Page 112 of The Manor of Dreams

Rennie blinked and realized that she was seeing vines.

She hauled herself up in bed. Her head pounded.No. Not again.Drawing her knees up to her chest, she watched as the vines traced down, drilling into the walls, and making them fracture and split.

This was a nightmare. The house was shaking. The floor itself tilted. Rennie grabbed on to the headboard of her bed to anchor herself. Something shattered. This was how it had been when she was a kid. She’d always dreamed of the walls rumbling, splitting apart.Wake up, Rennie. Wake up.

Someone pounded on her door.

“Yí Ma!”

Rennie froze. It was her niece’s voice. This couldn’t—

This was real. The vines, the house, the cracks in the drywall. Her mind was muddy, but her body knew she had to move.

“I’m coming,” she called out. “I’m coming!” She pushed herself from the bed and staggered forward.

When she looked up, her mother was standing in front of the door.

Rennie let out a cry and scrambled backward. A searing pain cut through her foot, and she realized she’d stepped on the glass from a broken bottle. Dark wine puddled around her feet.

Ma tilted her head and looked at her curiously. The wrinkles around her eyes had deepened. She opened her mouth and dirt fell from her lips. “Are you so scared of your own ma?”

Rennie shivered. She had to get out. She forced herself to look the ghost of her mother in the eye. She was wearing the same clothes Rennie had last seen her in.

“Please,” she said, her voice plaintive.

“You were the one I wanted to call me the most when I was alive. You were the daughter that flew the farthest away from me. You broke my heart.”

Rennie squeezed her eyes shut. She remembered the promise she had made to herself so many years ago, sitting by the phone, that she would only call if she had good news. How new and beautiful and possible everything had seemed then. She could barely register the chaos around her. The wood of her dresser groaned as vines tore it apart. “I meant to call,” Rennie whispered. “I really did.”

“I can’t even remember the last time you came to see me,” Ma mused, oblivious to the destruction. Rennie opened her eyes. “Was it New Year’s, five years ago?”

“I saw you two weeks ago,” Rennie cried. “I came, don’t you remember?”

“That wasn’t Ma.” A voice emerged behind her. Rennie knew, even without turning her head, that it was Ada. “She was dead by then.”

Rennie stopped short as a chill poured over her. She remembered how odd Ma had looked that evening; her skin so pale, it was almost translucent. The strange, flat hiss of her voice. Her mottled teeth.

If she had already been dead… then Rennie had been speaking to a ghost.

“???,” Ma rasped. Dirt dripped from her lips. Her eyes glittered cruelly.My darling daughter.“You had the whole world. I had so many dreams for you. I sacrificed so much for you. And look at you now.”

The window overlooking the garden shattered clean through. Rennie staggered back, her breaths jagged in her chest.Wake up, wake up, she told herself. She faced the apparition of her mother, the expectations that had tormented her for a lifetime. Now she knew the truth of what had happened thirty-four years ago. What her mother had done—what her father had done—and the aftermath of it.

“You—abandoned us,” Rennie whispered. “You failed us too.”

“I gave you everything I had,” Ma snarled. “Wasn’t it enough, Bao bèi?”

“This isn’t real,” the ghost of Ada warned. “This is not Ma. It’s this house. Rennie, you need to leave. Before it’s too late.”

Maybe it wasn’t Ma’s ghost. It was a hallucination. A specter of her worst fears.

Rennie would have once cowered under Ma’s gaze, shriveled in the glare of it. She could have blamed her mother for playing tricks, for allowing them to dream, and then wielding those dreams against them. But now she understood that it didn’t just start and end with her mother. It was their family, this house, this place that surrounded them, that had poisoned them with triumphant and ruinous visions. She remembered when she looked in the mirror on the night her mother had won the Oscar. How clearly she had seen that vision, and how hungrily she’d latched on to that fate. How it compelled her for the rest of her life. Maybe each of them had seen such visions, only to be broken bythem. They had manifested and magnified their dreams, and in doing so, turned them into curses. This house fed on their hunger, their ambition, until it corrupted love and reason itself. A madness festering inside each of them.

The floor heaved. Rennie crumpled to her knees. Dust hailed down, and with a terrible, thunderous crack, a chunk of the outside wall dropped away.

Her mother started to cry, and Rennie still felt a strange ache to comfort her, even as the floors began to crumble beneath her feet.

“Rennie,” Ada cried behind her. “Get out.”

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