“How am I supposed to kill someone who’s always moving? With the knife again?” I frowned. “That vanished, though.”

  “You make him stop moving,” suggested Molly. “Do you see that fishing line? We could stretch it out across the hallway and trip him. Then once he’s down on the ground, you can take care of him.”

  There was, in fact, a spool of fishing line sitting on top of one of the dusty CHRISTMAS boxes. It seemed to glitter the same way the dust did. I picked it up, nodding. “That’s a really good idea.”

  “I know,” said Molly, grinning from ear to ear. Her eyes were practically twinkling. “You have two stars now, did you know that?”

  I reached up and poked at my cheek. “Do they look stupid?”

  Molly squinted at me, looking as though she were thinking about it really hard. Then she shook her head. “I like them. I wish I had some stars like that. Every good ballerina should have her own star.”

  “Maybe we can draw you one with a marker or something.” I looked at her smooth, blemish-free face. “After we find the old guy. Where does he normally pace around?”

  “Down,” said Molly. “In a lot of rooms. From one to the next, always moving. I’ve never seen him sit.”

  “Never?”

  “Not ever—not even once!” Molly said it accusingly, as though that was a crime on the same level as public indecency. “But you’ll make him stay still, won’t you?”

  “Oh.” I curled one corner of my lips. “I sure will.”

  Fishing Line and Moon Cycles

  Dream Mr. Tart was, just as Molly said, always moving. He was also down. I wasn’t sure what floor we were on. We had gone down way more stairs than should have existed in the manor house before we found him. He wore a sweater vest—and a frown.

  Up and down he went, stepping into each room he came across. He kept one arm folded behind his back, at the small of it, and rubbed endlessly at his chin with the other hand. He stared at the floor as he walked. When he entered a room, he would walk through the entire perimeter of it and then leave and pace in the hallway until he came to the next door.

  It was almost like watching a wind-up doll move along its pre-set track. When he hit the end of the Down Hallway, he turned around and came back up. That at least made it easy to find a good spot to put the fishing line.

  Molly helped me stretch the fishing line from one wall to the other wall. We pressed it into place with thumb tacks. Then, laughing, we both stepped into a room on the opposite wall from each other.

  All we had to do then was wait.

  Dream Mr. Tart paced to the end of the hallway. Anticipation built up inside of me. It was like waiting for the right timing in a video game. He went to the end of the hallway and then did his circuit through each room. Then, he came back over toward where we were hiding.

  He didn’t see the wire on the floor and tripped over it. As though he were in a cartoon, Dream Mr. Tart threw his arms up in the air and hollered. He flailed and then landed face first on the ground with a hard crack. I wasn’t sure if it was his nose, his neck, or his head that made the sound but I could almost picture the white crack sound effect in the air.

  He didn’t get back up.

  “Yes! Got him!” I triumphantly stepped out of my hiding spot.

  Molly shook her head. In a sing-song voice, she cajoled, “No you didn’t!”

  She reached up and tapped on the side of her cheek. I reached up and touched my own. “No star?”

  “No star.” She gave a second shake of her head.

  I gave a heavy sigh. “Okay. That’s…okay. Fine. So I have to do something else to kill him. That’s fine.”

  “What are you going to do?” Molly asked.

  I thought about it for a moment, then went and untacked the wire from my end of the hall. “Grab your end.”

  “Oh! That’s brilliant.” She laughed and grabbed her end of the fishing line. Together, we brought the wire back over to where Dream Mr. Tart was lying, wrapped it around his neck, and we pulled.

  He jerked back to life!

  It was like a flip had been switched. Suddenly, Dream Mr. Tart was filled with energy. He kicked and thrashed, grabbing at his neck. The fishing line was too thin and pulled too tight for him to grab onto, though, so he couldn’t get a grip on it.

  His nails left thick raised lines on the soft of his throat. His cheeks started to go red. He made these awful gasping sounds, too; like he was trying to breathe but couldn’t. It almost sounded like a stopped-up pipe that was getting hit with a plunger.

  Then he struggled to get onto his knees, but he couldn’t make it. There was blood running from his nose—that was what he broke in that fall!—and from a split on his temple. He twisted and thrashed and tried to get away, and then he just dropped to the ground and began to wheeze.

  The fishing line was so thin that it was cutting into his skin. Little beads of red formed on the soft of his throat. They dripped down onto the floor. It was almost like letting a drop of water hit your paint. It rippled and expanded into a great, warbling red mess.

  And then he went still.

  My hands ached from how tightly I had been holding the fishing line. When I dropped it, there were red marks on my palms and around my fingers.

  Molly dropped her side of the fishing line and held her hands up, smiling. “Look!” Thin red lines marred her perfectly pale skin. “We match!” Her smile widened. “And you have another star, too!”

  “That took way more work than I thought it would.” I walked over to Dream Mr. Tart. Before I could reach him, though, the man seemed to blink out of existence, twisting down into a sort of wind-up doll. A brass key stuck out of his back.

  I picked him up, looked him over, and pulled the key out.

  “I don’t think you’re going to be needing that any time soon,” I told him with a little laugh.

