What the Wallpaper Hid

The house was quiet in the way a held breath is quiet.

Nora found the second staircase on her fourth night, behind a door she was sure had been a wall. It went down farther than the house had any right to go.

The letters had been stuffed into the flue and forgotten, the paper brittle as moth wings. The first one began: If you are reading this, the house has chosen you too.

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She told herself it was the pipes. Old houses knocked. Old houses sighed. Old houses did not, as a rule, whisper her name in her mother’s voice.

In the morning, the dust on the hall table showed a single handprint, small, like a child’s, pressed flat as if to hold something down.

The wallpaper in the nursery was a pattern of small birds. When she looked closely, every bird had its head turned toward the window, as if something outside had called them.