The foyer was quite grand. Moonlight had brightened the rather large room slightly. This room seemed to be the foyer. In the center was a grand staircase that led to the second floor, and on either side of the room were many chairs, sofas, and tables. Pictures hung crookedly on the walls. The walls themselves were in severe condition; the wallpaper peeling off in many different places. Of course there were cobwebs hanging around in places within the foyer.
  "We should go back," I said.
  "But this place looks so awesome!" Amber protested.
  A few seconds after we heard a loud slam. We looked behind us and saw that the door had shut. I twisted and tugged the doorknob, but the door didn't budge.
  "We're locked in!" I panicked. "We need to get out!"
  Amber was strangely calm. She tried to open the door herself, but it didn't work for her, either. "We'll be fine... Hey, look at this!" Amber exclaimed, suddenly changing the subject.
  I rolled my eyes, but I crouched next to her. She stood stooped over the floor, holding a piece of paper.
  "It has strange writing and symbols," Amber said, showing the wrinkled paper to me. "What could it possibly mean?"

  I shrugged. "I don't really care; I just want to-"

  There was a loud cracking noise, and the floor gave way beneath us. I tried grabbing onto the solid floor, but instead I went plummeting toward the bottom of the dark pit.
  When I landed, there was a loud sploosh. I had landed underwater! I swam up to the surface, and I was gasping for breath. The strange water-like substance was up to my chest.
  "Amber?" I called out. "Are you there?"
Everything was silent at first, but then I heard a faint, "Yeah?! I'm over here!"
  My eyes adjusted to the darkness. I looked up and saw the hole in the floor which we had fallen through.
  I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I jumped. "It's just me," Amber replied. I sighed with relief.
  "How are we going to get back up?" I questioned.
  We both stood there for a moment, thinking. We looked around the dark pit, the water up to our chests splashing about as we tried to find a way out.
Soon enough, I stumbled through a doorway. "I think I found something!" I called.
  Amber located me, and we went through the doorway that led to a stairway. We carefully went up the stairs, groping around for a railing to hold on to.
  A dim light had shone through a doorway that stood before us. We stepped in, and there were shelves and shelves of books arranged in different directions.
  “A maze?” I said.
  Amber and I sighed. “We’re going to have to find our way through,” Amber told me. “If we want to get home,” she added.
  I grumbled as we entered the library maze. There were twists and turns everywhere, and sometimes we ended up going in circles. The dim light didn’t make things that much easier.
  After what seemed like half an hour of navigating the library, we finally came across a route we hadn’t recognized before. We turned left, and followed this new route.
  It seemed to be ten minutes before we came across an opened book sprawled across the floor.
  Amber picked it up. “The designs on these pages look like the ones on the piece of paper I found.”
  “Do you still have it?” I asked her.
  She nodded, and pulled the damp paper out of her pocket.
  “There’s a decoding chart in this book,” Amber said to me, flipping through the pages of the rather strange book. Once we found the decoding chart, I was able to decode it first. I read aloud:

“Break this unwanted curse,
Unlift this dark spirit,
Kill the one with the secrets,
Before matters get worse.”

  There was a long pause before Amber put the book under her arm. “We’ll take it with us,” she told me. “Just in case.”     We shivered, but I wasn’t sure whether it was from the water we swam in or the eerie message I had read aloud.

  We continued through the maze, and soon enough we had reached the end of the maze. There was a spiral staircase that we climbed up. The door at the top was made of some kind of metal. I put my hand against the doorknob, and it felt oddly cold. Probably because I was still cold from being drenched with water. I opened the door, and a blast of cold air whipped against our faces. Frost lined the edge of the metal door, and there was a loud buzzing noise made me want to smash my head into a brick wall.

  “Where are we?” I asked, astonished by the fact that there was snow up to our ankles in this strange room.

