THE VESTIBULE

There's a place you know better than your own house.

You haven't been there in years. You never needed to go: it came with you.

It's a palace. It has hallways you ran up, a bedroom where your hand must never hang off the bed, a closet whose door never quite closed. It has a room for every sound that woke you, every shape in the dark, every night you pretended to be asleep.

You closed the doors. You grew up. You forgot.

The palace didn't.

Frissonia doesn't tell stories. Frissonia reopens rooms. One at a time, at night, in a low voice.

This palace isn't ours. It's yours. We just have the key.

You already know the way.