’t you? And you…” It’s hard to believe, but he’s swimming in fog, so he decides he’s going to believe it anyway. “You care. That’s more than I get from most people.”

Jon stiffens at that. When he speaks again, his voice sounds more substantial than it has since they went up the first set of stairs. “That’s not right. You- You shouldn’t have… You deserve care. That’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair.” But he’s smiling at the indignation. It’s warm. The warmth hurts, in the fog, but it’s warm. “Nothing is. You can’t control anything, ultimately. No one gets what they deserve, for good or bad. Not as a rule. And sometimes you’re useless. Sometimes bad things happen and you can’t do shit about it, and that’s okay. That’s life. That’s just what it is to be human.”

Jon resettles his grip as the fog again tries to break them apart. “Is that supposed to be reassuring?”

“I don’t know. I’m not good at reassuring. What I mean is, it’s okay. This is enough.”

Jon lets out a long, shuddering breath. He sounds like he’s trying to say something, but in the end, he doesn’t.

Gerry wants to go home. He wants to be out of the fog, sitting somewhere warm where he can think about all this without having to fight the fog back at every turn. Maybe without having to force himself not to let go, he can figure out what this hug actually means. If it means anything at all. Just thinking too much about it here is liable to cause him trouble.

Georgie’s voice cuts through again. “We’re coming back now! Where are you at?”

“Over- Over here!” Jon yells, struggling to be heard.

“Sweet! I can’t see anything, so keep yelling! I’ll follow your voices!”

Over the next couple minutes, they shout into the fog, hearing Georgie’s voice coming closer and closer. It’s clear Sarah is with her, but there’s no word from her. Not until they make it to the ladder.

“Gerry?” Georgie calls out. “Sarah’s pretty small. Think the ladder can hold both of us?”

Beholding itches in his eyes, but he doesn’t need it for this. He knows already. “It’s not about weight! You have to go alone!”

Jon pulls away, just a little, and they crouch down in the door by the edge of the drop. Georgie’s voice drifts up from below, too quiet to make out the words of. She’s talking to Sarah, and judging by her pauses, Sarah is answering.

Then, “I’m going to send Sarah up first, okay? You’ll keep her safe when she reaches the top?”

“Of course!” Gerry calls back.

Jon leans over the edge and yells, “Sarah? Can you hear me?”

After a few seconds, a small, faint voice drifts up, barely audible. “Yes!”

He takes a bracing breath and yells again, “Climb up here! You’ll be safe!”

It’s a lie. Of course it’s a lie. It’s a long ladder to climb down and a longer one to climb back up, and Sarah is only a young girl. She’s been alone in the Lonely for a number of days, and a climb on an endless ladder isn’t going to help. No part of this is safe. It’s only safer than any alternative.

From below, they hear Georgie shouting encouragement, but not as much as a whisper from Sarah. The ladder doesn’t twitch, and the fog is as empty and white as ever.

Gerry closes his eyes and tries to Know how she’s doing, but while Beholding happily fed him light switch locations and ladder mechanics, Sarah seems to be entirely uninteresting to it. A good thing, probably, but it doesn’t help the worry.

Jon seems to feel the same way, his hand a claw clutched onto Gerry’s forearm. The fog hasn’t tried to make them let go in a while. Is the worry for another person keeping it at bay, or is it lulling them into a false sense of security?

When Sarah’s voice finally breaks through the fog again, she’s closer. “I’m scared!” she nearly screams.

Gerry’s heart stops in his chest. If she falls, what can he do? There’s nothing. Just trying to get on the ladder now will take them both down. All he can do is sit here and listen.

Jon’s hand tightens on his arm, and then he leans forward with an intense look on his face and yells into the void. “You have to keep going! I know it’s scary! I know it’s hard! But you have to keep going! You will get out! Just one more step! And then one more!”

“You can do it! You’re so strong!” Georgie shouts from below.

The next sound from Sarah is too quiet to make out. It still sounds scared, but it sounds like it might be an ‘okay’.

For several minutes, Jon and Georgie take turns shouting encouragement while Gerry stares into the fog, hoping to see something, anything.

He’s staring so hard that when something finally stirs, he’s not sure if he’s imagining it. But there it is again, a small, dark shape moving in the white, getting closer step by step.

“I see you,” he says, just loud enough she might hear.

“You’re almost there!” Jon cheers enthusiastically. “Just a few more steps. You’re almost to the top.”

A faint sound of a shaking breath comes from below, and slowly, she comes into sight.

She is young, and small. All colour seems to have been leeched from her. Perhaps her hair was always blonde, but her clothes are faded almost white. Her hands are red from the thin ladder rungs and her cheeks are tear-streaked, but her face is set in terrified determination, eyes fixed on the ladder as she drags herself up rung by rung.

“Almost there,” he says without really meaning to.

Finally she looks up and spots them above, nearly close enough to touch. New tears spring from her eyes and she drags herself upwards with renewed resolve, clumsy hands grabbing for the ladder.

Gerry plants a knee against the wall to secure himself, and then shakes free of Jon to scoot over the ledge and reach out for her. Jon grumbles and grabs onto his belt to hold him.

Her hands are within reach. She pulls herself up another rung and reaches for him.