  “These crates are full of food,” Amber pointed out.”I suppose it’s some sort of freezer.”
  “One of those walk-in-freezers,” I said, shivering from the extreme cold.
  The freezer was only about half the size of my room, which meant that it’s rather small. But it was so hard to see the other side of the freezer mainly because of the wind summoning snowflakes and pieces of ice to dance around the freezer. Icicles hung from the ceiling, and one nearly fell on my head, but I dodged it just in time. It was extremely cold, and  our wet clothes weren’t making things any better.
  I found the other door, and we took turns trying to open it. It wouldn’t open though; the door was frozen shut! We turned to the door of where we came through, and the door slammed shut. I ran over, trying as hard as I could to open it, but it refused to open.
  “We’re locked in!” I panicked. My teeth began to chatter from the cold.
  Amber and I looked around, and we found a lever on the wall. It was up high, so I pushed a crate against the wall so I could reach it. Of course, the lever had frozen in place. It was very difficult to push it down, so Amber had to help me. On the third try, we were able to push it down.
  The fans stopped whirling. The loud buzzing noise ceased. The pieces of snow and ice that were flying in the air had fallen to the ground. The cold slowly abated. In the vents above, hot air had pulsed through. Within a matter of minutes, the snow we were standing in had turned to slush, and the ice on the door had completely melted. I was amazed with how hot the room had gotten so quickly.

  The hot air had dried our clothes, but the walk-in-freezer was quickly turning into a walk-in-oven.

  Amber opened the door, and we stepped into a new room. The tiled floors were stained with blood, as well as the counters. Several knives, cleavers and other sharp tools were scattered on the counters. Old food was rotting, and a strange smell lingered in the air. There was an old oven, and a woodstove in the center of the room. The refrigerator against the wall was wide open, but it seemed that it had stopped working some time ago.

  “This is one creepy kitchen,” I said, suppressing a shiver. “I wish we could leave now.”

  And what about Rune? Where was that stupid cat anyway?
  There were two doors at the end of the hallway that branched off the kitchen.       “You go one way, and I’ll go the other,” she said to me. “We can see if there are any more clues on how to get out. And how to break this ‘curse’.”
  “You expect me to go alone?!” I said, almost screaming.
  “If we split up, we can find clues faster. Right?”
  I sighed. “O-okay,” I answered, my voice quivering with fear. “But if I get snatched up by some horrible demon, it’s all your fault for leaving me here alone.”
  Amber just rolled her eyes. “We’re going to pull through. I promise.” She then opened one of the doors and walked into the room.
  I went into the room she told me to go into, and what stood before me was a long table, covered by a white tablecloth, with many chairs on either side. This room was the dining room.
  I examined the entire table, and all of the chairs. The last chair had another piece of paper with strange writing on it.
If Amber still had the book, we could be able to decode it.
  There was a loud thud that came from what seemed like the room Amber was in. I raced to that room, which turned out to be the tearoom.
  There was Amber, standing in shock, and there was a table that had apparently flung itself against the wall.
  “What happened?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. I was starting to get a little drowsy.
  “It just… flung itself at me!” She exclaimed, pointing to where the table once stood. “It could’ve knocked me out if I hadn’t dodged it in time.”
  “There could be spirits in this house,” I said. “You believe in ghosts, don’t you Amber? Because there’s no way a table could’ve done that all by itself!”
  It took a few moments before she replied, “I don’t know.”
  “That could’ve been the cat,” I told her, in a low whisper. Amber gave me a quizzical look. “You know, Rune?”
  “What do you mean?” Amber asked. “About Rune?” she clarified.
  “Don’t you know about Rune? That ghostly cat that keeps the secrets of this house? It’s said that if you find out their secrets, you’ll die horribly…”
  Amber snickered. “Yeah, right. Like there’s totally a cat that’s going to kill us.”
  “Well, can you at least admit that you believe the rumor about the Cadavers being murderers?”
  “Duh; that’s why I came to check it out. To see if the rumor was true.”
  I shook my head. “You’d believe me if you saw it. Anyways, I found this,” I said giving her the piece of paper I found in the dining room.
  Amber and I sat down on the fancy chairs. Amber had the book. She opened it to the page with the decoding chart on it.

  I was the first to decode it. I read the message aloud.

“Kill it with fire!
Don’t let it conspire!”

