Archive of Our Own ^beta

The gravel road underneath their tires had been shrinking for miles, but now it seemed to vanish more than narrow, devoured on either side by a forest that leaned in too close, like it meant to smother them. The trees were old, impossibly tall, their trunks gnarled and split like cracked bone and their bark black with rot. Spanish moss drooped from every limb in long, draping tendrils, brushing against the roof of the car in slow, deliberate passes that sounded too much like breath. The air was dense with silence. Not the peaceful kind, this was the heavy, coiled quiet of something waiting to move. Waiting to strike.

Josh gripped the wheel harder, the leather slick beneath his palms. His shoulders were hunched, his spine rigid. Every turn looked like the one before. Every tree trunk seemed familiar. The deeper they went, the more the woods felt like a loop. Like they weren’t driving through the forest, but being pulled in by it. Consumed.

Above them, the sky sagged low and swollen, a slab of dead gray that pressed down over the canopy like a lid. Light came through in patches, sickly, pallid beams that painted the landscape in flickering, feverish hues. Greens too yellow. Browns too red. Everything looked off, like a photograph left too long in water. Colors bleeding, edges softening. Reality bending at the corners.

Josh’s gut had been tight for miles, but now it twisted sharp, bile rising at the back of his throat. “This can’t be right,” he muttered, voice barely louder than the gravel grinding under the tires. He glanced down at the GPS. The signal blinked in and out like it was struggling to breathe. No bars. Just a flicker of direction before the screen pixelated and froze again.

Tyler leaned forward in his seat, eyes wide, the corner of his mouth tugged up in something that wasn’t quite a smile. There was a glint to him, something lit up behind his expression like he already knew the ending to a story Josh hadn’t even begun to read. He had one elbow propped against the window, fingers tapping lazily against the glass, the heel of one boot resting on the dashboard like they were heading to some lakeside getaway.

“No, this is definitely it,” he said, too easily. Too certain. “The coordinates match the envelope. We’re close.”

His voice was light. Warm. Like he didn’t feel the pressure in the air. Like the trees hadn’t been whispering their names since they crossed the state line. He sounded like someone who’d already been here before.

He sounded like someone who had come home.

Josh cast a glance sideways, uneasy. Tyler’s face was half-lit in the watery light bleeding through the trees, and the expression he wore didn’t sit right. It was too relaxed, too pleased, like he knew something that Josh didn’t. “You’re way too excited about this,” Josh said, his voice thin, stretched taut over a gutful of nerves.

Tyler only shrugged, a crooked smirk tugging lazily at the corner of his mouth. “It’s free real estate.”

Josh didn’t even attempt a smile. His eyes stayed on the road, scanning the trees like they might reach in and drag the car off the path. “It’s free cursed real estate.”

Tyler let out a low, quiet laugh, barely more than a breath. Then he turned away from the window and dug into his backpack, fingers moving with practiced ease until they found the envelope again. It emerged like something sacred, creased and soft at the corners, its once-crisp edges now smudged from constant handling, worn like a worry stone. He’d been thumbing it obsessively since they’d crossed the state line, like the act of holding it could anchor him to something. 

“A house in the middle of nowhere Louisiana,” Tyler said, his voice light, detached, the cadence just a hair too slow. He unfolded the letter carefully, reverently, like he was afraid it might dissolve in his hands. “Gifted to me by some dead great-uncle I never met. No will. No next of kin. No phone call. Just a letter. Just… little old me.”

There was a strange tone to his voice, nestled just beneath the humor, a softness, a distance, like he was repeating something he’d heard long ago. Like he wasn’t entirely awake. Like he was remembering something from a dream that hadn’t ended yet.

Josh shook his head, the motion sharp. “We don’t even know what he died of.”

Tyler leaned back against the seat, the leather groaning softly beneath him, eyes still fixed on the paper like it might rearrange itself if he looked long enough. “Probably boredom,” he muttered absently.

Josh didn’t answer. He just kept his eyes on the road, but his pulse had quickened. The forest seemed darker now. Closer. And the house felt like it was waiting.

He kept driving, jaw tight, every muscle in his arms locked from holding the wheel for so long. He tried not to think about the way the moss dragged itself slowly down the sides of the car, curling tighter across the windows with each passing mile. It looked less like a plant now and more like fingers, skeletal, groping, dragging along the glass like they were drawing a curtain shut. Blocking out the sky. Stealing the light.

Then, all at once, the trees fell away. The sudden exposure made his chest clench, breath catching in his throat. His stomach twisted hard enough to knock the wind from him, like something in his body had sensed the shift before his eyes could make sense of it. An instinct. A warning.

And there it was.

The house stood, or rather, sagged, at the end of a winding gravel drive, hunched like a wounded animal in the middle of a clearing that felt too wide, too quiet. It looked wrong. Not just old. Not just abandoned. Wrong in its shape , in the way it seemed to press down into the earth like it had tried to bury itself and failed. Like something underneath had been pulling it down. Three stories of gray, rotting wood stretched upward toward the sky like bones too long for their skin. The windows stared back, black and blank, like sockets where eyes had once been.

The roof dipped in the center, warped like a spine bent under too much weight, as though the whole structure had been holding its breath for years and was seconds away from exhaling for good. The shutters hung crooked, rusted hinges twisted, one shutter dangling upside down like a snapped wrist. Thick ivy crawled up the sides in strangled ropes, not decorative but invasive, parasitic, burrowing into every gap in the siding with an intelligence that felt too deliberate to be coincidence.

The porch leaned drunkenly to the left, warped boards bowing as though buckling beneath an invisible weight. The entire house looked like it was leaning forward, waiting for them to get close enough so it could fall on top of them and swallow them whole.

Josh hit the brakes without thinking. The car jerked to a halt, gravel popping under the tires with a sharp crackle, and then nothing. The silence that followed wasn’t just silence. It was a vacuum. It was the sound of breath being held. There were no birds. No bugs. No wind. Just the slow, mechanical exhale of the engine fading into clicks, and a pressure that wrapped around the vehicle like fog or a hand. The air itself felt thick against the windshield, like something had leaned in to get a better look at them.

Josh stared through the glass, unable to blink.

“Jesus,” he breathed. “That’s it?”

Tyler didn’t answer.

Josh turned, uneasy, the silence growing heavier by the second. Tyler was staring at the house now, eyes wide and distant, lips slightly parted like he’d forgotten how to breathe. His expression was unreadable. Blank, but not empty. Like something had been spoken to him in a language only he understood. Like the house had whispered a secret through the windshield and Tyler hadn’t stopped listening. The kind of silence that feels too full, like there’s no room for your own thoughts anymore.

Then, without a word, Tyler gave the envelope in his lap a small shake.

Something dropped into his palm with a dull metallic clink. The sound was soft but sharp in the dead air, louder than it should’ve been, like it echoed through more than just the car. Like it rattled the bones of the trees outside.

Josh leaned in slightly, frowning.

It was a key. An old skeleton key, long and curved and blackened like it had been pulled from a riverbed after a hundred years underwater. The metal was dull, tarnished, cold-looking, and worn smooth in places like it had passed through a thousand hands, or been turned in the same lock over and over again. It didn’t shine. It didn’t catch the light. It just sat in Tyler’s hand like something that had always belonged there. A relic. A tool. A weapon.

The stem curved gently, too elegant for something so functional, almost like it had grown that way, organic and deliberate. Its shape was fragile, thin around the edges, but somehow felt unbreakable. Final. At the base of the handle, a faint mark was carved into the surface. A letter, maybe. A “T”. Or a crack in the metal that just happened to look like it belonged to him. Like the house had known who would come for it in the end.

Josh’s throat felt dry. He stared at the thing, his heart ticking faster.

“That looks like it opens a coffin,” he said, voice quiet with unease.

Tyler didn’t flinch. His fingers curled around the key slowly, gently, like it was something sacred. Like he recognized it. Like he’d missed it.

He smiled, soft and strange. “Or a treasure chest.”

Josh frowned, the crease between his brows deepening as he turned to look at Tyler. “You’re way too calm about this.”

Tyler’s eyes never left the house. “It’s beautiful, dude.”

Josh stared at him, at the easy way the words left his mouth, like he was looking at a castle instead of a carcass. His voice was flat, edged with disbelief. “No. It’s not. It looks like it wants to eat us.”

Tyler laughed, but it didn’t sound like it belonged to the moment. It was soft, distant, like it came from behind glass or from inside a dream. His gaze remained fixed on the structure, unfazed, almost mesmerized. “You’re such a coward.”

Josh didn’t respond. He couldn’t. The words landed but didn’t register. His chest felt too tight, his pulse a thick thrum in his ears. His eyes were locked on the second floor, on the rows of tall, skeletal windows that pierced the sagging face of the house. They were warped by time and dirt, black with age, too dark to reflect even the dim gray light bleeding through the forest canopy. They weren’t just windows anymore. They were eyes. Not metaphorically, not in some poetic way that dismisses the danger with a flourish. They were watching. Seeing. Waiting.

The sensation crawled beneath his skin, electric and intimate. Not the feeling of being seen from afar, but the feeling of something pressing in close. Of breath on the back of his neck. Of fingers hovering just out of reach. This wasn’t curiosity. This was hunger. And worse, it felt old. Like the house had been waiting a very long time for this exact moment. For them.

His stomach twisted again, sudden and violent, a sour clench that felt like it came from somewhere deeper than his gut. It stole his breath and made his vision blur for half a second. He winced, curling his fingers tighter around the steering wheel until his knuckles stood out sharp and white.

“You okay?” Tyler asked, glancing over, his voice still light, still untouched by the cold weight pressing in on them.

Josh forced himself to nod, jaw tight. “Yeah. Just… queasy.”

Tyler raised the skeleton key, holding it up between two fingers. Its dark metal shimmered slightly in the fractured light that filtered through the branches overhead, catching just enough to gleam. It looked heavier now. Important. Ritualistic. Like a relic passed down for a purpose no one ever explained out loud.

He smiled, teeth just barely visible. “Let’s go meet our inheritance.”

Josh didn’t move.

The quiet around him stretched thin, heavy, as taut as wire. It filled the car like rising water pressing against his ears and soaking into his skin. Every second passed like a held breath that refused to release. Even the trees seemed to hush, as if the forest itself was listening now, leaning closer and waiting.

The engine clicked softly as it cooled, a series of faint metallic pings that sounded too loud in the silence. Josh could feel the air shift around the car, subtle but wrong, like pressure changing before a storm. And above them, towering and still, the house watched. Not lifeless. Not abandoned. Just patient. Like it had been holding itself still for years, waiting for someone to come back.

Then Tyler moved.

He popped the passenger door open with a smooth push, no hesitation, no glance back. He stepped out like he’d done it a thousand times, like this wasn’t new, wasn’t strange. The moment his boot touched the gravel, the atmosphere around them changed.

The trees tilted imperceptibly inward. Shadows, once scattered, thickened between the trunks like ink dropped into water. The heat that had been pressing against the windshield all morning thinned in an instant, replaced by something sharper, colder, with air that tasted like stone and old water and the bottom of a locked drawer.

Josh stayed frozen in the driver’s seat, muscles locked tight. His jaw clenched until his teeth ached, temples pulsing in sharp, syncopated rhythm with his heartbeat. He could feel it pounding against his ribs, against his spine, like it wanted out. Like it knew. Get out. Turn the car around. Leave him. Leave this.

But he couldn’t.

He looked up.

Tyler was already halfway up the drive, walking slow but steady, the skeleton key dangling from one hand, swaying back and forth with each step like a pendulum counting down. His shoulders were relaxed. His pace was unhurried. There was a weightlessness to his stride that made Josh’s blood run cold. Tyler didn’t look like someone approaching an unknown. He looked like someone coming home.

The wind rose without warning. No rustle, no buildup, just a sudden, precise gust, slicing down the path like a blade. It cut through the trees, through the silence, through Josh. Cold against his skin, colder in his chest. It didn’t feel natural. It felt like breath. Like the house had exhaled just for him.

Josh swallowed hard, his throat dry and raw, and forced his hand to the door handle. The chill from the metal bit into his palm. He pushed it open, slowly, and stepped into the wind.

Into it all.

The front steps groaned beneath their weight, each one exhaling a warped, brittle sigh that felt too human. Josh kept a careful distance behind Tyler, his feet hesitant, shoulders tight, every motion loud and graceless against the warped boards of the porch. The wood beneath him didn’t just sag, it gave, pliant and damp like something that had been left to rot too long in the dark. Each step felt like it sank deeper than the last, as though the house were trying to draw them in through the soles of their shoes.

There was water in the wood, but not just water. Something else. Something slicker. The smell rose with every step, mildew, sweet rot, wet earth, and under it all a faint note of something biological. Fungal. Like breath trapped in insulation. Like sweat soaked into floorboards. Like pure decay.