A gust of cold bites through him, harsher than any he’s felt this far. It makes him twitch, it makes Jon swear, and it makes Sarah yelp and slip backwards.

He lurches for her, grabs, misses her arm, gets his fingers into the collar of her top and holds on white-knuckled.

“Grab on, grab on, grab on!” He reaches with his other arm, catches one of hers just in time for her feet to slip entirely off the ladder, leaving her dangling from his grasp.

She’s screaming. Jon is shouting, holding on for dear life. Georgie is yelling something, but Gerry is too busy to listen, teeth grit, trying not to slip further over the edge. She finally gets her free hand on his arm. The grip on her collar cannot be comfortable, but there’s an infinite drop below.

He can’t afford to think, can’t afford to be scared or in pain. All he has to do is heave.

Pulling with everything he’s got, he jams his knee hard against the wall, ignores the doorframe digging into his stomach and drags Sarah over the edge into the hallway. Then he falls back against the wall and breathes, waiting for the panic to pass.

Sarah gets up on her knees and scrambles away from him.

Jon says, “Hey, a-are you…” and she clearly recognizes his voice and crawls over to hide behind him.

Gerry might have felt slightly hurt at that if he wasn’t still shaking with sudden adrenaline.

“What happened? You guys okay?” comes Georgie’s voice from below.

He peeks through the door just enough to yell back down, “She’s up! We’re fine! Come on!” and then settle back against the wall again.

Jon seems to be checking Sarah over, looking at her red palms and straightening her crumpled clothes. “Yes, you are going to be all right,” he tells her in a quiet voice.

She is. She’s fine. It’s fine. They did it. Gerry leans back against the wall and closes his eyes. They’re almost home free, now. Just down the hall, down the stairs. Easy. He can breathe a little, let the jitters fade. It tried to get them and it failed, as always. They’ve basically won.

No. Some old, paranoid part of him wakes up and starts clawing. Dangerous thoughts. They’re still in the house, still in danger.

He forces his eyes open and tries to shake off the mist curling around him. Dammit, dammit, dammit.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Sarah,” Jon is saying. “I’m Jon, and this is Gerry. He’s a little scary-looking, but I promise he’s nice.”

Scary-looking? Okay, fair. He can ignore that. The attention helps him drag himself back out of the cold.

Sarah still looks dubious.

Jon smiles at her, almost conspiratorially. “Really, I mean it. He’s very good at saving people. He saved us when we first met, and he’s here at all because he wanted to save you. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Wasn’t there something…? Oh, right. “I think I have something of yours,” Gerry says, and pulls the plush rabbit out of his pocket.

“Mister Honey!” Sarah yells, all reservations forgotten as she throws herself to her knees in front of Gerry and grabs the plush, hugging it hard to her chest.

“You… named it Mister Honey…?” he asks.

She nods without looking up. “Cause he’s sweet and it sounds like bunny.”

“That is an excellent name,” Jon says, settling on his knees beside her.

“Where did you find him? I thought he was lost.”

“In your room, under your bed,” Gerry says.

“But I was in my room.”

Jon and Gerry’s eyes meet over her head, and he knows they have the realization at the exact same time.

“But that’s… o-oh, that makes… a s-sort of sense.”

“First door on the right.”

“And the light switch. And- And the drop just through the door.” Jon closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “It really is her room. Just a- a nightmare version.”

“Christ, I hate this place.”

“Mhm. Sarah?” He’s so gentle. So unbearably soft. Gerry isn’t built for listening to this. “Is it all right if I hold your hand? I would rather not lose you to the fog.”

Sarah doesn’t hesitate long to grab his hand. He takes Gerry’s in his other. It makes him no less cold, but a little more grounded. Then Sarah looks a little nervously at Gerry.

He tells her, “You don’t have to hold mine if you don’t want to. I’ve got Jon, see?”

She squints at him, then shifts her grip on her bunny, holds it out towards him. “You can hold Mister Honey’s hand.”

Gerry doesn’t really know what to do except as she says, taking the little bunny’s little arm in his hand. It’s a strange, nonsensical thing to do, and it makes his heart jump in an unfamiliar way. Sarah takes the bunny’s other arm, leaving them sat in a weird little circle on the floor.

“You’re cold,” she tells Jon accusingly.

“This place makes most people cold, I’m afraid.”

“Georgie wasn’t cold.”

“Georgie is immune to supernatural… buffoonery,” Jon says, clearly having meant something a little less child friendly. “The rest of us are not so lucky.”

“Oh.” She bites her lip for a couple seconds. “My mum was cold too. I thought maybe she made the house like this, but the house made her cold instead, then?”

“That sounds reasonable to assume, yes.”

“Your mum, not your dad?” Gerry asks.

Sarah shakes her head. “Dad left,” she says. “That’s when mum started getting cold. Did he make the house like this?”

“I don’t believe so,” Jon says. “The house was always like this.”

“Yeah, it’s a bad house.”

“Boys, a hand?” Georgie says, her head poking up past the ledge and a hand clawing for purchase against the smooth floor of the hallway.

Gerry lets Jon take the bunny’s hand so he can help pull her up. She flinches when he touches her, and from the way the heat of her burns him, he doesn’t blame her. But he doesn’t let go, and once he’s pulled her all the way into the hallway, he closes the door behind her.

