“Oh my God,” Chanyeol said, “this place is amazing.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s actually a hole,” Amber replied, as she pulled the largest duffel bag out of the trunk and slung it over her shoulder.

Chanyeol reached past her and grabbed his massive cooler, heaving it out of the trunk. “But it’s an amazing hole. Seriously, are you looking at this?” The manor house was unlike anything Chanyeol had ever seen in Korea, absolutely enormous, a sprawling, stone-brick Victorian monstrosity laid out over rambling, overgrown grounds like a sleeping giant. It looked like it should have been housing an entire school of children, possibly magical children, or maybe the mutant kind.

Maybe it had, years ago. But as far as Chanyeol knew, this house hadn’t been occupied in close to a decade - not since his great-aunt had gone into a nursing home. His great-aunt was gone now, and for some reason, she’d chosen Chanyeol to inherit the house. Maybe she’d heard he worked as a home improvement contractor, Chanyeol didn’t know. He’d met the woman a grand total of three times in his life.

As they walked up the winding, crumbling brick driveway, lugging duffels and pulling rolling suitcases behind them, Chanyeol gave the front of the house a critical once-over. The second floor balcony was long and spacious, but sagging and rotted out in places. Several of the windows were broken or cracked. The tower on the west side appeared to be missing part of its roof, and as they carefully made their way up the front stairs, Chanyeol noted that the hardware on the ornate double doors was so rusty, he felt like he was getting tetanus just looking at it.

Covering his hands with his jacket sleeves, Chanyeol fumbled with the rusted lock for a good long minute before he managed to get the door open. He stepped over the threshold and gasped, eyes widening.

“Wow,” Chanyeol breathed, his note of awe trailing away into the serene stillness of the manor’s two-story, walnut-and-crimson formal foyer. The room was completely dominated by a grand, curved double staircase and an enormous, very dusty brass and crystal chandelier. Old cobwebs clung to intricately carved doorways, beyond which glimpses of large, open rooms filled with furniture covered in white sheets could be seen.

“This place,” Amber said, “is going to need a lot of work.”

It quickly became apparent that ‘a lot of work’ was a gross understatement. The manor was somehow even bigger on the inside than it appeared from the outside, and though it had probably once been surprisingly airy, the number of collapsed staircases, blocked-off doorways and clutter-filled rooms made it maze-like and difficult to navigate.

Still, it was almost impossible not to admire the place. Its framework was close to two hundred years old, but it seemed to have been kept in relatively decent repair for most of that time; the worst of the damage seemed to be more recent. The architecture was clearly Western, extremely rare for a building this old in Korea, but it had clear Asian influences as well, with geometric and floral patterns in the carved fretwork, screens in the place of some of the interior doors, and very classic Korean furniture. It was unique, and gorgeous, and the more Chanyeol and Amber explored, the more possibilities they saw.

“You could turn this place into a hotel,” Amber was saying, as they examined the fourth bedroom they’d found so far. “Or rent it out as a venue.” She opened the door to the balcony and stuck her head out, but didn’t dare to go out onto it for fear of the floor crumbling out from under her. “, look at this view.”

“I need to hire a landscaping company,” Chanyeol thought out loud. The view over Amber’s shoulder was green and wild, rambling fields and overgrown gardens that butted up against lush woods.

Amber pulled the door closed carefully. “I thought you were excited about this?” she asked.

Chanyeol flashed her a smile. “I am! It’s just - I can see how much effort this place is going to take. Like, specifically, I mean. I’m already drafting a budget in my head, I can’t help it.” He ran a finger across the fireplace mantle, not at all surprised when it came away brown. Where he had swiped through the layer of dust, the white-streaked green marble winked at him, as if to make promises about how beautiful it could be.

“Well, you have money and you have time,” Amber said cheerfully. “And... a project like this will be good for you.”

Pretending he didn’t see the way Amber’s expression softened and folded in on itself as she said that - pretending it didn’t make an unhappy pit open in his stomach - Chanyeol crossed the room and stuck his head into an open doorway. “I wonder what these spaces used to be,” he said, as a distraction. “There’s no way every bedroom had an attached bath back in 1820-whatever when this place was built, they must have been added afterwards.”

Amber leaned around his shoulder to look. “Makes it even easier to turn this place into a hotel!” she pointed out. Then she made a face. “You’re going to have to get rid of this godawful tile, though, it looks like the 70’s threw up in here.”

“I’d honestly love to do a historical restoration,” Chanyeol murmured, brushing away a cobweb that was threatening his hair. “Maybe not a hundred percent accurate to the way the house used to look, but at least using classic materials and styles, you know?”

Nodding sagely, Amber said, “People would pay through the nose to stay in a place like this, if it was restored. It’s basically a castle.” Her grin turned wicked. “Just imagine the cash rich parents would drop to have a birthday party for their little princess here. You could even have pony rides out on the grounds.”

The image was a cute one, even if Chanyeol knew Amber was thinking more about the money. “I think there actually was a stables attached,” he said. “On the bottom floor of the east wing? Looks like someone converted it into a garage at some point in the past century.” Amber’s eyes lit up, and Chanyeol laughed at her. “Tell you what, when I get this place all fixed up, you can come be manager.”

They kept exploring for another hour or so, exclaiming over each new discovery and brainstorming what they could make of it, before Amber’s alarm went off, reminding her that she needed to get going. She had an appointment to make later that night, and a two hour drive to get there.

“Maybe when this place is open to the public we could call it Princess Castle,” Chanyeol thought out loud, as he walked her to the door. “We could name each suite after a famous princess and decorate it according to that time period.”

