It strikes you oddly when you enter the parlor to see Billy slouched against the front door.

He's still. His arms are limp at his sides. His eyes are blank, the bundle of red yarn matted to his head. What unnerves you, though, is how his chin is tucked into his frilly collar as if he's fallen asleep.

You walk with small steps from the dining room hall to the couch and pull your knees up to your chest. Billy is far scarier when he's still than when he's moving. It makes you think he'll pop awake one day and snap your neck. You wonder if he decided to fall asleep against the door, or if he was propped up there by the rabbit to keep you from leaving.

You rest your chin on your knees and stare at him. "Keep," was the phrase they used here and there. You suppose that's Billy's job: to keep the child where they should be. Keep them from leaving. You suppose he's designed to lure them in. Maybe he's a comfort to them. You remember thinking that clowns were all right as a child; now you only find them disturbing.

Billy is small potatoes compared to Witch and the rabbit, though. You appreciate that he hasn't tried to lie, hurt or cheat you thus far. You chalk that up to the fact that he barely does anything at all.

You curl up tighter and assure yourself that Billy won't hurt you. At least, not unless you try to leave. Why does seeing him drawn up at the door frighten you so much?

The rabbit has gone upstairs again. It'll let you know when it's time for you to go back to the cellar. For now, you can roam—though you can feel a sharpness in its stare these days when it ushers you down, almost like a warning. You know what it's hiding. It knows you know. It looks at you with that shrewd, unspoken understanding, and you know you've hardly won anything.

Tonight, you think you'll go down the black hallway again. Not into the kitchen, god, no. It's probably locked a thousand times over after your little break-in. You think of the other doorway you passed before the corner. Yes. One more room to scratch off.

You stand up from the couch and ignore Billy's looming presence as you approach the hall. You can't help but feel like you've forgotten something.

As you're about to walk in, something zips out past you and you stagger back from the doorway.

TVA beelines to the rose wallpaper and takes a sharp right just when he's about to crash, making for the hall that leads to the cellar. You catch your breath and take a tentative step back towards the doorway. That was probably it. You enter the hall.

You still rely on feeling along the wall to know where you're going in the pitch black. When you bump into the strip of door casing about ten feet down, your fingers cling to it.

You reach past it and try to find the door attached. Your hand waves through thin air, a dim red light catching on your palm. You can see your hand.

You blink and poke your head past the casing. It takes a few seconds to adjust your eyes, but you can see the inside of the room. Wooden tables line the wall opposite you, two square ones by the walls on either side. Resting on them are shallow plastic trays. Lamps of varying kinds stand scattered about the tables. Some are switched on, emanating that faint red light, while the two glass ones on the side tables are off.

Strung to the far wall are clothespins, holding photos that are too cloaked in darkness to discern. Of course. It's a darkroom.

You walk in hesitantly and approach the trays lining the wall. They're filled halfway with some kind of thin liquid—it looks like water, but you have to doubt that—and they're all labeled by the pair, in messy capital letters:

"DEV."

"STOP."

"FIX."

The trays on the two tables on either side of the room are blank. As you walk along the wall, you notice two photos submerged in what must be the developer. You can see a trace of their negatives, but barely more than that. You lean closer to the one on the left.

It's a pudgy young girl in a fairy costume, the ends of a pillowcase bunched in her hands.

You stand back up straight and squeeze your eyes shut. You won't think about that right now.

The last of the photos strung on the wall is fully developed. You have to knock your legs on the table in front of you in order to get a good look at it; to avoid spilling any trays, you reach up and unclip the photo, handling it by the white edge with a shaky, delicate hand.

You squint and hold it close to your face, trying to discern a thing in what little light you have. You wonder if it was smudged or set wrong; it doesn't look like the usual clean portrait of whatever children had stayed here last. It looks more like the vague shape of roadkill.

You let out a quiet grumble when it seems your eyes just won't be able to adjust well enough for this. You turn to the table on your left and, after a long stare at the doorway, pull the switch on its lamp.

It's a green banker's lamp, you can see, as that corner of the darkroom is bathed in a stream of plain white light. You hold your breath a moment, knowing whatever pictures are developing now will most certainly be ruined.

Well, if the rabbit really cares, it could just lock me out of this room too.

You shake the thought from your mind and hold the photo under the light. The picture is bled black and overexposed—it's someone collapsed in a heap on the chintz couch, the harsh light painting their [S/C] face yellow. They're shabbily clothed with loose pants and a worn, stained sweater. Their hair is matted to their face, a faint line of drool crusted along their mouth and chin. They're sickly; they look dead. They're you.

You breathe in thinly through your nose. You feel faint looking at this. You wonder who carried you from the couch to the cellar Halloween night. You wonder if you were still awake when they took that photo, if you can remember the flash or the smell of the house, or the sight of the rabbit standing over you as you made yourself sick with candy.

You must have been so hungry that night. Hungry and cold.