Tyler didn’t seem to notice. He moved with a strange grace, light and sure, as if the house recognized him. As if he knew exactly how not to disturb it. When he reached the door, he didn’t open it. He reached out first, dragging the tips of his fingers down the cracked paint in one long, reverent stroke. The sound it made was soft, almost tender, like skin peeling away from bark. His touch was slow, intimate. Josh felt a chill claw its way down his spine.

Then Tyler pulled the skeleton key from his pocket and slid it into the lock.

It didn’t stick. Didn’t grind or click like it had to fight its way in. It slid in like water finding its level. Like it had been waiting for years for someone to come home.

Josh’s gut twisted. His mouth went dry. Every nerve in his body screamed no.

The door creaked open on its own. There was no sudden gust, no dramatic rush of air. No push from Tyler’s hand. Just a slow, measured inward swing, hinges crying out with a wet, strangled moan. It sounded like a breath dragged through a broken throat.

And then the house exhaled.

The heat hit Josh first, wet, heavy, and pungent. The breath of the house was thick with mildew and something older, like pages left to molder in a locked drawer. Underneath that, something coppery clung to the back of his tongue, rust, or blood left too long in the open air. A hospital room gone to ruin. A wound that never closed.

He froze on the threshold, one foot over the line. His skin prickled, every hair rising as his body tried to reject the place. There was something wrong with the temperature. The warmth wasn’t comforting, it clung to him. It wrapped around his neck. It was the warmth of meat just beginning to spoil.

This wasn’t a house. It was a body. And they were stepping into its mouth.

The walls groaned, low and subtle, like old joints stretching in the dark. The air shifted in slow pulses. Inhale. Exhale. And the floor under his boots creaked not just with age, but with intention. With weight. Like ribs bowing inward.

Tyler stepped inside as though he were stepping into his bedroom.

Josh stood trembling for half a second longer, heart pounding so loud it drowned out thought. Then he crossed the threshold.

The moment his second foot hit the warped floorboards, the door shut behind them with a soft, clean click. Not a slam. Not a breeze. Just final.

The kind of sound that doesn’t need an explanation. The kind of sound that tells you something just ended.

The foyer opened around them like a hollow cathedral, wide and echoless, steeped in silence so dense it felt alive. It was cavernous, stretching upward into shadows that seemed to breathe, the high ceiling lost in a veil of grime and age. The air was thick and unmoving, swollen with moisture and dust that drifted in sluggish, unnatural spirals through beams of watery light. Every breath Josh took felt like drawing in the ghost of something long dead.

To the left, a staircase swept up in a slow, regal curve, once grand, now sunken and skeletal. The steps bowed inward as though sagging beneath the weight of years of neglect. A net of cobwebs clung to the balustrade in intricate, suffocating knots, and brittle vines had clawed their way in through the cracks in the window glass, curling along the rail like veins pumped dry. Each step looked like it would splinter under a whisper.

High above, a stained-glass window pulsed faintly with the fading day, but its light was sick. The reds were too red, like rust in water. The purples had gone muddy. The green looked like mold. That window didn’t color the light, it corrupted it. It poured down over the floor in fractured bruises, warped by grime, casting long shadows that bled into the corners. The floor beneath them was coated in a sheen of dust so thick it might’ve been ash. Nothing stirred it. There was no breeze. No movement. Just suspended particles frozen in air, hovering like the house was waiting to exhale.

And above it all, the chandelier hung like a corpse. Once ornate, now a dangling, ruined thing. Crystals long since fallen or shattered. The chain that held it creaked softly, stretched taut, threadbare, one side sagging as if it were slowly being pulled downward by something invisible and patient. It swayed gently, a pendulum over the dead center of the room. Josh couldn’t stop staring at it. His mind whispered things he didn’t want to hear. That it would fall. That it wanted to. That maybe it had waited just for him.

“This is amazing,” Tyler said, his voice low with awe.

Josh turned toward him, the sound cutting clean through the thickness of the room. “What?”

Tyler stepped further into the foyer, slow and unafraid, his boots leaving no imprint in the dust. He twirled once, arms hanging loose at his sides like he was letting the house spin him, like he belonged to it already. His eyes shone with something that looked like wonder.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Look at the bones of it. The ceilings. The windows. I mean, yeah, it’s falling apart, but you can tell it used to shine.”

Josh didn’t follow.

He stayed rooted near the door, the air pressing tighter against his skin, cold leaking in through every pore. Something pulsed just behind his eyes, a pressure that throbbed in time with his heartbeat, as if the house had found a way in. He didn’t answer right away. Just stared past Tyler at the floating dust, at the chandelier, at the way the air held everything in place like a breath caught in a throat.

“Yeah,” he said finally, his voice hollow. “Used to.”

And still, the dust didn’t fall. It hung there, weightless, refusing gravity. Unmoving.

Josh watched it, chest tightening with something he couldn’t name. The silence wasn't peaceful, it was total. A sealed vacuum. Not emptiness, but fullness. The kind of silence that pressed in from all sides. The kind that came just before something spoke. Or screamed.

In the center of the vast entryway stood a curved table, elegant in shape but long surrendered to dust and time. Its once-polished surface had dulled to a grayish film, the wood beneath barely visible, hidden under years of abandonment. And yet, it remained standing, upright, poised, untouched by the rot that had claimed everything else. There was a quiet dignity to it, something unnerving in the way it defied the decay around it. Like it had been placed there not just for function, but for ceremony. And resting at its heart, centered with unsettling precision, was a bowl. Ceramic. Bone white. Perfectly round. Perfectly still.

Josh hadn’t seen it when they walked in. Could’ve sworn it hadn’t been there a second ago. But now it was the only thing in the room that mattered. Inside the bowl, a delicate nest of rose petals sat in a loose spiral, their edges crisp and dark, crumbling into themselves with the papery frailty of something long dead. They should’ve been dust by now. But they weren’t. They looked placed. Arranged. Fresh in their decay, as though someone had come just yesterday to tuck them in by hand. As though someone still lived here.

He stepped closer, drawn without realizing it, his fingertips hovering just above the edge of the bowl. Heat rose off the porcelain in a low, steady pulse, unexpected and wrong. Not burning, but alive. Like it had been touched only moments before. Like it had memory. Like it had skin . His breath caught. He didn’t want to touch it. But he couldn’t look away.

Across the room, Tyler had drifted to the staircase like a man in a dream. He trailed his hand along the rotted banister, fingers dragging through nests of cobwebs that stuck to his knuckles and wrist like lace spun from dead skin. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink.

“Can you imagine this place a hundred years ago?” Tyler’s voice was soft, half-lost in the vast stillness. “Candles everywhere. Velvet curtains. Dinner parties. Someone playing that old piano down the hall…”

Josh’s head snapped toward him, his stomach twisting. Piano? There hadn’t been a piano.

He turned on instinct, and behind him, where there had been only an empty wall before, now stretched a hallway. Long. Narrow. Shrouded in black like it had been waiting for its cue. It pulsed with depth, the kind of dark that wasn’t just shadow but absence. A cold absence that pressed in from all sides. He didn’t remember seeing it. Could’ve sworn it hadn’t been there when they entered. There had been no hallway. No door. And certainly no piano.

He stared at it, frozen.

The hallway stared back.

And then, slowly, carefully, Josh turned away. Refused to look too long. Refused to let it know it had his attention. The air felt heavier now, tighter, like the house had inhaled again, expecting.

“Tyler,” Josh said, his voice careful, each word placed like a footstep on thin ice, “maybe we should pick a room and crash. We’ve been driving for hours.”

Tyler nodded, but it felt automatic, reflexive. His eyes were still on the walls, drifting upward toward the ceiling, tracing the veins of cracks in the plaster like they meant something, like they spelled out messages in a language only he could read. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, but the words came distant and weightless. His body turned slowly in place, like he was keeping time with something Josh couldn’t hear. He moved like the house was singing under the silence, some low, slow lullaby caught between the walls, and Tyler was the only one who knew the tune.

Josh felt another twist in his stomach, sharper this time, deep and cold like a fist closing around his gut. He swallowed hard, but it didn’t help. The air clung to the back of his throat, heavy with the taste of mold and something worse, bitter and metallic, like ash soaked in old water. Like breathing in the dust of something buried too long.

“Ty,” he said again, quieter now, the fear threading in behind the word, uninvited but raw. “Can we… stick close tonight?”

He hadn’t meant for it to come out like that. Hadn’t meant to sound so small.

But Tyler turned to him then, and he smiled, soft and slow, and not the grin he wore for strangers or photos or late-night gas station conversations. This smile was real. Quiet. The kind of smile Tyler only gave him when the world was asleep, when everything else had fallen away. The 2 a.m. smile. The one that meant I see you .

“Sure,” he said gently, with something in his voice Josh almost recognized. “You can take whatever room you want.”

Then he nodded down the hallway. “I’ll grab the one at the end.”

Josh’s pulse kicked hard in his chest. A sudden jolt, primal and instinctive. Like a deer freezing just before the snap of a branch.

He turned toward the hallway again.

There were too many doors. Lining the corridor like teeth, narrow and close-set, each one slightly different. Some were cracked open just an inch, just enough to show a slice of dark. Others gaped wide, pitch black with no visible end. Shadows spilled out across the warped floorboards like ink, curling and reaching, as if the rooms themselves were exhaling. The further down he looked, the longer the hall seemed to stretch, receding into itself like a tunnel. He couldn’t remember it being this long. He couldn’t remember there being this many doors.

He turned back to say something, to call Tyler back, to stop him.

But Tyler was already gone. It was just the sound of soft footfalls receding on the old carpet. Light, aimless. Unbothered.

The foyer groaned softly behind him, a low, aching sound that seemed to rise from the bones of the floor itself. Not a creak from shifting wood, not the harmless moan of an old house, but something deeper. A vertebral sigh. A sound of slow awakening. Josh stood completely still in the center of the room, shoulders tight, throat dry, caught in a silence that felt more like suspension. The air hung thick and unmoving, the dust caught in it floating like ash in water, frozen mid-fall. It felt like time was holding its breath.

He turned his head toward the hallway again. Its mouth looked wrong. Crooked somehow. Tilted just enough to register as unnatural. The length of it was impossible, stretched beyond logic, pulling further into shadow than the dimensions of the house should’ve allowed. Josh blinked hard, as if he could force the geometry to correct itself, but the deeper he looked, the more it dissolved. The floorboards twisted subtly, their seams not aligning. The walls bowed in places and then out again, pulsing gently, like lungs expanding. The light from the foyer didn’t fade into the hallway, it curved, refracted around the first door and then disappeared altogether, swallowed by the dark.

He could hear Tyler somewhere down the corridor. Footsteps, slow and deliberate. But there was something wrong with the rhythm. It wasn’t walking, not really. It was too slow, too meandering, circling without direction. Like he was pacing. Or dancing. Drifting from room to room in some quiet, private pattern Josh couldn’t decipher. The floor creaked, then shifted, first to the left, then behind him, then back to the center. No direction. No sense. The sound moved like something crawling through the walls. Or like the house itself was turning inward.

Josh stepped toward the mouth of the hallway, every instinct in him recoiling. The temperature changed almost immediately. The air grew still and dense, the quiet was deeper here, swallowed whole by the dark. From inside the walls, a sound rose up. A steady thrum. Too low to name, too steady to ignore. Not quite the hum of electricity. Not quite breath. Somewhere in between. A heartbeat maybe. Or a pulse.

His own heart pounded against his ribs as he reached for the first door on the right.

It creaked open under his hand.

A narrow bedroom yawned out in front of him, sloped at odd angles beneath a ceiling that felt too low and too close. The geometry was wrong here too, claustrophobic and off-kilter, like the room had been bent around something that used to live here. A twin bed sat against the far wall, the iron frame rusted and thin, its mattress slumped deep in the middle. The kind of dent that only came from time. Or from someone who had died in that position and had never been found.

The wallpaper curled away from the corners in brittle strips, its once-delicate pattern now obscured by slow-moving mold, the black-green patches spreading like rot through tissue. Everything in the room felt waterlogged and thick. The smell was sharp and sour, mildew and ancient cloth, like fabric soaked in years of silence and never once rung dry. The floor was damp beneath his boots, and the cold came not from the walls or the window, but from beneath the floorboards themselves, rising in slow, nauseating waves.

Josh stepped back, his breath shallow, his skin crawling with a fear he couldn’t name.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment, his stomach still knotting in slow, persistent waves. The air behind him felt denser now, pressing gently at his back like a hand encouraging him to step inside. Eventually, with a kind of numb resignation, he dropped his bag just inside the room and left the door wide open. It felt like the only lifeline he had left. A small, desperate tether to something outside the room. To Tyler. To light. To sanity itself. Even if the hallway already seemed to stretch wider, darker, the sound of his friend growing fainter by the second.

Somewhere down the corridor, Tyler laughed.

