Late Check-Out: Lights OutOne hour until check-out

Only the kitchen fire is burning now. The room is cold everywhere except in front of it, and she is standing in it, fourteen years old, with a poker across her hands, looking at you as if you had been gone one night and not three hundred and sixty-one years.

Hour Five: the forty days

A modern kitchen in an old manor at night: a pale stone island with a bowl of pumpkins, recessed lights in the old oak beams, and in the wall a great stone fireplace where tall flames rise out of an empty iron fire basket. Nobody in the room.

She says she kept it. Every night. She says she was afraid that if it went out you would not be able to find the house in the dark.

On your phone, the message thread from the host has scrolled itself all the way up to the top, to the first message, which you have never seen before. It is dated the first of November, 1665, at first light:

Then I shall keep the fire until you do.

The order that shut this house is in the county records, and the rental company framed a copy for the kitchen wall, beside the fireplace, because guests like that sort of thing:

BY ORDER OF THE JUSTICES
THIS HOUSE IS SHUT UP
THE SECOND OF OCTOBER
TILL FORTY DAYS BE PAST
LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US

She asks you, very politely, the way she asked whether you would come back: is it over?

Tell her the day the forty days ended.

To the front door.