Chapter 2: The Room That Shouldn't Exist

Jarrin pressed his palm flat against the wall next to the cast-iron stove. The metal was warm under his hand, giving off a steady heat that didn't match anything about the rest of the hallway. Cold elsewhere. Stale air near the ceiling vents. But here, right where a bathroom should have been, the walls radiated body heat like something alive.

He measured the space with his eyes. The bathroom door frame to the kitchen counter should have been about eight feet. He'd walked that gap twice tonight. Three steps. Four. Maybe five if he counted wrong, which he sometimes did. The kitchen counter was definitely closer than eight feet. Three feet short, at minimum.

The hallway had rewritten itself. That wasn't speculation. It was happening in real time, and Jarrin had been looking at the results for long enough to stop being surprised and start being careful.

Jazz stood across from him, one boot propped against the baseboard. She was already working out what this meant. Her eyes moved from the doorway to the stove to the ceiling, mapping the room the same way Fred mapped crime scenes.

"We split," she said.

"The what?"

"You go west. I'll go to the lobby. Fred's got two bodies and a room that shouldn't be there. He's going to want to talk, and if he sees my face, he'll see my hands, and he'll see the cards. If he sees the cards, he'll see what I can do, and then every word out of my mouth becomes evidence. I need him talking to me about the murder, not about me."

"Fair point. West wing it is."

"Stay off the east wing. Don't touch anything that looks like it might have done something to someone. And if the walls start moving, just stand still and let them finish."

"Smart advice. I'll follow it. Reluctantly."

"Good. Go."

Jazz turned toward the lobby and moved fast. Her boots were too loud for stealth, but she needed to be seen going to Fred. That was the point. Fred was a tracker, and trackers followed what moved toward them, what didn't hide.

Jarrin took the corridor to the west. The fog machines had stopped here, or maybe they'd never been aimed this way. The air was cleaner, drier. Less smell, which could mean fewer people, or it could mean the same thing the empty hallway meant: something had cleaned this place up.

Jolly Roger's bubble formed between Jarrin's fingertips. A small one. The size of a large pea. He held it there for three seconds, watching the shimmer, then popped it against the wall with his thumb.

A dent appeared. Clean, circular, about two inches across. The drywall crumpled inward like it was made of foil instead of plaster. A crack radiated from the impact point, spiderwebbing through the painted surface. The kinetic force had gone exactly where he aimed it. Directional. Precise. A small push that did damage proportional to the bubble's size.

He tested it again. Another bubble, same size, popped against the baseboard. The wood splintered. Not much. Just enough to tell him how it worked. Popping a bubble released energy, and the size of the bubble determined the size of the shove. If the killer's Stand worked on the same principle, that was useful information. Or terrifying. Maybe both.

Jarrin pocketed a third bubble without popping it. He'd need it later. The question was whether the killer had a range limit, whether the Stand had a tether. If he popped a bubble near the killer, would the energy transfer work through distance, or did Jolly Roger need line of sight? He'd figure that out eventually. Eventually.

The west wing was long. Corridors branched and turned at angles that felt arbitrary, though Jarrin reminded himself that arbitrary was exactly the point. This place wasn't built to make sense. It was built to confuse, and whoever ran it clearly knew what they were doing.

He passed a staircase going up, but he stayed on the main floor. Fred had said the second floor was empty, which either meant nothing was up there or something had cleared it already. Either way, stairs meant exposure. Jarrin preferred to keep his options open.

Twenty minutes ago, he'd walked past this section of the hallway twice. There had been three doors here. A linen closet. A broom cupboard. A door he couldn't identify, the kind that belonged to a storage room nobody used. He remembered all three. They were gone now.

In their place was a door that hadn't existed. The frame sat flush with the wall, no gap between the casing and the plaster, as if the drywall had simply grown around it. The wood was older than the rest of the mansion, darker, with a grain pattern that looked hand-cut. A brass handle sat at waist height, oxidized green but still functional.

Jarrin didn't touch it immediately. He stood there for a moment, looking at the door like it was a puzzle he wasn't ready to solve. The door looked back. Well, the door didn't look back. Jarrin couldn't shake the feeling that it was aware of him, which was probably just his imagination. Or his Stand. Either way, he gripped the handle anyway.

The door opened inward without resistance.

The room beyond was tall and narrow. Floor to ceiling shelves lined every wall, though they weren't shelves so much as displays. Each one held an object suspended inside a translucent bubble, and every bubble pulsed rhythmically. In and out. In and out. Like breathing lungs.

Jarrin stepped inside. The floorboards didn't creak.

