The house loomed before her like a giant intent on squashing her. It was massive. Enormous. Not just a home but a place. Vast and many-windowed, it hunkered at the corner of Garrison and College streets in a town no one’s heard of called Arkham, Massachusetts, a rambling, dusty gray Victorian like something out of a storybook. Or a Stephen King novel. Jane Campion was trying to decide which when her father spoke. “Wanna give your old man a hand here?”


    Jane turned just as her father was getting a smallish box from the back seat of their trusty Volvo station wagon. The movers would be there within the hour with their big truck loaded with the rest of their worldly possessions, but Jane and her dad had crammed everything they could into the car before driving from Des Moines to the East Coast. “Might as well carry a box inside with you while you check the place out,” her dad said with a groan, and Jane went and helped him with the box, which was full of kitchen odds and ends.


    Jane took it and walked up the wide gray steps to the huge front porch. “This house should have its own zip code.”


    “Key should be under the mat,” said her father as he wrestled another box from behind the driver’s seat.


    Jane sat the box on a white rocking chair and flipped over the brown welcome mat with the toe of her scuffed hightop. Sure enough, a key glittered there, and she picked it up and inserted it into the lock.


    Jane entered the house’s cool confines, the box she’d carried onto the porch already forgotten. She stood in a long, wide hallway, the end of which led to what had to be the kitchen. She noted the transoms over each doorway lined with colored glass inserts. One of them had been cracked long ago and never replaced, but instead of marring the aesthetic, it only seemed to add to it. Gave it character, as her mother would say.


    The thought of her mother brought with it a well of pain which she tamped back down with a deep, slow breath. As angry as Jane was at her father for bringing them here, and for setting in motion the turn of events that made them leave Des Moines in the first place, this really was some house.


    “Hey,” her dad called from behind her. “Can you get the door?”


    Jane swung around and grabbed the door, pulling it open as her father stumbled in carrying a box of his reference books. Jane shook her head at him. He’d need those for work, so he’d only have to load them back in the car again once it had been emptied.


    “There’ll be time for the tour later. Right now we’ve got a car to unload. The movers will be here any minute.”


    “OK, Dad.”


    Making sure her father noticed her rolling her eyes, Jane went back through the door and grabbed the box she had left in the rocker, lugging it to the small kitchen and placing it on the dusty countertop. “So what’s the deal with this place?” she called.


    Her father was right behind her with another box full of kitchen stuff. “Huh? Oh, it belongs to the university. They lend it to visiting faculty.”


    “So does that mean we’re staying here rent-free?”


    “Yeah.” Her dad smiled at her. “Cool, huh?”


    Jane looked around the kitchen. “Yeah. I guess. Though this kitchen just makes me want to order pizza.”


    “I know it’s old, but it’s free, and this place is huge. Wait till you see it.”


    “Yeah, I got that from the outside,” said Jane.


    Jane’s father fixed her with his accusatory stare. “Then what? I’m trying here, Janey. I’m trying as best I can.”


    “Nothing, Dad,” Jane replied, not wanting to be cornered in this tiny kitchen. She stepped around him and hurried back up the hall. “It’s fine.”


    Jane ran out to the car to get more boxes, but it was really so she could stop crying before her father saw. She took a deep breath as her eyes welled with tears. She was going to hate it here, and she wanted her father to hate it just as much as she did. It was his penance for what he had done. To both of them. And to her mother’s memory.


    As soon as the car was unloaded, Jane left her father alone in the living room opening boxes and went exploring. The place was sparsely furnished, which made sense if people regularly stayed there. Jane lurched up the narrow steps, wondering how the movers would squeeze her mattress through the smallish passage, and up to the second floor, where a longer, mahogany-lined hallway greeted her, most of its length covered by a faded Oriental rug. There were two bedrooms up there, each one staged with large, four-poster beds, a dresser, and matching porcelain wash basins and pitchers. “Holy time warp,” she muttered. “I hope I don’t have to get water from the crick.”


