I walked inside the chicken coop. Killie appeared as she always did, giving my legs a rub with her back. I knelt down to pet her before picking her up and burying my face in her fur.

  “I’m quite sure I would have gone insane without you two,” I said as I looked over at Daisy. “I brought you a friend.” I reached into my pocket dimension and brought out the second chicken. The chicken was in mid cluck when I stuffed her into my inventory, and she was flapping again. I let her go, and the chicken pranced around, getting used to her surroundings.

  “I think I’ll call you Buttercup,” I said.

  The chicken gave no indication that she even heard me. Instead, I brought out the medicine flower and crushed it up in my palm before dropping it in Daisy’s food. Daisy came over to inspect it. “There you go, girl,” I told her.

  Daisy pecked away at it, and I found myself leaning against the wall of the chicken coop, trying to come to terms with what just happened. I still had a deep fear that I had seen Theo for the last time. Clearly the thing I needed to do was focus on my jobs. I pulled out my list again.

  Repair all damages done by them

  Build a barn

  Purchase a cow

  Purchase the fourth article of clothing for building

  Build a trap

  Set trap in your foraging area

  Clean the blackness in the house

  I had a little less than four and a half days to finish this. I really had to get a lot more done. By tomorrow morning the second greenhouse would be completely cleared of damage, and most of the first greenhouse would be done. Maybe I could buy a trap to catch a cow, as I would have time, but then again, I could just purchase one from the clipboard, like the list suggested.

  Focus on what I needed to do. The fence was waiting for the tool to finish the stone blocks for the main fence. The greenhouse fence still needed more bricks, but I wanted to see what more I had left with the main fence. So, barn. In the three and a half hours I had left until the wolf appeared, I needed to work on building the barn.

  I gave Daisy and Buttercup pats on their heads and carried Killie out of the chicken coop. She scampered out of my arms the moment we got out of the coop, and she ran around the house to hopefully catch a mouse. I pulled out my axe and headed toward the other side of the house.

  I dropped tree after tree, turning logs into boards. I went through the motion, stuffing the boards into my inventory before dropping them into the barn. I was clearing out the trees around the barn. It was quite close to the fourth greenhouse, and I could already see the fence start to inch around the base of the barn the more boards I put in there. The greenhouse fence was now going to be the greenhouse and barn fence.

  I ate through my meagerly stored food. The stronger my levels, the less stamina it took to chop down the trees, and also less thwacks against the trunk, but it still took some. It was alright. I kept telling myself that the greenhouses would soon be back to functioning as normal, and I’d be getting a lot of food.

  I placed the last board into the barn as the sun sank below the tree line. I placed my hands on my hips, waiting. The words shifted and changed as walls appeared. It wasn’t completed, as there was no roof, but the words appeared all the same.

  0/100 firewood

  Perfect. I chopped the rest of the boards around my feet and dropped them into the barn. I then went back to more trees and kept dropping them. It was a lot of chopping. Chopping took a lot more stamina. Despite being able to drop twenty-eight firewood from one tree into the barn at a time, it was still a lot of stamina that took a hit each time.

  The wolf had about twenty minutes before he arrived when I ate another soup to refill my stamina enough to chop the last boards into firewood. I then dropped them into the barn. I glanced up, waiting. What more did I have to do? It seemed like it was getting close.

  0/10 glass

  I let out a hiss. I hoped the barn wouldn’t need glass, but now that I thought about it, of course barns had windows. The only thing that brought me comfort about this whole thing was I had the sand for it. I was practically swimming in sand. This could be doable, of course. It just hurt that I was losing another few days on the greenhouse.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  This week was definitely one for recovery. I would get the first floor clean, and I would get the fences secure. The next seven days after the attack would no doubt be ones of stocking food and preparing for the more constant attacks. But I’d honestly done a lot so far.

  I stepped into the house, Killie was ready to play. I smiled as I got to where I left off in the living room, getting to my hands and knees as my cleaning clothes appeared, the flashlight on the floor to make sure I got every last drop of them. I was only there a few minutes, tossing the ball a few times before I had to get up again and change the tool. The stone blocks went in, and I held my breath.

  0/5 shattered glass

  My heart fluttered in my chest. I had that. I already had that. The dopamine that hit me was like a drug as I rushed to the storage room and collected five shattered glass from what I collected from the greenhouses. I had a lot more where that came from, which meant I would have enough for the greenhouse fence too.

  I carefully placed the shattered glass into the fence and waited. A sheen went over the fence, and I let out a breath. It was done. The greenhouse fences followed the same pattern, so it wouldn’t take that much more. The fences were almost done. That meant I had to clean this floor to feel perfectly safe.