“Christ,” she hisses. “You alright?”

“Cold, tired,” he says. “Still here, though. No one’s harmed.”

“Jon? Sarah?”

“M’fine,” Sarah says. She and Jon have stood up to get closer and she has the bunny clutched to her chest.

“Still here,” Jon says, reaching out with his now free hand for Georgie to catch.

“Brian’s left- has been gone for a while,” Gerry says. “Eloise is still here, and I have a good guess where we might find her, but Georgie…”

“What?” She stands between them like a beacon of normality. Her contrast makes it far too clear how cold it’s gotten.

“This is getting risky,” he says. “We cannot split up again.”

She nods almost immediately.

He continues, “We’ll have to decide if we’re going to keep risking it, or if it might be safer for everyone to turn back now.” He says ‘everyone’, but he nods towards Sarah to make it clear what he means.

Sarah looks between them like she’s about to start crying again. “I want to get my mum. We can’t leave her here.”

It hurts, and he doesn’t want to, but he also doesn’t want to risk losing anyone to the fog. It’s gotten too close too many times and he doesn’t know how many chances they have left. Jon and Georgie seem to have similar thoughts, sharing frustrated and devastated and—on Jon’s part—scared glances. None of them wants to leave anyone here. None of them wants to separate Sarah from her mother, but they may have to be realistic about it.

“How about a-a suggestion,” Jon says. “We just- We just check. K-Keep going and see if- if it tries to separate us again. If so, we leave, but…”

It’s not going to want to give them the choice.

“Gerry?” Georgie looks at him, and he thinks she’s decided to base whatever decision she makes on him. “How good are our chances, do you think?”

“Hard to say.” He balls his free hand into a fist. Flexes his fingers. Leans into the itching behind his eyes, not to Know anything specific, just to clear his mind of stray fog, think a little more objectively. It’s a bad habit, but it works. “It’s not zero, but it won’t be easy, and… the challenge might not even be finding her. This house was built to let the Lonely knock on the door, but someone does have to open it, unintentionally or not. It might be hard to convince her to leave.”

Jon lets out a tired breath, and sounds almost optimistic when he says, “Worth a shot, do you think?”

God, he wants to say no. He wants to decide there’s no chance, it’s best to just get out now. But Sarah’s mother is still in here somewhere, and she might not be lost yet. “Might be, yeah.”

He nods, and Georgie nods, and they’ve decided.

It’s hard to figure out how to keep moving with Sarah with them, since Georgie only has two hands and they all more or less need her to keep grounded. Eventually, Jon has an idea, and with a bit of convincing, Sarah climbs onto Gerry’s back. Georgie hooks her arm through his and holds Sarah’s hand, and holds Jon’s with her other.

“So where do you think we’ll find her?” Georgie asks as they walk. “You said you had a guess.”

Gerry nods towards the door already disappeared in the fog behind them. “Well, we figured that was a nightmare version of Sarah’s bedroom.”

“Yeah, I got that. Her bed was down there, and the furniture… yeah.”

“Eloise’s room was the first door on the left, right? Should still be, here, and I bet that’s where she is.” It occurs to him they might have a better authority on the subject with them. “You think that’s right, Sarah?”

“Yeah, mum’s always hiding in her room.” Her voice is flat. Too dull for a child.

“Good guess,” Georgie says, and he doesn’t correct her that it might well have been Beholding-powered intuition. “It should’ve been across the hall.”

“Well, it wasn’t. Would’ve been too close, I bet.”

The hallway seems as infinite as it is uniform. At least until it splits, and Gerry curses his earlier optimism for thinking it wouldn’t. They take the left fork without much deliberation. He hopes dearly he’s right about the fucked-up internal logic of the place. There’s a weight on his back he cannot afford to drop, and Georgie can only do so much.

Talking is hard, with the fog pressing in, but they try to keep some conversation going regardless. It’s stilted, the topics unimportant and soon forgotten, just a lot of different ways to say the same thing. We’re still here. We’re still together.

“How did you even know about this place?” Georgie ultimately asks.

Gerry breathes a laugh that feels unfamiliar. “It’s… not fun to explain.”

“If you say ‘magic’ again…” Jon warns.

“No, it’s just… my mum.”

Sarah shifts a little, and he takes the reminder to tighten his grip on her. “Did your mum send you to save us?”

Jesus, the thought. “No, she’s evil.”

“Your mum’s evil?”

He doesn’t have the energy to laugh it off. Not this. It’s not like it’s a fresh wound, or a new realization. It’s always been true, and… he’s probably always known, at least since he was about Sarah’s age, but denial stuck for a long time, and shedding it still hurts. Which is silly. It’s not like anything’s changed.

“She is,” he tells her, trying to keep his voice light. “And she has a lot of evil friends. One of them’s the woman who made your house go bad. Sometimes she visits and brags about her projects, all the people she’s…” Don’t say ‘killed’ to the kid. “…hurt. Don’t think she knew I was listening, this time. Probably wouldn’t have said anything if she did.”

Sarah is very quiet when she asks, “Will your mum be angry with you because you saved us?”

