The time was nearing 6:30 P.M and the sun had gone down late, as it normally did during the Australian spring season. The streets were cold and empty like most nights, especially now that the new football season had started. The only signs of life on the street were those delivering pizzas around the neighbourhood as people prepared for some of the most eventful TV scheduling of the year.

The night-time air was icy on Harper's pale skin as she wandered down the street with a cheerful skip in her step. Although she normally enjoyed this weather, it had caused her to constantly brush her hair out of the way. It was already hard enough walking in the dark and she didn't need visual disruptions, so this annoyed her just a little bit.

"Don't step on the cracks, Harper. You'll win yourself a lovely bout of unluckiness!"

She chimed to herself as she skipped over the edges and cracks in the concrete pathway she was following. She had no one to impress by saying that out loud so it was purely as a personal reminder.

Eventually, she halted in her path, as if the tracks had come to an end for her little train ride in the night. She looked around the neighbourhood she had arrived at. It was a high-class area in town, mostly occupied by the richest of the rich. It was a blossoming green area, lush with native greenery. Most of the houses had the same external design; they were modern and white, sleek, and expertly designed.

The house she had stopped in front of, however, was a little more unique than that. The exterior was mostly grey, with trimmed edges of red and gold. If someone hadn't known this was a home in Australia, they would have guessed it to be a European mansion of sorts.

The one point giving away the fact that it was an Australian home was the bushes and trees in the front yard. Jacaranda trees towered over the roof of the house, leaving their purple flowers spread across the yard. Lining the walkway were small white lilly pilly bushes, just blooming for the start of spring. Harper enjoyed their sweet and earthy smell. While the house wasn't as large as a typical mansion, the perfectly kept appearance of the exterior and front garden certainly indicated its owner’s wealth.

Harper approached the front door of the bold and bewildering home, taking note of the lovely pearl-finish rails as she stepped up the tiny entrance staircase. In front of the door was a neatly placed floor mat, one that looked like it had barely been used by dirty soles of shoes. Either that or it was regularly cleaned by the homeowners. She pried up one of the edges of the mat to reveal a small golden key underneath and she firmly took it in her hand. With this, she unlocked the front door and afterward, kept the key in her skirt pocket.

As she meandered into the divine and luxurious entrance, Harper spun around to face the front yard again, a wide grin on her face. With a twirl of her wrists, she held her arms out in an inviting fashion.

"Welcome welcome! Thank You all for attending our tour this evening, I'm absolutely stunned at the turnout. Everlast Real Estate welcomes you all!"

She tapped her feet on the frame of the door, seemingly directing her speech to the invisible audience in the open air.

"Tonight, you'll be perusing the lovely home before you, three stories, five bedrooms, four bathrooms, two dining areas, and a whole lot more I could care less about at the moment! Some say the area was once a famous crime scene, but I’m legally not allowed to spare you the details!"

She spun back around again, almost hitting her head on the doorframe as she did, only narrowly missing it and giggling to herself about it. She proceeded into the house with an energetic skip in her step.

The general interior of the home was rich with a clean and modern atmosphere, the flow of refreshing air from the air conditioners helped solidify that. Down the maroon carpeted hallway, the walls rose high to a peak in the ceiling, donned with an impressively large chandelier. The walls were smooth with white paint and dozens of family photos hung orderly and straight in their frames. The furniture along the hallway was clearly antique and mostly made of wood, nicely showing its age in a sophisticated way. Every element seen in the hallway was enough to indicate this house contained a lot of wealth and history just upon a first glance.

"As we walk down the hallway, you'll see that most of the rooms are spacious, open, and welcoming! Honestly, you could get away with a lot of things in this happy home; loud parties with 'oodles' of noise, horror-movie nights filled with screams! Oh, the list could go on, but I know you're not interested in the sound-proof walls..."

