The Creepening of Dogwood House by Eden Royce

Author:Eden Royce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

13

It was two in the morning when Roddie awoke. His mouth felt sticky and gross, like he’d been asleep for a hundred years. The room was hot, the fan blowing warm air across his scalp. Moonlight threw weak rays on the walls, and Captain Galaxy’s long shadow stretched along the floor. Roddie turned over once, and then again, unable to find a cool spot on the mattress or the pillow.

The comforting sounds of his aunt and uncle’s voices and movements were gone. Creaks emanated from the warped floorboards, and a foul stench, hot as breath, was in the air. He pinched his nose closed, breathing through his mouth. A weightiness filled his room, like someone else shared this space with him. He thought of the hunched figure he’d seen upstairs when he was outside. His eyes shot open.

No one else was in here.

Why hadn’t he been able to find that window? He was sure he’d seen it; it had been right near the edge of the house. What room would that even have been?

Roddie sighed. He wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep anyway, so he reached over and took the floor plan out of his nightstand, laying it on his lap. The lines weren’t quite as clear as Aunt Angie’s printed version had been, but by the light of the moon, he could make them out pretty well. He followed with a finger as he read out the names of each room on the first floor—the living room, dining room, and kitchen were all the same, but Angie’s and Erik’s offices were called laundry room and playroom. He then moved to the image of the second floor. Each of the rooms up here was labeled as well: there were five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small closet off the hallway, all in the right places.

He turned his attention to the paper itself. It felt thick in his fingers, like it was drawn on the back of a piece of wallpaper. He turned it over, but there was no pattern or color. He flipped it back over to the side with the floor plan and—

Wait.

The floor plan had changed.

He blinked, then rubbed his eyes, but it wasn’t his imagination, like the fireplace statues or the voices in the water. The layout of Dogwood House, correct just a moment ago, had changed.

On the first floor, the stairs were still in the same place, and the kitchen, living room, and dining room were roughly where they were supposed to be, though the walls were in slightly different places. But where Angie’s office now was, there was something labeled sewing room. The second office, Erik’s office, was labeled sitting room.

Roddie peered closer at the second floor. There were still the same number of bedrooms, and the closet, but the bathroom off Aunt Angie’s room had disappeared, replaced by an empty rectangle with a door down the hall. He flipped the paper over and back again, but nothing changed this time: the strange extra room beside his own was still there.

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