_Wherever there is light, the flowers will find it._

She was lying on the floor, her mother’s voice seeming to echo through her head and down the dark hallway.

Something felt off. She touched her side, expecting the mess of blood and intestines spilling out. But there was nothing, except for a haphazard line of stitches. And a hairy hand.

“Shit!” She yelped and tried to roll away, but the hand crawled after her. Under the dim lighting, the wriggling shadow it cast curdled and stretched along the wooden panels long-stained with her blood.

She grabbed a teapot, one of many heirlooms that belonged to her great aunt’s house, and threw it at the hand. It was hardly effective, bouncing off the hand’s very hairs and falling with a splintering crash.

She repeated the attempt with a teacup, a saucer, a pitcher of milk. _This must be the dining hall_, she thought to herself as she threw another priceless object at the creature. It would only wriggle in disgust and crawl forward at even greater speed, its fat hairy digits thumping against the wood.

Just up ahead, the wall was covered with a thick maroon curtain. Was it a window? She posited that she probably only needed another minute until she reached her potential exit. But the hand, dripping with soured milk and scraping itself along the wood to remove the glass shards, it only lay a few yards away.

An aroma of sweet honeysuckle filled her nose. One of the objects she’d thrown was a vial of perfume. The hand, covered in a light sheen of the fragrance, writhed in pain on its back. Rolling back and forth, its fingers trembled and clicked towards the ceiling as if in pain.

Rolling on her side to wall, she groaned to a stop beside the curtain. Still the hand tussled with some invisible demon, but somehow it’d moved a few feet closer in its convulsions.

She had less than a minute. Sitting up, she grasped the hefty folds of fabric and jerked it down. No good. The top and bottom edges were bolted into the wall, so any efforts to remove it would be pointless. Looking back, the hand had rolled forward a bit. It was only a yard away.

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To her left, she spotted one of the innocent remains of a family heirloom. Grasping the pottery shard—_hurry!_—she struck across the curtain. Once. Twice. Finally, she hit a snag and the lower half sagged down. She smelled something sweet and flowery.

She shrieked. “Get off, you disgusting thing!” Kicking it off, she pulled herself through the hole, pulled the latch, and shoved the window up. There was a ten foot drop, but anything was better than this. Hearing the rapid thumping behind her, she pushed herself into the night air.