    At the end of the hall was a larger bedroom, devoid of any furniture. There was a big bay window overlooking the front yard, with a plush window seat. From this height, she had a grand view of Garrison Street, the houses on the other side of it similar but not as grand, crammed close together. She noticed a tall, thin man standing beneath a wild old oak across the way. He was clutching the handlebars of a bicycle, one of those big, sleek thick-framed models from the 1950s, with big whitewall tires. He was gaunt, with wispy tufts of gray hair encircling his bald head just above the ears, like a wreath of fog around a mountain crag. But the most notable thing about him was that he was staring up at the house. Up at her.


    “Dad!” Jane called, purposefully using the loud, insistent tone usually reserved when one found a snake in one’s bathroom; the kind of tone that said get up here, quick!


    Jane turned toward the open door, hearing the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs, up the hall.


    “What is it?” her dad said as he entered, panting.


    Jane pointed to the window. “There’s this weird guy across the street. He’s–”


    But when she looked out the window again, the man and his bicycle were gone.


    “Hm,” Dad said, looking over Jane’s shoulder at the street outside. “Probably just curious about who’s moving in. It’s a small town. They don’t get much excitement.”


    Jane sighed. “Well, he’s going to be severely disappointed.”


    Her dad smiled. “Come on. I just heard from the movers. They’re only a few minutes out. Help me move some boxes out of their way.”


    Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Jane took one last glance out the window, wondering where the man on the bicycle went, and wondering if he would come back, while hoping he wouldn’t. She didn’t think he had been looking at the house. She thought he had been staring at her.


    * * *


    Once the movers came, the weird man with the bicycle was all but forgotten amid a flurry of lugging boxes upstairs, and directing the movers where to go and getting things into some bare semblance of normalcy, and the next time Jane had a moment to process everything it was night. Her father ordered them a pizza, half cheese for her, half pepperoni and black olives for him, but she was too tired to eat, and merely picked at it.


    “Listen,” her dad said. “It’s getting late, and you’ve got school tomorrow.”


    Jane scowled at him. School was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. Especially a brand new school where she didn’t know anyone.


    “Come on, can’t I have just one more day to get settled?”


    Her father shook his head. “Sorry, Janey. You’ve got school and I’ve got work. It’s my first day at a new school too.”


    “Oh all right.”


    Jane moped upstairs, changed into an oversized Winnie the Pooh t-shirt she used as a nightgown, and climbed into bed. Her old bed, in a new place. She stared up at the alien ceiling, knowing that just beyond that was an alien sky in an alien town with alien people. She felt like she had been banished through no fault of her own to the other side of the Earth. Or hell. She counted cracks in the ceiling’s paint until she fell asleep.


    A thunderous jolt woke her. Bleary-eyed, she checked her phone. It was two-thirty in the morning. She waited, thinking she might have dreamed it. Then it happened again. Only it wasn’t thunder. More like footsteps. Footsteps in the attic.


    Jane had noticed the separate staircase on the far end of the second-floor hallway that led into what must be the attic, but she had been too busy to check it out. Apparently the attic ran the entire length of the house, for the sounds she heard were coming from directly above her bed.


    Gotta be critters, she told herself. Squirrels. A family of raccoons. Even bats. Though she’d never heard of any of those animals getting big enough to make footfalls like that.


    Boom. There it was again. Jane sat bolt upright in bed, waiting. There’s no way her father hadn’t heard that. He should be rushing up here to check on her, see what it was.


    Boom. Nope. The old man had let her down again. “Well, Janey,” she whispered. “Looks like it’s up to you.”


    Jane climbed out of bed, found her flip-flops, grabbed her phone, and crept down the hallway. She heard the sound again, but muffled this time since it was now above and behind her. She activated her phone’s flashlight as she mounted the steps, grasping the cold glass Hope Diamond-looking doorknob when she reached the top.


    Jane thought it might be locked, but the knob twisted easily in her hand, the door pushing open with the slightest creak of ancient hinges and moisture-swollen wood. She stepped into the cool attic, her heart half in her throat.


