The house was all wrong.
On the outside, it looked fine. Blue Victorian two-story. Gray shingles. A brown door, which Mom despised. One porch swing with a chain that could snap at any moment. A minuscule yard, with grass just short of dying and a paved walkway to the street.
Inside, the layout changed. Rooms switched places every day. Hallways tipped toward hell, listed left and tripped their occupants. Floors inclined or declined without explanation. Without consistency. Lights flickered, but that was the least shocking thing that happened in the house.
We moved in seven months ago. We should have moved out right away.
The house was all wrong then, and now so are we.
On our last day, I awoke in the middle of the night. My bed had moved across the room. I sat up and hit my head against the window sill, which was halfway up the wall now.
I rubbed my skull and stared at my door, much farther away than it had been. That was nothing new.
But my mother’s scream was.
Throwing off the covers, I leaped out of bed and ran toward the door. The floor lurched beneath me. My stomach lurched with it. Wood and metal groaned as the room changed shape again. I froze. I didn’t have time for this.
“Laurie!”
My mother’s voice struck my spine like an arrow. Goosebumps rose on my arms. “I’m on my way!”
She screamed again, but this time, her voice didn’t form any words. The floor stopped moving. I didn’t waste any time examining the new layout. Instead, I burst through my doorway and staggered out into the hall—and promptly froze again.
Normally, Mom’s room sat next to mine. Now it glowed at the end of the hall, a beacon in the darkness, thanks to the lamp on her nightstand. I sprinted toward it without thinking, hurtling into the room without stopping to reorient myself.
What I saw there stopped my heart.
The furniture in my mom’s room had become a tangled mess. Her desk and bookcase formed a misshapen totem pole, with books sticking out of the wood in all directions. Her bed, split in half, cornered the desk/bookcase mutant like bookends. An enormous chasm spanned the floor. Instead of revealing the living room below, it appeared to open into some insane abyss.
But that was all tame stuff, compared to my mother.
The abomination—as that was all I could think of when I looked at what had been my mother—stood impossibly tall and thin, like it had been stretched out almost to breaking. The Eldritch entity waved its useless, flesh-colored tentacles at me, flashing jagged teeth from the mouth in its chest. Its eyes were massive—one winked from its hip the other leaked tears at the creature’s stomach.
I could only watch, helpless, as I felt my bones break and my organs switch places.
The house wasn’t only rearranging its interior.
It was rearranging us.