Amber laughed and pulled him into a one-armed hug. “Maybe if you stay here long enough, your prince will finally come,” she joked.

Chanyeol chuckled, but it wasn’t up to his usual standard. He wasn’t really in the market for a prince at the moment, and Amber should know that, and it was a little frustrating that she insisted on pushing the issue. She meant well, but it was frustrating all the same.

“I’m gonna call and check on you every day, okay?” Amber said as she pulled away, her tone sobering. “Like, I know you know what you’re doing, but this place is really remote and, I don’t know. Don’t fall through the floor or anything.”

“I’ll keep my phone on me at all times,” Chanyeol promised. “Have a safe trip.”

Kissing his cheek, Amber let herself out the front door and left Chanyeol alone in his new home.

As the only family members still living, Chanyeol and his sister Yura had gotten their great-aunt’s entire inheritance. Yura had gotten the investments and business ventures, the summer beach house, and the china collection; Chanyeol had gotten the manor. Looking out of the great room’s massive windows and watching the sun set over the trees, Chanyeol thought he might have gotten the better end of the deal.

If it had only been the manor itself, Chanyeol might not have been so excited about it, but in addition to the material possessions, his great-aunt’s substantial fortune had been split evenly between the siblings. The news of the inheritance had come as a shock, and Yura had immediately dragged Chanyeol to a professional finance manager, who had guided them both through paying off their debts and taxes and sinking the rest into investments. Chanyeol now had a salary that was twice what he used to make, automatically deposited into his spending account every two weeks. Like a paycheck, except he was paying himself, and the money came from investment returns alone. According to the advisor, the actual amount of the inheritance wouldn’t even need to be touched unless Chanyeol had to spend an enormous sum all at once. It was smart - Chanyeol didn’t have the first clue how to handle a huge, static amount of money, but he knew how to manage a salary.

For the first time in his life, Chanyeol had enough money to quit working, enough money to actually devote himself to a massive labor of love like the manor, and frankly, he was looking forward to it. He hadn’t really had a lot of personal successes in his life, so it would be nice to have a project he could call his own, something he could see through to the end.

The first order of business, before anything else, was to find at least one functional bathroom. Ten years of no use had done a number on the pipes, and once Chanyeol got the water , the walls were filled with awkward, creepy groaning and creaking noises.

Several rooms on the first floor had been converted into a master bedroom suite around the time that his great-aunt had started having trouble with stairs, so Chanyeol worked on that bathroom first, guessing that it would be the least decrepit. He seemed to be right - though the pipes loudly protested and the water from the tap was so brown with rust it almost looked like blood, with a half an hour’s work he managed to get both the toilet and the sink in working order. The water from the tap tested safe when he dipped a test strip in it, but it tasted a little metallic and weird, so Chanyeol pulled out his filter pitcher and filled it up.

With drinking water and the ability to flush a toilet taken care of, Chanyeol turned next to the lights. Locating the fuse box in the cellar was a chore that took him far longer than it should have, and Chanyeol was pretty certain he saw at least eight different genuses of insects and possibly a rat. He added call an exterminator to his mental list of To Do and squinted at the faded labels on the fuses until he found the one for the kitchen and great room.

He’d had a professional electrician test all the wiring before he arrived, and the fuses that led to faulty or damaged wiring were taped off with neon pink duct tape, but still, Chanyeol held his breath as he flipped the switch. It would be just his luck that he would set the house on fire his first night.

All that happened, though, was the water pipes groaning at him.

Chanyeol patted the wall. “You’ll be fine,” he told the house. “I know it’s weird, but you’ll get used to having someone living here again.” The wall creaked at him, and Chanyeol chuckled and made his way back up the stairs.

“This place is probably a to heat in the winter,” Chanyeol thought out loud. His deep voice echoed oddly in the stairwell. “I have a lot of work to do before autumn is over.” He added a mental note to check on the insulation situation in the attic and to get the floor heating units functional, and fumbled for the light switch in the foyer.

He found it, and flipped it. Overhead, the crystal chandelier flickered on, half of its candle-shaped bulbs burnt out, casting a warm, golden glow over the twin staircases.

“I need LED bulbs,” Chanyeol noted. “A lot of them.” The electric bill for this house was probably astronomical; it would be worth the expense up front to install low-energy LEDs. They'd put less strain on the old wiring, and they lasted forever so it would save Chanyeol having to lower the chandelier every time a bulb burnt out. Counting the lighting fixtures in the foyer under his breath, Chanyeol moved into the great room.

Spotting something in his periphery, Chanyeol turned.

Huh.

In the corner of his eye, it had looked like there was a dark, streaky handprint on the wall by the doorway, but now that he was looking directly at it, there was nothing there.

“Must have been a trick of the light,” he muttered. There were a couple of evening songbirds fluttering around outside the windows, maybe one of them had flown by at just the right moment to cast an odd shadow on the wall.

Chanyeol finished his count of the light fixtures and noted the number in his notetaking app, then started opening what windows he could to air out some of the musty smell. The first floor windows had been replaced at some point, but they were still pretty old and sticky, and only about two of the half-dozen of them would open. But it let in a breeze and the sounds of birds chirping, so Chanyeol considered it a success and turned towards uncovering the furniture.

It was a big room, with a lot of furniture in it, and very quickly a large pile of white canvas dropcloths formed in the corner. Chanyeol distantly wondered where the laundry was - a house this big had to have one, if not more than one - as he pulled the dropcloth off the last lump in the room.