    She scanned the walls on either side with her phone, looking for a light switch, but found nothing. She waved the phone’s slender beam around, illuminating a large, mostly empty space. The shadow of a figure startled her, but when she recovered she saw it was just an old dressmaker’s dummy.


    Get it together, girl.


    Jane moved her phone around in a sweeping arc, the pale light picking out an old trunk, a dusty rocking horse on rusted springs, and other bits of detritus. The far wall of the attic was taken up by a large round picture window filled with colored glass inserts that matched the transoms downstairs, only more ornate, for they were painted in what appeared to be constellations and astrological signs, a strange zodiac in a dusty, New England attic. Jane stared at it for a long moment. She hadn’t noticed it when they arrived, because its height and the large gables hid it from view. As she marveled at it, she heard the noise again, coming from a far corner off to her left.


    Her heart threatened to leap from her throat, but Jane steadied herself. She could do this. After all she’d been through the past year, she wasn’t afraid, more like annoyed. It was bad enough she had to move here, she had to be awakened by odd thumps in the middle of the night? No freaking way.


    Jane edged closer to where she’d heard the noise, finding nothing but a clapboard wall next to the giant window. She looked around for a doorknob or handle, but there was nothing there. Then she heard it again, louder, and more like the sound of a heavy footfall than she wanted it to. But she was already there. Might as well check it out, right?


    She inspected the wall again, this time moving along it to the left. She found a tiny crease running through the clapboard from floor to ceiling, and again across the top from left to right, just above her head. This is a door, she thought with excitement. A secret door someone had taken pains to make sure was hidden.


    OK, Nancy Drew. Now how do we get it open?


    Making a fist, Jane started tapping lightly against it in different spots. When she had moved back to her right, she struck it midways up, about where a doorknob would be if it had one, and the door popped open with a tiny click. Jane pulled it open and shoved her phone inside.


    The light revealed another room. A big room. Too big.


    Jane pulled her arm out and looked down the wall toward the window. She was no more than a few inches from the outside of the house, and this door was set into the outer wall beside the window. And yet–


    She stuck her phone arm back inside and waved it around. The room stretched maybe ten feet in every direction. It was also completely free of dust and filled with strange objects. Jane stepped inside. When she didn’t tumble down the roof outside and fall to her death, she decided she probably wasn’t hallucinating and got the courage to go exploring.


    In the middle of the room, Jane found a string hanging from a bare bulb and pulled it, flooding the place with milky light that flickered, the filaments inside the bulb humming. Wincing up at it, Jane made a mental note to grab a CFL bulb from downstairs tomorrow, then started looking around. In the corner was an ornate and heavy-looking lectern made from some old, dark wood, with a strange emblem embossed on the front she couldn’t read in the light from either the waning bulb or her phone, which cast too many shadows in the intricately carved sigil to be of any help. In the center of the floor was a large symbol that had been drawn in white paint, a circle enclosing a five-pointed star. A pentagram?


    No, Jane realized, fixating on the star’s center, which was etched with what appeared to be a stylized flame. She didn’t see anything that would account for the noises she heard, and they did not repeat since she discovered the secret door.


    Jane felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “OK,” she whispered. “What the hell is this?”


    The light from her phone caught a glint of something, and she turned to her right. It was a silver key hanging from a leather thong suspended from a rusty old nail. She went to inspect it, cradling it in her hand. It was cool to the touch and quite beautiful. Jane remembered reading that the Victorians loved making even the most mundane items ornate. The shaft was long and cylindrical, the bow worked in a swirling pattern. It shined bright as silver in the wavering light.


    Without really knowing why, Jane removed the key from its nail and placed it around her neck, feeling its cold solidity against the skin of her throat. Taking one last look around, Jane turned off the light, closed the secret door, and went to bed. She heard no more sounds that night, but clutching the key in the dark, it was most of another hour before sleep once again found her.