A week after the Holt family moves into the Baneberry Hall house, five-year-old Maggie Holt tells her father, Ewan, that he should check her room for ghosts. Maggie’s father isn’t superstitious, but he admits that the walls in the house shift and make odd noises.

Maggie’s room is on the second floor. Ewan checks the closet and under the bed; he then opens the doors of an ornate armoire. The surface is carved with cherubs, and it reminds him of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories. It’s empty, and he hopes she’ll be reassured. However, when he tells her that there’s no such thing as ghosts, she insists that she has seen them. One ghost—“Mister Shadow” (7)—talks to her. Maggie tells her father that Mister Shadow says they’ll die there.

The narrative flash-forwards to when the adult Maggie enters a legal office and realizes that the receptionist—a woman named Wendy Davenport—obviously knows about what Maggie refers to as “the Book” (9) throughout the story. She says she’s there to see Arthur Rosenfield. Like most people, Wendy notices the scar on her left cheek. When Wendy mentions the Book—the actual title is House of Horrors—Maggie says her father wrote it.