And you must have ducked your head, curled up on the couch, and cracked open your eyes to see Billy standing by the front door, a dark and still blur.

But before that you had to have walked in.

You click off the lamp.

You clutch the photo to your chest, stumble towards the door and lean back on it, closing it shut. You sink to the floor and pull up your knees. You won't have any interruptions.

You squeeze your eyes shut and crease the photo with your thumbs, as if to squeeze the memory out of the film. You're cold, hungry, tired. It's Halloween night. You need a place to stay.

—

The house looks decrepit and paper-like, as if a doll were supposed to live inside. It's small, the outside peeling away to reveal the brick underneath. The windows are shut and boarded. It sits at the very edge of town by a mulchy woods. The trick-or-treaters haven't so much as looked at it all night.

You drag your feet to the dilapidated front porch and idle, grateful for a moment of rest. You sway in the still air like a poorly rooted flagpole and count your options.

One. Stand out here and die.

Two. Go inside, and maybe die.

You'd heave a sigh right now if you had the strength. You blink at the door, its minute ridges more plastic than wood, a pulsing static vignette around your vision. It really does look like a dollhouse. You're sure that nobody lives here.

You knock on the door anyways.

You decide you'll stand here for about thirty seconds longer before you decide to curl up on the porch and fall asleep. Maybe if you're lucky, you'll never wake up.

Your knock is answered in ten. The door opens and the patio you're timidly standing on is flooded with harsh yellow light. The blurry silhouette before you looms so tall that its head touches the doorframe.

"A trick-or-treater, all by yourself?"

The voice is sweet and feminine with a hint of southern twang—but it doesn't sound quite right. It doesn't sound real. You squint up at the face attached to this stilted dial tone voice.

A sheep's head mounted on a segmented copper neck looks down at you.

Your eyes go wide as you process the sight. You want to believe this thing didn't really answer the door, that it's just a prop, but you can't see who would have answered you otherwise through the blinding light. The sheep's "neck" is collared, attached to a large gray animatronic body, its chest and stomach padded with suede. Segmented copper claws poke from its fleece arms, as if its skin is just meant for dress. Its yellow eyes betray little emotion, a pair of ram's horns jutting out from underneath its dark woolen mane. Its rubbery mouth is curled in a smile.

The longer you stand there, gawking at what must be some kind of retired fast food mascot, the longer you get the feeling it's waiting for you to speak.

A gust of wind nearly shakes you off your feet. You clutch your sweater tighter to yourself and look past the giant animatronic. There's light inside. Warmth inside. There might be food inside. Maybe you can talk to a worker who lives here, whatever kind of mad science project they're running, and ask to stay the night.

"I..."

You turn your gaze back up to the sheep and—no, it's just as terrifying as it was before. You decide that whatever you do, you won't disagree with a thing it says.

"Yeah, okay. Sure." You clear your throat and narrow your gaze on its collar. "Trick-or-treating."

When the sheep—ram?—speaks again, her jaw only flaps to the sound of the words, unable to form any real shapes, her voice muffled and unnatural.

"Come inside. We have plenty of candy for you."

"Sure, sure," you say on the tail of her words, and drag yourself inside the moment she steps away from the doorway. The ram-sheep-thing closes the door behind you, and it gives an extra click as you regain your senses on whatever horrible purple carpet lines the front hall.

Looking around—which burns your eyes, the sting of the sickly light—it's definitely a parlor. Bright chintz and framed photos line the walls, a coffee table in the middle with a large plastic bowl of candy. Off to the side is a large phonograph. What's most jarring—besides, god, that carpet—is that every other room beyond this one is completely dark. You wonder if the other rooms are ever in use; if maybe the goat only exists to welcome beggars into her parlor, then disappear. You wonder if anyone, anything else, lives here at all. You shrink into yourself and resist sitting down.

"Listen, I'm really sorry to ask this of you, but—"

"It's awfully late," she remarks, and you feel another apology welling up before she says,

"Are you sure it's safe for a child like you to be wandering around at this hour?"

Excuse me?

"I—child—?" you sputter. Whatever you've been planning to say has evaporated on your tongue. You shake your head. "You know what, whatever. I-I'm fine. I just need to—"

Your stomach growls. Loudly.

The silence that follows, and the way the sheep has stopped moving, tells you that jarred even her.

After a moment of you wondering if you've broken her, she walks jerkily to the coffee table and picks up the bowl of candy. She holds it out to you in offering.

"Here. Hold your bag out."

Before you can respond, she dumps the entire bowl onto the floor.

The two of you stand still. The sheep smiles, two yellow teeth like kernels of corn poking out from her lips.

You drop your gaze to the floor. Your stomach twists at the sight of all the candy scattered there.

After another tense minute of silence, you crouch to gather as many of the pieces as you can carry and sit on the couch nearest to you. You stare down at your two fistfuls of candy, at a loss. You look back up to the darkened rooms beyond this one. Maybe nobody else will ever come.