  Molly giggled, covering her mouth with both hands. “That means there’s only three of them left!”

  “The other girl, the boy, and the mother,” I said, nodding. Then I frowned. “You know, this feels like it’s a really long dream. I kind of figured that I would have woken up by now.”

  Molly cocked her head to the side, giving me a curious look. “Well, you can’t leave until the story is finished. Otherwise, you’re going to be trapped in the moon cycle.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” My nose wrinkled. “The moon cycle?”

  “Once a month the moon goes bright, though you can’t see it there tonight.” Molly sang out, all but dancing her way over to the nearby end of the hallway. There was no window there earlier, but there certainly is one now; the glass leading out into the darkness that had fast become familiar.

  “I still don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.” I went with her, bracing one shoulder against the wall beside the window. I didn’t like looking out into all that darkness, especially not after Dream May had just floated off into it. “When the moon goes bright… Like, on the night of the full moon?”

  Right, I had to keep that dream logic in mind. It was a full moon when I ‘arrived.’ I remembered seeing it through the window in the dining room…before I went downstairs and cracked my head.

  Molly nodded enthusiastically. “The moon is a cycle all of its own, and though there is no sun to see, it’s out there rising all the same. Up it goes for thirty days and on the next end of the cycle, there will be a new full moon. A loop. A circle.”

  She turned away from the window and formed her hands into a ‘loop’ by connecting her thumbs and her pointer fingers.

  Molly held the circle of fingers up in front of her face and looked at me through it. “That means you have until the end of the cycle to finish the story.”

  “What happens if I don’t?” I questioned.

  “You’ll be stuck,” said Molly. “Because the Narrator will be mad at you, for not following along.”

  “The Narrator?” A frown curled over my features. “You’ve never mentioned that guy before. Does he live in the house too?”

  Molly shook her head. “I don’t know where the Narrator lives, but we can all hear him when he speaks. He’s being quiet now, so he doesn’t mess up the story!”

  The story. That would be me killing everyone, I suppose.

  Okay, so long as I kept things in the realm of dream logic, it sort of made sense. After all, it wasn’t like I was going to be able to just wake myself up. I had tried that before, with pinching and poking and splashing cold water on my face. Nothing had worked. It must have been a deep sleep—or again, the thought of being in a coma sneaked into my mind and made me shudder.

  I supposed that since I couldn’t actually wake up, there was no reason why I shouldn’t have just tried to go along with it, right? I mean, if the dream people were saying I needed to do a certain thing to wake up… Maybe it was true? It was like when your dream was just something chasing you, and then it ended when you got caught.

  I was the chaser here. Maybe I needed to catch everyone to make the dream come to an end.

  “Who did you want to go for next?” Molly asked eagerly as she let her hands drop down to her sides, the motion somehow both graceful and creepy. It was like her body only sometimes remembered that it wasn’t still a doll in a chair somewhere.

  The rest of the time, it didn’t want to work right.

  “Let’s go with the other girl,” I decided. “My hero.”

  “Your hero?” Molly tilted her head to the side. “I don’t think you need a hero, Quinn. You’re plenty good at taking care of yourself. You just need a friend.” A bright smile crossed her face, showing off all of her sparkling white teeth. “And that’s me! I’m the perfect friend for you!”

  “You have been a pretty great friend,” I told her with an easy smile of my own. Best to just stop trying to figure it out. Whatever, forever. Right?

  Right.

  I held my hand out to her, only a little surprised to see that the red lines the fishing line had left behind were gone. Molly was quick to take my hand. With a laugh, she took off down the hallway and I ran after her, more at home and alive than I had been in a long time.

  Things were different here. I was different here.

  Our footsteps banged and thudded on the wood as we went. The hallway had been long. Now, it was short, the way that it should have been. We hit the end of it and Molly paused, laughing. She looked like something regal, a fairy, something out of a story book.

  Even though we had been running a lot, there was no sweat on her skin. Not a single hair was out of place. Unlike me. I could feel my pink curls clinging to the back of my neck, and the way that they clung to my cheeks, too.

  I let go of her hand and swept it away from my face, tucking it behind my ears. “Hey,” I asked. “I just realized something.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t eaten anything since I got here.”

  Molly’s shoulders bounced. “You don’t need to eat, Quinn. You’re a ghost.”

  “Right, but… Okay, no. That makes sense. I just… Guess I hadn’t thought about it,” I reasoned. “What about you, Molly?”

  Molly’s eyes were bright as stars. “I don’t need to eat either.”

  Rather than elaborate on why she didn’t need to eat—I supposed it made sense that dolls didn’t eat—she turned and darted off into the house. She did this all the time, if I asked about something that she didn’t want to talk about. Molly would run off, and I would have to follow her.

  I was a little worried that if I lost track of Molly, I would end up lost in this house forever.

  This time, she led us to the main foyer. I couldn’t understand how the building was put together. Harry sat in the living room. I could see his curly blue hair poking up over the back of the couch. He was staring at the TV, but it wasn’t on.

  I grabbed Molly’s hand and led her into the living room. “Harry!”

  The clown didn’t look away from the TV. He grunted at me.