Yes, if she finds out, but probably not too bad. No more than she always is, these days. The worst this will do for her is piss off Margaret Lukas, and Maggie is hardly the most valuable business partner. If he’s lucky, she might not even punish him for it.

“Nah,” he says. “She’s still my mum. It’ll be fine.”

“Oh, Gerry,” Georgie breathes, leaning into him, so she might’ve picked up on the lie.

She doesn’t say anything else, however, and neither does Jon, though he looks concerned when Gerry glances over to meet his eyes.

Not long after, their patience is rewarded.

It’s just an innocuous door, as white and not-quite-translucent as everything else here, set into the left wall of the corridor, but Gerry’s eyes itch something fierce when he sees it, and before anyone even reaches for it, he Knows.

“Yeah, she’s in there,” he says. “She’s… She’s in there.”

They look at each other, and Jon slowly twists the handle and pushes the door open.

There’s a floor this time, at least, but that’s the best that can be said for it. The only thing on the other side of that door is fog, denser than they’ve seen anywhere this far. The air feels heavy to breathe in.

“Looks… not immediately lethal, at least?” Georgie tries.

Gerry isn’t so sure. He’s never heard of the Lonely freezing anyone to death, but by its nature, no one would be around to see if it did.

“H-How do we…” Jon starts. “If we go in there, do- w-will we get lost? How do we find the door again?”

“I mean, worst case, we just follow the wall,” Georgie says. “…right?”

Gerry shakes his head. “Worst case, the walls disappear and we get lost in the void forever.”

“Right. Great.”

“Mum!” Sarah yells suddenly, so loud it hurts Gerry’s ears. It doesn’t echo. As with every other sound, the fog eats it.

They look at each other, then Georgie raises her voice again. “Eloise! Hello?”

Nothing but silence responds.

“W-Well,” Jon says. “Well. If we follow the walls from the beginning, will- will that make them less likely to disappear?”

“Probably not.” Gerry sighs, closes his eyes for a deep breath, wishes again he’d learned how to give up. “You’re sure you want to do this? Don’t just want to go home?”

“We can’t leave my mum!”

Jon looks between Sarah and Gerry, presses himself close to Georgie, not looking certain at all. “Of course I would like to go home. But… if- if there is a way…”

Georgie shrugs. “Don’t think my judgement’s to be trusted here. I’d like to try.”

“Right.” Another sigh. They’re doing it. Of course they’re doing it. They’re already here. Might as well walk the last few steps through the jaws of death. “There’s… in my coat pocket, right one, I’ll need a hand…”

Jon, being the only one of them with a free hand that can reach, roots through Gerry’s pocket at his direction and pulls out the skein of green yarn he carries around for shit like this. It’s nothing special, just normal wool thread. He picked the colour because Beholding comes in green more often than not, but he’s reasonably sure it doesn’t actually make a difference.

“Tie that around the doorhandle. Can’t guarantee it’ll help, but it has a better chance than anything else.”

“And then, off into the fog?” Georgie asks. “Do we try to follow the wall at all and hope it doesn’t disappear, or do we just wander ahead?”

“Won’t make much of a difference,” Gerry says as Jon finishes tying the yarn. He walks them through the door before anyone can hesitate further, and the fog closes around them like a physical thing. “Here on out, space is going to stop even pretending to make sense. If she wants to be found at all, we might find her. If not, we won’t.”

“She better,” Georgie mock-threatens.

It’s not enough to draw a laugh, but it’s something. It’s something.

The floor might have been wood at some point. Maybe some sort of false wooden flooring. It doesn’t matter now. Here, it’s indistinguishable from the fog that presses into their skin. They’re walking through the void.

Sarah’s weight on his back burns. It’s not heat. She’s warmer than he is, but only by a little. It’s the mere act of touching another human being that hurts, that feels wrong in a way the fog reaching tendrils into his lungs doesn’t. Georgie’s arm hooked through his does burn, with heat and contact both, urging him to let go.

It would be so easy to let go. To just drift. The fog is soft and the cold doesn’t hurt. People are hard to deal with, always painful, in the end.

He grits his teeth and forces those thoughts down. They might be right and might be wrong, but it doesn’t matter. He will not give in to the Lonely. Not now. Not ever. If he’s so clingy they end up hating him, he loses nothing. He’ll do it anyway, just to spite the fog. Their companionship is a pleasant dream, and it matters even if it ends. It does. It does. It does.

“Mum!” Sarah cries into the fog, as scared as she was on the ladder. The sound goes nowhere and nobody answers.

They shouldn’t have brought a child here. They shouldn’t have gone this deep. If they keep fighting it now, it’ll kill them. If they don’t, it’ll take them. It’s too late already.

It’s not. It’s not. Those thoughts stay out of his head.

Jon is still metering out the skein of yarn. The bright green thread disappears in the white behind them, showing no sign of leading anywhere now. It feels… too long. They’ve been walking for too long. They should have reached the end of the string already?

Time distortion, then. Probably. Gerry doesn’t have his hands free to check his phone, but it feels right.

That’s… bad? It means they can take as much time as they want, but also that it can take as much time as it wants with them. It’s bad. He knows, objectively, it’s bad. It’s hard to care. He tries. At least he tries.