You unwrap one piece of candy with trembling hands and bite into it. Instantly, you start to salivate. Just the feeling of a tiny chocolate in your mouth is making the knot in your stomach twist tighter.

You finish that piece and then unwrap another. You finish that one, then pop one more. Then another. You can't stop yourself. You can worry about getting real food later. Eventually, you curl sideways on the couch as you eat, the remaining pieces in your lap tumbling onto the cushions.

"I'm sorry," you say between bites. The mush of chocolate and saliva in your mouth causes your words to slur together. You swallow and your vision blurs with tears. You blink them away. "I—I just need to stay here for the night." It's difficult to keep your voice steady all of a sudden.

Once you finish one fistful of candy, you look up from your own shaking hands. Another figure stands in the black doorway leading from the parlor. You freeze at once, eyes wide.

It's an orange-and-yellow rabbit drawn almost to ceiling height, staring straight at you. Its felt ears are tall and segmented, its body the same suede as the sheep's. Around its neck is a dark purple bowtie; just underneath is a gaping black cavity in its chest, rough around the edges as if it'd been ripped open. Its neck and claws are a strange green color—you realize they're copper, too, so old that they're coated all over in patina.

The rabbit walks into the room, and you're startled from your daze. You're far too exhausted to get up, instead cowering against the couch cushions as it stops by the coffee table and cocks its head at you. Its movements are more fluid than the sheep's, as if it's being piloted rather than jerked around on a string. Two black sockets are in place of its eyes, and its mouth is fixed in a wide, toothy smile.

"Oh," the sheep says. She shakily approaches the rabbit as if on rollers and rests her claws on its shoulder. You suddenly feel as if you're watching some kind of grotesque puppet show.

"My friend arrived just in time to meet you. This is the Pumpkin Rabbit."

The rabbit does not look back at the sheep. Its hollow eyes stay locked on you.

Your mouth goes taut. You wonder if the rabbit is really just a suit, a character someone is playing as if they work at a theme park. Your eyes dart around the parlor you're lying in, ping-pong between the rabbit and the sheep, posed like husband and wife. A disbelieved shudder runs through you.

Did I just walk into a freak's house?

"Listen," you say at last, and try to make yourself smaller. These two animals staring down at you as you scarf down candy and plead for help—you can't help but feel humiliated. "Whatever you're doing here, I'm—I'm not looking. I don't see it. I just need to stay."

"That sounds perfectly reasonable."

The rabbit's mouth doesn't move with its voice, and dear God, is its voice low. It's so soft and murmury, too, that you nearly ask it to repeat itself. You manage a surprised blink. It approaches and leans over your crumpled body on the couch.

"How about you stay here for the night," it continues through locked teeth, "then in the morning, we'll let you go home?"

Your voice is gone for a moment. The darkened rooms, the nauseous yellow light, the huge, terrifying animal costumes—you're convinced this is a dream. The rabbit lifts a patina hand to the cavity in its chest.

"Where is your home, little one?"

No home, you almost say. But you can't even muster that.

"I'm—I'm sorry," you mumble instead into the cushions. "I'm so sorry. It'll just be for one night."

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

—

Bang. Bang. Bang.

You snap awake and let out a small yelp. Something is pounding on the door, on your back. The way it draws back and rattles, stocky, like a broken printer, tells you it's TVA. You're blocking the way.

You hurry to stand up, feeling stupid. You fling open the door and flatten yourself against the wall behind it on shaky legs. You tuck the photo into the waist of your pants at glacial pace and pull your sweater back over, patting your beltline to make sure it's secure.

TVA rolls straight for the two photos still submerged in the developer and lifts them from their trays with his grabber-hands. He waits a moment—maybe for the photos to stop dripping from the corners—then slides to the right and lays them inside the two trays labeled "STOP."

You wonder over the next few minutes when he will pause his work and turn around to close the door, only to find you standing there with one of his photos tucked into your pants. He might alert the rabbit, however he would do that; you haven't heard him speak a word before. He might simply snatch it back with his grabbers and place it with the others without a care about why you're there.

The longer he goes at his work, though, the more you start to think he won't do anything.

You hold your breath and cling to the doorknob, waiting for your chance. He keeps going, unbothered—but every now and then he will pause a moment, whip around to reach for something at another table, and you'll go unnaturally still.

At last, after he's taken the two photos out of the unlabeled pair of trays and clipped them to the string, he zips out of the room and slams the door shut.

You pat the photo under your sweater again and crack the door open. You poke your head out and look up and down the hallway—not that that will do much, it's so dark—before following him out as quietly as you can.

The rabbit is standing just around the corner.

You flinch. You step back and, before you can stop yourself, clutch the photo to your side. The rabbit doesn't move. It just stares.

You set your jaw and keep your eyes square on its face. It must know you did something. You try to decipher what it's about to do, what it must be thinking.

After a moment, it raises its head to look at something over your shoulder. You turn around.

Billy is still propped by the door.

You look again at the rabbit's face, at its unperturbed eyes.

You haven't won anything.