It was soft. Faint. But it reached Josh a moment too late, lagging like a sound that had to swim through something thick before it could reach him. It echoed unnaturally, dragged out and wet, like it had been filtered through water or old teeth or the belly of something with lungs too large. Something listening. Something amused. He froze.

With shaking fingers, he peeled off his jacket and sat carefully on the edge of the bed. It gave a high, thin groan beneath him, less the sound of stressed wood and more like an organic complaint. Like pressure on a wound. Like pain being recalled by something that had once known it. The mattress dipped under his weight in a way that didn’t feel proportional. Like it resented the presence of a body.

Josh let his eyes drift around the room again, slow and cautious. There was no mirror. No closet. Just the low, crooked dresser that leaned to one side like a bad memory and a single narrow window tucked between peeling walls. Thin lace curtains hung motionless across the glass, the color of old bone. Stiff. Brittle. The pane itself was cloudy, fogged over from the inside, as if the room had been holding its breath for decades and never let it go.

He rubbed at the glass with the sleeve of his hoodie, but the fog didn’t lift. It didn’t even smear. His own reflection stared back at him, but it was wrong. The face was his, but it shimmered at the edges, pulsing faintly like a signal out of range. Like static trying to hold shape. Like the image might blink away at any second. He leaned closer. Watched the shape of himself bend and waver. The fog behind the reflection moved.

Then he saw it.

A handprint. Pressed flat into the center of the pane from the inside. Small. Child-sized. The palm open, the fingers splayed. Not fresh, soft, ghosted, like breath caught on cold glass, but clear enough to be real, and real enough to hurt. His chest tightened as if something had clamped around his ribs. He staggered back too fast, hitting the bed frame behind him. It let out another groan, longer this time. Low and hollow. A sound that carried.

“Ty?” he called, his voice brittle.

No answer. Not even the creak of a floorboard in reply.

Josh sat down again, slower this time. His spine straight, his shoulders locked. His hands folded tightly between his knees, the fingers twisted together in a grip that felt like prayer or panic. The silence wrapped around him like gauze, thick and dry. His stomach wasn’t churning anymore, it had settled into something deeper, something quieter. A static hum beneath his sternum, pulsing like a hidden alarm. Not loud enough to name. Just loud enough to know it was there. A failing smoke detector, maybe. A failing heart.

He lay back carefully, the mattress sinking under him like lungs drawing in breath. Or something heavier settling into place.

The ceiling above him was cracked, webbed with hairline fractures. A single spider crept across the plaster on delicate legs, pausing with each step like it was listening. Then another emerged from the seam where the wall met the ceiling. Then two more. Crawling soundlessly out of the darkness like thoughts you couldn’t stop thinking once you noticed them. Their bodies were small, but wrong, too glossy, too black. Wet-looking. Josh didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He just stared upward, silent, wondering how many more were already hidden in the walls. In the corners. Under the bed.

Josh sat up fast, his pulse hammering in his throat, a sudden surge of panic shoving the breath from his lungs.

“Fuck this,” he muttered, his voice low and raw.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, the warped floorboards groaning beneath him like they recognized his fear. His hands fumbled for his bag, fingers unsteady, muscles tight with something too deep for adrenaline to cut through. It was older than that. Animal-deep. His survival instinct had begun to scream. He stepped into the hallway and froze.

There it was. Faint, but unmistakable. Music.

It floated down the corridor like smoke, slow and thin, delicate as cracked glass. A lullaby played through rusted metal teeth, the melody both sweet and broken, the kind of tune that might soothe a child who didn’t realize they were already dead. The notes were warped, dragged just out of rhythm, like a memory remembered wrong. It wound through the silence with the aching persistence of something that had been forgotten, but never forgiven.

Josh stiffened, his entire body going cold. It wasn’t just the sound that sent a jolt down his spine. It was the feeling beneath it. The intent. Every part of him screamed to stop, to turn around, to shut the door and pretend he hadn’t heard anything. But his legs moved anyway. Slow. Quiet. Drawn forward like a thread had hooked behind his ribs and was tugging him toward the sound.

At the end of the hallway, a door stood cracked open, just wide enough to spill light onto the warped wood floor in a long, milky stripe. Moonlight. Unnaturally bright, casting everything in shades of bone and silver. Tyler stood in the center of it, motionless, backlit, framed by a tall, narrow window.

The light clung to him. It outlined his shoulders, caught the edge of his jaw, dusted through the ends of his hair like frost. He didn’t look like a person standing in a house. He looked like something the house had grown, had carved from its ribs, sculpted from its memory. Still. Beautiful. Almost serene.

In his hands, cradled with the tenderness of something sacred, was a small wooden music box.

It was open. The tiny crank turned between his fingers in a slow, steady rhythm, the song spilling out in soft mechanical chirps. The sound filled the room like mist. It turned the air heavy, sweet, wrong. Josh stepped into the doorway and stopped, his breath catching halfway up his throat, like even his lungs didn’t want to make noise.

Tyler didn’t look up. His fingers moved, the crank clicking, the melody spinning around him like a shroud.

“This was mine,” Tyler said.

The words were too soft, too calm. They floated like the music, untethered, unshaken.

Josh blinked. “What?” he asked, though he’d heard him. The question wasn’t for clarity. It was disbelief.

Tyler lifted his gaze. His eyes were wide and glassy in the moonlight, glinting like they’d caught something he couldn’t see. His face was open. Peaceful. The kind of calm that didn’t belong in a place like this. The kind of calm that suggested something had been emptied out to make space for it.

“This,” he said again, holding up the box with a fragile reverence. “I remember it. It sat on my windowsill when I was a kid. My mom wound it up every night. It even plays the same song.”

Josh stepped forward cautiously, the air inside the room hitting him like a wave. Thicker than the hallway. Dense with dust and something else, something sticky and invisible. Not quite a scent. Not quite a memory. Just a pressure, a presence, like the room had exhaled and was now waiting to see what he’d do.

“You never lived here,” Josh said, and his voice came out too loud. Not because he meant it to, but because the quiet swallowed so much of everything that speaking at all felt like breaking a spell.

Tyler didn’t flinch. He just looked at Josh, blinking slowly, almost like he pitied him. “I think I did ,” he whispered. “I think maybe I just forgot about it.”

The music box gave one last winding groan. Click… click… click…

And then silence. Complete. Sudden. Absolute.

Not the silence of a lullaby ending. Not the quiet of peace. It was the silence of something listening.

Josh didn’t move. He didn’t dare. The stillness in the room wasn’t passive, it was expectant. Watchful. Like a held breath just behind the walls. Like the air itself was waiting to see if the spell would break.

Tyler stood motionless, eyes locked on the box in his hands, like if he stared long enough, it would give him back something he’d lost. Or open a door that had never existed.

And Josh, still frozen just inside the doorway, realized he wasn’t sure which would be worse.

From the wall behind Tyler, a sound began.

It was soft at first. Barely audible. But it carried with it a weight that made the hairs on Josh’s arms rise.

Scratch. Pause. Scratch.

A slow, deliberate dragging, quiet but unmistakable. Not the frenzied scrabble of animals. Not the rustle of mice or the shuffle of rats. No. This was slower. Rhythmic. Measured. Like fingernails being drawn gently down the inside of wood. Like something trapped, but not in a hurry. Something with time.

Josh went still, his spine locking tight, every nerve pulled taut like a tripwire strung too close to breaking.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered, his voice thin and frayed.

Tyler blinked at him, slow and unconcerned. “Hear what?”

The sound came again.

Scratch… scratch… scratch…

Each pull of it was spaced exactly the same, dragging just long enough to make Josh’s skin crawl. The noise was coming from the wall, just behind the headboard. A few feet from where Tyler sat, bathed in moonlight, his face soft and unbothered, as though he hadn’t noticed a thing.

“There’s something in there,” Josh said, taking a cautious step forward. His blood thundered in his ears, a drumbeat of dread pulsing behind his ribs.

Tyler tilted his head slightly, still cradling the music box in his lap like a sleeping animal. “It’s probably just mice or something.”

But it wasn’t.

There were no hurried footsteps. No squeaks or fluttering. No small noises of panic or movement. Just that long, even scrape, as though something was testing the wood with care, as though it didn’t want to break through.

Not yet.

Josh moved closer, breath held tight in his throat, until he stood inches from the wall. The plaster was stained and warped, lined with fine cracks like spiderwebs. He pressed his palm to it gently, then leaned in until his ear touched the surface.

The scratching stopped. The silence that followed felt heavier than the sound had. Thicker. As if the very air had gone still to make room for something else. Something older. 

Then, from just beyond the wall, so close it felt like it slipped directly into his ear, came a whisper.

“Josh.”

It wasn’t loud. But it didn’t need to be. The intimacy of it hit like a hand to the throat. A voice he didn’t recognize, but one that knew his name. Knew how to say it softly, sweetly. Like a secret passed under the door.

Josh recoiled like he’d touched a live wire, stumbling backward, breath locking in his chest, heart hammering wildly. He spun around fast, the room suddenly too wide, too empty.

But there was nothing. No one behind him. The doorway to the hall stood dark and vacant. The corners of the room swallowed the shadows greedily.

Tyler was still sitting on the bed, calm as ever. The music box rested in his hands, and his eyes were steady. Watching.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice mild, like he was inquiring after a forgotten dream. Like none of what just happened could possibly matter.

Josh nodded too fast, hands trembling at his sides. “Y-Yeah. I… must’ve imagined it.” The words felt like chalk in his mouth. Dry and brittle.

Tyler nodded back, slow and easy, as if the explanation settled something. As if it confirmed what he already believed. He turned his gaze downward again and began winding the music box.

Click… click… click…

The sound filled the room like a second heartbeat, soft and patient. Each tick of the mechanism slid into the air like thread through skin.

Josh stared at him. Watched the way his posture didn’t shift, his muscles didn’t twitch. He was too still. Not stiff, but empty. Like his body was a puppet held upright by a memory. Like something else was in there, playing him from the inside out.

The melody began again. Slow. Crooked. A lullaby stretched too far.

Josh’s breath hitched. Something tightened in his chest. Not fear, exactly. Not yet.

Grief. The kind of grief that doesn’t come from losing someone, but from watching them fade in front of you, smiling all the while.

He stepped backward into the hallway, the floor groaning beneath his boots like something old and resentful waking beneath the boards. The sound echoed longer than it should have, bouncing down the corridor and returning to him warped, as if the house was mimicking his footsteps a second too late.

He didn’t look back into the room.

He couldn’t stand to see Tyler like that, bathed in silver light, still and smiling, winding that cursed little box like it was sacred. Couldn’t bear to hear that music again, delicate and broken, unraveling him thread by thread. Couldn’t look at the wall, couldn’t wonder if the whisper might return. If it might know his name again. Or something more.

He turned and walked slowly toward his own room, each step deliberate, soft, like he was trying not to disturb something just beneath the surface. The hallway stretched ahead of him, too long, too dark. He didn’t trust the shadows. He didn’t trust the doors.

Josh slipped inside and closed the door behind him, not all the way, just enough to feel like he still had an escape route. A tether. The illusion of safety.

He sat at the edge of the bed, spine bent forward, elbows resting heavily on his knees. His hands were clasped tightly in front of his mouth, fingers white at the knuckles, as if prayer might keep something from slipping through the cracks.

He stared at the floor but didn’t see it. His gaze was glassy, unfocused. Breathing shallow. Controlled. The kind of breathing you use when panic sits just below your ribs, when you’re fighting the scream you can’t name. When your body is already in survival mode and your mind hasn’t caught up.

The air in the room had changed.

It was colder now, truly cold. Not the chill of old houses or poor insulation. This was deeper. Sharper. The kind of cold that settled into the marrow. That breathed against the back of your neck with ice-laced lungs. His breath curled faintly in front of him, visible in the dim room like a ghost exhaling.

He looked up. The window was fogged over again, thick with condensation from the inside, the glass smeared and damp. The handprint was still there.

But it wasn’t the same.

It had changed. The fingers had dragged slightly downward, carving thin trails through the moisture, leaving behind long, streaked smudges. As if whatever had touched it was trying to press harder. Or climb through. Or reach for him again.

Josh’s body locked up. His heart didn’t skip, it stalled. For one long, quiet second, he felt weightless. Hollowed out.

His duffel bag sat in the corner where he’d dropped it. Still zipped. Still packed. Still waiting. He hadn’t touched it since they’d walked in. It was the last thing in the room that felt like him. Like the outside world. A lifeline in nylon and canvas. Something to grab if he needed to run.

But he didn’t move toward it. Couldn’t.

The room was different now. It smelled worse, thicker. The wet-wood rot had deepened, gone sour. Mold and dust clung to the air like spores, but beneath it, something sweeter had begun to rise. Overripe. Sickening. Like fruit left too long in the heat. Peaches, maybe. Or nectarines gone soft and wet and crawling. A sweetness that made his stomach turn.

