The girl was alone, but that did not scare her. Nor did the darkness, or the cold, though it made her shiver, and that made the unlit lantern in her hand swing.

What scared her was the noise, the sounds of the walls and the floors and the ceilings. When she walked down a flight of stairs, each step creaked beneath her feet, and she could hear a sound like the swaying of a forest of pines in the wind, and that made her wonder if there was wind outside those walls.

After a while, she decided to try and combat the sounds with ones of her own. She could not speak without her tongue, so she hummed instead, and wondered where that tongue might be. She was certain she’d had it at some point recently, but she also hadn’t been that concerned when she awoke in the forest to find it gone. She couldn’t say why she had not panicked, not screamed, but she hadn’t, and only now was she realising that it was really quite an important thing, and to not have it was actually deeply troubling.

She was still humming, quite tunelessly, when she walked through a doorway into a room lined with mirrors. Here, it seemed, in a strange way, that the noise of the house was lessened, but she kept humming all the same as she walked up to one of the mirrors and held the lantern up a little higher as though it was lit, then realised that she must have looked very stupid doing so.

In the mirror, she could see a thin face with pale eyes, light hair hanging to the shoulders on either side. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly remarkable about it, which she found disappointing, so she opened her mouth to see what sort of wound was left in place of her tongue, but it was too dark to make out much. She thought only that there seemed to be a scar of some kind, any details hidden amidst shadow.

When she turned away, the room had changed.

Where the rest of the mirrors had once been, the walls were bare, and the end of the room stretched much, much farther away, so far that she couldn’t see the end of it. What she could see was a trail of splotches of some dark, dried liquid, leading away into the darkness. She knew the only thing it could be, and gripped the unlit lantern tighter. It was made of iron, and quite heavy. Maybe she could use it as a weapon if something attacked her.

Realising she had stopped humming, she started again as she inspected the room, unsure why it made her feel so much safer to be making noise. Resolving never to fall silent again, she began to follow the trail of blood, not because she wanted to, but because that was the only way there was to go.

The size and length of the room were perhaps the worst thing about it. Some might have been scared by the darkness, but that wasn’t frightening to the girl ― certainly, dangerous things could hide in shadow, but most of the time there was nothing to be afraid of, and indeed in some ways it was quite a comforting thing. She couldn’t remember ever having actually seen them, but she was very sure that the bright and flashing lights of the world could be quite draining. Darkness was like a retreat, a cool, unintrusive space to rest and recover.

Others would have been afraid of the blood trail, or the utter lack of furniture, doors, windows, inhabitants, or anything else of note, and those things did unnerve her a little, but they were not frightening.

No, the only truly frightening thing was the room’s sheer extent. After what seemed like an hour of walking, humming gently, she found she was constantly glancing back over her shoulder, wondering if she had missed an exit, or some other detail.

How was it possible for a room to be this long? How was it possible for a blood trail to be this long? Had she really been walking for an hour? Maybe it had been longer. She was starting to get hungry, and thirsty. Had it been many hours? Had it been a day? Was there any end to this place at all?

Then she came upon a change. A short way ahead of her, a body emerged from darkness. It lay against one of the walls, and its head hung down, and the trail of blood ended at it. Though she had little hope for its survival, the girl ran towards it, still humming, and the sound wavered a little as her anxiety rose and her feet hit the floor, each step jolting through her voice.

As she grew closer, she realised quite quickly that the body was the younger man, the one from the forest who would never shut up. His face was white, bloodless, and his eyes stared into empty space as blood ran down his lips and chin and onto his clothes, once so well kept. The girl did not look inside his mouth, for she was afraid that she might see that his tongue had been taken, and she did not want to think about what that could mean.

Instead, she took one step back and looked at him for a little longer, trying to decide if she was really sad about his death or just upset by the fact that someone, anyone, was dead. Then she looked up, and found that the room had changed again. It was not even a room any more ― it was just a corridor, with the body lying at the side, and a long, dark space ahead, beckoning.

