Chapter 491: Vanished
The moment we stepped out to wherever the house wanted us to go, I turned to look over my shoulder. I wanted some type of reassurance that the door that brought us here was still going to be there when we wanted to go home.
What can I say? I was becoming paranoid anytime the house was involved with something.
However, the doorway that we stepped through wasn’t a doorway anymore.
It was a mouth. Bone-white and crooked, carved with symbols that pulsed faintly like veins under skin.
Cold air poured from the threshold, curling around my ankles like smoke from a corpse. The runes weren’t hellish. They weren’t divine. They were just there...designed by something that didn’t know right from wrong, only hunger.
I stepped forward, out of Daddy’s arms, with Dante on one side and Daddy close behind me, steady and unblinking. I could hear Tank cracking his knuckles as if he was already prepared to take someone out, while Ronan adjusted his grip on the rifle cradled in his arms like a baby.
But no one told me to stop. Instead, they all walked into the belly of the beast with me.
The air on the other side of that door; it didn’t seem like air at all. The oppressive weight of grief and something wrong bore down on my shoulders until every step forward was like walking through quicksand.
The further we got away from the door, the hallway behind us faded away until there was nothing left of the house.
We were standing in the middle of a flat, gray, colorless field. Even the gray sky above hung like wet paper, heavy and low. There were no trees, nothing breaking up the sky and the ground. No horizon as you think about it, just a stillness that bordered on creepy.
And then it moved.