She sighed, rolling her eyes at the pathetic nature of the imaginary audience with her. She continued down the hallway at a steady pace, stopping in front of a door that caught her interest. On the front of it was hung a sign that read 'recording in process' very hastily written with a marker on paper. She grimaced at the unofficial nature of the notice and stood in front of the door with her back to it.

"Unfortunately, the recording and audio room is closed for business. Permanently."

Whoever Harper was talking to had seemed to show displeasure at that and she rolled her eyes yet again. With that, her interest in playing real estate had dwindled and she pulled out her phone, completely killing the game she had made for herself.

"Can't always please the people, huh?"

With her head in her phone, engrossed by the hold of another unsolved mystery case, she continued down the hallway, using the wall to guide herself and avoid any obstacles. It wasn't long after that she had reached a room of interest again and she quickly hid away her phone. It was a bedroom, and a large one at that, adorned with its inhabitants’ prized possessions worth more than she could ever imagine. The walls were a rich and clean white and the curtains were beautifully blue and silky. She peered through the doorway, hoping to see one of her imaginary buyers scoping out the interior, but alas, they had left her to explore the house on her lonesome.

With a scoff at the bold statement of the bedroom, she turned to continue down the hallway, but she was quickly stopped by the obstacle just a meter away from her.

"Hey, get behind me and follow the tour like everyone else, buddy.”

Standing tall and dazed in front of her, the figure turned to meet her eyes. For a moment, Harper wasn’t sure if they were just some illusion like the rest of the people in her head or whether there was actually someone standing in front of her. The stare between the two was direct, yet also distant as they stood in silence. The taller one spoke up with some hesitation in his voice.

“Harper, what are you doing in my house?”

There was a short and tense moment of silence from Harper as she quietly stared at the young man before her.

“I should be asking you the same question, Atlas, I thought you were gone.”

Atlas crossed his arms, clearly frustrated at her presence.

“I thought so too, but I’m not entirely sure now. How did you get here in such a short time? You didn’t take the intercity bus, did you?”

Harper simply smiled at him, letting her eyes drift to the wall beside her.

“Yeah, I took the bus, obviously! I wouldn’t have, like...walked here you know, that’d take ages! Days, even...”

Her reply was so intensely positive that it seemed somewhat faked, as if she had something to hide. Whatever it was though, was unclear at the time to Atlas. Harper continued, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.

“But you can’t really do anything about it now that I’m here, right? We might as well practise that dance for tonight, yeah? You’ve got a speech to do, too! Don't forget, Atlas! You're the special one tonight!”

She stepped towards him with some amount of forcefulness, and he quickly stepped out of her way with concern in his pale blue eyes. What did she mean by 'tonight' and 'speech'? Did she really come all the way to his new house just to drag him back to SilkenArts?

“Harper, you’re not giving me a straight or believable answer here. How exactly did you get to my house? Why are you here? We’re not even dance partners anymore, I left the academy.”

Atlas’s questions presented themselves one after the other, each one being twice as intense as the last. It was obvious that he didn’t approve of her just appearing out of nowhere with a less than reasonable intention.

“I’m here because you’re here, obviously. I couldn’t just leave my partner behind, that’d be so cruel.”

She placed her hands on either side of her face and faked a saddened expression with her childish whining tone, clearly upsetting Atlas in doing so. His right eye twitched in frustration, unbeknownst to the girl.

“You keep saying ‘obviously, obviously’ but nothing here is obvious, Harper! You’re really creeping me out right now, it’s the middle of the evening and you said nothing to me about visiting.”

Harper looked a bit shocked. In some aspects, she was hurt that her partner didn’t want to see her, even if she did happen to turn up without notice. She hung her head low and stared at the ground, gently kicking her foot to the floor like an ashamed child.

“I never meant to creep you out or anything, I just wanted to check if you were okay.”

She looked up at him with an innocent smile, and that had somewhat calmed Atlas for the moment. He sighed and held his hand to his face as if he could feel a headache coming on. He was uncertain on how the girl had managed to make it to his new address in a distant city so quickly, but he pushed all the questions to the back of his mind for the moment. If she was already here, there was an explanation as to why. He just had to work a believable answer out of her somehow. That was usually the normal conversation progression for the two of them anyway.