And deeper than that, metal. Copper.

Josh swallowed reflexively, and the taste was already there. Coating his tongue. Tangy and sharp. The flavor of pennies held too long in the mouth. He hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t bled. But it was there. In his throat. In his teeth.

The house was inside him now. Leaking in. Staining.

He sat perfectly still on the edge of the bed, too afraid to lie down, too afraid to stand up. Afraid that movement might invite something in. Or wake something that had only pretended to sleep.

He felt it in his bones now.

The house wasn’t just around them. It wasn’t just watching. It was listening. It was remembering. It was swallowing them slowly.

And Josh could feel it, thin and quiet as a thread, pulling tight through the center of his chest.

He reached for his phone, hands trembling just enough to make the screen blur for a second as it lit up the dark. The glow was stark, blue-white and sterile against the shadows that curled thick around him. His thumb hovered over the screen. No service. Not even a flicker of a bar. The signal icon was hollow, an empty promise. The Wi-Fi symbol grayed out completely, like it had never existed. Like it had never even been part of this world.

2:12 AM.

Josh stared at the time as if willing it to shift. As if the numbers might glitch and tumble backward, as if they could drag him back an hour or two, back before the music box, back before the whispers in the walls, back to a moment where everything was still just a little bit uncertain, instead of this. This knowing . This slow, steady descent into something he couldn’t crawl out of.

Then, from the hallway, a sound.

A creak, faint, distant, wood settling, maybe. Or shifting. The soft, unmistakable complaint of old floorboards bearing weight.

It came from Tyler’s room.

Josh sat up straighter, his pulse jumping. The air around him felt thinner now, like altitude sickness, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room anymore. And then he heard it.

Humming. Low, barely audible. Carried more in the walls than through the air.

It was the melody from the music box. That same delicate tune, broken at the edges, mournful and childlike and wrong. Tyler’s voice hummed it, soft and breathy, almost tender. Like he was holding onto it with both hands. Like it was cradling him back. The sound looped, slow and hypnotic, the same short phrase over and over and over, as though Tyler didn’t realize he was doing it. Or couldn’t stop.

Josh didn’t move.

The sound rooted him in place, every hair on his arms rising. His heartbeat thudded against his ribs like a warning drum. Then came the footsteps.

Soft at first. Uneven.

Five steps. A pause. Then three more.

Then, dragging. A long, dry scrape, as if someone were pulling their foot behind them across the floorboards. Then stillness.

Josh stood, knees locked, legs stiff from sitting too long in fear. The cold had deepened. It wasn’t the kind that made you shiver. It was older than that. It seeped into the soles of his feet, even through the fabric of his socks, crept up through the bones of his legs. It felt like he was standing barefoot on stone. Something buried. Something long-dead and colder than the earth around it.

He moved to the door and opened it a crack, just wide enough to look out.

The hallway was pitch black. Not just unlit, but consuming. The kind of dark that eats light alive. He raised his phone instinctively, but the glow from the screen barely made it past the doorway. It illuminated only the air immediately in front of him, catching the fine dust motes hanging still in the air, turning them into snow suspended mid-fall. Beyond that, the darkness looked thick. Viscous. Like it had weight. Like it might spill into the room if the door opened any farther.

Josh swallowed and glanced behind him, hoping, irrationally, that something had changed. That the power had returned. That the nightmare edge of this place had dulled in the minutes since the music began.

Then he reached for the switch on the wall and flipped it.

Nothing, of course.

The house had devoured the electricity the same way it had devoured the silence. Bit by bit. Until only its own rules remained.

He stood in the doorway, frozen, phone screen dimming in his palm, his ears straining for anything that might follow.

The humming stopped abruptly. No slow fade. No hesitation. Just gone. As if a wire had been severed. Like something had noticed him listening.

The silence that followed was brutal. Not empty, too full for that. It felt swollen. Pregnant with breath. With eyes. With something just behind the veil of what could be seen. It pressed in on him, thick and steady, like a heartbeat pulsing from inside the walls.

Then, another sound.

A door creaked open somewhere down the hall.

Not his. Not Tyler’s. Somewhere further off, where the shadows bent too sharply and the angles of the house no longer made sense.

The hinges groaned, long and heavy, like a jaw opening slowly.

Then came the footsteps. Bare. Steady.

Soft against the wood, but purposeful. Moving across the hallway at a pace that wasn’t cautious or exploratory, just sure. Like whoever, whatever , was walking already knew the house by heart. Like they didn’t need light. Like they’d walked this path a thousand times in the dark and remembered every floorboard.

Josh couldn’t see anything. But he felt it. The weight of it.

Each step vibrated faintly through the floor, subtle but real, like something older than the house itself was moving past him. And for the first time since they’d arrived, Josh felt like he wasn’t just being watched.

He felt outnumbered.

And then the footsteps stopped. The silence that followed was deeper than before. Not absence, but presence. A stillness so complete it felt alive. Breathing. Listening back.

Josh stood in the open door of his room, the black of the hallway stretching toward him like a mouth, and the house waited.

Then came Tyler’s voice.

Soft. Too soft to understand the words. Just a whisper, barely there, breath-thin and muffled, but unmistakably him. It floated through the walls like it had gotten lost on the way to its source. Familiar in tone, but off in cadence. Slower. Gentler. Like he was comforting someone. But he wasn’t talking to himself. Not exactly.

Josh felt the impact of it deep in his chest. His heart slammed against his ribs, the sound of a dull, brutal thud in his ears. His breath stuttered. Limbs stiff, he backed slowly into the room, one foot at a time, keeping his gaze fixed on the door as though something might come through it if he blinked. He shut it quietly behind him, easing it closed with a care that felt instinctive, ceremonial. He didn’t lock it. Couldn’t bring himself to.

He didn’t move. Just listened.

The house said nothing. No groaning floorboards, no wind through the cracks, no distant creak of an opening door. Just that still, unnatural silence, the kind that felt too full, too aware. Like the walls had exhaled and were holding that breath again, waiting for him to make a sound.

Josh sat down on the edge of the bed, each movement deliberate, muffled by thick air and muscle fatigue. He reached for his phone again, the screen smeared with fingerprints, the corners warm from being gripped too hard for too long. The glow flared in the dark, casting a sterile blue-white light across his face, every flash deepening the hollows beneath his eyes. He stared at it like it was a window to the world, like it owed him escape.

Still no service. No signal. No bars. No Wi-Fi. No blinking connection icon. No GPS. No emergency call option. The time sat frozen in the corner, unmoving. The screen might as well have been a mirror. A cold, glowing reflection of nothing.

No messages. No weather app. No maps. No news. No world. Just the house. Just the black bleeding through the edges of the room.

He looked up, throat tight.

The window was pale with fog again. But the handprint wasn't where it had been. It had moved.

Josh stared and his skin went cold.

It was pressed into the inside of the glass now. Not outside in the night, but in the room with him. A small print, smaller than his own, delicate fingers splayed gently, as if whoever it belonged to had simply laid their hand there to say hello.

Fresher. Closer.

His lungs refused to expand. His limbs locked in place. He didn’t scream. Didn’t speak. Just sat with his eyes fixed on that faint impression in the glass, like it might deepen or shift if he looked away. The weight of it was heavier than sound, dragging against his ribs like gravity had tripled. Like someone was pressing their palm into his chest, slow and constant.

He didn’t sleep. Not really.

He curled into himself on top of the bed, knees drawn up, hoodie zipped tight and pulled around his neck like armor. The phone never left his hands. He kept it lit. Kept the screen active. Played the same two puzzle games in a loop, stacking shapes, rotating blocks, chasing hollow victories in silence, not because he cared about the score, but because the tiny digital clicks were something. Anything. A thread tying him to a world outside the rotting walls.

Because the humming never stopped.

It came and went in waves. Sometimes above him, soft and lullaby-sweet. Tyler’s voice, slow and uneven, filtering through the ceiling like water through a floorboard. Sometimes it slipped through the hallway, curling around corners, pacing the same path again and again. And sometimes…

Sometimes it came from inside the walls. From behind the dresser. Beneath the floorboards. Just behind his head. Moving from room to room. Following him.

And each time, each low echo of Tyler’s voice slipping into that same fragmented tune, Josh would sit up, heart pounding, mouth dry, hand poised on the doorknob.

And every time he opened the door, there was nothing.

Not even the sound of footsteps. Just the hallway. Still. Watching.

The house knew how to hold its breath, and it was playing with him.

By the time morning bled in, Josh felt like he’d been dragged across gravel in his sleep, except he hadn’t slept. Not really. His eyes burned, dry and gritty, as if scraped raw with glass, every blink a rasp of pain. His chest was hollow, raw, lungs full of dust and sand. Each breath dragged like it had to be pulled through a funnel of needles. The exhaustion didn’t blur his edges, it carved them sharper. Made everything too loud, too clear. The grain of the walls. The weight of the silence. The shape of every shadow.

Light seeped weakly through the fogged window, pale and uncertain, more gray than gold, as if daylight hadn’t quite decided if it wanted to arrive. It didn’t feel like morning. It felt like the hour before something terrible happened.

The handprint on the glass was gone. But Josh didn’t trust that. Not for a second.

He stood slowly, every joint stiff and creaking like old furniture, tendons taut with the memory of fear. His body ached in places that didn’t usually ache, his shoulders, his palms, the back of his neck, as if the weight of the night had settled into his bones.

The silence in the room had thickened and turned syrupy. Not just quiet but pressurized. Like a sealed container waiting to pop. The air pressed against his ears, muffling his breath, turning every heartbeat into a throb he could feel behind his eyes.

He stepped into the hall. The air was colder out here, sharper, like something had passed through while he wasn’t looking. The floor groaned beneath him with every step, the sound drawn out and aching, like the house hated his presence.

Tyler’s door was ajar just enough to see the darkness beyond.

Josh froze, then stepped forward slowly. He reached out and knocked once. Barely a tap. “Ty?”

No answer.

He hesitated for a moment, then pushed.

The door swung inward with a long, reluctant creak, the hinges resisting like they were trying to keep whatever was inside from being disturbed.

Tyler lay curled on the bed, a silhouette folded in on itself like something sleeping too deeply. One arm tucked under his head. His hoodie bunched up at the waist, baring a stretch of pale skin to the morning chill. His ribs rose and fell in slow, even motions. The music box sat on the windowsill, closed now. Still. A prop from a dream, waiting for the next act.

Josh stepped inside without thinking, every movement careful, deliberate. His heart climbed into his throat, beating too hard against the cage of his ribs. He didn’t know what he expected to find. Only that something inside the room felt... wrong.

Off in the way that too-clean rooms feel in the aftermath of a tragedy.

“Ty,” he said again, voice louder this time. It cracked a little.

Tyler stirred. His eyes fluttered open slowly, unfocused for a breathless moment, then cleared. His face softened as he saw Josh, no confusion, no alarm.

Just a smile. Soft. Slow. Warm.

Like nothing was wrong at all. Like he’d just woken from the best dream of his life.

And for a second, Josh didn’t know whether to cry or run.

“Dude, you look like shit,” Tyler mumbled, voice still thick with sleep, stretching the words like old gum.

Josh didn’t laugh.

He stood rigid in the doorway, arms stiff at his sides, fists clenched so tight the tendons in his wrists stood out like wires. His whole body looked like it had been held in place by something fragile and invisible, like if he moved the wrong way, he might splinter apart.

“You were up all night,” he said quietly, voice hoarse from disuse. “Walking around and humming.”

Tyler blinked, slow and heavy, then let out a long, careless yawn. He scrubbed both hands over his face like someone shaking off a nap, not a haunting. “No I wasn’t,” he said, dragging the words out with the lazy cadence of someone who hadn’t heard the things Josh had heard.

Josh just stared at him. Hard.

“You were ,” he repeated, firmer now, teeth tight around the words. “I heard you. You were pacing. You were humming that music box song. And you were talking to someone. Do you have service?”

Tyler groaned and dropped his hands. The movement was loose, dismissive. “Dude, I passed out the second I hit the bed,” he said, voice edged with irritation now. “I feel like I slept for a week.”

Josh’s stomach turned over like something cold had just crawled through it. The nausea returned fast and mean, rising like bile.

“No,” he said, barely above a whisper. “You didn’t.”

But Tyler didn’t even look at him. Just shrugged, unbothered, and sat up. His hoodie slipped off one shoulder as he rolled his neck, bones cracking faintly. Then he turned to look out the window like he was watching for nothing in particular, like it was just another normal morning and not whatever this was.

Josh’s mouth opened. He tried to speak. But nothing came out.

What could he say? How do you explain something that felt like it lived under your skin? How do you prove that the person you love wasn’t the one standing in front of you?

He swallowed it. All of it. And turned without a word.

His footsteps were too loud on the warped wood as he walked out, shoulders braced like he expected the hallway to collapse around him.

