“You saying this is too much attention for you?” Harper asked, laughing from the front seat as she slammed her door shut.

  The fans were amped up, now. The three of them shouting and laughing and one-upping each other, taking selfies, trying to angle so they could get Harper through the window.

  Carl had made it back to the SUV. He put the pizza in the cargo area while the beachgoers asked him questions and he responded with things like, “You kids go on home, now. These gals don’t need the bother. They’re working out here. This is their job. Do you kids have jobs?”

  “Brookhants has more security than just the booth and the gate, right?” This from Audrey.

  “Are you really scared of Mackenzie, Asha, and Bryce?” Harper asked, turning around in her seat again.

  “Am I scared of people doing stupid people things?” Audrey asked. “Always.”

  Carl opened his door to get in and the overhead light came on and the stalkers in the parking lot screamed to see their heroines again. “Well there’s your Rhode Island welcome committee,” he said, starting the engine.

  He pulled out slowly, the three fans still standing there, still shooting with their phones. “That pretty typical for you?” he asked Harper. “In the real world?”

  “Sometimes,” Harper said. “Depends.”

  Carl shook his head like this was end times.

  Harper went to put her Icee in the cupholder. She had to remove one of the apples she’d taken from the road to do it. As fast as she picked it up, she dropped it onto the floor, shaking the hand she’d held it in back and forth, flicking her fingers. Wet sludge flew off them and spattered about.

  “Gross!” Merritt said as some of it landed on her cheek.

  “What’s the problem there, touchy?” Carl asked Harper. “Had a bug on it?”

  “No, it was mush,” Harper said. She poked at the apple still in the other cupholder and then jerked her hand back like she’d discovered that it was a coiled snake. “Fuck, this one’s like that, too—it’s like they melted.”

  Merritt was still wiping her cheek even though there was no longer a need. “Well, you left them in a hot car in a parking lot.” She lowered her window to clear the sweet stink.

  “It’s not that hot,” Harper said. “And we had the air on. These are like applesauce in wet skin.”

  Audrey reached to touch the apple still in the cupholder. “Gross,” she said as she pulled her hand back. “I think it’s rotten.”

  Carl turned on the overhead light again so they could all look. The apple was rotten. It was soft and sunken in on itself, its skin leached of color and wet, sweating like it had a fever. You could see where Harper and Audrey had poked it, the pocks in its rubbery flesh.

  “You sure picked bad ones,” Carl said. “A bad apple knows its kind, I guess.” He seemed very pleased with himself for this observation.

  “They were fine when I took them,” Harper said. “I ate one. You all saw me do it.”

  “I told you not to,” Merritt said.

  “They were fine,” Harper said. “All of them were completely fine. They were not rotten skin sacks.”

  “I already called in for somebody to go pick up the crates we left there,” Carl said, turning off the light. “They can take another look and try to figure out where they came from.”

  “It’s another weird thing, Merritt,” Harper said. “For your list.”

  “It’s your list,” Merritt said. “Not mine.”

  The rest of the ride they were quiet. The return trip was a little shorter, since they didn’t have to go through campus proper but instead went around to the Spite Manor side, where their tiny houses sat all in a row. This also meant they didn’t have to travel the apple-crate road, though it’s unlikely they could have seen anything, even if they had. The roads they traveled were dark now except for the SUV’s headlights, which revealed the slither of white fog that was beginning to gather low across their path. Carl turned up his rock station.

  There was a curious energy around them. It was like they’d trapped some of the excitement from the convenience store fans in with them—like it was buzzing about them now, brushing their bodies with flicks and twitches. Nobody mentioned it, but Merritt thought they could all feel it.

  When they reached the entrance gate, Carl stopped, rolled down his window, and said, “Hey, I’ve got the semiprecious cargo here,” to the bald guy in the security booth, who pushed the button to slide the gate back and open the road.

  “This really is it for security?” Audrey asked.

  “No, we’ve got some guards patrolling, too,” Carl said. “A few of them.”