A leather belt, brown, women's style. A pearl necklace, string intact, pearls uniform in size. A set of keys on a ring, four of them. A black leather wallet, slightly bulging. A man's tie, navy blue, silk. A handbag, small, red. A pair of glasses, tortoiseshell frames.

All of them floating. All of them inside their own bubbles. The bubbles were about six inches across, translucent but not clear, and they pulsed with a faint luminescence that made the room glow in pale amber.

Jarrin looked at the items. The belt and the necklace. The tie and the wallet. Personal belongings. Things people carried. Things that would be on their bodies when they died.

Two bodies. Fred had found two bodies. These were their effects. Collected here, sealed in these pulsing bubbles, stored like specimens in some private museum of murder.

The pulses synced across all the bubbles. A rhythmic contraction and expansion that looked almost mechanical, though nothing mechanical pulsed like this. The bubbles were breathing. Whatever held these items was alive, or at least running on something that behaved like aliveness.

Jarrin picked up the tie. Navy blue. Good quality. Probably belonged to one of the victims, though which one he couldn't say. The bubble around it was firm but not rigid. He could press against it with a finger without resistance.

He pressed.

The bubble popped. A small one. The tie vanished from its suspension and fell to the shelf. In the space where the bubble had been, a new shape materialized. A shimmering, translucent outline that took the form of a word before it dissolved into light and floated down into Jarrin's open palm.

Lock.

The word sat in his hand like a marble. Smooth, cool, weightless. A concept, stripped from its object, floating free in the space between his fingers. He closed his fist around it.

The room was silent now. The other bubbles kept pulsing. The other items kept floating. Jarrin's bubble was gone. So was the tie, presumably, somewhere inside the belt buckle of Jolly Roger's uniform, stored in whatever pocket this Stand used for its hauls.

He pocketed the lock marble. One theft. One concept. He could use it once, or give it to someone else, or just keep it. That was the deal. What he took stayed his, and when he chose to spend it, the concept would do whatever he wanted with it. For one use. After that, the original object would return to normal. Or, if the object had been destroyed, nothing would.

The tie hadn't been destroyed. It was back on the shelf, floating in a bubble again, as if the theft had been reversed. Except it hadn't. The lock marble sat in his pocket, real enough. One use. That was the rule. Everything else was speculation.

The lobby was loud. Too loud. Every voice overlapping, every question layered on top of the next. Fred had taken center stage by necessity, standing near the wall where the photographs were pinned against the plaster with what looked like a bread knife for a tack. Two bodies. The east wing. Fred's evidence was everywhere.

Jazz didn't go straight to him. She waited near the buffet table, refilling her glass from a bottle she'd produced from somewhere, and watched Fred for three minutes. He was talking to Daphne, pointing at the photographs with the patience of someone explaining something to a child who kept missing the point. Shaggy sat on the floor near the fireplace with Scooby between his legs. Both of them looked exhausted. Scooby looked like Scooby.

Preston was by the door. The door that wouldn't open. He'd given up on it about ten minutes ago and was now using it as a leaning post, though the posture was more defensive than relaxed.

Jazz walked up to Fred with her wine glass and a smile that was probably the friendliest she'd ever managed on purpose.

"Tell me what you found."

Fred looked at her. "You're Jazz."

"That's one of my names."

"The one with the cards."

"Also one of my names."

Fred pulled the photographs closer. Two young men. Both dead. Both with marks around their throats that could have been fingers or chains or something that looked like both. The lighting in the photos was bad. Fred had used the flashlight, which meant the east wing was dark.

"First body," Fred said. "Hallway on the second floor. Choked. The marks are inconsistent with anything I can identify. The door to the hallway had no handles on the inside. I tried every door on the second floor. This was the only one that was locked from the outside."

"Second body."

"Room with no doors. No windows. No connections to any other part of the mansion. The walls were intact. The floor was solid. I had to climb through the ceiling to get in."

"How?"

"There was a gap in the plaster. A hidden panel, maybe, or something that had been broken loose. Either way, the room was ten feet by eight, maybe twelve feet high. One bed. No exits except the ceiling. The man was on the bed. Dead the same way as the first one."

"A room with no doors," Jazz said. "You're sure?"

"Absolutely. I measured twice. The room exists inside the mansion's footprint, which means it was built into the structure. Not added on. Not a secret room behind a wall. Built in. From the beginning, probably."

"Or added later."

Fred looked at her carefully. "Yes."

"Who added it?"

"I don't know."

"That's not helpful."

Fred held her gaze. "Neither is standing in my lobby with a bottle of wine you stole from a dead woman's purse."

The smile dropped. Jazz tilted her head. "The wine was already open."