The door clicked shut behind him.

Tyler didn’t call after him. And somehow, that was the worst part.

They met again downstairs, in what might’ve once passed for a kitchen if the word still meant anything in a place like this.

The room was barely standing. Most of the cabinets had collapsed in on themselves or hung crooked from rusted hinges like broken jaws. The ceiling above the sink had given way completely, leaving behind a yawning hole where the plaster had decayed into dust. Above it, the exposed beams stretched like ribs, fractured and damp, as if the house had been gutted and left to rot from the inside out.

Dead vines had crept in through the shattered window, curling thick and brown across the counter, their tendrils splitting drawers open like fingers forcing their way through. Everything glistened faintly with moisture. The floorboards underfoot gave soft, reluctant groans with each step, spongy in places like they were soaked through.

The air was saturated, wet earth, rust, mildew. But layered beneath that, almost masked, was something else. The cloying sweetness of rot. The sour sting of mold grown over blood. Something that had been alive once, left to fester.

Josh stood near the entryway, rubbing at his face with one trembling hand, eyes sunken, skin gray with exhaustion. His voice came raw and low, like it had scraped its way up. “This wasn’t here yesterday.”

Tyler looked up from the sink where he’d been rinsing out a chipped mug, water dribbling down the side like blood from a cracked tooth. “What wasn’t?”

Josh didn’t answer at first. Just lifted one hand, pointing.

There, beside the space where a refrigerator might have once stood, now just gouged tile and a smear of mildew, was a door.

Narrow. Wooden. Painted the same dull, faded green as the walls, almost perfectly camouflaged. But the lines were too clean. The frame unchipped. The knob unblemished, round and smooth and dark like glass. New.

Startlingly new.

Josh’s throat tightened. “I swear that wasn’t here.”

A cold, leaden weight settled in his gut. The kind that made you feel like the ground under you had shifted, just enough to make everything wrong.

Tyler stepped toward it without pause, something curious flickering in his expression. “It’s probably just a pantry.”

He said it like they were in someone’s grandmother’s house. Like this place hadn’t already shown them its teeth.

Josh didn’t respond. He just stared at the door. The line of it. The impossibility of it. The way it hadn’t existed the day before, and now it was just… part of the wall. Seamless and waiting.

He didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Couldn’t breathe.

Tyler reached for the knob.

It turned too easily. No resistance. No sound but the soft, wet whisper of the latch sliding open. The door swung inward on silent hinges, revealing a corridor that shouldn’t have fit behind the wall.

Narrow. Crooked. Windowless.

The walls were bare wood, grain bloated and warped from pressure and time, blotched with old stains that might’ve been water, or might’ve been worse. At the far end, a staircase curled down, sharp and uneven, disappearing into the kind of black that wasn’t just absence of light but the swallowing of it.

A breath of air rose up from below. Not cool. Not fresh. Damp. Dense.

It crawled up Josh’s throat and settled in his sinuses, thick with the smell of wet timber and rotted cloth. But under that, unmistakably, was something more animal. Something spoiled. Meat left too long in the dark. Sweet and foul, like a body trying to pretend it wasn’t decaying.

Tyler peered down the corridor.

Josh didn’t move. He could feel the house leaning in closer. Listening. Smiling.

He took a sharp step back, his foot hitting the warped floorboards with a jolt that reverberated through his spine. His stomach turned, curling in on itself like something inside him had flinched away from whatever lived beyond that door.

Tyler looked over his shoulder, expression still placid, lightly amused. The way someone might react to finding an old crawlspace or a forgotten nook tucked behind a kitchen wall. “Must be the basement,” he said, voice casual. “Want to check it out?”

“No,” Josh said instantly, the word punching out of him like it had been waiting in his chest. “Absolutely not.”

Tyler only smiled, soft and unbothered, like Josh had declined a glass of water. “We’ll come back to it later,” he said, already turning away.

He let the door swing back, not with a click, not with finality, just left it ajar. Hanging open an inch. Breathing.

Josh’s eyes stayed locked on that sliver of black long after they’d walked away. He kept looking over his shoulder like it would widen on its own, like something behind it might be watching back.

They moved through the first floor together, though the shape of it no longer felt fixed. It didn’t feel like exploring anymore. It felt like mapping a coastline that was still being eaten by the tide. Like charting a maze where the walls shifted when you blinked.

The layout had changed. Josh was sure of it.

Yesterday, the hallway curved left in a soft arc after the entryway. Now it forked, two unnatural angles jutting off in opposite directions, one sharp as a broken bone. He remembered three doors along the west wall. Now there were four.

But it wasn’t just the number, it was the way they sat. Wrong. Uneven. Like the house had built them in a hurry and had forgotten how doors were supposed to work.

Behind one of them, a sitting room now sprawled where there’d been nothing but a bricked-up fireplace the day before. Heavy furniture stood stiffly beneath a film of dust, lace curtains wilted at the windows like veins. The bricked wall was gone, as if it had never existed. The wallpaper behind the couch was peeled away, revealing wood marked with deep, crescent-shaped gouges, like someone had tried to claw their way out, or in.

Josh didn’t step past the threshold.

They moved on. Another door, one he could’ve sworn led to a linen closet, now opened into a long corridor, lined floor to ceiling with mirrors. Each one tall and warped with age, frames bowed and splintered, glass filmed over, clouded like breath caught in winter. The reflections didn’t match. Angles bent wrong. Movements delayed, lagging behind like the glass was remembering too slowly. Tyler stared at them a little too long.

Josh shut the door hard.

Another room brought them back where they’d started, except the chairs were facing a different direction now, turned toward the wall instead of the window. And the rug was gone. Josh could see the shadow of it in the dust.

He stopped in the hallway, chest tight, breath catching on something he couldn’t name.

The house was wrong. Not haunted. Not cursed. Alive . And still growing.

“Are you seeing this?” Josh asked, his voice barely more than breath.

Tyler nodded, unshaken. Calm, like they were wandering a museum. “Yeah.”

Josh turned to him, eyes sharp. “And that doesn’t bother you?”

Tyler’s shoulders lifted in a small shrug, the kind you give when a vending machine eats your dollar. “Old houses do weird things,” he said mildly. “Settling. Shifting foundations. Rot...”

Josh stepped in front of him, blocking his path, his voice a notch higher, more brittle. “Entire rooms don’t move, Tyler. That’s not a thing that happens.”

Tyler finally met his gaze, and for a moment something passed between them, quiet and heavy. His expression didn’t shift, but something in his eyes darkened. Slowed. An unreadable shadow.

“Maybe we just didn’t notice before,” he said softly.

Josh stared, heart thudding against his ribs, a tight pull wrapping around his chest like wire. Fear, maybe. Or something lonelier. The kind of isolation that sneaks up when someone you love starts slipping into a place you can’t follow.

He didn’t want to lose sight of him. Not here. Not in this place that bent light and memory until you couldn’t tell what was real anymore.

Then Tyler said, “Let’s split up,” like it was nothing. Like it wasn’t the worst possible thing they could do. He was already drifting toward the fork in the hallway, one foot in shadow, the other fading.

Josh’s breath caught. “That’s literally what they say before someone dies in every horror movie ever.”

Tyler turned his head just enough to flash him a crooked grin. Careless. Distant. Like none of this touched him. Like he was already somewhere else entirely.

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “Just a quick sweep to get our bearings.”

Josh wanted to grab his arm. To stop him. To say no, please, not this . But the words didn’t come. And Tyler was already moving, already gone, swallowed by the bend in the corridor. His footsteps made no sound, like the house had muffled them. Or like it had taken them in.

So Josh turned the other way.

His jaw clenched. Shoulders stiff. Hands buried deep in his pockets, fingers curled so tightly around themselves that they might bruise.

The hallway stretched out in front of him. A little too long. A little too quiet. Like it had grown the moment he turned his back. And the silence behind him, thick, unnatural, settled into place like a lid.

Josh found the mirror hallway again without meaning to.

One moment he was heading toward the front parlor, the air stale but familiar, and the next, he turned a corner that shouldn’t have existed, and there it was. Waiting for him.

Three of them stood in rigid formation along the right-hand wall. Tall and narrow, housed in thick wooden frames cracked with age and warped as if the house had tried to twist them into some new shape. The air here was colder than anywhere else in the house, unmoving and thick, like the lungs of the place had stopped mid-inhale.

Each mirror was coated in a thin skin of dust, but it didn’t dull their reflections. The glass, silver-backed and rotten with age, shimmered faintly in the dim light, like oil on water, like heat rising from pavement, though Josh could see his breath when he exhaled.

He slowed as he passed the first mirror.

It showed him. Mostly.

His face stared back, pale and raw, his features worn thin from a sleepless night. The hoodie he still wore was wrinkled across the chest. His hair stuck out at tired angles. But there was something... off. The reflection’s stance was too stiff. The arms too straight. The head tilted just slightly too much, like a puppet resting wrong on its strings. His own eyes met his, yet it didn’t feel like a mirror. It felt like a stranger studying him through a window, mimicking his shape with microscopic delay.

His heart thudded once, hard, and he moved to the second.

This time, it was worse.

The reflection still resembled him, same nose, same jaw, but his clothes were unfamiliar. A pale collared shirt, buttoned neatly to the throat. His hair was longer, curling past his ears, like it hadn’t been cut in months. The background had changed too. The ruined hallway behind him had transformed, no longer dust-choked and mold-eaten, but elegant. Freshly painted walls. A chandelier gleaming with a thousand tiny lights. The air in the reflection seemed warmer. Inviting.

He looked like he belonged there.

Josh blinked rapidly, nausea curling up his throat. A sharp ringing started behind his ears.

Then he turned to the third mirror and everything dropped.

He wasn’t in it. The hallway stretched out in perfect replica, down to the fraying edge of the rug and the splayed crack in the molding. But he was gone. No reflection. No trace. As if the mirror simply refused to acknowledge his presence.

He shifted to the side, and a sliver of his shoulder flickered into view, but when he moved back, there was nothing. Just the corridor. A copy of reality with him carefully cut out of it.

Josh’s hand lifted almost involuntarily and touched the glass.

It was warm. Warmer than it should’ve been. As if it had just been touched from the other side.

Then something changed behind him. A shift in the air. A soft pressure against the skin of his neck, like breath, but colder. A faint creak, not of floorboards, but of something leaning forward.

He turned sharply, his heart slamming.

Nothing. Just the hallway. Empty as it always had been.

But when his eyes snapped back to the mirror, someone was behind him.

Not a person. A shape. A silhouette etched in darkness, tall, impossibly thin, slightly hunched. Its head bowed, arms stretched long, reaching upward like it had waited too long in the dark and was only now unfolding.

No eyes. No mouth. No face. Just shadow stitched into a human outline, carved out of absence.

Josh spun again, faster this time, breath tearing from his throat. Nothing. Not even the shift of air. And when he turned back, the mirror was blank once more.

Just the hallway. Just the dust.

But the warmth still lingered on the glass.

He stumbled backward, every nerve sparking, every muscle too tight to move cleanly. His breath came in short, uneven gasps, hands trembling so hard he nearly dropped them to his knees.

He didn’t cry out. He didn’t speak. He ran.

Back the way he came, feet loud on the wood, heart louder, like the house had finally finished luring him in, and had started to follow.

Tyler moved through the house like he had always belonged to it.

There was no hesitation in his steps, no uncertainty in the turn of his shoulders or the tilt of his gaze. Every corner unfolded for him before he reached it, each hallway seeming to lean inward just slightly, as if guiding him along a path already laid out in his bones. The air did not resist him. The shadows did not cling. Doors opened a breath before his hand reached them, quiet, reverent sighs of hinges parting like lips in a welcome. The floorboards, so restless under Josh’s steps, made no sound beneath his. There were no groans. No sharp cracks. Only a soft hum of acceptance, as if the house had exhaled his name and was finally breathing again now that he was home.

He passed through an arched doorway he didn’t remember seeing before. But the room beyond did not feel new. It felt… returned. Like it had been waiting, quietly, just behind the edges of his vision. Waiting to be remembered.

A nursery.

Or something that had once been one. The wallpaper peeled in sagging curls from the ceiling, revealing long strips of dark, water-stained wood beneath. Mold crept in branching veins across the walls like old bruises that hadn’t healed right. The air was wet with rot and something sharper, soured milk, decayed linens, time itself collapsed into scent.

In the corner, a crib slouched sideways, its frame partially collapsed, legs splintered as if something had tried to crawl out. Above it, a mobile spun lazily in air that didn’t stir, its tiny wooden charms tangled in webs so thick they looked like gauze. Moons. Stars. A single pegasus with a cracked wing dangled low, caught in a slow, impossible turn.