The lump was a chair, similar to the other armchairs in the room, but there was something sitting on the chair’s seat. Chanyeol prodded it.

A disembodied tiger’s head fell out. Chanyeol yelled and jumped back, but the head didn’t hit the ground. It lolled, staring at Chanyeol upside down with beady yellow eyes and a fanged, frozen snarl, hanging from the bundle on the chair.

His heart pounding, Chanyeol stared for a long moment. When nothing moved, he prodded it again, and carefully pulled open the bundle. It was a wadded up tiger-skin rug, and judging by the feel of the fur in his hands, it was a real one.

Squatting down, Chanyeol gingerly picked up the head and cradled it in his palms. It glared at him balefully. “I wonder how old this is,” he muttered. Tiger-skin rugs were illegal to own now, right? Or were they just illegal to produce, and owning an old one that had been made before they were illegal was okay?

“Oh!” Suddenly realizing something, Chanyeol turned and looked over his shoulder. In the center of the room, between two ancient coffee tables, the floor was a little discolored. He’d noticed it earlier and thought that there must have been a rug there at some point, but it was a weird shape so he’d dismissed the notion.

Curious, Chanyeol carefully pulled the rug off the chair and took it over to the center of the room. Sure enough, it matched up almost exactly with the discoloration on the floor, silently snarling out towards the foyer. Not Chanyeol’s taste, but it was kind of cool to get a little glimpse of how the room looked decades ago.

The lights flickered.

Chanyeol froze, cocking his head and listening, but he didn’t hear the pop of a light bulb burning out, or the buzz of a bad wire, or the crackle of flame, so it was probably fine. Still, he turned off the great room’s lights on his way out the door, headed to the kitchen to get something that resembled dinner.

He hadn’t turned the gas on yet and he wasn’t certain he trusted the wiring enough to risk running the ancient microwave, so Chanyeol just stood at the counter and scarfed down some kimbap from the cooler he’d brought while making notes and plans with his phone. He had so many ideas, he was actually worried about losing them all if he didn’t jot them down.

The pipes groaned at him, the lights flickered, and more than once the normal creaking sounds of an old house settling jolted him out of his concentration, but Chanyeol didn’t really mind it. They were familiar sounds, and it helped to break up the quiet inside the deserted house.

By the time he was done eating, the sun was completely set and what little dusk-light was left was fading fast. Knowing he wasn’t going to get much done without light, Chanyeol went back down to the cellar - yeah, that was definitely a rat, he’d call the exterminator tomorrow - and found the fuse for the ground-floor master suite.

As the most recently-updated section of the house, the master suite actually had wall plugs, light switches, working air vents - not that he was going to risk turning on the heat until he checked it out, of course - and comparatively modern, if slightly ugly, furniture. There were musty but clean linens in the bathroom linen closet, and Chanyeol made up his great-aunt’s bed, tossed his own pillow onto it, and flopped.

He scrolled for a bit on his phone, checking his usual apps and sites. The house was really, really quiet, and the bed was larger than he was used to, and Chanyeol felt a familiar, unwanted emptiness creeping in.

Opening up his texting app, he scrolled down until he found the conversation he wanted. The last text was his own, sent a few weeks ago, just after he’d found out about his inheritance. Hey, I know this is random, but do you mind if I call you? He’d be left on read, the little checkmark taunting him. Unsurprising, but it hurt anyway.

Chanyeol typed out another text. I miss you. Please call me? I just want to go back to being friends, I promise. His thumb hovered over the ‘send’ button, but he didn’t let it drop, reading his own text over and over.

Eventually, he read it so many times that it started to sound like pathetic nonsense, and he deleted the text without sending it. Pushing his own disgust at himself to the back of his mind, he pulled up a new document on his phone instead, and lost himself in making notes and plans about the manor until he fell asleep with his phone on his chest.

Just handling the basic stuff took Chanyeol three days.

He concentrated on the main living areas first - getting the plumbing cleared out, the electricity switched on, faulty wiring replaced. He scrubbed down the entire kitchen, a massive, open affair that had clearly been built at some point in the late 80’s by knocking down the walls of the original kitchen and expanding. He had groceries in the fridge and staples in the pantry, had confirmed that the stove did, in fact, work, and had purchased a new microwave when it became apparent that the one built into the wall did not work.

The exterminator came and did a sweep of the areas Chanyeol had opened up so far; Chanyeol planned to call him back as he opened the rest of the house as well. Judging by the scraping, skritching noises in the walls, it would probably be a while before Chanyeol had completely removed any pest problems, but that was fine, Chanyeol wasn’t squeamish.

In the middle of the third night, Chanyeol was jerked awake by a horrible scream and the sound of shattering glass.

On his feet before he even fully awoke, Chanyeol stumbled out into the great room, through the foyer and out onto the front portico, and squinted out into the darkness. It was quite hard to tell, but there didn’t seem to be any movement, and there weren’t any cars in the driveway, either. The house was so far from the road, Chanyeol found it difficult to imagine any robber or intruder approaching without a car.

Seeing nothing, but still hearing the tinkle of falling glass shards, Chanyeol went back through the house, checking every room he could get to. He didn’t see anything, couldn’t figure out which window had broken - , this house was so ing big, how was he supposed to figure out where the sound was even coming from?

Then, Chanyeol happened to look out of the breakfast-room windows, and saw that the glass ceiling of the conservatory was shattered.

“Oh my God,” Chanyeol breathed, and raced down the hall.

