The space behind the door was pale, half-finished, and smelled of sand, and as they walked through it, Rube talked continuously so that she wouldn’t panic.  (She almost thought, “so that Sally wouldn’t panic,” but then she decided to be honest with herself.)

“I don’t think they’ll notice we’re gone unless someone points it out,” she told Sally, “Think about it- they know the three of us are sisters.  And they can… merge with their siblings.”  They rounded a corner.  “And they probably know that humans can’t, but if no-one reminds them, their minds will just fill in what they expect to see, right?”

“Right,” said Sally, with a look on her face as if she was humouring a lunatic.

“It’s like that thing where you try to read a paragraph, and all of the words have the first and last letter in the right place, but the rest of the letters are mixed up, but you can read it and understand it anyway.  You see what you expect to see.  That’s why…”

She broke off.  Up ahead of them, in the inside wall, was a door.  It was hanging slightly ajar.

“We need to be quiet when we walk past,” Rube told Sally, nodding towards it.

Sally shook her head.  “I don’t think it goes back into the living room…”

She was right.  The door looked as if it had warped and swelled over the years s that it could no longer close properly, and as they got closer Rube could see through the gap.  It looked like there was a set of steps.  They went down rather than up, but they went somewhere.

Rube opened the door fully, and glanced at Sally for confirmation on what they were going to do.  She didn’t really need to, though.  They hadn’t come this far not to check everything out.

So they descended into the Iridescences’ basement, Rube fighting every instinct that told her what a bad idea it was.  She couldn’t even see what was down there.  A beige curtain, made out of some kind of thick, heavy material, hung over the bottom of the stairs.  When Rube touched it so she could move it aside, it had a grubby, greasy feel to it, as if it had been there gathering dust for decades on end.

On the other side was a hallway, and Rube was unnerved by how featureless it was.  The walls, in the same shade of grey as the scuffed tile on the floor, looked as if they had been made out of the same cardboard as cheap egg cartons, all rough and knobbled, looking as if it would fall apart if it got even slightly damp.  There was light, enough to see everything clearly, but no matter how much they looked around, they couldn’t find the source of it.  No bulbs, no windows, no anything.

At the end of the hallway, there was a bend that led into another.  And halfway down that hallway, jutting out of the wall, was a huge skeleton.

Sally was the one who screamed first, which at least meant that Rube felt less embarrassed later.  It was understandable, though- that thing had practically leapt out at them.  It towered over them, taking up half the hallway, its fangs and empty black eye sockets reminding Rube of that close-up photo of a spider in her old Biology textbook.

Sally, her hands still clutched in front of her chest, let out a sheepish laugh.  “Do you think it’s an elephant?”

“Maybe?” said Rube, “Or a mammoth?”  She eyed the skeleton warily.  They were in a new place, after all, and they didn’t know all the rules yet.  Rube couldn’t be completely certain that the skeleton wouldn’t suddenly roar into life.  “But what’s it doing…”

She broke off.  She’d heard something.

There were footsteps coming towards them.  Rube and Sally turned to the other end of the hallway, beyond the skeleton, just in time to see someone put her head around the corner.  A girl about Rube’s age, with hair the same shade of blue as her skin.

(To be continued)