When the girl looked back the other way, stairs led up, and she decided to follow those instead. However, she reached the top very quickly, and found that the doorway there was covered by a thick layer of vines, roots, branches, and leaves. Small white flowers were growing along them, newly unfurled, with beads of dew upon their petals. Then she blinked, and the flowers were black, and the beads were of blood, and the blood was not black, but violently, furiously red, and she stepped back and felt her foot meet air as she remembered she was standing on a staircase, and she fell.

She did not fall far. She collapsed against a flat floor, only really grazing her elbows and bruising herself a little, as the room changed for a third time. This room was square and not very large, which was a welcome change, however nothing else here was at all welcome.

Recovering somewhat, she resumed her humming, which the fall had cut off, and looked at the crates around her, and the barrels, and the shelves, and the jars on the shelves, and the body parts in the jars, and her eyes froze on one in particular: a tongue.

She did not know how she knew this, but she knew that the tongue in that jar was her tongue. And she was not at all happy about it being in a jar.

Scowling at the audacity of whoever it was that owned this house to steal her tongue, she climbed up a somewhat precarious stack of crates, her humming briefly faltering as she carefully balanced herself and reached out for the jar. It was not large; indeed, it fitted into one hand, and she snatched it and began to climb back down the stack.

It wobbled as she neared the bottom, and right as she touched the floor, one crate fell off the top and hit something soft before thudding against the floor.

The girl turned around, wondering what she had hit, and saw that it was another corpse, one she had somehow missed entirely in her single-minded determination to retrieve her tongue. She knew the body at a glance, for it was the woman from the forest, and she was missing her ears. Grimacing at the sight, the girl turned away and looked at the two corridors leading out of the room.

One of them was empty and dark. The other was empty and dark, and had a trail of blood leading into its darkness. Perhaps the girl should have learned not to follow those by now, but she hadn’t.

It was a much shorter one than the first. The girl barely had time to notice the roots that were grasping towards her through small holes in the wall before she came to the end of the corridor, and the last body.

She had guessed the identity of this one the moment she saw its slumped shape, but she inspected him to confirm it nonetheless. His long coat was still there, along with his scarf, and his eyes, once only pale, were now also glassy. His hair and beard, a mess, as before. His skin, scarred and white. There were only three things missing: the knife he had carried, and the two hands with which he had carried it.

She knelt down beside him, barely noticing as her humming began to subside, failing before the oppressive creaks and groans of the wooden walls and ceiling around and above her. Putting the jar and lantern down, she looked at the old man’s face, afraid, frozen, and then past him, to the blank wall here, right at the end of the corridor, the dead end.

When she glanced away, the room did not change, so she sighed, and looked back. Was this where she was going to die? Was it her turn to meet some awful fate? She wondered why she had to be last, and then thought herself a fool for asking such a pointless question. Chance was chance, she supposed, looking up and down the wall once more.

And then she stopped, because something caught her eye. Something away down in the corner of the wall. A hole, unoccupied where the others all bore roots. And when she peered at it, she could see a room through it. There seemed to be a table in the middle of the room; the rest she couldn’t make out from the angle.

There were small chips in the wood around the hole. Knife marks. Her eyes turned to the old man’s body beside her, but his knife was not here.

There was only one other weapon. She picked up the lantern, pulled it back, and slammed it against the wall. Cracks sprang out from the hole immediately, as part of it broke and bent in the way. The girl grinned at that. It felt devious. It felt like she was breaking the rules, breaking out, and that made her feel strong, and she swung the lantern more vigorously, and a splinter of wood snapped off and flew into the room beyond.

Only as she reached back for a third swing did she realise she had stopped humming altogether, and the creaking wood was ever so loud, and now there was another sound as well.

It was the sound of a walking stick. At least, that was what she thought at first, but it was too heavy for that. With a deep breath, she looked over her shoulder, and saw something coming towards her from down the corridor. It wasn’t close yet, but it didn’t need to be. It was cloaked in roiling, misty darkness. A rake came before it, almost as tall as the ceiling, grating against it when lifted with each step. The thing moved slowly, shuffling along, its breath rasping and sighing, at once like the harsh cry of a crow and the soft whisper of wind drifting over a field.