  I draped my arms over the back of the couch. “What are you doing?”

  “Watching,” said Harry. “Don’t act like your eyes aren’t working.”

  I looked at Molly; she twisted a finger into a circle at the side of her head, and made the crazy symbol. I had to bite my tongue not to snicker about it.

  “Well, if you’re watching, have you been watching the humans? We’re looking for the girl,” I informed him.

  Harry didn’t look away from the screen. His eyes didn’t so much as twitch. He lifted up one hand and pointed toward the stairs. “In the bedroom. The one with the big window.”

  My room.

  Something creaked behind me. Tabitha. She stood in the doorway to the foyer and watched us with those big dark eyes of hers, brows pinched down and lips twisted into a frown. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything to her.

  It seemed Tabitha didn’t like me very much. Or she didn’t like Molly, and I was just caught up in the middle of that. It could have been either.

  Molly gave Harry a pat on the head. “Thanks, goofball! You just stay down here and enjoy your show, alright?”

  He grunted, “I can’t hear it with you talking.”

  The TV was dark. Silent.

  Something gave a strange pinch in the back of my chest. I told Molly, “Let’s just go upstairs and stop bothering him.”

  She rolled her eyes but moved from the couch to the stairs, and I followed her. Just as I went to step up them, there was a flash of light in the very corner of my eye; a jumble of voices, overlapped and muffled, saying something. I turned to look.

  The TV was still off. Harry was still staring at it, wide eyed. He was crying.

  I turned and hurried up the stairs after Molly without saying another word.

  That was too much weird for me. Even in this place.

  Dream Hero

  When we hit the second-floor hallway, I was desperate to distract myself from what I had just seen. Harry crying had ingrained itself into my mind. I latched onto the next thing that I could think about, asking, “What if I don’t finish the story?”

  “You have to,” said Molly simply.

  The hallway walls warped and shimmered. I reached out and put a hand against them. The wood felt still, but I could see the way it shifted in and out, like the breathing of a great slumbering beast. “But I don’t have an actual ending to my story. Like, the one that I’ve been making?”

  “Every moon cycle,” said Molly. “The Narrator will bring you back here. And then you can try and finish it! See? The Narrator knows everything, Quinn.”

  At least that means I’ll go back to the real world…Quinn rolled her eyes right after that thought. Dummy. This isn’t real, it’s a dream. Or a coma. Of course I’m not going to be down here forever. I’ve got to wake up at some point.

  But the moon was almost full again...so who knew? Maybe that really was when I would wake up.

  It didn’t matter. The focus right now was on taking down my hero. I guessed that she wasn’t really the hero. She was just the Ghost Girl’s first victim. I didn’t know anything about her. Maybe that was why we found her standing in the middle of the bedroom, staring straight ahead. She was just staring at the wall.

  Molly stepped into the room, laughing. “Watch this!”

  The ballerina darted forward and gave the Dream Hero a pinch on the arm. Nothing happened.

  Dream Hero kept staring straight ahead.

  I frowned. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “You should know.” Molly tilted her head as she looked at me. “She isn’t like the others.”

  That was true. The Hero was the only one that hadn’t been made based on anyone I knew. She was this abstract concept in the back of my head; a pretty face to get the story rolling, someone that was never meant to last. I hadn’t liked the design. She looked… Boring. Obvious.

  Maybe I just hadn’t liked the fact that I couldn’t seem to make her real.

  She had key chains on her phone and a pink kitty sitting on the bed. Her shirt had stars on it, which was supposed to be foreshadowing to the stars that Ghost Girl got when she was killed. But that was about all the thought that I had put into her.

  I had been angry at the others, so I developed them instead.

  Feeling brave and childish—and still thinking about Harry, crying at something only he could see and hear—I stepped into the room and circled Dream Hero. She was alive. Her eyes followed me. Her expression stayed blank, though, and she didn’t talk or move.

  She stared straight ahead, even when I stopped in front of her and planted both of my hands on her hips. I cocked one of them to the side, tilting my head at her. “Can you hear me?”

  Her mouth pulled into a thin, strained line. She didn’t move though. She didn’t speak.

  Molly laughed and went over to the desk. “This is kind of fun, don’t you think? You came up with a very interesting story.”

  “It was for school.”

  “School,” said Molly, the tone of the word almost wistful. “Well, there’s no school here.”

  “You said that was because I didn’t make any other places. If I made more in my art, would there be more here?” I asked, walking over to join her at the desk.

  Hero Girl stayed still behind us.

  Molly pulled open a drawer, revealing what looked to be a collection of sewing supplies. There were old scraps of fabric, bundles of thread, and little tins of needles. “I don’t know. What are you going to do with her? It’s almost the full moon, you know.”

  “How can you tell?” It was just black outside of that window.

  Molly hummed. “I just can.”

  “That’s not very helpful. You should at least try to explain things, since we’re friends and all.”

  “I’m trying. It’s not my fault I don’t know all of the answers. The Narrator didn’t tell me everything, and neither did you.”

  I reached past her and picked up a pair of scissors. They were large, heavy-duty sewing scissors. The letter A was inscribed in the handle. “A? Like, Annie?”