The conservatory was part solid, and the other part entirely glass, a half-dome that jutted out from the side of the house. It has been totally closed off from the rest of the house; Chanyeol had assumed that was because it let all the heat escape in the winter and had been planning to wait until spring to restore it. Now, he pounded on the boarded-up door, yelling, “Hey! Hey, is someone in there? Are you okay?”

No answer, but Chanyeol thought he heard a groan. Rationality temporarily flew, and Chanyeol took a step back, judged the boards, and kicked.

The first kick rebounded, but he felt the plywood crack. Rebalancing, Chanyeol kicked again, putting all his strength into his heel. It was hardly the first door he’d kicked down.

The plywood splintered. Chanyeol gave it one more kick, putting a fracture line right down the center, and then yanked the pieces back, bending the nails holding them in place until the opening was wide enough to squirm through.

Glass was everywhere, shining in the light of the crescent moon, and there was so much blood. Pooling on the floor, splattered across the windows, like something large and fleshy had just exploded -

Chanyeol blinked, and it was gone. No more blood, no more viscera, no more glass. The dome ceiling of the conservatory was whole, unbroken.

“What the ,” Chanyeol muttered. He blinked again, scrubbed the back of his hand over his eyes just to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. Something wet smeared across Chanyeol’s cheek.

His hands were bleeding.

It took him a moment to realize it. He flexed his fingers, feeling splinters moving inside the skin, and watched in confused fascination as a drop of blood fell to the floor.

The house shuddered around him. Guessing that he was dizzy - had he lost that much blood already? - Chanyeol quickly leaned back against the wall and pressed his palms against his thighs, putting pressure on them to slow the bleeding.

“So that was a dream,” he said out loud. It must have been a dream. Chanyeol had never had a dream that vivid in his life, and certainly not one that affected him so badly that it kept going as a waking nightmare, but there was literally no other explanation.

In the distance, Chanyeol vaguely heard the deep, resonant chime of the ancient grandfather clock in the library. Bong. Bong.

“Two AM,” he muttered. “Great.” Exhausted, Chanyeol decided he would deal with all of this nonsense in the morning. Maybe all of it was a dream, including his hands.

Chanyeol stumbled back to the master suite and faceplanted into bed.

“And when I woke up, I was shirtless, and my favorite AC/DC t-shirt had been ripped into strips to bind my hands,” Chanyeol said.

Amber laughed in his ear, tinny over the shaky cell phone connection. “You not only broke down a door in your sleep, you also dressed the wounds? And you don’t remember it?” Chanyeol huffed, and Amber whistled. “, boy, I think the solitude is getting to you.”

“I don’t feel like I’m cracking up,” Chanyeol complained. He grimaced as he dug the tweezers into his skin, working on removing his third splinter. “I feel fine. The house is huge, but it’s got a ton of personality, you know? I don’t really feel like I’m alone.” He shifted the phone between his ear and shoulder. “Ahh, hell. I hate splinters.”

“You went back and checked the room in daylight, right?” Amber asked.

“Sure did. Nothing. I mean, the boarding was still splintered, and I could see the bloodstains on the floor from where I had bled, but no glass, no blood. I honestly dreamed the whole thing. Got it,” he crowed, dropping the wood shard on the kitchen counter. “That’s all of them. Remind me not to grab broken wood with my bare hands in the future.”

Amber snorted. “Hey idiot, don’t grab broken wood with your bare hands in the future.”

“Very funny.” Chanyeol pulled over his very large, professional first-aid kit and set to work cleaning and wrapping his hands in actual bandages this time. “The conservatory is gorgeous, though, I’m kind of glad I decided to open it. I think I’m going to work on cleaning it out today.” He glanced out of the east-facing windows. “It would be a really nice place to have my coffee in the mornings.”

“Yeol,” Amber said, “I’m gonna come up there for a few hours tonight, okay?” Chanyeol blinked. “Be prepared to feed me, because I don’t think anyone delivers takeout to the manor.”

“No, they won’t even deliver mail,” Chanyeol agreed. “I have to go down to the town to get it. Amber, you don’t have to waste your Saturday night checking on me.”

“Sure I do, and who said it was a waste? I’ll bring my tablet, we can catch you up on the dramas.”

“I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to function without WiFi in this house,” Chanyeol grumbled as he tied off the bandages. Adjusting the phone between his shoulder and ear, he went over to the sink to wash the dried blood off his fingers. “It’s so far away from the road, running a line out here would be -”

The water that gushed from the tap was too dark, too thick.

“What the…” Chanyeol blinked, and brushed one finger through the flow. It was warm, and came away deep red on his finger.

“Yeol? You okay?”

Chanyeol rubbed his fingers together, frowning. It really looked like nothing so much as blood, but obviously that couldn’t be right. Was it just a trick of the light? “Yeah,” he said distantly, “I’m fine.” It was a bad idea, but Chanyeol lifted his finger and touched his tongue to it, just to see.

Slightly metallic, but familiarly so. Tap water. He looked down, and saw the water was clear on his hands, not dark, and the stream rushing from the tap was clear too.

“I need more coffee,” he muttered, and rinsed off his fingers.

Amber chuckled. “Alright, you do that. I'll see you in a few hours, okay?”

Chanyeol agreed, hung up, and went to start his coffee maker.

The manor’s doorbell didn’t work, so Amber just yelled “Ding dong!” at the top of her lungs. Laughing, Chanyeol jogged across the house to let her in.

“I have a back door, you know,” Chanyeol said. “Actually, I have four back doors. And two side doors. And probably a lot more doors that I just haven’t found yet, honestly.”

“Yeah,” Amber said as she stepped past him, “but how am I supposed to know which door you’re closest too?”

Chanyeol pulled the door closed. “Fair point,” he conceded.