  But then, before the gate had even made it all the way across, from behind them came headlights and shouts, a beeping horn. They turned, all of them—even Carl, though he put his head out his open window to do it. The fans had followed them—because of course they had, Readers—and were now idling behind the SUV in their beatah (the way Carl says beater) car, a massive land yacht with a black cloth top and a white body and a front hood panel that had at some point been replaced, apparently, because it was blue.

  “We wanna party with you!” Asha was screaming while hanging out the front passenger-side window. “Let me kiss you, too!”

  “Me too!” Bryce yelled. He was the one driving and he pounded the car horn in several short blasts.

  “Amateurs,” Harper said as she lowered her own window and waved at them, which made them scream louder. “They played this all wrong. They should have snuck in through the woods. They could’ve done it quiet that way.”

  “That’s comforting,” Audrey said.

  The guy from the security booth stepped outside. He told Carl to drive on through and that he’d take care of these frickin’ idiots. He radioed another guard and turned on the bright beam of his long-handled flashlight, pointing it at the fans’ car. “Seems like you mighta took yourselves a wrong turn,” he said as he approached the land yacht.

  “No, we took all the exact right turns!” Mackenzie shouted back as the other two laughed.

  The gate slid back across the road, closing the SUV into Brookhants. Carl drove on, leaving the fans behind in the thickening fog, which soon swallowed them up.

  “You were saying, about security?” Audrey said.

  “It worked, didn’t it?” Harper said.

  “For now,” Audrey said. “But they’ll have to do more than this.”

  “I think you might be right about that,” Carl said.

  “Don’t encourage her, Carl,” Harper said.

  “I’m not,” he said. “Not at all.”

  Merritt added nothing to this discussion, but privately she thought that the things they should most worry about at Brookhants had already been invited in.

  A Tower Tour, a Carpet Picnic, a Sound in the Night

  By the time the road rounded to Spite Manor, the fog had intensified so much that they could only hear the chime of shells beneath their wheels without actually seeing the change in surface. With the house, and its tower, looming before them, Harper mentioned, as casually as she could—though she did not feel casual about it—that she still hadn’t seen the inside.

  “You want to go now?” Merritt asked.

  “Um—yes,” Harper said, turning around in her seat to best perform her enthusiasm for Merritt. “You’re serious?”

  “Can we?” Audrey asked.

  “I don’t see why not,” Merritt said.

  “You check in with Elaine about this?” Carl asked.

  “I think I can handle any necessary check-ins with Lainey, Carl,” Merritt said. “Let us out here, please.”

  Carl didn’t stop, though he did slow down. “Let me turn around,” he said. “I’ll drive you back.” They’d already gone around the back of the house and had just entered the canopy of the woods, the dirt road’s skeleton of tree roots rumbling them along.

  “No need,” Merritt said in her Merritt way. “Please stop now.”

  Carl did as he was told. Even still, he added, “Here? You really wanna get out here?”

  “Yes,” Merritt said, opening her door to the dark and the fog. “We can cut across the terraces.”

  “This is the kind of Brookhants event I’ve been waiting for,” Harper said. She turned to Audrey and said, “Tell me you’re down for this?”

  “I mean,” Audrey said, “how can I say no?”

  “Like this,” Carl said. “No.”

  The three of them ignored him and climbed out, the woods at once crowding them with shadows and sounds. As Harper went around back to get the pizza, Carl craned his head out his window to look at the dark shape of the house in the distance. “Not very many lights on in there,” he said. “Just in the tower is all I can see.” He sighed. “If you wake her up, you’d better tell her I said for you not to go in.”

  “It’s fine, Carl,” Merritt said.

  “I’m gonna tell her you told us to make ourselves at home,” Harper said. “And to be sure to turn on all the TVs and run the vacuum.”

  “You would,” he said.

  Soon the red glow of his taillights grew fuzzy with distance and darkness and fog. It blew in from the water and swirled about, hanging from branches that stirred uneasily, their leaves fluttering like the wings of bats. Or maybe they were the wings of bats.

