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There's nothing there.

Not a shut thing. Not a held thing. Painted wood, a brass handle, and three hundred people going loud behind me.

"Anything?" Gage says.

"It's a door." My voice comes out wrong. "It's just a door."

He doesn't tell me to try again. That's bad.

Behind us the room is turning. A woman in a gold cat mask is pounding on the kitchen door with the flat of both hands. Someone's phone light swings across the ceiling.

The plague doctor kid has his beak pushed up on his forehead and he's crying, and he's about fourteen.

I put two hundred masks in this building. I know what's under every one of them.

And the only thing in this house I can't feel is the house itself.

The girl in the nightgown drifts over and stands beside me at the terrace glass, close enough that the hem of her gown moves in air that isn't moving anything else.

"They're all going to try the doors," she says. "Everyone always tries the doors."

"Maren." He's looking past me now, at the wall. "When did the candles light?"

"Ten minutes ago. They went out and came back on. In order."

He turns in a slow circle and I watch his eyes follow it. North wall. Around the corner. Down the east wall, across the fireplace, behind the piano, up both sides of the staircase, closing at the terrace doors.

Every flame stands straight up.

"I've seen one of these," he says. "Out in the dead acres. Ash and dead marigolds and black wax."

"How big?"

"Six feet across, with a scrap of your apron in the middle of it." His jaw works. "This one's got a town in it."

The girl in the nightgown tips her head at the mantel. "The old ones did it out in the garden," she says. "Theirs was smaller."

Across the ballroom, Ansel pushes his blue mask up onto his head and starts collecting children.

He does it without saying much. Marcy's twins by the collar, a boy in a skeleton hoodie, a girl who won't let go of a plastic pumpkin. He walks them all through the back hall door and puts himself in the frame of it and stands there with his arms crossed.

"He's got his back to us," Cass says.

"He's got his back to them," Gage says.

Then every dead person in this room turns their head at the same time.

Eleven of them. All night they've faced the black star under my feet. Now they're facing the front hall, and the old man at the piano stands up off his bench, slow, the way you stand when company arrives.

"Something's coming," I say.

Gage's whole body changes. "What?"

"They all just looked at the same thing."

The front hall doors open.

They're the only doors in this house that will.