Part 1: Lantern Hill

Every Threshold is a Dare. The Timid falter, the Bold step forward. Yet mark this: the House openeth not to Courage, but to Hunger.

— Testament of Elias Harrow, 1764

Clara Whitfield climbed Lantern Hill with her hands jammed deep into her coat pockets, shoulders rounded against the October wind. The hill was steeper than she remembered, the path uneven, gravel crunching under her boots. Each step sounded too loud, too solitary, in the hush that fell once she left the last streetlight behind. The air carried the copper tang of damp leaves and the faint perfume of chimney smoke. Somewhere below, a child shrieked with laughter — sharp, bright — then fell silent as if even mischief had a curfew.

She stopped to retie her bootlace, though it hadn’t loosened. Of course it hadn’t. The gesture was nothing more than delay, an excuse to draw in a breath and steady her hands. Ahead, her friends’ flashlights bobbed like erratic fireflies, jittering near the hilltop. Their voices drifted faintly back — laughter stretched thin by the wind. Casual for them, brittle for her.

“Last chance to back out!” Marcus called. “But if you do, you’re buying pancakes in the morning.”

“Deal,” Jade snapped back. “Extra syrup. You’re paying, Reed.”

Naomi’s voice, cool as ever: “Statistically, you’ll both be dead before breakfast.”

Clara smiled despite herself, though the sound made her chest tighten. It was Halloween night, and they were treating the dare like a carnival game. A night in the Harrow mansion — it was nothing really, she told herself.

Besides, Jade would never have let her live it down if she’d refused. Everyone knew her role in the group: Clara the Careful. Clara the Hesitant. The one who found reasons to wait by the fence while the rest jumped. She had grown used to the part, the way one grows used to a limp — inconvenient, yes, but familiar. Tonight she would prove otherwise. Or so she insisted.

But of course that wasn’t the truth, either. The truth was that Dylan had said yes.

The thought had sat in her chest all day like a coin she couldn’t stop touching. Dylan, with his scarf tied neat as if he were expected at some better party. Dylan, whose English accent could make a grocery list sound like a benediction. Dylan, who touched people lightly — on the arm, the shoulder, the small of the back — as though every gesture were an act of courtesy. He had smiled when Jade proposed the dare and agreed without hesitation. Clara — poor Clara — had agreed too, though her reasons had nothing to do with bravery.

She tried to scold herself for it. Tried to call it pathetic, transparent. Yet anyone watching her climb would have known the truth at once. They would have seen how her pace quickened at the thought of him, how her breath caught when she pictured his glance, how her shoulders straightened though the wind pressed them down. Clara wasn’t climbing Lantern Hill to conquer fear. She was climbing it for Dylan. And she wasn’t the first girl to mistake a neat scarf, a courteous hand, and a warm laugh for the makings of love. It happens more often than we like to admit.

The wind shifted, carrying the smell of wet earth and something faintly sour — mildew, perhaps, or the ghost of bonfires past. The house’s legends stirred with it, stories she had heard since childhood. There was the preacher’s daughter who had gone in one Halloween night and never returned, her name penciled into the margins of school notebooks, passed between classmates like a curse. There were witches, of course, lanterns guttering as they carved spells into the floorboards. And there was the ball — the infamous Halloween revel more than a century ago, when masked dancers had filled the house until fire, sudden and ravenous, devoured them whole. Some swore you could still smell the smoke in its walls. Others argued there had never been a fire at all, that the story was simply more interesting that way. Towns do love their legends.

As a child, Clara had pressed her face against the school-bus window to glimpse the mansion through the trees. It had never looked like a house to her but like something the wind had tried and failed to destroy, sulking atop the hill in stubborn defiance. She remembered shivering at the sight, blaming the cracked bus window for the draft. Memory, like fear, is good at finding excuses.

Her boots scuffed again on the gravel as she pressed forward. She clenched her jaw. It’s just a house, she told herself. Just beams and bricks. Just wood and nails.