Astrid had learned one unshakable truth in the past few weeks: things that shouldn’t exist had a habit of existing anyway.

Take the house, for instance—the one that shouldn’t be, the one that rearranged itself like it was dreaming. One minute it had staircases leading nowhere, the next it had doors that sighed when you walked past. And now, as she stood in the hallway, staring at the door that absolutely, positively hadn’t been there yesterday, Astrid felt that truth settling into her bones like the chill before a storm.

This door was wrong. She knew it. She’d spent her life noticing when spaces didn’t behave.

It was taller than it should’ve been, a shade too dark, like the wood had been burned but never turned to ash. The handle wasn’t quite right either—it wasn’t brass or silver or anything ordinary. It looked like it was made of bone.

Behind her, George and Rita were arguing about something pointless—whether Stinky the cat had actually spoken the night before or if they’d all just been too tired to think straight. Astrid barely heard them.

She reached for the handle. It was cold. Too cold.

“Astrid?” Rita’s voice cut through the thick silence.

Astrid hesitated. “Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

That was a lie. She knew exactly what she was doing.

She was making a mistake.

But Astrid had never been particularly good at avoiding those.

She turned the handle.

The door opened.

A gust of air rushed past them, carrying the scent of something fermenting, metallic, and acrid, like a storm that had been waiting for centuries. The room beyond wasn’t a room at all. It was a void, a space that stretched too far and too deep to belong inside a house, even this house.

She stepped inside.

The floor wasn’t quite solid. It felt like walking on the surface of a lake, just before the ice cracked. Shadows twisted at the edges of her vision, shifting like they had minds of their own.

“Astrid—wait!” George grabbed her wrist, yanking her back just as the door groaned wider. The shadows reacted instantly, stretching toward them like grasping fingers.

“Do you see that?” Rita whispered, her voice trembling.