An extract from ‘Emily’, from Make a Home of Me by Vanessa Santos

Vanessa Santos’s debut short story collection Make a Home of Me, published today by Dead Ink Books, explores all the ways in which our sanctuaries can turn into foreign places, each house haunted in its own unique way. A bold new voice in contemporary horror, her first novel In Your Heart a Devil will be published in 2026, and promises Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca meets Ottessa Moshfegh in Bluebeard’s Castle. Below, read an extract from ‘Emily’, which follows a woman’s intense new relationship with a single father and his strange young daughter. 

The day I officially moved in we painted her walls, a pastel faded-out red that she chose herself, the only colour in the whole room. I slowly discovered it wasn’t an unfinished room, it was just how she liked things. Sparse, nearly empty. Muted. She kept the blinds in her room always halfway drawn, never fully dark but not allowing the full brightness of the sun in, either. There were a few stuffed animals she paid no attention to, probably gifts from people that were carted over to the city just because something had to be. She had no dolls, no books, no toys. I bought her a full set of crayons that sat unopened for two weeks before she took one out and started doodling on a corner of her wall. I was shocked when I first saw it, but Ryan swooped in to tell me he’d given her permission – in that one corner she had complete artistic freedom. She drew swirls, mostly, like vines climbing the wall. She only used the green crayon, whose tip was soon snubbed down. She drew for a few days, a week at most, then stopped and left the massive pack of crayons alone once more, looking as pristine as when I bought them except for that one half-used forest green one.

On Friday evenings, right after Ryan got home, we ate dinner in the living room and watched kids’ movies – cartoons and Disney, silly light stories and heavier ones. She never commented on them, never laughed at the jokes or smiled at the happy endings. She wasn’t scared of the monsters perfectly designed to be an acceptable amount of scary for young children. Her eyes were always glued to the screen – I mean she looked at one spot on the TV and didn’t move them the whole time, didn’t follow the moving cartoons, didn’t look away for a second. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, sitting perfectly still, barely blinking, looking but not seeing, eyes absolutely blank. When the movie ended, she got up and went to her room. Sometimes she whispered ‘goodnight’ as she was leaving, sometimes she didn’t speak at all. I often wondered if in her bedroom she did the same thing – sat and stared blankly at the wall.

To say we were a happy little family is to stretch the truth a fair bit, but we coexisted peacefully, for the most part. There were no arguments, no pouting, no passive-aggressive signs of discontent. Emily sailed through life as she always had before I came along, as far as I could tell, and Ryan and I easily fell into each other, with the familiarity of an old married couple. I made him coffee each morning, except when he brought us breakfast in bed on Sunday. We took turns cooking, or cooked together – when we were both overworked, we picked up food, often forgetting that Emily wouldn’t be eating that extra-spicy Indian dish we both loved. She faded into the background, as it seemed she wanted. I think sometimes she herself forgot she existed.

It was a smooth transition. There were moments when I felt an inexplicable dread, like my primitive senses suddenly perceived some threat that my eyes couldn’t see. Sometimes the house felt entirely alien – I would be walking back to our bedroom after brushing my teeth at night and in the stillness and darkness I felt adrift from the planet, like I had unwittingly been dropped somewhere outside of my own dimension, an unfamiliar jungle. I still got out at the wrong train stop sometimes, and felt a light shiver when I realised I had to go back.

It was only natural. Everything had moved so fast, after all. Despite how comfortable everything felt, the absurdly sudden shift in my life had to leave me a little off centre. How could it not? In less than a year, I had met someone who filled my life in strange new wonderful ways, and soon our lives were so tangled together you couldn’t pry them apart – complete with a kid I now collected from school or warmed up dinner for when her father couldn’t make it on time. A child, even one as self-sufficient as Emily, is a big commitment, life-changing in ways it’s hard to foresee. Emily’s stillness was a distraction, it helped weave the illusion that it wasn’t a big deal after all. Most of the time, I believed it. But there were moments when I knocked on her door and opened it to call her to dinner and she would fix her eyes on me, such a focused stare that I often forgot what I wanted to say.

A few times, I felt her watching me that way when we were eating or taking a walk or watching TV together. It never happened often enough to bring up with Ryan, or even try to ask her about it. I wanted to maintain our blessed peace, and Emily, in her own strange way, was just trying to get to know me and get used to me. If she memorised my features, perhaps she’d stop feeling the need to look at me that way, and her gaze would drift back down to the floor.

I tried to shake off the occasional sense of unease. 

When summer was ending, the air distinctly chillier but the sun still shining brightly, we took a little family trip. We packed our bags and rented a cottage by the sea for the weekend. We wanted to enjoy the last few moments of good weather before winter buried us in coats and scarves.

The drive was long but pleasant; we were all lost in our own thoughts but excited, too. Talk was sporadic, but the silence didn’t feel heavy, and we arrived energised. The cottage was old, clean but not in great condition, clearly in need of repair. Still, it more than suited our needs, with two small bedrooms, one of which faced the sea. We got there late in the evening, and Ryan and I took a stroll along the sand after Emily had gone to bed. The temperature dropped considerably in the evenings, so we were wrapped up in warm sweaters, enjoying the empty beach and the way the wind chopped up the waves. Despite the cold, it was peaceful and pretty.

We took our time, enjoying being alone and far removed from everyone. Night was in full swing when we got back, and only the porch light was on – everything else was dark. It had gotten cold inside, too, and Ryan turned on the heating, going from room to room making sure all was working properly. That’s when we realised Emily was missing.

Extracted from Make a Home of Me by Vanessa Santos, published by Dead Ink Books, priced £10.99.