  “This is terrifying, right?” Audrey said. “It’s at least a little bit terrifying.”

  “No,” Merritt said.

  But there they stood in an unmoving knot on that dark, uneven road in the fluttering night woods while they breathed and listened.

  And then—

  “This way,” Merritt said, her voice and steps sure as she took off in the direction of the house. Neither Harper nor Audrey let her get very far ahead. She cut them back out of the woods and down through the walking paths of a rigidly ordered vegetable garden. “We’ll go around to the front and then you can imagine I’m Sara Dahlgren giving you my very best come-on.”

  “No need to imagine that part,” Harper said.

  “Really?” Merritt said. “If anybody here’s a Sara Dahlgren, it’s you.” She said this happily.

  The fog was even thicker in front of the house, sometimes almost like they were walking through sheets on a line or along the edge of a velvet stage curtain. And with the damp grass a sponge beneath them, the whole world felt soft and out of focus—as if it was intent on hiding parts of itself from them.

  “Yeah, OK, so this is creepy, though,” Audrey said.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” Harper said. She meant it. But she also kept catching flutters at the corners of her eye, things that moved too quickly, especially in the fog, to catch in full. They almost could have been people. She couldn’t decide if these moments actually scared her, or if she only liked the idea of being scared right then.

  “It’s like this a lot this time of year,” Merritt said. “There’s a beach not far from here called Fogland. But it is particularly dense tonight.”

  Near the house, they hit a patch that was thinner than what they’d just walked through, and in the glow of strategically planted outdoor lighting, they could take in some of the impressive banks of hydrangeas, their blue blooms the size of infants’ heads.

  Spite Tower was now above them, its lit windows a row of teeth.

  “Is this still real life?” Audrey asked.

  “No,” Merritt and Harper both said.

  They climbed the stairs and crossed the porch, the painted floorboards groaning with their steps. Harper caught a glimpse of her ghost self in the dark window glass and felt her heart skip around, and again when the ocean breeze jostled the hanging ferns, and again when Merritt gripped the knob to open the front door.

  “Hey, maybe she is asleep,” Harper whispered, surprising herself as she did. “We could just stay out here. It’s nice out here.”

  “Are you scared, too?” Merritt asked over her shoulder. “That I did not expect.”

  “No, I just . . .” Harper trailed off as Merritt pushed open the door. Unlike the floorboards, it didn’t squeak at all, having been recently oiled by production. The dark house now stood open, its heavy silence seeping out like its own kind of fog.

  It was so cliché even to think it, but that didn’t stop Harper from doing so: it felt like the house was waiting for them.

  Compared to the fog world they were about to leave, this house seemed too solid, too sure of itself. Harper found herself wanting to stay in the land of impressionism. Spite Manor, she knew, would be an experience in photorealism.

  But then, this is what they’d come for.

  Merritt stepped in first, clearly comfortable with the drill—flicking on the entrance-hall light and slipping off her shoes. “Shoes-off house,” she said, pushing her sandals with the toes of one foot until they were in a neat twosome off to the side. Audrey followed next, doing the same with her flip-flops. By the time Harper was even inside the door, the two of them were already well into the foyer, Merritt saying something to Audrey about the bouquet of blue hydrangeas on the highly polished table at the room’s center. Other than the whisper of their voices, all around them was heavy stillness.

  Harper, with the pizza box, felt that she had to move quickly. She did not want to let them get too far ahead of her in this house. It bothered her to imagine them no longer in her sight, even though the fact of that bothering her bothered her, too. But she was wearing her vintage Jordans, and even with the laces half undone she couldn’t just slip the shoes off like they were a pair of sandals. Still, she tried to use the toe of her right shoe to push down on the heel of her left and pull her foot free from it. But even as she did this, she noticed Merritt move into an adjoining room, disappearing from view, and Audrey following her.

