Nine Rules

The list was taped inside the pantry door, and it had been there so long that the tape had gone the colour of weak tea, and the three Auclair siblings found it within an hour of arriving at the farmhouse they had just, between them, inherited. It was Genevieve who found it, because Genevieve was the eldest and the eldest goes into the pantry first; this is simply how families work. She had opened the pantry to see what their grandmother had left behind in the way of food, and instead of food she found the list, nine lines in their grandmother's upright old-fashioned hand, on a sheet of paper that had outlived the woman who wrote it. "Come and look at this," she called, and her brother Theo and her sister Margaux came, because the three of them had spent the whole long drive up not quite knowing how to be in a house their grandmother was no longer in, and a thing to look at was a relief. HOUSE RULES, the paper said at the top, underlined twice. And then, numbered one to nine: *1. Latch the back gate before dark, even in summer.* *2. The radio in the kitchen stays on. Low is fine. Off is not.* *3. If the dog will not come inside, you come inside without the dog.* *4. Salt the windowsill in the small bedroom every Sunday.* *5. Do not answer the door between three and four in the morning, whoever's voice it is.* *6. The well is capped for a reason. Leave the cap.* *7. If you hear someone in the orchard calling you by your name, it is not calling you.* *8. Count the family before you sleep. If the count is wrong, lock your door and wait for morning.* *9. We do not speak of the cellar. We do not open the cellar. We do not go down.* Nobody said anything for a moment. The farmhouse settled around them the way old houses do, a tick and a creak, the sound of timber remembering its shape. "She was ninety-one," Theo said at last. He said it the way you say a thing you want very much to be the whole explanation. "Ninety-one and out here alone for the last twenty years of it. People get — you know. They get rituals. My downstairs neighbour taps the doorframe four times before she leaves, every time, she's perfectly sane otherwise. This is that. This is an old woman's tapping." "Number eight isn't tapping," Margaux said. She was the youngest, and the quietest, and she had a way of saying the thing the other two were stepping around. "*Count the family before you sleep.* That's not a ritual. That's an instruction. You only write down an instruction if something went wrong without it." Genevieve was still looking at the paper. She was thinking — though she would not say it yet — about the funeral, and about how the village people who had come to it had been kind to the three of them in a careful, distant way, the way you are kind to people who have just been handed something heavier than they understand. *You're the ones taking the house*, one old man had said to her, and it had not sounded like a question, and it had not sounded like congratulation. "It's nine handwritten rules taped in a pantry," she said, making her voice firm, making it the eldest's voice. "We are not going to spend our first night here being frightened of our own grandmother's handwriting. We'll laugh about this in a week." But she noticed that she did not take the list down. She left it taped to the pantry door, the tea-coloured tape and the upright hand, and when she closed the pantry she closed it gently. It was Theo, that evening, who went looking for the cellar door — not to go down, he said, just to *see*, because a rule that said we do not open the cellar naturally made a person want to know where the cellar even was. He looked for an hour. He checked behind every door in the farmhouse, under the stairs, in the pantry itself. There was no cellar door. There was no way down anywhere in the house. And that, Genevieve thought, lying awake that first night while the kitchen radio murmured low through the floorboards exactly as rule two required, was somehow far worse than finding one. Their grandmother had written nine rules and given the last and most frightening of them to a door that, as far as any of them could find, did not exist. You do not forbid a thing that is not there. Which meant the cellar was somewhere. It only meant their grandmother had not wanted it found. Down the hall, very faintly, Genevieve heard Margaux's voice, counting. One. Two. Three. A pause. And then, smaller, Margaux counting it again.