  Once I had five bags of sand in the tool for the night, I returned to my cleaning after locking both doors. Four more days of cleaning, and I felt pretty good about it all. I was working my way through the living room, bopping the wadded-up paper toward Killie at every opportunity. I heard the hauntings upstairs, but my sanity was nice and full. I could take it.

  It was slow and steady. I kept scrubbing the carpet, dunking the brush in the bucket to rinse it off and going back to scrub it. Ghost Theo was singing Ring Around the Rosies as I scrubbed the carpet, clearing of a section around the front door before heading toward the computer desk. I heard the whisperings above me, which is when Killie stopped playing and started meowing at the people above us. I swallowed, my sanity shivering. I kept scrubbing, double checking with my flashlight to make sure I got every corner. They would not come through at the end of the week. I’d be prepared for them.

  I was almost done with the living room when I heard it. The creaking at the top of the stairs. Everything inside me froze. It hadn’t happened yesterday. But it was happening tonight. I remember the whispers today, and not yesterday. That must be the pattern. When the people whisper, the stairs eventually creak.

  But here. Now. With a full sanity, I could figure out what this meant. If I wasn’t such a terribly frightened scaredy cat.

  Once again, I glanced over at Killie who was napping on the couch. I heard the continual creaks on the steps and knew I had to gather my courage. If Theo was unafraid to die, I could stand up and walk over to the kitchen and wait to see what happens.

  I slowly got to my feet, brushing my hands off because I needed something to do. I took careful steps, my heart getting more and more erratic as every instinct told me there was a murderer in the house and I needed to run in the opposite direction. Or hide in the bathroom again.

  Not tonight. Information. If this killed me, then I would lose the rest of tonight. It wasn’t that big of a sacrifice. I got a lot of the living room done. The bedroom, entertainment room, and hallway were all I had left. I could do it. It was okay if I died. It was okay. I’d be fine.

  The axe appeared in my sweaty palms as I lifted it. I stood by the cherry wood table, gripping the handle tightly. I heard more creaking as the person came down the stairs.

  Information. Maybe I could figure out who killed Theo’s mom this way. Maybe it was the creep that dropped beer cans and cigarette butts outside my bedroom window. Maybe the phantom would appear, and we could have an epic fight.

  I braced myself, ready for anything as the door to the hallway creaked open on its own. I held my breath, waiting. Ready for the phantom to appear. For the fight. For our blades to cross.

  The person who I could not see kept walking at a slow pace. The only thing I could see of the person was their bloody footprints on the ground. No phantom appeared. No growling. Just silence except for the feet padding against the ground. My sanity was down to seventy percent, but it wasn’t taking quite as big of a drop now as I realized I wouldn’t be fighting a ghost.

  The footprints were covered in blood, but starting to fade as the person walked through me and walked out of the kitchen. There was no battle. No shrieking ghosts. Instead, silence as the footprints disappeared, the blood starting to wear off onto the carpet. I flipped on my flashlight, pointing at the ground. I followed the footprints back toward the hallway, frowning. Something seemed off about this all.

  I got to the hallway leading up to the stairs, my heart still pounding in my chest. Something in me understood why this was so odd well before the rest of me caught up, and I could already feel my soul crumbling. But I didn’t understand. Why did they seem so off? Why were they-

  I froze, then placed my own foot next to one of the footprints.

  “Oh, god,” I whispered.

  Barefoot. Toe imprints. Small. This wasn’t the murderer’s footprints. These were the footprints of a child. A child who must have stumbled on a scene covered in blood before walking down the stairs in a complete daze, finding himself alone.

  “Theo,” I whispered.

  The child who I didn’t recognize was him when I first got here. The child who was singing nursery rhymes upstairs without a care in the world. I had never heard Theo singing while at Brenda and Doug’s. I knew even then something had happened to him that drove all the songs out of his body. The memory of his haunted little face returned in full force.

  The flashlight dropped out of my hands as I covered my mouth. Tears leapt to my eyes as I realized the implication. He saw her. He had stumbled on his mother’s dead body. Maybe his grandmother’s, too. Considering how much blood came out of that locked room, there was no doubt in my mind they were murdered. That happy, giggling child changed that night.

  I scooped up the flashlight, following the footsteps to see where they went. They kept fading, getting harder and harder to track. But they left the kitchen, walked into the living room before stepping out the front door. Was Theo discovered in the streets? He must have, to be picked up by services and placed in Brenda and Doug’s care.

  The footprints disappeared, and the tears kept running down my cheeks.

  “Why,” Brenda had said in my memories. “Why is the world so cruel to the ones that are the most innocent?”