  “Hey, wait,” Harper said, trying to whisper but still be heard, trying to sound chill and definitely not panicked, trying to hold the pizza box steady while also getting her foot out without losing her balance. She did not. She fell over, hard, onto the antique entryway runner, crushing the pizza box as she went down and sending a puff of dust and sand up into her face, which made her sneeze. Loudly. So loudly.

  “Good gawd,” Merritt said through her teeth as she came back from wherever she’d been. “Can I bring you a trumpet, too, Tank?”

  “Sorry,” Harper said from the floor, where she now pulled off her sneakers. (Which is what she should have done in the first place.) Then she stood with the now-smashed pizza box, her feet in socks.

  “This is it, right?” Audrey was saying quietly. She was on the other side of the foyer, her neck craned to look up a dark staircase. “The tower?”

  “Yes,” Merritt said.

  “So right here is where . . .” Audrey didn’t finish, but instead looked down at the floor beneath her feet.

  “Yes,” Merritt said. “I was planning to save it for last, but I can see there’s no point.”

  “We don’t have to go up there right this second,” Audrey said, but Merritt had already moved past her and was on the first stair.

  “Yes we do,” she said.

  Harper hurried across the room to join them. Her socks were slippery on the tiles but soon they again found rug. She hit the first stair, pizza box in hand, thought better of it, and left it on the table with the hydrangeas, moving fast to catch up to Merritt and Audrey. She took Audrey’s hand as soon as it was near enough to grab.

  “Don’t let go,” Audrey said quietly when she did.

  Harper didn’t. She didn’t want to. The stairs were steep and unevenly spaced, awkward, and the walls so strange and crowding with their lumpy rows of books, the light from the sconces too dim to do much but throw gothic shadows around them. Somewhere near the middle of their climb, Harper’s sock snagged on the rough tread and she felt herself, momentarily, get pulled back—until the thread broke, that is. But that split second of being stuck, being claimed by the tower stairs, was enough to rattle her—deliciously so.

  “You OK?” Audrey said as Harper shoved even closer behind her.

  “Oh for sure,” Harper said. “Loving every minute.” This was not untrue. She felt young in a way she hadn’t for a while, and a little silly too, in her stocking feet scaring herself. She liked it.

  The air in the stairwell was heavy and hot. Her palm was sweaty where she held it together with Audrey’s. Soon more light spilled from above and they came up the final turn and into the round expanse of the study. Merritt was waiting for them.

  It was just as Harper had imagined it—somehow almost too much like the thing it was supposed to be: the windows lining its curved walls, the high ceiling shaped like a circus tent, the taxidermy staring at them, and the shelves stuffed with books and maps and pictures. A room-sized cabinet of curiosities.

  “Is this all set design?” Audrey asked.

  “No,” Merritt said. “This is how it’s always been since I can remember it.” She looked more carefully at Harper, and said, “Did you drop the pizza again?”

  “No, I left it downstairs,” Harper said. Merritt stared at her like she needed more of an explanation. “I felt like maybe we shouldn’t eat up here or something,” Harper added. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s adorable,” Merritt said. “I’ll go get it.”

  “Just because it’s like fancy up here or whatever,” Harper said to further explain, but Merritt was already slipping past her to the stairs, their bodies glancing as she went.

  “It’s the least fancy room in the house,” Merritt said from the stairs.

  “This view’s unreal,” Audrey said, looking out a window.

  “This room is unreal,” Harper said.

  “This whole place.”

  Harper nodded. She thought that something was about to happen, or was already happening, something that she couldn’t quite get a handle on. Like the day in Bo’s office, at the windows—the toddler in the garden, the snow that couldn’t be—but now it was happening to all of them, for all of them. She pulled out her phone, started recording: a circular sweep of the room with close-ups on the reflective eye of the taxidermy hawk and also a few of the antique book spines: Psychography—Marvelous Manifestations of Psychic Power, Book of Mediums: Experimental Philosophies of Mediumship, The Society for Psychical Research. She entered the frame in the video’s last moments to do a surprise-mouthed-emoji face with a thumbs-up, and then uploaded it to her stories with the (rather uninspired) caption: MotherFing Spite Tower!!!!