Setting down her bag, Amber cocked her head. “You been swinging from the chandelier, Yeol?” she asked, sounding amused.

Following her gaze, Chanyeol’s brow creased. The crystal chandelier in the foyer was indeed swinging back and forth, and not just a little bit, either. Wide, slow, pendulous arcs, from right over the front door all the way up almost to where the two staircases met on the second floor.

“Huh. That’s odd.” Chanyeol took a few steps up the stairs, craning his neck to look for something that could have caused a weight that heavy to swing that far. “I’ll have to take a look at that later. C’mon, I was just about to start dinner.”

In the kitchen, they fell into the same patterns as when they lived together, back when they were both just out of university and broke, with Amber helping to prep and do dishes while Chanyeol cooked. Except now they were in this huge kitchen that had clearly been state-of-the-art thirty years ago, and Chanyeol had the money to buy really good ingredients.

“This steak is gorgeous,” Amber said as she started to slice the steak in question. “Seems almost a waste to use it on a stir-fry.”

“Cut it thicker, I’ll cook it slow,” Chanyeol replied absently, his attention on getting the pan set up and choosing his spices. “I bought an entire spice rack’s worth of stuff today, how is it that I still don’t have the right spices to use?” he grumbled. “I did buy red pepper, didn’t I?”

Amber turned. “I saw it. I think it was over - !”

Chanyeol heard her trip before he saw it, and completely on instinct, he whipped around and reached out. Sharp pain sliced down his arm, and Amber stumbled against him, catching herself with hands fisted in his shirt as the chef’s knife hit the floor.

“Are you okay?” Chanyeol asked immediately.

“I think your kitchen floor is trying to kill me,” Amber said, her eyes full of humor as she glanced up. She pulled away and righted herself, and her gaze dropped. She gasped. “Yeol! !”

Chanyeol was already moving to put pressure on his arm. “I’m fine,” he said automatically, even though the warm flow of blood between his fingers was thicker than he’d expected, and it hurt. “I’ve had worse.”

“, that looks bad,” Amber said worriedly. She took his elbow, clearly intending to lead him to the sink, but then stopped, her eyes on the floor. “Uh…”

Following her gaze, Chanyeol saw that the knife had somehow embedded in a chip in the tile floor handle-first, its blade aimed up at an angle, pointing right at them and dripping blood onto the tile.

His heart gave a funny little jolt. “Good thing I caught you,” he murmured. “You would have fallen right…” He didn’t finish the thought.

Bending, Amber very carefully wrapped her hand around the knife’s handle, and tugged gently until it came free. She dropped it in the sink. “I’m sorry, Yeol,” she said. “Come on, let’s clean you up.”

The cut was long, but it was shallow; from experience Chanyeol guessed that it wouldn’t need stitches. Amber wanted to take him into town to get it looked at, but Chanyeol insisted that he didn’t want to ruin their night together, so she just helped him to clean and wrap it, and then they put their lovely steak away and heated up some frozen dumplings instead.

They had every intention of watching dramas, but Chanyeol got caught up talking about everything he’d found so far in the house. He couldn’t help it - he was a social creature by nature, and until he started talking he didn’t realize how badly he’d missed having company.

“I’ve been thinking about the northeast tower all day,” Chanyeol said. “It’s right above the conservatory, so I’m thinking, maybe a loose brick or some shingles fell and made the crashing sound that woke me? I literally ran out if the room ninety-five percent of the way asleep, I probably just dreamed the rest, but the sound, I’m certain that was real.”

Amber popped another shrimp chip in . “Did you go up there to look?” she asked curiously.

“That’s just the thing!” Chanyeol said excitedly. “I can’t figure out how to get up there! I mean, there’s a bunch of rooms on the second floor that I haven’t really explored yet, and there’s a staircase on that side that’s too damaged to climb, but I’m pretty sure it goes to the second floor of the east wing, not up to the tower.” He grabbed her hand with his uninjured one. “Here, let me show you.”

Pulling Amber behind him, Chanyeol headed past the grand staircase, noting vaguely as he went that the chandelier was no longer swinging. “That tiger rug creeps me out,” Amber muttered, turning to look back at it before they rounded the corner. “Can’t you like, turn it the other way, at least? So it’s not staring at me the moment I walk in the door?”

“That’s the best part, though,” Chanyeol told her, and ignored her when she snorted. “Okay, so, there’s two towers, right? The west tower is above my great-aunt’s room, the room I’m staying in. There’s a little room off of the side of the bedroom that has a spiral staircase in it, but the stairs are damaged so I haven’t gone up there yet.” Reaching the door of the conservatory, he kicked at the remaining boarding until it opened wide enough for them to get through easily. “The west tower only goes up one floor anyway, but the east tower -” He helped her pick her way around and over the debris in the room, pulling her under the glass dome ceiling and pointing up.

Amber looked where he was pointing. Above them, the tower stretched straight up, thrown into shadow by the streaks of sunset behind it. It was beautiful, but Chanyeol suspected it would be more beautiful at sunrise. He definitely had to get this room cleaned out so he could have his coffee in here.

“I see what you mean,” Amber said, taking a few steps to the side to get a better view. “If something fell off of that, it would land right on top of us in here.” She tapped her lip thoughtfully. “So what’s that, like, smaller tower thing, that’s attached to the main tower?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s the staircase,” Chanyeol said. “It’s the same size and shape as the staircase room on the other tower, except, you know, taller.”

“So if the stairs are pretty much right above us… What room is up there? Those windows, right there?”

