The roads had disappeared. Hours before they had been blanketed with so much snow no vehicle could pass through, but the snow had not let up, and the ground was a dense, white sheet. Ridges of the cold, pale powder piled up on the edge of the windowsill Evelin Baudelaire stared through, her eyes’ gaze tracing the unrelenting swirling of the falling flakes. There was no hope for her to get back home before morning, or maybe afternoon. And if there was no hope for that, it was beyond consideration that she would be able to get back to her laptop in her bedroom to turn in her history paper. Goodbye getting at least a C, hello late point deductions.

The guest bedroom was cold. The home’s owner had not anticipated overnight guests, but the weather forecasters had not expected such an early start to the impending snowstorm. Samuel had been kind enough to lend Evelin the room after a fatiguing hour of trying and failing to summon a taxi driver who would be willing to brave the conditions to take her home.

The other guests had stayed, too. There were a good few of them, about five, if Evelin remembered correctly. She had met them during the evening, but they were still nearly strangers to her. She was lucky she did not have to share the guest bedroom with any of the near-strangers, but maybe their body heat would have helped to warm the place up a bit.

All of those guests, Evelin presumed, would be sleeping in their own borrowed spaces, and her room was so cold. Unpleasant, too. It was small, dark, and frigid, a musty smell permeated the place, and in the meager light off the snow outside, Evelin could see around her the forms of cardboard boxes that filled the space. The storage of it all brought her a sense of unease as it reminded her it was not her neat bedroom at home, and so she left the bed, slipped on the sneakers she had placed by the door, and half-walked, half-shivered out into the hallway. What she was going to do when she reached its end, she did not know. Maybe have a slightly warmer spiral into terror about her essay, catching the remnants of the fire that had been put out in the living room’s fireplace before she went to bed. There would be no fire glow, but there would be the enveloping heat still lingering through the air, and the smell of the wood smoke instead of molding storage boxes.

The hallway had seemed so wide and well-decorated with watercolour paintings in gilded frames during the early evening, when the party began. But all of those details disappeared into the late hour. All was still, and all was bathed in the deepest grey of night, erasing detail. Evelin hardly knew her way around the house, as large as it was, but the guest bedroom was near the end of the hallway, and surely the main living space—living room, kitchen…—would be at the other end. So she followed it, wishing Samuel was the sort to enjoy night lights, or that her phone battery had not died earlier in the night to prevent her from using its flashlight, or that she had brought a compatible charger, which no one else at the party possessed. All of their phones had been new enough to take the tiny USB, or of the brand that used them to begin with, and for the first time, Evelin found herself bothered at having bought her phone, old and used, off of the local classifieds.

The area around Evelin opened up. She felt her way forward with her hands extended, relieved no one else could see her ridiculous little zombie walk or the way she brought up solid against the side of a black velvet couch. Stepping out from the space too close to the couch, she poked around until she found a desk at its side, and a lamp, and a little, ridged knob on the stem. With a click, warm orange light filled the living room.

A woman lay on the couch.

Evelin stepped back, startled. She placed a hand over her mouth to prevent the gasp that pressed for release. She vaguely recognised the woman from earlier in the evening, but could not remember her name. Studying the woman’s features—long black hair that fell limp around her, a delicate frame that had made Evelin nearly protest when the woman defeated her in an arm wrestle around the table at dinner, and light, black clothes that suggested the woman was no stranger to dressing with no mind to the temperature—she tried to determine her next move. Her options did not number many: go back to the room and leave the woman to her sleep, though shiver all night in the bedroom that was colder than the living room, or to rest in the living room’s relative warmth alongside the woman and hope she did not make too much of a sound.

The living room did hold more warmth than the room had, a warmth with a certain coziness that made her think it was no wonder the partygoer had perched down there to fall asleep instead of in a freezing guest room that was more used to holding stuff than people.

The thought left Evelin’s mind. Something was deeply wrong with the woman’s sleep. Her eyes were open.

Dark eyes, fixed on nothing in particular, nothing but the air ahead. Evelin had heard some people could sleep with their eyes open, but she had never ever seen it before. Goosebumps crawled along her arms. She should have stayed home, she told herself. She should not have gone to Samuel’s weird party with Samuel’s weird friends who slept with their eyes open, and then she would not have been stuck overnight in Samuel’s weird, cold house and stranded from her own mediocre essay.

There was no use in thinking of what she should have done. There was nothing she could do about it. There was no way to reverse her landing in a weird situation, so the only way out was some weird way through.

She waved a hand in front of the woman’s eyes. Could people who slept with their eyes open see? Did she even want to know?

“Creepy,” she whispered beneath her breath, and the woman’s eyes moved just to the side to look directly at her.

Evelin stopped waving and froze in place.

The woman’s eyes drifted back to stare directly ahead.

“Can you see and hear me?” Evelin asked quietly.

“Mhm,” the woman mumbled.

Evelin’s shoulders tensed. “O-okay. But you’re asleep? Or are you awake?”

“I am sleeping deeply,” the woman droned.

“But you’re talking to me. You answered me.” Evelin folded her arms around each other in front of her chest. “How do you do this?”

“I am sleeping deeply,” the woman repeated.

Evelin took large steps backward. It was time to abort the mission. No living room warmth had to be worth witnessing what she did for any longer. She took too many of those steps, backing up hard into a wingback chair. “Ow!”

The woman on the couch blinked a few times and sat up in the glowing lamplight. She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her wrists. “Hello?”