“Mum, where are you?” Sarah calls out, and the pain in her voice makes everything hurt even more.

Then Georgie yells, “Eloise! For fuck’s sake! Listen to your daughter!”

Mentally it feels like a blast of warm air. Nowhere near enough to blow the fog from his mind, but enough to be a reminder of what that feels like, and he digs his metaphorical fingers into it.

“Language,” Sarah scolds automatically.

“Yes, Georgie.” The humour in Jon’s voice is thin, hollow, but there. “Don’t swear in front of the child.”

She rolls her eyes hard enough to move her whole body. “Oh, excuse me for being a little- …did you hear that?”

Gerry isn’t sure he did. It sounded more like a figment of his imagination than a genuine sound from the fog. It could have been anything. Yarn hitting the floor. A brush of fabric against fabric. Not a voice. Not here.

But it was.

“Mum! Mum, I’m over here!”

“Eloise, I swear to god!”

It’s not proper Knowing, not even intuition. The fog is soothing the itching behind his eyes, and all he has left is gut instinct at best. A half-baked feeling that might mean something and might not at all.

“This way,” he says instead of questioning, pushing them in the direction of whatever that was.

“Are you sure?” Georgie asks.

“Not even remotely.”

They keep going, intermittently yelling into the fog. Something out there is angry with them. Something out there is trying to kill them. Something that already has them secure between its hands. Maybe it’ll succeed, but they can’t stop now. Not while there’s still hope.

Then Jon swears loudly and yanks them to a stop.

They look back to see the sad, frayed end of yarn in his hand, no more skein left to unwind. They’ve reached the end of the line.

He tugs at it, tries to get some slack out of the seemingly infinite length they’ve left behind them, but it’s stuck on something somewhere, and he’s unwilling to yank hard enough to risk breaking it. “I don’t- I don’t think we can go any farther.”

That’s it, then. They’ll have to turn back, and hope the line still leads somewhere.

“Mum! This isn’t funny!”

“Christ,” Georgie swears quietly, and then she yells, “Eloise! You better answer me! Sarah needs you! You can handle this for a bloody second!”

Anger doesn’t belong in the Lonely. It doesn’t fit, sharp against the soft and numb world. The fog rises up in response—swirls as if disturbed by a wind that doesn’t exist—before it falls down and smothers them again, settling as tight as before.

And then there’s a chair, as white and immaterial as anything else here, a copy or an echo of the desk chair in Eloise’s distant, real bedroom. And in it is a woman.

She seems less real than the chair she’s sitting on, skin pale, hair streaked with white, form strangely transparent. She looks passively off into the distance as if she can’t see them at all, her eyes dull and empty.

“Mum!” Sarah cries, wiggling until Gerry crouches to let her down so she won’t fall and crack her head open. She runs over to the woman in the chair and throws her arms around her middle. There is almost no response, just a faint twitch as Eloise shrinks in on herself.

Then, slowly, she looks down at her daughter and whispers in a voice that hasn’t heard use in too long, “You shouldn’t be here. I told you not to go into my room.”

Sarah tightens her grip and shakes her head.

Suddenly terrified they’ll both fade away before his eyes, Gerry tries to get close enough to grab them, but it’s no use. The chair is far enough away that either they have to let go of each other, or Jon has to let go of their lifeline. Neither is an option.

“Eloise.” He tries to keep his voice calm, keep the fear out. “This is not your room.”

She blinks at him, slowly, eyes uncaring, looking through him. “Who are you?”

Sarah sniffles. “These are my friends. They’re here to save us.”

“I don’t need saving.” It’s the firmest thing she’s said yet. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Yes, it is!”

“Nothing’s wrong, Sarah.”

“I’m scared!”

A look of pure annoyed exhaustion comes over Eloise’s face. She sighs, and moves as if she’s going through the motions, but she does lift her hands to rub her daughter’s back. “You don’t have to be scared. Everything is fine. I’m just a bit tired. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Are you serious?” Georgie snaps, and Eloise flinches like she’s been slapped. “You’re not in your room, you’re in an infinite hell dimension! That’s a little bit beyond just being tired, Eloise!”

Eloise blinks like there’s sand in her eyes. She looks no less exhausted and empty, but she’s looking at them now. “Who are you people?”

Might as well try. “We broke into your house,” Gerry says. It’s still a joke. Sort of. “Might kidnap your daughter. You should probably call the police. Do you have a phone here?” He looks pointedly around at the white, empty void surrounding them.

She looks around as well, slowly. A halting tightness comes over her shoulders and her hands close almost protectively in the fabric of Sarah’s top.

And then the burst of half-hearted energy passes, and she sits back into lethargy. Her eyes drift to the distance again. “Just leave.”

“Kidnapping included?” Gerry asks. He thinks Sarah is crying again, and he’s not joking anymore. He won’t leave without her, even if that means taking her from her mother. From the way her shoulders hitch, he thinks Sarah can hear it in his voice.

Eloise’s next words are so quiet he reads them on her lips more than he hears them. “Might be better.”

“Mum!” Sarah clings hard enough to be clearly uncomfortable, terror evident in her voice.

“I’m sorry,” Eloise says, still so quiet they’re barely words. “I’m so tired, these days. It might be better if you stayed somewhere else for a while. I just… need a break.”