Chanyeol hummed. “Not sure. Wanna go figure it out?”

Amber grinned, reversed their grips so she was the one dragging him by the hand, and lead the way.

It took them a minute to suss out which room was directly above the conservatory, but after a few minutes of opening doors and looking out windows, they found it. It looked like a study - a large, formal, stuffy room that Chanyeol could see becoming the main office if he was ever to actually make this place into a hotel. Unlike the conservatory, this room was not boarded off, but judging by the dust and the date on the newspaper in the desk drawer, it had not been actively used for at least three decades.

“I can literally see the staircase tower from here,” Amber said, leaning her head on one of the windows. “It should be right there.”

Chanyeol went back to the hall and looked. “All that’s over on this side of the wall is the stairwell that goes down to the garage,” he said as he returned. “It’s gotta be in here.”

They both looked to the built-in bookcase in the corner.

“I mean,” Amber said, “that’s almost too obvious?”

“The tower is obvious anyway,” Chanyeol pointed out.

“True.”

They examined the bookcase. It was a big, heavy thing in hand-carved hardwood, and it looked very much a part of the wall. The books on it were mostly quite old and looked somewhat arranged, like the bookcase had been intended for show rather than for actual use. It took a few minutes of pushing, tugging, sliding, and feeling along every possible surface, but then Chanyeol happened to grab the carved jade figurine of a Chinese dragon that was sitting in the corner of the top shelf. He intended to move it, to see if the latch was hidden behind it, but it turned in his hand like a vertical knob and the entire bookcase shifted.

“Hey,” he said, pleased. “That’s cool.” He set his hip against the shelves and pushed, and the bookcase swung open with a screeching groan of protest.

Wincing at the noise, Amber followed him into the tiny room that was revealed. “You need some WD-40 on those hinges,” she muttered.

“I wonder how long it’s been since this door was opened,” Chanyeol mused. The room beyond the bookcase was only just large enough to house a wrought-iron spiral staircase, exactly like the one attached to the west tower. That one had rusted completely through halfway up, but this one seemed surprisingly intact for how old it must be.

The tower had very thin, arrow-slit type windows, and the light of dusk that came through them was fading fast, so Chanyeol pulled out his phone and the flashlight. Motioning for Amber to stay put, Chanyeol started up the stairs, carefully testing each step before he put his full weight on it. The staircase rocked disconcertingly under his feet, and Chanyeol noted a few places where he’d have to replace the bolts, but he got up to the third floor without incident and called Amber up after him.

They opened the door to the third floor into a library. Dressed in green and gold, it had cluttered, much more well-used bookcases, with a small fireplace and two very, very old-looking armchairs in the center.

“Oh,” Chanyeol breathed. “I think I’m in love.”

Amber laughed at him, but Chanyeol was barely listening. He took a careful step into the room. The hardwood floor was coated with a layer of dust, and it creaked underfoot, but it felt stable, so Chanyeol braved it and started poking around. The windows in this room were large enough that Chanyeol could mostly see, but he kept the flashlight on.

He was literally afraid to touch the books on the shelves, which were so cracked and yellowed with age that Chanyeol thought they probably belonged in a museum, but he did test out one of the chairs. The upholstery was brittle, but the springs still held him, and it was surprisingly comfortable.

“Dude,” Amber said, “this book is almost two hundred years old.” Chanyeol looked up. “See? It’s signed. To my beloved Lord. Dated August 10th, 1832.” She carefully replaced the book on the shelf. “Has this tower seriously not been disturbed for two hundred years?”

“That doesn’t seem very likely,” Chanyeol said. “The secret door isn’t that hard to find. Unless this house just… Wasn’t really lived in, before my great-aunt purchased it?” He ran a hand over the beautifully carved wood of the chair’s back. “That would be a shame.”

“C’mon,” Amber said, “let’s keep going up.”

After the library, Chanyeol was prepared for something very old, very dusty, and very awesome, and he was not disappointed.

The fourth floor was a bedroom. The fireplace mirrored the one in the library below - they probably shared a chimney - but this room had two tiny balconies, one on either side of the room, only just big enough for two people to stand next to each other. The center of the room was dominated by the most ostentatious four-poster bed Chanyeol had ever seen, shrouded in faded emerald green velvet.

The only other furniture was a small nightstand and a hand-painted, Chinese-style lacquered wardrobe armoire in the corner. Curious, Chanyeol tried to open the armoire, but the doors appeared to be stuck. Wary of breaking it, he gave up, and carefully tested the bed. The bed linens crackled under his hand.

“,” Amber muttered, wrapping her arms around herself. “It’s cold as up here.”

It was a little bit chilly up here. Chanyeol eyed the windows, wondering how well they sealed after all these years. “You’re cold? Here.” He pulled off his hoodie and handed it to her. “Come on, I want to keep going.”

On the fifth floor landing, the door didn't open into a room. It opened out onto a terrace, crumbling brick pavers surrounded by an intricately carved wooden guard rail.

“Sick,” Amber said approvingly. “This is gorgeous.”

The east side of the railing had broken, rotted away where some of the bricks had crumbled out from under it. But the west side was in okay shape, and Chanyeol leaned on the railing, looking out over the sprawling slopes of the manor’s roof. “How am I supposed to decide where to drink my coffee when there's so many cool places to do it?” he grumbled. “I'll be eating in a different room every morning.”

“You poor baby.”

“I know, it's a hard life.” As Amber came over to lean next to him, Chanyeol pointed out over the roof. “Looks like a section of the west wing roof has collapsed. That'll need to get fixed ASAP.”

