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I paced around the living room, waiting for the doorbell to ring. She would be here any minute and first impressions were everything.

"Okay, Dani," I said to myself. "This should be easy. Just smile and be nice. It'll be fine. It'll be fine." This, of course, was a total lie. One that I'd been repeating for the last few days in a serious attempt to believe them. So far, there had been no progress.

Carla, my girlfriend of two months, was a mama's girl and if I couldn't figure out how to make her mom like me, or at least tolerate my existence, we would be over before it even really began. Naturally, I'd done everything humanly possible to make sure this dinner would go as planned. Just to be sure, I prayed to all the gods I could think of when I woke up this morning.

My luck, or lack thereof, would probably see this dinner ending horrifically.

From the kitchen, mom called out, "Dani! Help me out a moment, please."

"What's up?"

"Can you go to the basement and get the extra chairs?" Mom barely looked in my direction as she busied about the kitchen trying her hardest to perfect the timing of the menu for the night. We were having pork chops, macaroni, broccoli, and rice. All of Carla's favorites. If I could cook, I'd be right there beside her, but any potential I might have had disappeared a few years ago during Thanksgiving when I dislocated my middle finger.

It was a long story involving a frozen turkey, my grandma's undies, and lots and lots of whipped cream—a story better left untold.

"All over it." I replied.

"You are a rose in a field of daisies," she called as I hustled out. I went over to the back door and rounded the porch to the cellar doors. We had an old fashioned basement. During a storm, it wouldn't have been all that useful since the doors tended to fall off after every use. Now was a perfect example. Descending the stairs, I picked out the splinters from my hands and glanced back to make sure the other door wasn't in danger of falling on me. It had happened twice before.

Even though the cellar ran the length of the house, it seemed a lot bigger since walls weren't in place to make it sectioned off. Although if you weren't careful, you'd run right into a support beam.

Arms extended in front of me, I felt my way toward where I remembered the chairs to be. After stubbing my toe on an old dresser, I remembered that, duh, I had a smartphone with a flashlight feature. I turned on its flashlight and swallowed a scream that had built up in my chest. An old Victorian mansion, three stories high, loomed in front of me. The painting was inside of a frame nearly as tall as I was.

I took a deep breath to calm my frantic heartbeat.

There didn't seem to be anything special about it other than that it looked ready to collapse. Faded wood and stone worked together to keep it standing. There were a few odd things that stuck out to me. A satellite dish clung desperately to the porch overhang. The stairs were missing, something blotchy and white was there in their place, and the porch itself seemed to be supported by cinderblocks. A mattress lay abused and abandoned on the aforementioned vestibule. A plastic sheet covered one of the first floor windows.

The modern attachments seemed so off since the house looked a thousand years old. Maybe whoever painted this had an eye for having old and new collide. To me, it just looked wrong. Like seeing an old man in converse, an X Ambassadors t-shirt, and skinny jeans.

Another part caught my eye. To add to the creepiness of the picture, the curtain was drawn back like someone was looking through it.

"Dani!" mom called. "Hurry up with the chairs. It's almost seven."