“Sorry,” Evelin said. “I didn’t mean to wake you. You were asleep, weren’t you? That’s what you told me.”

The woman considered the question for a moment. “I don’t know. I watched you as you came in, and as you spoke to me. But it doesn’t feel entirely real. So, you really are here right now?”

“But your eyes were open. Can you sleep with your eyes open?”

“I’ve never done that before,” the woman admitted. “Why am I on the couch? Oh, right, I was sitting here when…”

“When what?”

The woman covered her face with her hands. “It’s going to sound strange, and I don’t remember much, but someone showed me an antique pocket watch earlier, and implored me to look at it. I don’t know how I didn’t realise.” She set her hands down on her lap. “I’ve been hypnotized.”

Evelin almost laughed. “That’s not the sort of party trick I was expecting to happen here tonight, but it does explain the state you were in when I found you. A trance, then, was that it?” Her shoulders eased, and a soft smile fell over her lips. “You weren’t actually fully asleep for real?”

“I bet it brings you some peace to know I wasn’t sleeping with my eyes open, huh?” the woman asked.

“No doubt. Sorry I said you were creepy.” Evelin sat down next to the woman on the couch. “Hypnotized, though? Could you not sleep, or something? And someone helped you with that? I can’t blame you if the sounds of the snow and wind outside kept you up.”

The dark eyes became half-obscured under the heavy eyelids of contemplation. A twitch stirred the corner of the woman’s lips. “I don’t remember. I don’t even know who did it, even though I thought I knew everyone at this party well. Everyone but you.”

“Hey, hey, don’t look at me. If I knew how to hypnotize people, I’d have been in my history professor’s office this past week trying to get an extension. I have an essay due tonight that I can’t get done because I’m stuck here.” Evelin sighed. “Wait, what time is it? There’s no clock in the guest bedroom, and my phone’s dead. Do you have a phone or a watch or something?”

“Let me check. My phone should be in my purse. I think I left it by the side of the couch.” The woman dangled her narrow, but surprisingly strong, arm over the edge of the couch and pulled up a small, black leather bag. “Weird. It feels a bit light. I hope I didn’t leave my phone in the kitchen or the dining room.”

“If it’s past midnight I’m screwed,” Evelin lamented. “Forget hypnosis, I’m going to need time travel to fix this mess. Did you happen to catch the time? How long were you hypnotized for?”

“It feels like it’s been minutes, and it feels like it’s been hours. I wouldn’t trust me about time right now, if I were you. I guess that makes both of our trustworthiness uncertain?”

“What? It wasn’t me. I didn’t do that to you, I wouldn’t have thought you were sleeping with your eyes open if I did. Besides, what reason would I have to hypnotize you?”

“Revenge for beating you at arm wrestling earlier?”

“You won that fairly. I’m not a sore loser,” Evelin protested, even though her arm was sore. “Besides, it’s weird retribution for that, to tell you that you are sleeping deeply or whatever it was you repeated. If I were a sore loser and a hypnotist, wouldn’t I make you lose a round to me, or admit that I’m stronger than you are?”

The woman did not answer. Her jaw loosened as she drifted backward to lean her body on the couch, falling from her sitting position. “I am sleeping deeply,” she murmured.

Evelin waved a hand in front of her face. “Hang on, no, no, no, I didn’t mean to do that. Why are you like that again? Did I say a trigger phrase or something?”

“I am sleeping deeply.”

“Well, stop it. Wake up, please.”

With a few blinks and a return to the sitting posture, the trance subsided. “That was so odd…”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I won’t say it again, whatever it was I just said,” Evelin promised.

“Evelin Beauregard, isn’t it? Your surprise looks genuine enough, I have no reason to suspect that you hypnotized me.”

“Baudelaire,” Evelin corrected, a little ashamed. She was, after all, freaking out about it all worse than the woman who had been hypnotized was. “I’ve forgotten your name entirely, I’m sorry to say.”

“Raisa Ivanovna Morozova. I’m used to people forgetting it. There aren’t many people named Raisa around here. I get called everything from Raina to Eliza. Unfortunately.” Raisa laughed a bit. “It doesn’t help me get commissions at work if the customers don’t remember who helped them find their lipsticks and foundation. But I’d rather you call me anything but ‘that random hypnotized woman I met at Samuel’s party.’”

“Understood, Raisa, I won’t call you that.”

“Let me figure out what time it is for you, since neither of us know. I have a bad feeling it’s after midnight and your paper is late, but we may as well hope for the best. How come you went to a party anyway, knowing you had your paper to do?”

Raisa fished through her purse. There was little colour to her ghostly face, and the lack of light besides that from the lamp did not help the matter much, but what redness had been there drained completely as she searched.

“Did you leave your phone somewhere after all?” Evelin asked.

“My phone’s here. It’s my wallet that’s missing.” Raisa tossed objects onto the couch in the space between herself and Evelin. Dark lipstick, liquid eyeliner, wireless headphones, her phone, and a piece of folded paper. No wallet.

“I don’t know where it could have gone,” Evelin insisted, expecting Raisa’s suspicion again. With her knowledge on hypnosis so limited it was nearly nonexistent, she would have had an easier time pulling off a wallet theft, yet Raisa had suspected her, at first, as the surprise hypnotist.

“I think someone does,” Raisa said, disappointment dripping from her voice. She picked up the paper and unfolded it, then showed Evelin.

Typed words in a regal serif typeface spelled the message: “If you want your wallet back, you’ll get it when I get to hypnotize you again. Alone. No guests. Wear something pretty.”