“What's even in the wings?” Amber asked. “Have you been in there yet?”

The railing shifted ominously, and Chanyeol pulled back, tugging Amber away before it collapsed under them. “, I need to bolt this down. Or replace it. Probably replace it.” He lead Amber back towards the stairs. “I haven't yet, no. The bottom floor of the east wing is the garage, converted from the old stables. But the staircase to the second floor of the east wing is collapsed, and the entire west wing is blocked off.” He pointed over the railing at the front center of the house. “I'm also pretty sure there's rooms on the third and fourth floors there. See the round window on the peak? But I haven't figured out how to get up there yet.”

“Why the heck would anyone need this much house,” Amber asked incredulously as they closed the door behind them and continued up the stairs.

“Good question. As far as I can tell it's always been a residence, not a business, but I have no idea what the history is. I should find out,” Chanyeol mused. “I'd be really curious to see what - oh. Wow. Look at this.”

The spiral staircase finally ended on the sixth floor, a trapdoor opening up into a small, round room barely over a meter in diameter. It was surrounded on all sides by narrow, filmy windows, one of which was shattered out.

Amber looked out though the missing window. “I need some Rapunzel hair for this,” she joked.

Leaning over her, Chanyeol looked down at the glass of the conservatory's dome. “, this is high,” he said, and quickly pulled back.

Glancing at him, Amber leaned against the pitted brick walls. “What, you're not afraid of heights, are you?”

“Not usually.” Chanyeol rubbed his fingers over the glass of the window to his right, scraping off decades of grime. Underneath, it appeared that the window glass was etched. He wondered what the pattern was. “But this room is a little freaky, isn't it? It's so tiny, it feels like there's nothing holding you up.” With one hand on the wall to steady himself, he looked out the missing window again. “It's beautiful, though. It really is.”

“I agree,” Amber said, “but I'm gonna have to admire it more another time, because I have to pee. Where's the closest functioning bathroom in this maze?”

Chanyeol gave her directions, as simple as he could manage considering it was most of the way across the house, and Amber saluted him and started down the stairs.

Curious, Chanyeol pulled his rag from his back pocket and started wiping down one window as best he could. Without using a cleaner, it didn't come totally clean, but he could at least tell that the glass was etched with some kind of artistic scene, not a repeating pattern.

“I'll have to look up how to restore etched glass,” he thought aloud, and turned to go back down the stairs.

The trapdoor was gone.

Dropping into a crouch, Chanyeol ran his hands over the wooden floor, carefully at first, and then more frantically. He couldn’t find the joints, he couldn’t even see where the trapdoor had been. “No, nonono,” Chanyeol muttered, pushing on each floorboard to try and figure out which one had the latch.

He felt a sharp twinge, and the bandage still around his arm began soaking through. He’d pulled his cut open again. Swearing under his breath, Chanyeol sat back and pulled the bandage open, intending to re-wrap it tighter. Some of his blood dripped as he did so, soaking into the wood floor.

A wave of dizziness and nausea suddenly swept over him, and Chanyeol stopped moving, breathing harshly. The room was spinning, dirty, bloody glass closing in around him. Paralyzed, Chanyeol screwed his eyes shut, but he could still feel the floor spinning under him. It took all his concentration to keep from puking.

“Yeol!”

Familiar hands landed on his shoulders, and Chanyeol gasped and opened his eyes. The trapdoor was open, and Amber was kneeling in front of him, looking panicked.

“, why didn’t you call me?” Amber scolded, already re-wrapping his arm. “You’re bleeding all over the floor!”

“Don’t close the trapdoor,” Chanyeol murmured numbly. “You can’t open it from this side.”

Amber stopped and looked at him wide-eyed. “What the ?” she asked. “Why would anyone do that? That’s dangerous as .” Chanyeol didn’t answer her, still trying to get his nausea back under control. “Okay, let’s get out of here,” Amber said. “You okay to take the stairs?”

Chanyeol nodded, and Amber helped him as best she could on the narrow, rickety spiral staircase. She tried to get him to stop at the terrace and breathe, but Chanyeol determinedly kept going until they were back in the study on the second floor.

Once the bookcase swung closed behind them, Chanyeol felt a bit better, and he leaned against the cool, dusty marble of the fireplace to catch his breath. “Sorry,” he said. “I got kind of claustrophobic up there.”

“Seriously, why didn’t you call me? I was gone for almost ten minutes.”

What? “Ten minutes?” Chanyeol asked, confused. “It couldn’t have been more than two.”

Amber cupped his cheek in her hand, looking him over. The concern in her face, the worry, made guilt and embarrassment stab through Chanyeol’s stomach. “Yeol,” she said, “are you sure you’re okay? Did you have another panic attack?”

“I’m fine,” Chanyeol insisted, automatically and immediately. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you. I’ll be more careful, I promise.” Amber gave him a Look, and Chanyeol smiled at her, as best he could. “Come on, let’s go back downstairs and just watch some dumb dramas.”

He followed her down the stairs, holding carefully to the railing and trying to shake the feeling that the floor was still spinning.

Two episodes later, Chanyeol felt much more like himself, and very embarrassed for his outburst. Amber waved him off, pointing out that getting trapped in a tiny room six stories up while losing blood would probably disorient anyone, and made him promise not to go back up there unless he took the trapdoor completely off its hinges first.

After Amber left, Chanyeol intended to go to bed. It was getting late, and since much of the house still didn’t have reliable lighting, Chanyeol had been pretty much rising and resting with the sun.