“No! Don’t leave me! I don’t care if you’re tired, I’ll be quiet!”

“It’ll be okay.” She’s gentle, torturously, voice soft and hands pushing her daughter carefully away from her. “Everything is going to be fine, I promise.”

“With all due r-respect, Mrs. Lapin.” Jon’s voice is shaking, more from fear than the suffocating cold. “You c-cannot simply give up like this. You need to leave this place. You have things t-to do.”

“Oh. No, I don’t.” There’s a chilling happiness in those words. Devoid of joy and colour, there’s a smile with no warmth left in it, just the numb contentment of the fog. “I’m not needed anywhere. I can stay. No one will miss me.”

She pushes Sarah away, ever so gently, and Sarah cries like she’s been shot and isn’t strong enough to hold on.

Gerry looks to Georgie, feeling helpless, and gets a matching look back.

“I don’t know what to say,” she whispers. “I don’t want to leave her, but I don’t know what you’re meant to say when someone’s…”

“I don’t either. If you don’t have any other ideas… We’re on borrowed time as is.”

She looks absolutely miserable. “I don’t. You? No ideas?”

“One.” He looks at Sarah fighting to keep a hold of her mother’s sleeve. “It sucks.”

“I’ll take anything that might work,” Jon adds.

“Yeah,” he breathes, then, “Sarah? Come over here.”

“No! I’m not leaving! I’m not leaving!”

“Just for a moment,” he says, and tries to sound like he means it. The fog in his voice helps, for once, steals the shaking of emotion away. “Come hug Georgie to get some warmth back into you. Then we can try again.”

For a moment, he’s not sure it’ll work. Then Sarah twirls on her heel and all but crashes into Georgie, eliciting an ‘oof’ and a hissing inhale at the sudden cold.

He looks at Georgie, who still looks miserable. He looks at Jon, who looks wrecked and confused—before he’s struck by realization and meets Gerry’s eyes like he’s begging to be proven wrong. He looks at Eloise.

She looks satisfied, hands dropping back into her lap. Not happy, not pleased, just dully content. She isn’t fading back into the fog yet, but she will, soon. It’s already lapping at her edges.

Sarah seems to know as well, because after far too short a moment, she lets go of Georgie and races back towards her mother.

Gerry grabs her arm in passing and yanks her to a stop, pulls her back and picks her up, tucking her under his arm.

She screams.

Loud and scared and angry, she screams at him to let go. She kicks and punches and shouts and tries to wiggle free, but Gerry has fought much stronger opponents with much more leverage. Sarah is just a little girl. She’s easy to manhandle. She doesn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell at actually hurting him, and as she realizes that, her screams grow more and more scared. “Let go!” she screams. “Stop it! Stop it!”

He meets Eloise’s eyes, and for the first time, he thinks she really sees him.

“I don’t know about no one missing you…” he says, trying to talk over the screaming in his ear.

“It’s just not true!” Georgie says, warm and grounding and real. “This entire place is a lie. We’ll take Sarah out of here alone if we have to, but you can’t possibly tell me that’s for the best!”

Sarah has decided to start biting. Luckily the only thing she can reach is leather coat. She nearly drops her bunny plush and he juggles her around until he can take it from her. It takes some shuffling to keep them both secure, but she is small and light and the bunny is even smaller and fights much less.

Gerry takes a step backwards and watches Eloise’s eyes follow him, watches her hand land on the seat of her chair, like she’s thinking of pushing herself out of it. There’s a muted alarm on her face.

“We have to go,” Jon says, barely audible as Sarah’s terrified screaming reaches a fever pitch. “We- We can’t afford to wait anymore.”

A glance behind shows that the green yarn has faded to a pastel colour. Much longer and it’ll be white.

Eloise is still sitting there.

She’s still sitting there, too taken by the fog to move even as Sarah starts begging for her, screaming for help. She’s still sitting there, but her hands are curling into fists and her fear is visible again, and it might, might be enough.

It’s not hard to keep a hold of Sarah, no matter how she struggles. It feels like it should be harder. It hurts, of course, but the only parts of him that don’t hurt are the ones numbed by the fog.

No time left. They have to go. One last attempt as he hoists Sarah like an unruly bag and turns to leave. "If you can't get up for yourself, and can’t get up for her, consider, it’ll be a real kick in the teeth to Margaret Lukas if you leave.”

Sarah is mostly crying now. It’s just quiet enough that Eloise’s confused voice is barely audible. “My… landlord?”

Georgie holds him back from going farther, hand clenched on his wrist hard enough to hurt and frustrated tears running down her face. “She did this! You’re not tired, you’ve been poisoned! She did this on purpose!”

There’s silence, the creaking of a chair, a hitched breath, and then two feet hitting the floor. And then Eloise is walking towards them, unsteadily, hesitantly.

Gerry waits until she’s close enough to touch before he lets Sarah go.

She slams into her mother and clings like a burr, nearly toppling them both. Eloise looks at her with the terrified despair of someone who no longer knows how to touch the people she loves, who barely recognizes her own love, but there’s no time to get refamiliarized.