Fred stared at her for a long moment. Whatever calculation he was running, it didn't produce the answer he wanted. He stepped back, and the room opened up around him. The other guests were watching. Two of them had pulled out their phones, though the signal bars sat at zero. Useless rectangles of glass and metal.

The east wing screamed again.

Not a person this time. The sound came from deeper in the house, from wherever the east wing's dark corridors led. A long, wet sound, like something tearing. Every person in the lobby moved at once. Shaggy grabbed Scooby and bolted for the front entrance. Preston shoved past Fred and made for the stairs. Three other guests scattered toward different exits that may or may not have led anywhere.

One man broke from the crowd before the panic fully took hold. Tall, dark-haired, wearing a werewolf costume that was clearly purchased at a gas station. He moved toward the east wing corridor with a speed that shouldn't have been possible. His legs pumped. He didn't look back. He ran into the east wing and kept running.

Jazz moved. So did Jarrin, who had been walking toward the lobby and had heard the scream too. They both reached the east wing entrance at the same time, two doors open to a hallway that was changing around them as they watched.

The man was thirty feet in. Forty. The walls were narrowing. Not slowly. Fast. Like origami folding inward, with each section creasing and collapsing into the next. The man's scream started at forty feet and cut off at forty-five. There was no impact. No blood. No body. Just the man, running, and then the space where he had been empty.

A bubble sat on the floor. Translucent. Pulsing. It pulsed once, twice, and then it dissolved into nothing.

Jarrin and Jazz stood at the doorway. Neither of them moved past it. The hallway behind the bubble was dark and still. The walls had stopped changing, as if whatever was doing this had finished.

Jazz grabbed Jarrin's sleeve. "Kitchen. Now."

They stood near the cast-iron stove. The kitchen was warm and small, with a table that could have been made from a single slab of oak. Jazz leaned against the counter and breathed through her nose. Jarrin leaned against the wall and stared at his pocket.

"I got something," he said.

He pulled out the lock marble. It sat in his palm, translucent, with the word LOCK suspended inside it in letters that were barely visible through the surface.

"What is that?"

"A concept. Stolen from one of the bubbles in the storage room. The tie was still there. The concept of a lock came off instead."

"From a tie?"

"The tie was locked. Or the bubble was locking it. I don't know which. The effect was the same. I popped the bubble, got a lock, and the tie went back."

Jazz took the marble. She held it close to her face, turned it in her fingers. Poker Face appeared beside her for a moment, a gray-haired woman with white bunny ears and a magician's coat, watching the marble with sharp, pale eyes. Then Poker Face was gone.

"Cards store concepts," Jazz said. "Fuse them together. Combine two stored ideas and the resulting card does whatever the combination does. If I could get this into a card..."

"You could fuse it with something else. A door, a lock, a seal. Something that stops things from opening or closing."

"Exactly. We could use this to seal doors. Keep people out. Keep things contained. If we can pin down whatever is moving the walls, maybe we can stop it from rearranging the mansion whenever it feels like it."

"Or trap the killer."

"Or trap the killer."

Jarrin popped the lock bubble against the table. The marble shattered into light, and a shimmering outline floated into the air, took shape, and dropped into Jazz's waiting cards. Poker Face materialized again, standing between Jazz and the counter, pulling the lock concept into a deck with practiced motions. The cards stacked together, and one card pulsed with a faint golden light.

Jazz held the card out. "Try it."

Jarrin pressed the card against the kitchen door. The card dissolved on contact. The door clicked shut, and the lock engaged with a sound that was too solid, too certain, too final. Jazz pulled the handle. It didn't move. She pulled harder. Nothing.

"It's locked," Jazz said. "Sealed. I can't get it open without breaking the card or removing whatever sealed it."

"Good."

"Very good."

They stood there for a moment, looking at the door. The lock held. The kitchen door, which had been there for twenty minutes and which Jarrin had walked through twice, was now sealed by a concept he'd stolen from a dead man's tie. The room felt smaller than it had been a minute ago.

The lights went out.

Darkness. Complete. No string lights, no fog machine glow, no ambient light from anywhere. Just black. Jazz fumbled for her phone. No signal. Jarrin stood still and let his eyes adjust. They didn't. This wasn't normal darkness. Normal darkness let shapes through. This darkness just wasn't there.

Footsteps came from above. Steady. Deliberate. The sound of someone walking down a hallway with no reason to hurry. Whoever was making the noise knew where they were going. Knew the layout. Knew exactly which floor they were on and which direction led where.

The footsteps continued. One set. Moving at a pace that suggested the killer wasn't afraid of the dark or the silence or the locked doors. The killer was walking through this house like it was a garden.