The first thing Elias Thorne noticed was the cold.
It wasn't the cold of an October night in rural Pennsylvania. That kind of cold waited politely outside the windows. This cold lived in the attic itself, pooled in the corners like something spilled, and it breathed against the back of his neck as he climbed the last rung of the ladder at 2:17 a.m.
He should have been asleep. Marianne was asleep, one arm flung across the pillow where he should have been, and down the hall his children lay in their strange new bedrooms, surrounded by cardboard boxes still labeled in his handwriting: KITCHEN. BOOKS. WREN'S TOYS. Nobody in the house knew he was awake.
Nobody except, perhaps, the house.
"Just a quick look," he whispered. His flashlight swung across rafters furred with dust. Insulation hung in gray tongues. Somewhere close by, something ticked: tick, tick, tick. Cooling wood, he told himself. Or a clock with no hands.
Then the beam found the box.
It sat dead center in the attic, though nothing else did. No clutter around it. No old furniture. Just a square cardboard box on bare floorboards, as if someone had set it there that evening and waited. Beside it stood a Super 8 projector with a cracked leather strap. Beside that, a pale rectangle on the wall where a bedsheet had once been hung as a screen.
Elias felt every hair on his arms lift.
The movers had cleared this attic. He had walked through it himself with the realtor, with her too-bright smile and her careful avoidance of the oak tree in the backyard. Empty, she'd said. Broom clean.
Nothing about this was broom clean.
He crouched. The box was labeled in faded blue marker, in a child's rounded handwriting: HOME MOVIES. Beneath it, smaller: Picnic. Pool Day. Garden Party. Bedtime. A heart had been drawn after the last word. A little girl's heart.
His throat went dry. He told himself it was only film. He was a writer, and writers lived for exactly this: the box in the attic, the story waiting to be told. Three years ago his name had topped the bestseller list. Now he was forty-one, in debt, and the only thing standing between his family and ruin was a book that did not exist yet.
And this house was the book.
He had not told Marianne. That was his sin, and he carried it like a stone in his shoe. The family who lived here before them hadn't moved out. They had been found, all four of them, in the backyard, and the town still would not say how. He'd bought the house at a discount because nobody else would touch it. He had told his wife it was a bargain. A quiet place. A fresh start.
A fresh start, he thought, and almost laughed.
He dragged the projector toward him, hands shaking. The cord was frayed, but the plug fit. When he flicked the switch, the motor woke with a dry rattle, a sound like bones in a bag, and a white square of light jumped onto the pale patch of wall.
Four reels lay in the box, each in a metal can. He lifted the first. It was cold as a stone from a riverbed. The label read, in the same childish hand: Picnic.
He threaded the film. It took three tries. His fingers had gone numb.
Then he pressed the lever, and the attic filled with the soft, stuttering whir of the past.
Sunlight. That was the first shock, so bright after the dark that he flinched. A green lawn, grainy and warm, the colors bleeding the way old film bled. A checkered blanket. A wicker basket. A man in a short-sleeved shirt laughing at something off screen, a woman passing out sandwiches, two children, a boy and a girl, rolling down a grassy slope with their arms flung wide.
It was ordinary. It was almost painfully ordinary. Elias exhaled, and his breath smoked in the air in front of him.
Just a family, he thought. Just a nice, normal...
The camera swung. Whoever held it turned, and the lawn spun, and for a moment the frame filled with the huge, twisted shape of a tree. The oak. The same oak that stood outside his kitchen window right now, clawing at the October sky.
Cut into its trunk, at the height of a child's eyes, was a spiral of nine deep notches.
The family hadn't noticed. The man was pouring lemonade. The little girl was braiding a chain of daisies. And the camera crept toward the tree, closer, closer, as if the person behind the lens were walking and breathing and enjoying every step.
Then the sun was gone. The film jerked, and the screen went black, and in the black something moved, a pale smear that slid across the frame too fast to name.
When the picture returned, it was night.
The same lawn. The same blanket. But now the family sat in a ring upon it, wrists bound behind them, mouths sealed with gray tape, eyes wide and wet and fixed on the camera. The boy was shaking so hard the whole frame trembled.
Behind them stood a small figure, holding something long and metal that caught the moonlight.
Elias tried to scream and found he had no air. His hand scrabbled for the switch. The projector kept turning, kept clicking, and the small figure on the wall slowly, slowly began to lift its head toward the lens, as if it could see him.
It knows, he thought. It knows I'm watching.
The face filled the frame. It was smiling.
And behind that smile, in the black between the oak's branches, something enormous leaned down to look at him too.