He lunges, grabs Eloise and pulls them both in, and ends up tucking them between Jon and Georgie when Sarah shies away from him. Eloise cringes and flinches from the contact, but she isn’t pushing Sarah away. The bunny is in his pocket again, tucked away.

“Good. Good!” Jon squeaks, and without another word he begins to wind the yarn back up and they set off into the fog.

It’s slow going. They’re all exhausted. Eloise can barely walk, even with two of them pushing her forward, and even Georgie is shivering from the cold, not touched by its mental effects but struggling with the sheer temperature. Any attempt at conversation peters out and dies, but they’re going now, they’re going back. They’re heading out, finally.

The only thing that matters is their lifeline, the pale green thread stretching out into the fog ahead of them. The growing skein around Jon’s hand as he winds it back up marks their progress. As long as it’s still attached to the door…

That thread is all they have. It’s fading into white, but it’s still solid, they can still follow it, and as long as they can follow it, there’s still a way out.

He’s not sure how long they’ve been here. It feels like hours, but with the time distortion still going, it’s impossible to say. It only takes a few minutes to unroll a skein of yarn, even if you’re going slowly, which means the endless expanse they’re crossing is all in his head.

That’s not really reassuring. All of his fears are in his head. That doesn’t mean they can’t kill him.

But they still have a thread to follow, nearly invisible against the floor. White on white on white. Maybe he’ll go blind, looking at this place for too long. Maybe the itching will stay away for good if he does.

“Oh,” Jon says.

The thread lifts slightly off the floor as he pulls at it, as if somewhere in the fog ahead, it’s held aloft by something. Like a doorhandle, perhaps.

Hope rears up, and then crashes to the ground and shatters.

Two steps ahead of them, the fog parts. The thread rises, not to be tied around the handle of a door, but to be held in the waiting hand of Margaret Lukas.

She’s a tall, middle-aged woman, solidly built, but soft around the edges, dressed in a grey woollen sweater a size too large. She is pale and white-haired, and her eyes are cold steel, stern and disinterested.

Her gaze rakes over them, hitching on Eloise and moving on with nothing else than vague disappointment before it lands on Gerry.

“Hey, Maggie,” he tries. It sounds a lot less confident than he wishes it did, and still more than he feels.

“Gerard,” she says, voice like an ice bath. “Does your mother know you do this?”

If she doesn’t, she will now. He’s almost grateful to the fog for dulling the panic that should come at that. “Probably,” he tells her with a shrug.

“She was always too soft with you.”

He hardly needed the reminder that the Lukases kill off inconvenient heirs.

Maggie tosses the yarn end at Jon—who flinches back like she threw a snake at him—and lets her gaze land on Eloise again. “Mrs. Lapin, you really should know better than to cavort with strangers.”

Eloise freezes like a rabbit, her breath fogging the air impossibly further.

Georgie pushes into her, between her and Maggie as much as she can. “Hey, fuck you!”

Maggie stills, and turns steel eyes on Georgie. “You.” Her face has as much emotion on it as it ever gets, a frown that would be a twisted snarl on any other person. “You’re the one who’s been yelling so loudly in my quiet neighbourhood.”

“We’ve all been yelling. And it’s not like there’s anyone around here to hear.”

“You know what I mean, you little freak.”

Maggie shifts as if to walk closer to Georgie, and Gerry doesn’t think.

He’s had exactly one solid point of reference for the past unknown number of hours. The world outside this infinite house might as well not exist, but he knows with every nerve in his body that Georgie does, and if she goes, it’s all gone. He doesn’t think, he just reacts.

He tears free of her, steps forward, and drives a fist into the side of Maggie’s face.

Maggie doesn’t fall. The cold is locking up his joints, the dense fog dulls any unnatural strength, and she is a proper avatar. She won’t go down so easily. But she does stumble back, shocked and enraged, as much as she ever is either of those. surprised and miffed, perhaps.

“You don’t touch her,” he hisses, which is blindingly stupid, like shouting his weaknesses into the open sky.

Hand pressed to her face, her eyes land on him. She doesn’t say a word, she just scowls, and then she reaches out and delivers the weakest of feather touches of a push to his chest.

Cold closes on him like a vice. It freezes his lungs, crawls through his blood. Icy claws dig into every nerve he has and no numbness is there to help him any longer. It is all pain, all cold, all constricting, terrible nothing. He is dying, quickly, stupidly and painfully.

Burning heat catches his shoulder, and the cold fades like a mirage.

He comes to on his knees, gasping for breath, with Georgie grabbing him by the shoulder, having yanked him out of Maggie’s grasp like it was easy.

“How,” Maggie insists, that frown that would be a snarl on her face.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll do it as many times as it takes.”

Georgie is shaking from the cold and the exhaustion, and she definitely can’t, but she sounds resolute regardless.

Gerry struggles to his feet and hopes Georgie knows the look he sends her is an apology. “Maggie,” he says. “Just let us go. This project is a bust. All you’re doing here is forcing yourself to talk to people. You don’t want us here any more than we want to be here.”

The bruise on her face is already fading, but not half as fast as he’s pretty sure it should. They’re disturbing her, and he’s banking on that being enough.

