The screaming stops at 03:17 exactly. Not because the guests have run out of breath, but because the House of Drennin finally closes its mouth.
Silence falls like a guillotine.
Sixty-six people (some still twitching, some already cooling) lie arranged in perfect concentric circles around the grand staircase. Their blood has been guided by unseen hands into the grooves of the parquet floor, forming one immense entwined-serpent sigil that pulses like a living heartbeat. The smart lights are dead, but the sigil glows on its own: soft, arterial, proud.
Nicole and Rene stand at the top of the stairs in dresses that were never white to begin with. The fabric shifts when you look directly at it: hospital cotton, sequins, funeral lace, charred Victorian mourning silk, skin. Their joined hands drip something too dark to be blood.
Below them the burned Victorian family waits in a neat line, faces shining with parental pride. The little girl (Elsje, 1897–1897) holds up a crown braided from human hair and blackened ribbon. Rene kneels so the child can place it on her head. Nicole bows so the boy (Willem, forever nine) can crown her too. The parents, Father Elias and Mother Johanna Drennin, smile with mouths that have no lips left.
Gigi steps forward last, silk robe trailing ash that never quite reaches the floor. She kisses each girl on the mouth (slow, maternal, final) and whispers in the voice that once filled the Pelican Nightclub:
"Time to take your bows, my darlings. The house is full. The show can begin."
The front doors (which have been bricked over for hours) swing open on their own. Outside, dawn is trying to happen, but the sky refuses. It stays the colour of a healing bruise. The salt flats stretch away forever, glittering like a lake of broken mirrors.
And people are coming.
Hundreds. Thousands. They walk, drive, crawl across the salt in perfect silence. Every person who ever saw the listing, every person who ever scrolled past a TikTok, every person who ever dreamed of the crooked gable or woke with the taste of copper in their mouth. They come barefoot, in pyjamas, in wedding dresses, in funeral suits. Some carry babies. Some drag suitcases. All of them have the same serene, sleepy smile.
The House grows to greet them.
Walls stretch upward like lungs inhaling. New wings unfold from the east and west like vast black petals. The crooked gable straightens into a cathedral spire. The serpent sigil on the floor rises off the parquet and hangs in the air, turning slowly, a crimson galaxy.
Nicole raises her free hand. Every dead tenant (Gigi, the Nigerian enforcers, the maintenance crew, the influencer Liv with her melted ring-light still around her neck) steps forward and becomes a door. Their bodies flatten, stretch, harden into tall oval portals of skin and bone and memory. Sixty-six doors for sixty-six circles of hell, all opening at once.
The living flood in.
They do not scream now. They only sigh, the way people sigh when they finally lie down after carrying something too heavy for too long.
Rene walks down the staircase (each step blooming black roses that bleed upward into the air). At the bottom she stops in front of Thuli Nkosi, the single mother who lasted longest. Thuli is on her knees, cradling the small body of her son Lwazi. The boy's eyes are open, peaceful. Rene kneels too. She strokes Lwazi's cheek with a gentleness that should not be possible.
"You told good stories," Rene says, voice layered with every child who ever lived here. "This one gets to stay a child."
She kisses Lwazi's forehead. The boy's body dissolves into salt that swirls upward and becomes a new star in the crimson sigil spinning overhead. Thuli does not cry. She only smiles the sleepy smile and walks through Gigi's door, robe trailing behind her like a bridal train.
One by one the living choose their doors. Some doors show childhood bedrooms. Some show burning nurseries. Some show nothing at all, only welcoming dark. Every person walks through the door that knows their name best.
When the last guest has entered, the doors fold shut and become walls again. The house exhales, smaller now, satisfied, almost tender.
Nicole and Rene stand alone in the entrance hall. The serpent sigil lowers itself gently until it wraps around both girls like a living stole. They turn to face the open front door one final time.
Outside, the salt flats are empty. The sky finally lets the sun rise (thin, ashamed, the colour of old bone).
Rene speaks, and her voice is only hers now, small and wondering and nineteen years old:
"We did it, Nic. We brought them all home."
Nicole looks at her, eyes still beautiful, still broken, still the only person who ever followed her into the fire and stayed.
She squeezes Rene's hand.
"Yeah," she says. "We did."
Together they step over the threshold.
The front door closes behind them with the soft, final click of a jewellery box.
The House of Drennin folds in on itself (walls, roof, spire, salt, screams, lullabies, sequins, ashes) until it is no larger than a child's heart. Then it sinks into the flats, slow as a stone dropped into deep water. The salt closes over it without a ripple.
Where it stood there is only a perfect circle of black glass, still warm, still pulsing faintly at 03:17 every night.
People will come looking, of course. Surveyors, ghost-hunters, pastors with bottles of holy water that instantly boils, estate agents with new listings and brighter photographs. They will find nothing but mirror-smooth obsidian and their own reflections wearing party hats, smiling with too many teeth.
And somewhere far away, in a casino that no longer exists, in a psychiatric ward that has been demolished, in dreams you swear you've never had, two girls walk hand in hand through corridors that have no end, telling bedtime stories to children who will never grow up.
They are happy.
The house is happy.
The lease is fulfilled.
And the story (the real one, the one that was always based on a true story) finally ends where it began:
With a girl born already burning, and a girl who loved her enough to burn the world down so she would never be cold again.
Sleep tight.
The children are waiting for their next story.
And they know your name.