The floor was littered with the remnants of a life too small to fight back. Plastic soldiers melted and fused to the boards in rigid, broken poses. A rubber ball split at the seam. A pale rabbit missing both eyes, its stuffing curling like smoke from the rent in its chest. In the center of the room, pristine in its placement, a single baby shoe rested atop the dust like an offering. Untouched and undisturbed. 

Tyler didn’t pause. He moved with the quiet purpose of someone returning to a place they’d never left. His eyes slid over each artifact without fear, each detail registering not as discovery, but as recognition. Like stepping back into a dream he’d once forgotten how to remember.

He reached the crib and laid his hand against the rail. The wood was warm. Not room temperature, but warm like skin. Like breath. Like something living still curled beneath the decay, watching him, remembering him.

Behind him, the mobile creaked once, a soft, strained sound like an old breath caught in the throat.

Tyler didn’t turn. He only pressed his hand deeper into the crib’s edge and closed his eyes. Not afraid. Just listening.

In the far corner, beneath the shattered eye of a window long sealed by grime and the thick, glistening nets of spiders, something caught Tyler’s attention. A whisper of color beneath the dust, so faint it could’ve been imagined. But it wasn’t.

The air grew colder as he approached the wall, the chill pressing against his skin like breath. He knelt, his knees creaking against the warped floorboards, and leaned in close. The wood there had split, slightly bowed and cracked with age, and from that narrow mouth peeked a curled edge of something yellowed, something tucked away and left to be forgotten. Or hidden.

Tyler reached in and carefully slid it free.

It was paper. Brittle with time, stiff and bowed by water damage, the edges torn and feathered like a wound too long ignored. The surface was faded, stained with age and something darker in one corner. But beneath the decay, the image remained.

A child’s drawing. Done in heavy crayon strokes that had once been bright but now seemed sickened by the years. Two stick figures stood together, small hands connected. One colored in green. The other in blue. A single initial marked each one. T and J .

They stood before a lopsided gray mass, undeniably a house, roof pitched wrong, walls uneven. There was no door. No way in or out. Just five red squares scrawled into the façade. Windows, probably. But they looked like wounds. Square and bleeding. Stark against the dull gray.

Above them, the sky had been filled in with chaotic swirls of black and red, angry and consuming. Not like storm clouds. Like fire and smoke frozen mid-collapse. Like the sky had ruptured and was still leaking.

Tyler stared at it, his breath steady, unmoved.

His thumb brushed over the waxy lines. The shapes. The way the two figures leaned together, not stiff like children usually drew. No, this was different. The bodies tilted inward, close in a way that spoke of something more. Intimate. Protective. Like they were bracing against something. Or waiting.

He didn’t remember drawing it. Not clearly. Not at all. But it didn’t feel new. It didn’t feel found. It felt like recognition.

He smiled then, just a little. A slow, creeping curl at the edge of his mouth. It wasn’t joy. Not quite. It was softer than that. A kind of warmth buried in cold. Like hearing a song you don’t remember loving until it’s already in your throat.

With slow hands, he folded the paper once, careful not to tear it, and slipped it into the pocket of his hoodie like something sacred.

Behind him, the floor let out a low, aching groan, long and slow. Wood shifting under weight that wasn’t his. He didn’t turn. He didn’t need to.

Josh found Tyler sitting on the bottom step of the grand staircase, elbows braced on his knees, head tipped back like he was praying to the ceiling. Or listening. Tyler was staring up at the stained-glass window overhead, the one that bled its dead colors across the dust-thick air like bruises seeping through skin. The light caught him in broken patches, deep amethyst across one cheek, sickly green down his jaw, casting his face in colors that didn’t belong to the living.

He looked calm. Too much so. Like he belonged here.

Josh stopped just inside the foyer, chest heaving, breath hitching fast and shallow. His heart pounded against the inside of his ribs like a thing trying to escape. Sweat ran cold beneath his clothes, soaking into the fabric at his back, clinging under his arms. His hands were trembling again. He curled them into fists, but it didn’t help. The air in the house felt thicker now, heavier, like he was breathing through soaked cloth.

“There’s something wrong with the mirrors,” he rasped, his voice raw from running, from fear, from silence pressed too long against his throat.

Tyler turned his head slowly, his expression soft and smooth, like a lake with nothing under it. “What?”

Josh didn’t sit. Couldn’t. He moved closer instead, not quite pacing, but restless in every motion. His voice came out low and fast, too many words trying to shove their way out at once.

“That hallway with the mirrors,” he said. “You remember it?”

Tyler nodded once, serene. “Yeah. What about it?”

Josh dragged both hands through his hair, fingers clenching at his scalp, grounding himself in the sting. He couldn’t stop moving. Couldn’t get warm. Couldn’t think clearly with that thing’s shape still burned into his memory.

“They don’t reflect right,” he said. “The first one… fine. Me. Tired. Just me. But the second one… it was like I’d changed. My clothes were different. The house was clean. Like… like it used to be. And I looked…” He choked on the words for a second, breath caught between fear and disbelief. “I looked like I lived here. Like I belonged.”

He stopped and swallowed hard. “The third mirror didn’t show me at all .”

The words dropped into the air like stones. Tyler didn’t even flinch.

“It showed the hallway. Just the hallway. Same walls, same floors. But I wasn’t in it. No reflection. Like I wasn’t even there.”

Josh’s voice dropped to a whisper, like he was afraid saying it louder might make it more real.

“And then I saw something behind me. In the mirror, I mean. Not a person. A shape. Tall and thin. It didn’t have a face. It was just… there . Watching me. Reaching out.”

Tyler blinked once. Slowly. His face didn’t shift. If he was disturbed, he didn’t show it. He looked mildly curious, like Josh had just told him a strange weather report.

“Maybe the glass is warped,” he said. “Old houses do that sometimes. You probably just-”

“ No ,” Josh snapped, sharp and fast. “That wasn’t warping, Ty. That wasn’t old glass or weird light. There was something in there. Watching me. I felt it.”

His voice cracked under the weight of the words. His stomach turned, his skin crawling with the memory of that third mirror. The emptiness. The reaching arms.

But Tyler only tilted his head, the movement languid and detached. His voice was a hush. “Are you sure you’re not just overtired?”

Josh stared at him. His mouth opened, then shut again. He couldn’t find the words. Couldn’t translate the buzzing scream in his chest into anything useful. It pressed against his ribs, frantic and desperate, like some animal in a trap.

He wanted to shake Tyler. Grab him by the shoulders and yell until something real flickered behind his eyes. But Tyler just sat there. Still. Serene. Bathed in the broken light bleeding down from the stained-glass window like the house itself had claimed him.

Like maybe he didn’t want to leave. Like maybe part of him never had.

“Did you find anything?” Josh asked, voice rough and tight, still frayed at the edges from what he’d seen and what he couldn’t stop seeing. The image of that mirror clung to the inside of his skull like a brand. That empty reflection. That reaching shape.

Tyler didn’t answer right away. Just a pause. A fraction of a breath too long. Not long enough to seem dramatic. Just long enough to be real. Like he was choosing his words carefully.

Then he stood, slow and casual, brushing his palms along the thighs of his jeans in a motion that felt rehearsed. There was no dust on him. Not a smear. Like the house hadn’t touched him at all.

“Nah,” he said, voice light. Too light. “Just junk. Busted furniture. Kids’ toys.”

Josh didn’t move. Didn’t blink. He didn’t believe him. Not for a second.

Tyler’s voice had a smoothness to it that didn’t belong there, like a lie he’d practiced. The tone of someone who knew what questions were coming. Who’d already written his answers in the silence before the words even arrived.

Josh stared at him. At the easy curve of his mouth. The relaxed shoulders. The glint of stained light caught in his lashes like it had been placed there on purpose.

Tyler smiled, quick and placid, then turned away, walking calmly toward the back of the house like none of it mattered. Like they hadn’t just slept, or not slept, in a place with breathing walls and mirrors that erased people and shadows that watched.

Josh didn’t follow. Not yet.

His boots stayed glued to the foyer floor, his whole body braced as if the house might shift again beneath him. His breath came uneven, shallow. His chest rose and fell like he’d been running. His skin crawled with a ghost of cold he couldn’t shake. Like the fear hadn’t passed, just sunk deeper. Settled into his bones.

His thoughts scattered and reassembled wrong, every conclusion slippery. Out of order. Untrustworthy.

He lifted his eyes slowly.

The stained-glass window towered high above, casting fractured beams of color down the wall like the house was trying to paint over the truth. Crimson. Emerald. Violet. It should’ve been beautiful. Should’ve looked like light through jewels.

But the reds looked different now. Deeper. Wetter. Not just rich in color, but fresh , like pigment hadn’t dried. Like the glass had been cut from something still bleeding.

Josh stared up at it, his heart hammering quietly in his chest.

The light touched his face like fingers. And it didn’t feel like sunlight.

It felt like a warning.

That night, Josh lay awake again, flat on his back, jaw clenched so tight it ached down into his neck. Every muscle in his body buzzed with a wired kind of tension, not energy, but readiness, like prey just before the pounce. The bed beneath him felt harder than it had the night before, stiffer, colder, the springs pressing up through the thin mattress like ribs, like the bones of the house were shifting beneath him and inching closer. The wood groaned beneath him in slow, creaking exhales, as if the room was adjusting to his shape, memorizing it.

He stared at the ceiling, unblinking, as if daring it to move. His eyes searched every corner for a seam, a crack, a hairline fracture where something might break through. He kept expecting it to open. Not figuratively. Literally . To split wide and reveal what lived behind the drywall, pipes, yes, but also something worse. Something ancient and hidden. Something with sockets where eyes should’ve been, something with teeth that weren’t shaped for eating. Something that had been watching.

He’d left the light on this time.

The bulb in the rusted floor lamp buzzed low and constant, a dying wasp stuck in amber. Its sick, yellow glow didn’t spread so much as smear across the floorboards in uneven streaks. It barely reached the walls. It didn’t touch the corners. The dark there was stubborn, alive, curling into itself like smoke in reverse. It pressed in with a patience that felt intelligent. And in the half-light, the shadows had taken on new shapes. They didn’t sit still, they pulsed. They stretched slow across the walls in looping, arrhythmic waves, syncing to his breath, to his heartbeat. Or worse, changing it.

The house wasn’t quiet. Not really. It was still , yes, but not empty. Not sleeping.

It was the silence of something holding its breath. Something listening just beyond the drywall. Something that had paused with its mouth half-open, teeth waiting just behind the plaster.

Then, from down the hallway, the sound returned.

Tyler’s voice. Humming. Soft. Gentle. Like something singing itself to sleep. But the lullaby came in fragments now, disjointed and fractured. A few notes. Then a pause. A hitch. Then the melody again, slow and tender, just a little out of tune. The same melody from the music box. From the room that shouldn’t have existed.

Josh knew the rhythm by now. It had etched itself into him like a scar. He could’ve hummed it himself if he wanted to. If he let it in.

But he didn’t.

He curled in on himself instead, knees pulled up, fingers locked around his phone like it might keep the dark at bay. Like it could shield him from the voice down the hall, and the shadows that whispered without sound.

He hadn’t let go of the phone in hours.

The screen glowed dully between his palms, smeared with sweat and fingerprints. Still no service. No signal. Just the empty shell of connection. A single blinking dot pulsing where a name should’ve been. Like the phone was waiting for someone to call. Like the house had overwritten the contact list with something else. 

At 3:48 a.m., the screen dimmed, the battery at four percent.

Josh didn’t plug it in. Didn’t shut it off. Didn’t even blink.

He just lay there, eyes open, listening to the shadows breathe and the lullaby come and go like a tide he couldn’t stop.

Waiting for morning. Waiting for the ceiling to open. Waiting for the light to die. Waiting for the house to decide it was time.

Tyler dreamed.

And in the dream, he was home.

Not the crumbling shell they’d stepped into days ago, not the house wrapped in vines and swollen with rot, but a memory of it, pure and untouched. A version not born of time, but of longing. Of the house as it remembered itself. As it wanted to be remembered.

Sunlight spilled through the tall windows in golden floods, soft and heavy, casting long beams across a floor that gleamed with polish. The wood was warm beneath his bare feet, smooth and flawless, like it had never known decay. The scent of rosemary drifted through the air, chased by a whisper of garlic and lemon, something savory, something domestic. The breeze moved through the room with the gentleness of a familiar hand, brushing the curtains into slow, rhythmic sways. They danced against the window frames like something alive, like someone still lived here, and had only just stepped out.

Dust hung in the air, but not dead, not stagnant. It glittered in the light, suspended like stars in amber, drifting in slow motion. Time didn’t move here. It settled. Softly. Sweetly.

Tyler moved through the hall, silent. The boards didn’t groan beneath him. They welcomed him. They remembered the shape of his steps. The chandelier above sparkled, prisms of rainbow glinting gently across the white ceiling like a quiet celebration. The walls were clean, smooth, pale as bone and warm as skin. Everything felt tender. Familiar. Right.