Something white and pale green flashes in the corner of his eye, and it takes him a moment to parse that Jon has tossed the now useless skein of yarn at Maggie’s feet. “I-I suppose… y-you hardly need to be here to- to kill us. We’re lost as is.”

Maggie looks down at the yarn, white-bleached and worn. She scoffs. “If you go near one of my projects again, Mary won’t be enough to protect you.”

Then she fades away and is gone.

A weight lifts. Sarah makes a noise like she wants to cry, and Georgie says, “Wow. Yeah, alright. Awful.”

There’s a hint of an itch behind his eyes again. He’s shaking from something, and he’s not sure what. It could be any number of things.

“Gerry?” Jon says. “I hope I w-was wrong. About- About being lost.”

“Depends, I guess,” he breathes. They are still undoubtably lost in the fog, but Maggie is gone. The thing that has been wanting them dead since they entered this room has settled into its usual indifference. “Eloise? Do you want to get out of here?”

Eloise is still frozen with fear, but she has been standing next to Georgie for a while now, and she is present and solid like she wasn’t when they found her.

Sarah has not stopped clutching onto her. “I want to move back to our old flat,” she mumbles.

After a long, painful silence, Eloise whispers, “Yeah.”

Gerry doesn’t know which one of them she’s answering, but it really doesn’t matter. He reaches out into the fog and finds the door out.

The hallway seems shorter than it was, and doesn’t fork even once on their way back. It takes them minutes to reach the stairs down, and Gerry feels like crying with relief. He’s shivering now. They all are. The air is getting warmer and the cold bites on its way out.

The stairs again are too narrow to walk down side by side, and the knotted daisy chain of everyone sticking to Georgie is awkward, but no one even suggests letting go. Not until the stairs end far too early, spitting them out on the ground floor with only a few wisps of drifting fog sticking to the corners, and Jon has a spontaneous giggle fit.

“Wha…? Wait, but…” Georgie says, looking around at all the doors they left wide open searching this place an eternity ago, then looking back up the stairs with confusion.

Gerry smiles. It feels weird. “It’s a two-storey house, remember? Where else would we end up?” Then he has to laugh at her offended expression.

“The house is gaslighting me!”

Eloise looks between them, completely lost. “What are you talking about?”

“Ugh. Don’t worry about it.”

“Mrs. Lapin?” Jon says, idly searching through his own pockets.

“Eloise, please.” Her voice is quiet, but mostly by its own nature, now. “I’m not sure if I’ll be keeping his name.”

“Absolutely fair. Eloise, then.” He looks at her with serious eyes, the giggling having subsided completely. “Is there, ah. Is there anything in this house you would be particularly grieved to lose?”

“Oh.”

She turns slowly around, then, eyes drifting over grey walls and through doorways into grey rooms, before landing on Sarah.

Sarah blinks up at her, and then her eyes widen with shock and her head whips back to the stairs. “Mister Honey! I left Mister Honey!”

Right. “No, you didn’t,” Gerry says, and pulls the bunny back out of his pocket.

She doesn’t run at him for it this time. She freezes, scared, as if he’ll grab her again, but her eyes are fixed on the bunny.

Eloise steps up instead. takes it warily from his hand and gives it to her daughter.

“No,” she says to Jon, then. “I have everything.”

“Ah. Good,” Jon says, and pulls a lighter out of his pocket.

They start at the back of the house and split up to work around the staircase both ways, meeting again at the front door. The curtains catch easily, as do the trashy romance novels. Eloise rescues a couple drawings from the fridge before setting the wall calendar alight herself. They don’t really talk. There’s a general agreement it simply has to be done.

The heat from the flames is nice against the lingering cold when they finally stand on the sad lawn, watching the growing orange light through the windows. It might be nice to stand here for a while, but it really wouldn’t be smart. “We, ah. We should probably leave before the fire brigade arrives.”

Sarah and Eloise both inch away when he reminds them he’s there. It seems scary-looking is the part that stuck, which is fair, he supposes.

Jon and Georgie both simply blink with sudden realization. The neighbourhood might be empty, but once the smoke starts rising, that won’t matter much. They say their simple goodbyes and head down the road and away.

“It seems unfair to leave them homeless and alone like this,” Jon says, looking to the sky like a flower to the sun.

Georgie huffs a laugh. “Suppose you should’ve thought of that before getting happy for arson.”

“I- I- It’s not like the house was at all usable anymore!”

“Calm down, I was joking. I know.” She sobers. “I get it. I’m not happy about it either. Feels like there should’ve been something else we could’ve done.”

Gerry breathes deep of the early summer air, warming slowly up both inside and out. “There’s only ever so much you can do,” he says. “You can help as much as you want. Sooner or later, you have to trust that people can survive on their own. Often that’s more than you get.”

“I suppose… I suppose you’re right,” Jon says.

They’re not in the Lonely anymore. They don’t need to stick together to survive. He could go home, try to head off whatever disaster email Maggie is sure to send his mother.

“So, heard rumours you guys were missing a party?” he says instead. “I might not be a fancy university student, but if you’re down for a drink, I’ll buy you a round. Celebrate exams or whatever.”

And they’re not in the Lonely anymore. There’s no need for anyone to force themselves to be friendly just to keep each other alive.

So when what he gets in response is easy smiles, he almost even believes it.