As time passed, the nervous feelings that had come with Nathan’s suicide (as the police soon found out) slowly drained away until there was nothing left but memories. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop tensions from rising throughout the house among the different writers. When I had planned the experiment two years ago, something had pushed me to invite people into the house that had a bad history with one another. In my opinion, that was one very good reason for not telling them who else would be joining them in that house.

I would come downstairs every morning to find two of them fighting at the table, arguing endlessly about something. Every time I saw them screaming, I would remember that strange, evil delight that I’d felt when I had put them on my list. Somehow, by arguing, they would draw everyone else’s attention away from the awkwardness of the situation and over to them.

But there were still a few things I was worried about. Or, rather, people. Some writers are generally known to be recluses, and usually the case was that the stranger the genre, the more withdrawn the author. I kept an eye on three or so people, watching them, secretly making sure that they were all right. Dangerously, I even developed a kind of favoritism for them, a sort of affection from afar, that I regretted they couldn’t know about.

The most extreme of these cases, our resident science-fiction writer, was especially nervous around the two warring parties, who were often insulting the other’s work. Both of the same romantic genre, they often argued on the finer points of the craft, which sometimes got quite graphic. When everyone else gathered around the table, trying to break them up, she’d stand against the wall, looking petrified. Every day, this got worse, until she started going into the kitchen, just to get away from it. After about a week of this, I decided that it was finally time for me to do something.

One morning, I crept into the kitchen a few minutes after she’d gone in, and sat at the table across from her. “What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing… nothing’s wrong…” she said, sounding almost exactly like a character from one of her more famous novels, “Something… strange. Happened. And I can’t. Deal with it.”

I sighed. This was going to be difficult. “What happened, then?”

“Uh… well, it’s a weird story. But no weirder than yours,” she said, cracking a faint smile. “A few weeks ago, I went down to the library, to try to find a book to read. It was late, and I was just about to go back up to my room, when… I saw a book that had been left open on the table suddenly shoot out this beam of light that was so strong it lit up the whole room. Shocked, I ran over to the book, to see what had happened. As I began looking it over, the flash came over me again… and the next thing I knew, I was back in my room. It was morning.”

I stared at her. “Are you sure about this?”

She was silent. I asked again, and she refused to say anything more. Confused, I left the room, wondering what this had to do with the arguments, and what more she knew. Something didn’t fit, and it was, unfortunately, my job to figure out what she neglected to tell me.

Complier’s Note: This story will feature characters drawn from the Red Pen guild in a replica of the Winchester Mystery House, which I suggest you look up. Odd chapters will be from unnamed narrator, even from the POV of a houseguest. This chapter was written by Strings.