For a moment, the girl did not move. She feared she might be paralysed, but strength came, and she managed to force the humming back out of her, and it was small and fearful and trembling, but at the sound of it the creaking of the walls lessened, the branches that had been slowly snaking their way towards her recoiled, and the thing in the shadows lurched backwards, before advancing with a low, angry hiss, like a snake.

The girl did not wait for it to reach her. She slammed she lantern into the wall once more, and more wood broke away. It was not wide, but it was wide enough. She kicked at it a bit as she picked up the jar, then, abandoning the lantern, squeezed through.

Splinters of wood grazed against her skin and cut her. They were the fingernails of the house, grasping and pulling and trying to stop her from leaving that corridor, but she gritted her teeth pushed through, and emerged standing on the other side, clutching the jar to her chest and breathing heavily. Sweat rolled down her face as she fought back the tears that pain and fear were so infuriatingly trying to force into her eyes.

Doing her best to ignore the pounding of her heart and the feel of blood beading at the cuts on her skin, she looked around.

The room was small. There was a table in the middle, with a typewriter atop it. A sheet of paper was in it at that moment, with much written on it, but when the girl peered at it, she found she could not read the script, and was unsure if that was because it was foreign to her, or if she simply could not read at all. She could not ever remember reading.

In front of the table there was a chair, and beneath and behind it were boxes, filled with more sheets of paper. All those she could see had writing printed on them, but she couldn’t read any of it, so she moved to the door instead. She put her hand on it and pulled, and it was locked.

With a grunt of frustration, she turned away, put the jar on the table, and began to search through the boxes for a key. She wasn’t sure how likely it was to be there, but there was nothing else to do.

And then she heard the sound of wood splintering.

Raising her eyes to the wall where she had emerged, she saw a long hand wrapped in sack cloth and made of interwoven strands of straw reaching through, grasping towards her as more pieces of wood began to splinter away in its wake. Tendrils of mist-like shadow swept from the hole as well, twining about the arm like armour.

From the other side of the wall, the thing in the shadows was laughing at her. It was a slow laugh. The sound came perhaps once every second, in low, breathy gasps that each seemed to her to be the last sigh of a life that was ending.

She clenched her teeth and stood up. She could not panic. More of the wall was breaking away every second, but she would escape again. She had escaped before. She looked around. There was a locked door, a typewriter, and boxes with nothing but paper. The heavy lantern was in the corridor. The arm was reaching through, and there was a leg beginning to follow in a way that seemed anatomatically impossible.

Backing away, she snatched up the jar. She was not humming any more. She did not feel she could. It was like she had lost her voice. Or like it had been stolen. By fear? By the thing behind the wall? She couldn’t know, and she didn’t care. She could only think of one thing to do. She put out a hand, and swept the typewriter off the table.

When it came against the floor, it shattered, and the thing in the shadows howled. The sound echoed from one side of the room to the other, deafening, and it was actually a hundred sounds in one. The girl could hear pain, anger, mirth, confusion, desperation, pity, what she thought might be sorrow. And she could also hear something else. It was not an emotion she had a name for, but she knew what it meant, so she named it after that: it was the hunt.

The arm was scrabbling, the leg kicking, the wall creaking in a way that sounded as though it was wailing in pain as it strained to stay whole against the great strength that wanted to break it.

In the mess that was the typewriter, one flash of metal in particular caught the girl’s eye, and she reached down and picked up an old, long key. Backing away towards the door, she watched as the fingers of the second hand poked through and began feeding the rake to the first.

She turned and slotted the key into the lock. It fitted. She turned it. It clicked. She snatched it out, glanced back, and ducked as the rake came stabbing towards her. As it thudded against the door, she cried out instinctively, though she had not been hurt.

As the thing began to pull the rake back for a second strike, the girl reached up and pulled the door open. There was only blackness on the other side, but hesitation was not even a possibility that crossed her mind. She just clutched the jar with her tongue in it close, and ran forwards.

When she emerged on the other side, somewhere bright and entirely new, she slammed the door shut and turned the key again, and the click of its lock bore such weight and finality, and so powerful was the wash of relief that came over her, that she could not help but collapse in front of the door and cry.