  “Kill what with fire?” Amber echoed.
  “The keeper of the secrets. Which would be Rune. It has to be!” I exclaimed.
  She shrugged. “Possibly…”
  In the tearoom, there was a door that led to yet another room. I opened the door, and we ended up in the foyer yet again.
  “We should try going upstairs,” Amber said.
  I reluctantly nodded. We went upstairs, and we were greeted by three doorways. The first two doorways led to bedrooms, which we both checked out thoroughly. Amber had found a dead body in the master bedroom’s closet.
  When I saw Amber’s shocked expression, I asked in a quavering voice, “What is it?”
  “There’s a dead person in the closet!” Amber said with her hand over her mouth. By then, a pungent, rotten scent had filled the entire room, and we were both gasping for air.
  We ran back out into the hall, and I shut the door behind us. “What did you expect?” I told her. “The rumors are true. You have to believe it by now!”
  Amber just stood there. “M-maybe.”
  “Let’s try the other door,” I said, changing the subject. The last door led to a narrow spiral staircase. We clambered to the top, and we peered through the entryway. A small, gray-furred creature stood on the windowsill, looking out into the darkness of the night. Making sure nobody entered, I thought. Making sure the secrets were safe.

  It almost a split second, its head swerved around to look at ours; its dull blue eyes meeting up with ours.

  “Do you see it?” I nervously whispered, tugging at Amber’s sleeve.
  “T-the cat,” Amber whispered back. All of a sudden, there was an intense flash of lightning. Within a second, the room went pitch black.
  Then, there was a low growling noise that echoed throughout the room.
In an instant Amber had tumbled backward, plummeting down the narrow stairway.
  “Amber!” I began to scream, but I was interrupted by claws raking against my leg.
  The feeling of Rune’s claws scraping my leg felt oddly cold, yet mystical at the same time. Blood began to pour down my leg, soaking my pants and trickling into my sock.
  Wincing from the pain, I charged at Rune; the fear that I had toward it had seemingly faded away. I no longer felt fear, but anger. I struck a hard blow at the cat.
  Rune had jumped back, but wasn’t harmed by my attack in any way. Just as it began to leap at me, I thought of one of the papers Amber and me had found.

“Kill it with fire!
Don’t let it conspire!”

  Fire was what was needed to destroy this spirit.
  As I dodged Rune’s attack, I thought of how down in the kitchen there was the freezer, which became some sort of walk-in-oven afterward.
  There was another flash of lightning, and then I stood alone, in darkness.         There were no noises stirring around me. Moments later, the scent of smoke had filled the room. And soon after that, there was the sound of a crackling fire.
  The Cadaver house was going down in flames!

  But where was Rune?

  I stood there, motionless, until the fire had lit up the entire room. The fire surrounded me, threatening to swallow me up at any second.
  Then Rune emerged, out of thin air, and came lunging toward me. I had kicked it just in time, fortunately, and sent it into the hungry flames. I then crouched down to avoid breathing in the smoke.
  There was a loud yowling noise. Rune began to scream in such a loud and distorted way, that I had to block my ears.
  I closed my eyes as darkness rose from around me, and then it seemed to swallow me up. The strong force of the dark had caused me to black out.

  I woke up, finally. I stood up and glanced around. It was still dark out. Amber was sitting next to me in a seemingly lifeless position. I shook her just to make sure she was okay.
  I was very relieved to find out that she had survived the fall down the stairs. She told me that she wasn’t in any pain, which I thought was strange.
  There was also no stairway that Amber had fallen down on. In fact, no trace of the entire house was left. Not even Rune.
  “After Rune was killed in the fire, it all just… disappeared…” I said. Even the scar that Rune left on my leg had vanished.
  I looked across the street to where my house stood. Everything over there was perfectly fine, and everything else seemed untouched.
  “So weird,” Amber muttered.
  “We should be getting home now,” I told Amber. She nodded and we began to walk toward the street.
  But a strong wind had caused us to stop. A loud voice had boomed overhead: “What you two have done was undeniably heroic, and we very much thank you for that. But the problem is, is that no other people in the world will remember you for your deed. That is because once you broke the curse, parts of people’s minds were erased if they had anything to do with the Cadavers. But we are the spirits of the afterlife. To us, you shall always remain heroes, and we will always thank you very much for that…”
  The voice had faded away, and Amber and I glanced at each other.
  “We’re heroes… apparently,” Amber said.
  “But no person would ever realize that. Just the spirits of the afterlife will honor us for our bravery and heroism,” I said in a low voice.
  I shut my eyes, and when I opened them, we were in my room. I read my alarm clock: 2:18 A.M. I looked out of the window, and sure enough, the Cadaver house wasn’t there, and neither was Rune. Just a small field was present, and nobody, except for Amber and me, would remember the eerie, creepy Cadaver house.
  The house across the street.