He turned the corner and stopped.

Josh sat at the piano.

Not the collapsed ruin they’d found in the foyer, its strings rotted and teeth yellowed with dust, but the same instrument, now restored. Reborn. The keys were bright ivory, the wood dark and glossy, polished to a mirror sheen. Josh laughed, not because he was playing well, but because he wasn’t, his fingers stumbling over the keys in a playful, childish rhythm. The sound echoed through the room, joyful and alive.

“You’re terrible,” Tyler said, and smiled without thinking.

Josh turned to grin at him, eyes crinkled in the corners. “Come teach me, then.”

Tyler moved toward him, something warm and glowing in his chest, rising slow like steam from a teacup. He sat beside Josh on the bench, their shoulders brushing. Josh didn’t move away. Neither did Tyler. They sat like that for a moment, close. Easy.

“I used to play this,” Tyler murmured, fingers hovering above the keys. “When I was little. This song… it was mine.”

Josh tilted his head, his voice soft in reply. “Your mom used to hum it.”

Tyler nodded, the memory brushing against him like a breeze through the curtains. “She said the house liked when I played. That it would quiet down just for me.”

Then his fingers touched the keys, and the melody came.

Not broken now. Not the disjointed, rusted lullaby they’d heard echoing through the hallways. This was whole. Lush. The notes fell in perfect rhythm, gentle and glowing, like they’d never been forgotten. Like they’d just been waiting for him to remember.

And the house responded.

It didn’t speak. It didn’t move. But something shifted. The air grew warmer. The light deepened. The hush that followed wasn’t empty, it was reverent. A full-bodied stillness. Like the rooms had drawn in a breath and held it, listening.

Outside the windows, the world shimmered.

Sunlight played across the trees, their leaves fluttering like silver-green coins. Wind chimes sang somewhere in the distance, their notes light and chiming, delicate as glass.

Tyler closed his eyes.

And for a moment that stretched wide and golden and endless, he felt it. Not the fear. Not the buzzing tension or the thing behind the glass.

He felt safe. He felt loved. He felt home .

Josh sat on the edge of the bed, hunched forward, elbows braced against his knees, staring up at the ceiling like it might crack open and offer some kind of answer. The plaster above was jagged and veined, a fracture line splitting across it like a scar that hadn’t healed right. The silence pressed in around him, not comforting, not still, but taut. Braced. The shadows in the corners no longer crawled. They crouched now. Patient and watching, as if they were waiting for something to begin.

The air tasted of wet metal and old decay, like rusted pipes and the breath of something long dead. Each inhale carried the sting of mildew, sharp and sour at the back of his throat. His breath clouded faintly in front of his face, just enough to see. Just enough to know it was too cold in here for any normal house. The lamp beside the bed buzzed quietly, the bulb casting a warm, yellow-white light that barely reached the far walls. It flickered once, the room blinking like a tired eye, then steadied, but only just.

Then, above him, the floorboards groaned. A long, slow creak, weight shifting in the ceiling like someone walking barefoot overhead.

Then a voice. Tyler.

Josh went still. Every nerve sparked to attention, the fine hairs on his arms rising in unison.

Tyler’s voice drifted down through the walls, muffled and broken, like it was pressing through layers of insulation soaked in water. A thin, reedy sound at first. A murmur. Sleep-tangled. But even under the distortion, something was wrong. It didn’t sound like dreaming. It sounded spoken . Not to himself. Not in nonsense.

To something else.

Josh tilted his head, straining to catch more. A few clear sounds surfaced, syllables brushing the edges of language, but they weren’t right. The cadence was skewed, vowels stretched too long, consonants swallowed. It was as if he’d walked in on the middle of a conversation in a language he once almost understood, now twisted and wrong. Not foreign. Lost.

And then, louder, a shift in rhythm. The sounds looped, phrases repeated, the tone steady and rhythmic. A chant. Too precise to be sleep. Too careful. It built slowly, the cadence low and pulsing, like a heartbeat rendered in speech. Josh felt it in his chest more than his ears. A hum that made the bones beneath his skin feel wrong, like they didn’t belong to him anymore.

The fear bloomed under his ribs, cold and spreading.

He rose to his feet on instinct, breath shallow, eyes fixed on the walls. He moved toward the door with slow, cautious steps, his hand lifting toward the knob. The walls felt tighter as he neared them, the air denser. Like the room was shrinking.

Down the hall, Tyler kept speaking. Or… something was. The words began to unspool faster now, the syllables slurred together into wet, rushing sounds, too smooth, too fluid, like water running backward down a drain. It no longer sounded like a voice at all. More like voices . Layered. Sliding over each other in a sick, rising harmony. None of them belonged to Tyler. And yet, they all did.

Josh’s fingers hovered an inch from the doorknob, trembling.

He didn’t open it.

He just stood there in the heavy, breathing dark, listening to something that had started in Tyler’s mouth and become something else entirely. Afraid to hear what would come next. But more afraid of what might happen if it stopped.

In the dream, Tyler found the nursery again.

But it wasn’t ruined this time. Not broken. Not rotted. It was whole.

The wallpaper stretched smooth and seamless across the walls, pale yellow, scattered with tiny white stars that glowed faintly in the light. The ceiling arched above him in soft ivory, unmarred by cracks or water stains. Sunlight poured in through gauzy curtains, fluttering gently in a breeze that didn’t disturb the dust, because there was no dust. No mildew. No cobwebs. Only stillness and light and warmth.

The crib stood upright now, no longer collapsed, its wood polished to a gentle sheen. It was layered with soft blankets in delicate shades of blue and cream, the fabric plush and clean, tucked with quiet care. Above it, the mobile turned slowly, suspended in some invisible current. Tiny painted stars and moons spun in a quiet orbit, catching the golden light. They moved too perfectly, like they were performing for someone.

Everything was right . Too right.

A small toy duck sat on the windowsill, yellow, plastic, worn smooth from years of sunlight. Beside it sat the music box, gleaming like it had been polished just for him. Its lid was shut, the key unmoved, as if waiting for his touch. The air was warm with the scent of baby powder and fresh linen, the kind of scent meant to soothe, meant to make you forget.

Tyler stepped forward, each movement soundless, dreamlight pooling around his feet. The floor didn’t creak beneath him. It welcomed him. He moved through the nursery like it had been made for him, or remembered by him.

On the far wall, something shimmered, a picture frame, simple and black, hanging straight and proud. The glass was pristine. No fingerprints. No dust. Just light sliding off its surface like water.

Tyler crossed the room slowly, unsure why he was drawn to it, only knowing that he was.

Inside the frame was a photograph. Faded slightly by time, its edges curled but not damaged. Not torn.

Him and Josh.

Sitting side by side on the front steps of the house. Shoulders pressed together. Smiling like they didn’t know what fear was. Tyler’s arm slung easy over Josh’s shoulders, Josh’s hand resting gently on Tyler’s knee like it had always belonged there. Their faces were sun-dappled. Carefree. Young in a way that felt impossible now.

Behind them, the house loomed, not dark and haunted, but whole. Its paint uncracked. Its windows glowing. Each pane stained with red sunlight, not ominous, but warm. Like firelight in winter. Like safety.

Tyler stared at the image until the lines blurred. His chest ached with something too large to name.

He lifted a hand, slowly. Delicately.

His fingers touched the glass. It was warm. The warmth of breath. Of skin. Of life .

And in that moment, something stirred behind his ribs. A memory that didn’t feel like his alone. The house knew this. Knew them . And maybe it hadn’t been waiting.

Maybe it had simply been remembering.

Josh finally stood, every joint stiff and protesting with sharp, hollow pops that echoed louder than they should have. His knees locked and unlocked with a brittle ache, his calves numb from too many hours perched on the edge of the bed like a man bracing for a blow that never came. His muscles throbbed under the skin, not sharp pain, but the low, grinding fatigue of something being worn down by time and stillness. It felt like he hadn’t moved in days. Maybe he hadn’t.

The hallway beyond his door stretched out in darkness, thick and unmoving. Not quiet, still . The kind of stillness that swallowed breath, that held sound hostage. The air pressed against his skin like cloth soaked in ice water, too dense to inhale properly.

Josh moved like he didn’t trust the floor beneath him, his bare feet slipping carefully across warped wood. He stepped around the boards he remembered creaking, navigating the hall like a graveyard, muscle memory mixed with dread. But the house noticed. It always noticed. Its breath grew louder, heavier, with each step. The walls seemed to tighten. The ceiling bowed slightly, as if tilting down to watch him.

Tyler’s door was cracked open. Just enough. A thin sliver of lamplight cut through the dark like a knife, pooling across the floorboards in pale amber. It bled into the hallway without resistance, dragging long shadows behind it, warping the shapes into something unfamiliar. Nothing moved. But everything felt bent.

Josh hesitated, his chest tight, then reached out with two fingers and pressed the door open, soft, slow.

It didn’t creak. Didn’t groan. It opened smooth and silent, like a mouth parting to whisper. Like the door wanted him inside.

Tyler was still in bed.

His body lay stretched across the mattress, one arm slung up and draped over his eyes. His chest rose and fell in a perfect rhythm, unnaturally deep, unnaturally slow. His lips were parted slightly, mouth slack, his breath a steady hush through his nose. He looked like a mannequin made to sleep. Not at peace. Programmed.

At the foot of the bed, resting on the worn wood floor, the music box spun. Open and unstopping. Its melody spilled out like breath through cracked teeth, soft, broken, endless. The lullaby had slowed since the first time Josh heard it. The notes dragged now, low and dipping out of tune, like the gears inside had corroded. Some of the notes stuttered, others wavered in and out of pitch, creating tiny discordant glitches in the lullaby. But still it played. It never stopped.

Josh didn’t speak. He just watched.

Watched the rise of Tyler’s chest. The twitch of a finger. The way his lips curved just slightly into a smile too delicate to be conscious. That smile unnerved him most. It didn’t belong to the waking world. It belonged to dreams. And whatever dream had its claws in Tyler, it was good to him. It was gentle. It was showing him something perfect.

Josh felt it in his gut, like gravity shifting. That Tyler wasn’t really here anymore.

There was no sound but the lullaby, warped and patient, spiraling endlessly into the stale air. Josh’s breath hitched, caught behind his teeth like a secret. He didn’t dare say his name. Didn’t dare test whether the man in the bed would answer, or what voice might come out if he did.

He backed away. Slowly. Carefully.

The door closed with a hush, the latch sliding into place with the gentlest of clicks. But it sounded final. Like something had been sealed. Like a choice had been made.

Josh stood frozen, hand on the doorknob, staring at the grains in the wood. The lines looked deeper now. Carved instead of pressed. Like the house was drawing maps beneath his palm.

He didn’t know what he had hoped to find. Maybe the music would’ve stopped. Maybe Tyler would’ve woken.. But none of that happened.

Only the melody, dragging like breath through a failing machine.

And behind the door, Tyler dreamed on.

Josh didn’t go back to his room. He couldn’t.

Instead, he drifted, footsteps pulled not by decision but by something quieter, something deeper. The house offered no resistance. No guidance either. Just space, yawning open in front of him, one hallway at a time.

The silence pressed in like static, too complete to be natural. It wasn’t the silence of night, or even of stillness, it was forced . Choked. Like the air itself had swallowed every noise and held it hostage behind the walls. His ears rang faintly with the pressure, a thin whining tone that never faded. The absence of sound scraped against his skull like something sharp and vibrating.

Each step landed too loud. Each breath echoed longer than it should. The creak of a floorboard beneath his foot stretched outward, bouncing off unseen surfaces, multiplying into something cavernous. It sounded like he was walking through the inside of a throat.

Moonlight bent where it came through the stained-glass windows, color slanting wrong across the walls, shadows cast where no objects stood. The hallway seemed to warp with each turn, angling in ways that defied geometry. The walls leaned in. The floor dipped and rose without pattern. Doors blinked in and out of existence, places he remembered now sealed over, while new openings emerged like rot surfacing beneath old wallpaper.

He turned down a hallway that hadn’t existed before. 

The moment he crossed into it, the temperature changed. A cold bloomed beneath his skin, damp and crawling, the kind of chill that belonged underground. The scent came with it, standing water, mold soaked deep into wood, and a biting edge of rusted iron. Metal left in the rain too long. Blood dried too fast.

The wallpaper had changed too. Cream-yellow and brittle, patterned in looping gray vines that spiraled across the surface like veins. It peeled in long, curling strips from the corners. The kind of hallway no one had touched in decades. Maybe longer.

Josh’s pace slowed. His limbs felt heavier with each step, like gravity worked differently here. Like the air thickened behind him, pulling at his back.

He stopped and turned.

The hallway stretched longer now. Or maybe he’d walked farther than he realized. But the doorway he’d passed through was gone. Just darkness behind him. No sign of where he’d started.