“Okay okay okay, I believe you, but I’d just like an answer that makes sense. If that’s okay with you. You can give me that, right? You’re not gonna have one of your little episodes, right? You're not gonna yell at me and say 'SilkenArts needs you, please come back'?”

After stressing his points very clearly, he crossed his arms behind his back and waited for the girl to answer. She seemed to think for a bit, or perhaps it was an overdramatized reaction, but when she spoke it was full of her bubbly character again.

“Haha, oh no, I’m far past that now, I would never put you through such a childish thing like that again! I’m sorry if I ever do though. On that note, I’m glad that you’re well! This place must be treating you nicely and you’re looking lively, that’s for sure. Last time I saw you, well- I can’t say for sure, but you were pretty much glued to the studio floor. Kinda funny really. That session was hilarious!”

She feigned a drop of joy for a second as she laughed under her breath. Atlas glared with some amount of disdain towards her, furrowing his eyebrows in thought of how to translate what she had just told him.

“Do you want to swing that by me again? I’m not sure I understand what you meant. I was 'glued’ to what? I don’t feel like I’ve been glued to anything.”

His vision focused on the studio door for a brief second, wondering if she meant this specific recording and audio room in the hallway. Or was it another studio they had used for recording in the past? He wouldn’t have known which it was, except that there was a sub-second glance from the girl. Alerted, she stepped sideways to block his view of the door.

“I said, you were glued to the floor. We had that party, remember? You spilled a cup of wine and-”

Atlas swiftly interjected, raising an eyebrow and a hand to her face.

“Stop, you know I don’t drink wine. You don’t even drink wine yourself. Actually, neither of us drink alcohol, so what on earth are you talking about?”

Harper smiled for a brief second before she rose her hands to his face and clapped them in front of his eyes.

“Wake up silly boy! You’re in a dream, don't worry about anything! You're not even awake right now! You're so silly, all you ever do is freak out and have panic attacks, you're the king of freaks! It’s all a dream or something...yes! Just relax and enjoy the fact that I’m here."

She ended her crazy ramble with a smile, an extremely fake and forced one that didn't convince Atlas one bit. He especially didn't like the jab at his nervous tendencies.

"You're not making a whole lot of sense right now. Why do you expect me to believe you after turning up out of the blue just to make excuses for yourself? I’m already having a hard enough time figuring out where I am…I had the weirdest dream…"

His eyes drifted to the studio once again and he noticed Harper's panic to cover up the exact location, standing quickly in front of him, closer this time. With a deflated sigh, he stepped around her to get to the studio room door.

"Harper, if you broke the recording equipment, I don't really care. Just stop acting like some sort of maniac."

Harper mumbled something about breaking something valuable, but Atlas was already on the move to the studio door with a roll of his eyes.

As he turned the handle of the door, he noticed how it seemed to be jammed from the inside, it wasn’t going to be easy to open. He shot the girl a look of frustration before forcing his shoulder into the wooden frame. It cracked open and the chair holding it closed rolled across the room. He wondered how it got there in the first place if the room was jammed from inside, clearly there was no one left in the room. However, that was the least of his concerns within the room. Something was oddly heavy and foreboding about the atmosphere inside, so he flicked on the lights for some clearance.

He wished he hadn't done that in the end.

The room seemed to ebb and flow with an unsettling presence, and it wasn't noticeable at first because of how dim the lighting had become.

An overwhelming wave of dread swept over Atlas as he stared at the scene before him, wide-eyed and frozen in shock. He wasn't entirely sure what he was looking at, but it certainly wasn't pretty. It wasn't even natural for that matter. He could smell the blood, fresh in the carpet and on the walls. He could see the tears in the flesh and bruises on the skin. He could see it all, yet he could not believe it for a second.