Damn it! My dreams of making sweet, sweet love to Mr. Tumnus are once again dashed!

I scrolled back up to the photograph the original poster had included. It was a low-quality image taken a decade ago on a crappy camera phone, grainy and strangely cropped. It depicted the blackened remains of a stone house, taped off, some bricks gagging onto the sidewalk. The freestanding doorway was creepy. It emanated wrongness. I, too, had heard stories about abandoned staircases in the woods and how people had been warned not to go near them for whatever reason. I’d seen pictures of some of them; they felt out of place and otherworldly. The burned-out door had the same effect.

I couldn’t remember the night we disappeared very well, but I remembered the night we came back. I remembered standing in this exact spot, naked and shuddering between my sisters. I remembered Grey whispering something to me, whispering something to Vivi, tucking a strand of hair behind each of our ears. I remembered how the cold made my skin tight and numb, made it feel like it belonged to someone else. I remembered how we stood stock-still, not speaking, as we waited. I remembered a young woman turning down the street and screaming and dropping the bottle of wine she held when she saw us in the dark. I remembered her running to us, draping her heavy coat over my shoulders, yelling for the neighbors to call the police as she struggled out of her sweatshirt and gave it to Vivi. I remembered red and blue flashing lights reflecting off the slick cobblestones. I remembered the ambulance ride to the hospital, the three of us sitting pressed together on a stretcher, draped in aluminum blankets and harsh light. I remembered how Grey refused to let the nurses take her blood and how, when they tried to convince her, she’d freaked out and they’d backed off, whispering things like “Haven’t they been through enough already?” I remembered the way Gabe held Vivi’s little face in his hands after he scooped her up, his expression going from elated to searching and then to confused, like he already believed in that moment that we weren’t quite right.

I remembered that Cate carried Grey out of the hospital the next day, her little legs wrapped tightly around our mother’s hips.

I remembered Grey looking back at me over our mother’s shoulder as we headed into the light, safe in the comfort of her arms.

I remembered the way my sister held eye contact with me for a moment, the spark of a grin at the corner of her lips.

I remembered that she winked.

I could remember so much, but I couldn’t remember where we had been only minutes before the woman found us on the street.

That part was gone. Everything before it was a black abyss.

“The door,” I said. I zoomed in on the picture. Even though it was slightly out of focus, I could make out white flowers growing at the base of the stone. “It’s still the place, even though it’s changed,” I told Tyler. “I can still feel her. I can feel all of us.” I put my hand on the glossy black door of the rebuilt house. “We passed through here. We came this way.”

I could feel it. I felt Grey’s pulse in the wood, weak as a bird’s heart.

I took a deep breath and swallowed my revulsion. I had spent much of the last ten years trying to forget this place. I had poured my studies like cement over the radioactive thing that had happened to me here in my childhood and that continued to poison me. I had ached to be older. To be finished with university, to have a career, to be preoccupied with the small stresses of daily life that adults were always complaining about. Bills. Taxes. Health insurance. The dentist. I wanted the years to fill and stretch and stack, to put as much time between myself and this place as possible.

And now here I was, back again, trying to follow my sisters wherever they had gone, to the place I had sworn to never return to.

“It has to work,” I whispered to myself, staring at the door. “It has to work, it has to work, it has to work.”

I turned the handle. It was unlocked. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

“Hollow,” Tyler growled. “You can’t just go wandering into strange houses! Get back here.”

“No,” I said. I was too far into the hall for him to drag me out. “I’m not leaving until I find them.”

My jaw was quaking. I pressed my lips together.

“They’re obviously not here,” Tyler said. “This is just a house!”

My throat was thick. I knew he was right because I could feel it. Grey and Vivi weren’t here and hadn’t been here for a very long time. The energy they’d left behind was ten years old, crumbled to dust. The thing that linked me to them felt thin and weak, but it was all I had. I pressed forward into the dark hall.

“I will leave you here,” Tyler whispered, but his feet were moving forward to follow me. The hall smelled sour, of milk with base notes of urine. I knew that smell from the handful of babysitting gigs I’d done. A boiler was on somewhere. It congealed the baby odor into something oily and solid. The warm air cocooned me, felt too heavy after the February cold. Sweat prickled under my arms, on my palms. My cheeks were hot coins.

“There are whispers of us here,” I said as I made my way down the hall, fingers trailing the wall. “In the foundations. We were here. This place remembers us.”

The hall opened onto a softly lit kitchen and living area. A redheaded woman was sitting on a couch, breastfeeding a baby with her eyes closed.

I still had my palm on the wall, feeling the pulse of the stone. Tyler was tugging at the back of my coat, trying to get me to leave. The woman opened her eyes. Saw us. Tightened her grip around the baby, then stood and started to scream.

I crossed the floor in three strides and hooked a finger into the woman’s mouth. The effect was instantaneous; I might as well have plunged heroin into her veins. The woman’s muscles relaxed, and she folded into me like she was lovesick, her head nestled on my shoulder, the baby pressed between us.

I was breathing hard. I had not done this thing for a long time. Not since the photographer. I had never done this thing intentionally. It had always been a cursed power, far out of my control. A thing that made me weak, like Grey said.