“The butter goes in with the eggs Kaiko! Not the flour!” I shout at my brother.

“Well, it’s not like you tell me how I’m supposed to do this!” He shouts back, causing our mother to come into the room.

“If you two can’t stop arguing, then you can kiss baking for the new neighbor goodbye. It’s your choice,” she tells us in her stern-mom voice. This shuts us up.

    We’ve been waiting for someone to move in on our street. In the past, many people have, but they only stay for a short while. My mom, brother, and I are the only real residents of Garden Groves and Vineyards. Now, someone finally moved in down the street, a boy who my mom says is about nineteen or twenty. He’s quite cute, too, if I do say so myself. Chocolate brown eyes you could melt in mixed with dark blond hair, he’s almost too good to be true. Almost.

    After finally getting the cookies ready, we start the walk down to his house. His mansion, actually. The whole street is filled with them. We walk briskly, looking at all the houses. Lights out, windows permanently shut, doors forever closed. Then we find the house I’m looking for. Lights on, some windows open, door closed. That makes sense. He doesn’t want random strangers walking into his house. He lives in one of the smaller houses, with wooden steps leading up to the auburn porch. I reach up to use the knocker and wait. It’s off to the side of the door, which annoys me more than I’d like to admit. The Texas heat beats down on us, making the wait seem longer. After a minute, Kaiko goes for the doorknob.

    “Kaiko! You can’t just barge into someone’s house unannounced! How are you so bad with logic?” I ask him.

    “The door is open, Kaia. We’ll just go inside, find him, and give him the cookies. He won’t come to answer the door, that’s obvious,” he replies calmly as he walks inside. I roll my eyes and go in behind him after weighing the pros and cons.

    A crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling, casting eerie shadows on the carpet in front of us. We walk down the hallway, stopping at the staircase. There’s nowhere to go on the first level, so I start walking up the stairs, the cookies falling against each other in their case. On the landing, Kaiko runs up in front of me and turns left. The way he’s going is dimly lit by torches hanging on the walls. The hallway to my right is, too.

    “I’m going right. We have a better chance of finding him if we split up,” I say and he nods.

    The walls are blank and cream-colored, decorated only by torches and the shadows of their flames. One piece of paint is chipping off, and I stand there trying to repair it for ten minutes. Finally, I rip it off, making it worse. I’ve almost reached the end of the hall when I hear a noise. It’s a noise no one ever wants to hear. It’s Kaiko, screaming.

    I run down the hallway towards the noise, dropping the cookies on the way. When I enter the hallway he was in, the torches are blown out. Except for one. Quickly, I grab it off the wall. I walk slowly, taking in all the details of this hallway. Framed photographs line the walls. Some people in them are posing, others have been caught in mid-action. After walking for what seemed like forever, looking for my brother, or his body, I bump into the wall at the end. He’s not here, but that makes no sense. I bring the torch upwards to light up a photograph of a girl about my age on the beach. Her long, curly blonde hair waves in the wind, clashing against the indigo bikini. Then she blinks. I stagger away from the picture, taking the light off her portrait.

“I know where William took your brother. I can help you,” she whispers.

    Carefully, I push myself off from the wall and start to walk towards her. I bring the torch up to her photograph again. She smiles at me.

    “I will help you if you help me,” she tells me. “If you take me to the beach where he took the picture, I will return to my body. If William finds you, he’ll photograph you, too. Your brother hasn’t been photographed. He wants both of you together. If you promise me that you will save me, I will tell you where your brother is and how to save both of you.”

    “I promise.”

    She tells me where to go, and where to hide if I hear William coming back. All the lights are out now. The windows are boarded up. My torch is the only light in the whole house. I walk down every hallway, just to make sure the girl wasn’t lying. She told me he had brought Kaiko upstairs to the dungeons. It’s an odd place for dungeons. Certainly, it’s odd that he even has any dungeons, but I guess having them in an odd place was the point. With each step I take up the stairs, it echoes through the house. It’s the only noise I hear.

    Finally, I get to the top of the stairs. Still no sounds except for my shoes. As quietly as I can, I take them off and leave them on the landing. The floor is cold beneath my bare feet. Then I hear it. He’s not screaming anymore, just yelling my name. I can barely hear what he’s saying afterwards. Go back seems to be the main message. I don’t, though. I keep walking towards the sound. Then, I see him. He’s tied to a chair, the gag dangling loosely around his neck. William is nowhere to be seen. I run to him and begin untying the ropes. He’s shaking his head at me, tears streaming down his face.

    “I told you not to come. He’ll be back any minute now!” Kaiko exclaims.

    “I know where to go,” I tell him. “One of the photographs told me where to hide. We’ll get out of here. I promise.”

    He nods and gets up. Then I hear footsteps. I go in front, trying to remember what the girl on the beach had told me. She had mentioned a closet at the end of a hallway that William’s afraid of. She had said that the photographs are from his childhood. They’re the first people he took pictures of. He doesn’t like that this is what he does, and those pictures are reminders about what he could have stopped, what could have been. We’ll be safe there, if I can find it. We run through empty hallways. The footsteps are always heard, though I can never see him.

    After going through most of the house, we are in the last hallway on the second level. On the walls, are hundreds of photographs. They cover every inch of the walls. Some are in black and white, but most are in color. He must be older than twenty. At the end, is a closet. I break into a run, the photographs watching me with curious eyes. Kaiko is at my heels as I open the doors. It’s small, but we’ll fit. Kaiko goes in first, lifting me up. I blow out the torch, but some light still comes through the cracks between the wood that boards up the windows. He shuts the doors and we are submerged into complete darkness. I think about what my hair must look like, and then I realize that it doesn’t matter because the boy I wanted to look pretty for is trying to kill us. Then, the footsteps stop. William must be at the end of the hallway, reluctant to literally take a walk down memory lane. The only sound I hear is the beating of my own heart, blood pounding in my ears. My eyes have adjusted slightly to the darkness and I look through the crack in between the two doors. He’s not at the end of the hallway anymore. Like me, he took off his shoes. That’s why I didn’t hear him walking down the hallway. He’s looking through the crack, too. Our eyes meet.

    The door bursts open and I kick my feet out. They smash into his chest, causing him to stagger backwards. I jump out of the closet before he can come back. Kaiko is frozen to the spot, looking too scared to move. William has a camera in his hands. The girl was right, he’s going to try to photograph us. I lunge forward and grab the camera with both hands, determined not to let it go. He spins me around, pulling it out of my hands the whole time. William lets go of it and the momentum sends me flying into the wall. My vision is clouded with black spots, and it’s hard to breathe, but I have the camera. He’s advancing towards my body to get the camera back, and I lift it up to take a picture of him, but Kaiko is in the background. William sees me look behind him and smiles. He whips around and pushes Kaiko against the wall, knocking into one of the photographs. Using almost all my energy, I force myself to get up. I kick William in the back of the knee, and he falls to the ground, letting Kaiko go. He hits his head on the floor with a painful crack. I drop the camera and flip him over to his back. His eyes are closed, his breathing slowly steadying. I lift up his eyelids and see only white. I turn to Kaiko, pinned against the wall in fear.

    “I told you we’d get out of here,” I tell my brother. “We’re safe. William can’t hurt us now. No one can. We have to get the girl that helped me, and then we can leave.” Ever so slowly, he nods. Then, his eyes widen so much it seems as though they might pop out of his head.

I turn around just in time to see the flash of a camera in the dark hallway.