He intended to go to bed, but he didn’t. There was no way he was going all the way back up to the sixth-floor tower room again, but the rest of the tower had piqued his curiosity. He put his phone on the charger, grabbed one of his lantern-style camping flashlights, and went upstairs to the second-floor study. In the silent house, the screech of the bookcase’s ancient, belaboured hinges was piercingly loud. “WD-40,” Chanyeol reminded himself, and started up the stairs.

The tower library was silent. Very carefully, Chanyeol opened the windows, inspecting each one with the flashlight before he attempted it. Other than the dead bugs and the occasional leaf, they were relatively clean, and honestly they were in shockingly good shape, considering they were probably original to the house.

It was full-dark now, the sky moonless but filled with stars, and the breeze and sounds of crickets made the room seem far more inviting. Chanyeol turned off his flashlight and leaned on the window sash, letting his eyes adjust until he could clearly see the Milky Way. The house was a sprawling dark shape below him.

Next summer, he decided, he would bring his sleeping bag up here. Take it all the way up to the fifth-floor terrace and sleep up there, out under the stars. That would be nice.

For now, though, he turned the flashlight lantern back on, and set it on the small table between the chairs. With the room dimly illuminated, he started to poke through the bookshelves curiously.

Some of the books were stuck to the shelves, and some were stuck to each other. Some weren't books at all, but scrolls, or even folios of loose paper. Much of it was illegible, most of it was faded.

There was a stack of larger, thick-paged, leather-bound books that were in slightly better shape, so Chanyeol took them over to the chairs to examine them more closely. They turned out to be antique textbooks - anatomy, botany, illustrated atlases, all of them in English. Because the books were larger, the pages were less faded, and Chanyeol skimmed through them delightedly.

There was a smaller book tucked in between the last two large ones, and Chanyeol carefully unstuck it from the bottom book in the stack and opened it.

It was a sketchbook. The pages were yellowed and crinkled with years of humidity, and the ink on the pages was faded, but the drawings were still discernible, and they seemed to be mostly of antique men’s fashions, from all over the world. Chanyeol paged through it, fascinated.

Several pages of late-Joseon period hanboks were followed immediately by several more pages dedicated to British dandies. The next spread appeared to be a study of a single Indian nobleman’s attire, the full-figure sketch in the center surrounded by detail sketches of shoes, jewelry, the pattern on the edge of his coat.

Each sketch was accompanied by notes scrawled in the margins. Peculiarly, the notes were in multiple languages - Korean, English, and Chinese. Chanyeol's knowledge of Chinese and English was extremely limited to begin with, but judging by the antiquated syntax of the Korean, he guessed he would have trouble with this even if he was fluent.

The old chair was starting to hurt his back, but Chanyeol wanted to keep going through the sketchbook. His great-aunt’s room seemed way too far away, though - down the stairs, down the hall, down more stairs, and back through the maze to the other side of the house. There was a bedroom just below him, he could crash there?

Or maybe…

Chanyeol started up the stairs, instead of down.

The tower bedroom was quite dark, but when Chanyeol opened both balcony doors, it let in some starlight, lovely cricket chirping, and a very pleasant cross-breeze.

Setting his lantern on the nightstand, Chanyeol climbed into the bed and arranged himself until he was comfortable. Though musty, there was something really inviting about the room, particularly the bed, and Chanyeol mused aloud that he might have to move his things up here.

He ended up perusing the sketchbook until he fell asleep.

As is sometimes the case with nightmares, Chanyeol became aware that he was dreaming before he woke up, before the nightmare even ended. Still running, straining to get through the seemingly endless galleries of the manor, his feet moving slower and slower even though he was pushing himself harder and harder, Chanyeol realized it was a dream.

He fought it, fought to wake up. The walls were dripping with blood, and he had the vague thought that if he slipped in it, the tiger would catch him; but even as he thought it he knew it was dream logic and his conscious mind grabbed for the nearest door instead of running.

The bookcase swung open, and Chanyeol stumbled into the tower library, the green Persian rug turned rusty brown with bloodstains. Why the was there so much blood in this house? He shoved the door closed behind him and held it as the tiger slammed into it, roaring at him.

Chanyeol slipped, just as he had feared. He hit the ground on his knees, warm blood soaking through the legs of his pants, and the impact jolted him awake.

Heart pounding, Chanyeol stared at the shadowy green curtains above him, trying to focus on the sounds of crickets and sleepy pre-sunrise birds, trying to drag himself fully out of the nightmare. . That . His whole body was tingly, heavy, and warm, like the musty blankets he’d half kicked off were bloodsoaked and holding him down.

Groaning aloud just to hear his own voice, Chanyeol, with great effort, rolled onto his side.

Empty black eyes stared back at him.

Startling back so hard he nearly fell from the bed, Chanyeol stared, and blinked, and stared some more. There was a body in the bed with him - a man. Wide-eyed, black-haired, and bloodstained. His throat was sliced open, blood pooling onto the green sheets and turning them brown, just like in the dream.

“I’m still dreaming,” Chanyeol said out loud. His voice echoed off the old walls, mingling with the cheery noises of birds beginning to wake, but the body beside him didn’t disappear. Chanyeol forced himself to look away, to focus on the open balcony door and the first rays of sunrise he could just see beginning to peek over the trees.

When he looked back, the body was still there.

Incredulous, Chanyeol reached out and pushed it. He expected his hand to go through it - he was hallucinating, he had to be hallucinating - but to his horror, the body was solid under his hand, still warm. The man rolled under his touch, head lolling obscenely back, and a fresh gout of blood spouted from his neck, soaking Chanyeol’s hand.

Chanyeol screamed.

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