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As Ollie watched, frozen, the dead bear fell to all fours. Licked its chops. Then, creaking, the dead bear charged.
Ollie slewed around, found Mother Hemlock right behind her, her mouth pinched down in rage, one sleeve of her dress smoldering. She snatched at Ollie again, but Ollie dodged her and raced back through the dining room. The footsteps of the dead bear sounded close behind her, and she could smell its reek: a combination of dust and formaldehyde.
Ollie, wild with panic, wove and dodged. The bear took a swipe at her; its claws snagged on the hem of her hoodie, and she heard fabric tear as she ran.
It got darker the farther away from the fire Ollie went. She stubbed her toes again and again, banged her shins on debris she couldn’t see, snagged her socks on splinters, tried not to trip and fall. She was expecting every second to feel the bear’s claws sinking into her skin.
A shrill cry from above was her only warning before, with a rush of wind and the reek of more embalming fluid, the talons of one of the dead eagles raked through her hair, cutting her scalp. Huge wings beat around her head, making her gag with their stink.
But by then Ollie had made it across the dining room. She fended off the bird, shoved open the kitchen door, and threw herself through. She was only a step ahead of the thudding stride of the bear and, worse, the clacking footsteps of Mother Hemlock.
Ollie slammed the door shut and put her back against it just as the door shuddered, like the dead bear had thrown all its weight at it. It was so dark that Ollie couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or shut. The door shuddered again. Light, Ollie thought. I need light.
In a flash, Ollie remembered the matches. She was still wearing her hoodie. She plunged her hand into the front pocket and retrieved the matchbook, a slim, crisp shape against her fingers. Her hand was shaking. Breathe, Olivia, said the memory of her mother’s voice, somewhere in the back of her brain. Breathe.
She knew that if she managed to drop that book of matches, send it skittering across the floor, then in that ferocious darkness, she’d never find it again.
The kitchen door shook. Ollie leaned against it with all her weight. But she knew it couldn’t last. She was tall and broad-shouldered and strong for her age, but she was still just an eleven-year-old girl.
Gritting her teeth and working by touch, Ollie pulled out a match and found the rough side of the matchbook with the pad of her thumb. She hadn’t thought about the cold since she came through the mirror. There had been a lot else on her mind. But now she realized, by the sheer difficulty she was having using her fingers on the matches, that it was cold and getting colder.
Ollie thought of the ghosts’ frostbitten hands, and she shuddered, almost dropping her matchbook. That won’t happen to me, she promised herself. It won’t.
She took one more deep breath and struck a match.
In the flash of its light, she had a swift glimpse of the lodge kitchen. It wasn’t the shiny, modern kitchen that her dad had made pancakes in that morning. Instead she saw wooden countertops and dusty pots; it looked like a museum kitchen, smelling of old food and rot and dust all at once.
Her match was already flickering.
She turned it back and forth, hunting for a door, praying there was one.
She saw a face.
And froze.
She wasn’t alone in the kitchen.
A little girl, wearing a long white nightgown, stood in the middle of the kitchen. She was staring straight at Ollie with her frozen-open eyes.
She was pointing. The match was about to burn Ollie’s fingers, but she followed the direction of the ghost’s finger.
Saw a cabinet, a little open.
The match went out again, leaving Ollie trembling, and not alone in the dark.
She threw herself at the remembered direction of the open cabinet door, scrabbled, and managed to drag herself inside, hiding just as the kitchen door burst open.
A growl came from the doorway. She heard a sniff. Ollie hadn’t been able to get the cabinet door closed all the way. Her frantic heartbeat seemed to rock her body back and forth. She just hoped they couldn’t hear it.
She kept perfectly still.
The bear growled again. Its claws scraped on the floor. It crossed the kitchen. Then Ollie heard the cold voice of Mother Hemlock. “Well, where did she go, the little rat? Down the stairs? Or—is she hiding?”
The dead bear’s clawed feet halted. Ollie, with a shaking hand, groped in the empty cabinet, looking for something, anything, that she could use.
A flat piece of ceramic met her frantically groping hand. Plate? Saucer? She didn’t care. She picked it up and hurled it out of the cabinet, hard, so that it flew across the room and smashed into the opposite wall.
The bear roared, and she heard its claws scrabbling—scrabbling away, like a dog, as it followed the sound. In that second, Ollie flung herself out of the cabinet, across the kitchen, and darted silently through the skinny door on the opposite wall. The door that led into the basement.