Three doors waited along the right-hand wall. Identical in shape, narrow and tall, all painted the same uneven off-white as the rest of the corridor. At first glance, they looked like part of the wall, camouflaged by time and design. The paint blistered in strange patterns, like heat damage, like something had burned beneath it and tried to heal.

Each one had a brass knob, blackened, dulled, no two quite the same. They glinted faintly in the weak hallway light. Not inviting. Waiting.

Josh approached the first.

His hand hovered for a moment too long, fingers twitching in hesitation. Then he touched it.

The metal was cold, slick in a way that didn’t feel natural, like it had been buried in ice and left to sweat. But it turned easily. No protest from the hinges. No sound at all.

The door swung inward and revealed nothing.

Not darkness. Not shadow. Not a room. Nothing.

No walls. No floor. No ceiling. Just an expanse of black so absolute it felt alive. The light from the hallway didn’t penetrate it. It was consumed, dissolved on contact. Josh couldn’t see the end. Couldn’t see the beginning. Couldn’t tell if there was ground a step beyond the threshold or if he was looking out over an open drop into forever.

It felt hungry.

His breath caught. A flash of nausea twisted up from his gut. Every nerve in his body went sharp.

He slammed the door shut with a force that shook the walls, then stood there, chest heaving, palms sweating, heartbeat too loud in his ears.

The second door resisted him.

The knob was old brass, dulled to near-black, its surface pitted with tiny divots like it had been chewed by time. Josh twisted it once, no give. Tried again, harder, nothing. The mechanism held, stubborn and unyielding. He set his shoulder against the wood and shoved, muscle tight with frustration and a flicker of fear.

The door groaned in protest but didn’t budge. Not even a little.

He stepped back and kicked it, once, hard.

The sound that came back wasn’t right. No satisfying thud, no crack of wood or echo bouncing off an interior wall. Just a dull, swallowed thunk, as if his boot had struck something flesh-like on the other side. Heavy. Yielding. Leaning back . A weight that had already been pressing against the door, waiting. Josh staggered a half-step back, chest suddenly tight.

He didn’t try again.

The third door opened before he could touch it.

The knob turned on its own, smooth and silent, and the hinges gave without a sound.

What lay beyond stole the breath from his lungs, not because it was strange, but because it wasn’t.

It was his room, exactly as he’d left it.

The same tangled mess of sheets twisted at the foot of the bed. The same stale air heavy with damp and dust. The window was still fogged, the smeared remnant of a handprint barely visible in the condensation. His backpack slouched lifeless in the corner, untouched since the day they arrived. The little corner lamp buzzed faintly, its dying filament casting a sickly yellow light that flickered just enough to breathe life into the shadows.

Josh stood at the threshold, every muscle in his body braced like he was about to step into open flame. His heart climbed slowly up his throat, pulse drumming between his teeth. It shouldn’t be possible. It didn’t make sense.

But he stepped forward anyway.

As soon as his foot crossed the threshold, instinct pulled him around. He turned quickly, too quickly, and froze.

The door was gone. No crack in the wall. No knob. No trim. No sign it had ever been there. Just the same old wallpaper, stretched tight over drywall, patterned with gray vines that curled in shapes almost like writing. The paper peeled back at the seams in long, curling strips that reminded him of shedding skin. The air felt different now, warmer, wetter. Sweet in a way that clung to the roof of his mouth. Like overripe peaches left too long in a cellar. Like something turning.

A single bead of sweat slid down the back of his neck, slow and cold.

The walls felt closer than they had a second ago. Not in a way he could measure, but in a way his body knew. The kind of closeness that pressed just shy of contact. Like a presence standing behind you in the dark. Waiting. Watching.

The house was folding in. Not collapsing, but curling, subtly, deliberately, as if to keep him. As if it had been tracking him all along, and now it had him where it wanted.

Josh didn’t move for several seconds. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even swallow. He stood very still, pretending this was fine, pretending this was nothing.

Then, one step. Then another.

He crossed the space where the door had been and found himself back in the hallway.

Just like that. The air shifted. The pressure loosened. The shadows retreated a fraction of an inch, just enough for him to breathe.

He didn’t question it. Didn’t speak it aloud. Didn’t let the house know it had gotten to him.

Because he could feel it listening, and he wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction.

Somehow, without deciding to, Josh found himself at the top of the stairs again.

He didn’t remember climbing them. Couldn’t recall turning the corner, couldn’t recall lifting his foot to the first step or placing his hand on the railing, but there he was. His palm was pressed against the banister, damp with sweat. The wood was warm beneath his skin, too smooth, almost slick, as if it had been polished by the passing of too many hands. His heart thudded slow and heavy in his chest, a drumbeat that echoed up through his jaw as he stared down the hall.

Tyler’s door was still cracked open exactly as he had left it.

That thin bar of lamplight spilled across the hallway carpet in the same soft, unwavering line. Nothing had shifted. Nothing had dimmed. The edges of the light bled warm and gold into the dark, untouched, like time had frozen in that stretch of space. A photograph left in place too long.

Josh moved toward it, each step slow, deliberate, and soundless. The air grew thicker as he approached, not cold, not dry, but close. It pressed gently against his skin, clung to the fabric of his shirt, warmed the insides of his nose and lungs. It felt like entering a sealed room. A space that had been closed too long. A place not meant to be disturbed.

He reached out with one hand and eased the door open further. The hinge gave a tiny groan, barely audible, but enough to send a rush of unease up his spine, as if some fragile balance had just been tipped.

Inside, the room was still. Tyler hadn’t moved.

He lay exactly as he had before, flat on his back, one arm curled loosely near his mouth, the other resting limply across his chest. The blanket had been pulled higher in his sleep, tucked gently beneath his chin, the fabric soft and worn, disturbed only by the steady rise and fall of his chest. His face looked unreal in the lamplight. Not just peaceful, but untouched. His features softened to a kind of sacred calm. No crease in his brow. No tension in his jaw. Lips parted slightly, breath slow and deep and even. As if nothing in the world could harm him. As if the horrors of this place had passed him over entirely.

Josh stepped inside, barefoot.

The air shifted around him, subtle and immediate. The door stayed open behind him, but it felt like it wasn’t. The silence inside the room wasn’t empty, it was listening.

His eyes dropped to the music box. It was closed now. Shut tight, silent, still.

Its gold handle gleamed faintly where the lamplight caught it, unmoving, but Josh noticed, somehow, impossibly, that the lid was facing him directly. Like it had turned in his absence. Like it had been waiting for him. The box looked small, unthreatening, just a relic, a child's toy, some forgotten gift passed down through too many hands. But its stillness was loud. Louder than the lullaby had ever been.

He didn’t say a word.

Josh crossed the room in slow, measured steps, his breath shallow, like he might disrupt something sacred. The floorboards didn’t creak beneath him. His footsteps were too soft to register, or maybe the house was just holding its breath again. He reached the bed and lowered himself to the edge, the mattress sighing beneath his weight. It dipped ever so slightly, shifting toward Tyler’s body, but Tyler didn’t move. Not a flinch. Not a stir.

His chest rose. His chest fell. The same slow rhythm. The same half-smile still tugging at the corner of his lips, like whatever he was seeing behind his closed eyes was beautiful and worth staying in.

Josh stared at him and something opened up inside his chest. Something sharp. Something aching.

He couldn’t name it, not fully, not grief, not quite fear, not even love in the way he understood it. But it bloomed there, just beneath the ribs. A painful weight. A yearning to pull Tyler out of whatever dream had claimed him, and an equal dread of what might happen if he did. He sat there, frozen between two instincts, protect or run.

And under it all, beneath the silence, beneath the weight of the room, the house breathed.

Not audibly. Not overtly. But he could feel it. The low, steady hum behind the stillness. Like the floor beneath them had a pulse. Like the walls leaned closer when he wasn’t looking. Like the house had been patient, watching, waiting for him to return.

And now that he had, it would not let go.

Josh moved around the edge of the bed like he was circling something sacred, or something cursed. His steps were deliberate, each one placed with careful precision, as if the floor might vanish beneath him if he wasn’t paying attention. The boards gave slightly underfoot, not in the usual way old houses creak and complain, but in a manner that felt deliberate. Willing. As if the house had softened its ribs to let him pass. As if it had been waiting, and now it was ready to take him in again.

He reached the far side and slowly lowered himself beside Tyler, careful not to jostle the blanket, not to disturb the stillness. The mattress let out a long, thin creak beneath him, a sound too sharp for such a slow movement, like the wheeze of something that hadn’t been used in decades. It reminded him of teeth. Of pressure behind bone. Of something fragile bearing weight it wasn’t meant to hold.

He didn’t undress. Didn’t peel back the covers or reach for comfort. Instead, he lay down stiffly, arms folded across his chest, jacket still on, its fabric damp with sweat and something colder. The weight of it clung to him like wet skin, like a second layer of himself he hadn’t wanted to wear but couldn’t quite shed. His spine settled against the mattress as if it were the lid of a coffin. His breathing shallow. His eyes open.

The quiet that filled the room wasn’t restful. It wasn’t stillness in the way peace feels. It was coiled. Waiting. Like a stage right before the play begins, the lights dimmed, the air thick with expectation. Every corner felt alert. Every shadow watched. Even the light from the bedside lamp felt strange now, too warm, too gold, casting halos in places that shouldn’t have had them. Casting Tyler in a glow that felt too perfect to be real.

Beside him, Tyler stirred faintly. A sigh slipped from his lips, long and slow, like the release of a dream. Then he went still again. Breath even. Measured. Rhythmic. Almost mechanical in its calm. The kind of sleep that didn’t feel fragile, didn’t feel vulnerable. The kind that felt chosen.

Josh stared at the ceiling and felt the room breathing.

It wasn’t in the sound, not exactly, though the creaks and groans in the walls had a rhythm now, spaced too evenly to be coincidence. It was in the air. In the weight of it. Too thick. Too warm. The way it pushed against his lungs like humidity before a storm. The wood beneath him shifted slightly, not from pressure, but from motion. Like muscle rolling under skin. Like something beneath the floorboards was alive and stretching slowly toward the surface.

He turned his head toward Tyler.

He was so close. Inches away. Close enough to see the fine shimmer of sweat across his upper lip, the flutter of lashes against cheek. Close enough to count the pulse that beat in his throat like a metronome. But the peace on Tyler’s face was too complete. Too unbothered. Like he wasn’t here at all.

Josh’s throat burned. The words that came from him weren’t loud. They barely scraped free. But they hurt.

“I think the house is trying to erase me.”

No response. Not even a flinch.

The words disappeared into the room like vapor. Like they hadn’t been spoken at all. Like the air refused to carry them. Or worse, like the house had caught them in its throat and swallowed them whole.

Josh turned back to the ceiling.

Lines of water damage branched outward in quiet patterns above him, long veins etched into old plaster. Faint and spreading. Like something beneath the ceiling was pressing out, stretching upward, about to break through. Like the house was bleeding slowly, inch by inch.

He didn’t close his eyes. He couldn’t. Because sleep felt too much like surrender. Too much like stepping into a current and letting it take you under. So he lay there, next to the friend who no longer stirred, and stared upward into the slow decay above him.

Waiting for morning. Waiting for movement. Waiting for something he wouldn’t be able to stop.

Josh didn’t move when the morning came, didn’t flinch as the first slivers of light slid across the room like feelers searching for something still alive. It crept through the torn curtains in faint, fractured beams, thin as breath, heavy with dust, the color of old paper and diluted gold. The kind of light that had forgotten how to be warm. It spread in slow, uncertain pools across the warped floorboards, reaching the edge of the bed like it was testing the water, then sliding soft across Josh’s face.

It touched him, but it didn’t reach him.

The warmth felt counterfeit. Like it had passed through too many panes of old glass, filtered through too much rot. Like it had been touched by the house on its way in and came out wrong. There was no comfort in it. No promise. Just the illusion of daybreak in a place that didn’t care about time.

Josh lay perfectly still. There was a hollow space beneath his ribs that hadn’t been there yesterday. A coldness that wasn’t physical, that no blanket could reach. Not the kind of cold that made you shiver, but the kind that made you feel like a grave had opened inside you and let the air settle in. He felt emptied. Gutted. As if something had crawled in during the night and scraped him clean from the inside, careful not to leave a mark on the outside.

His eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling.

The cracks were worse now. They ran deeper, longer, curling through the plaster in branching, organic patterns that looked less like damage and more like something growing . Fungal, bone-white. Like veins or roots, slowly spreading, trying to connect to something. He traced them with his eyes, again and again, searching for shapes, for patterns, for meaning, but they only curled into nothing, disappearing into corners like they were afraid of being seen all the way through.

Beside him, Tyler stirred.

It was such a small sound. Just a slow breath in, the gentle rasp of a throat waking up, the whisper of fabric folding in on itself. But it struck Josh like a dropped glass, sharp and fragile and impossible to ignore. The sound of presence in a room where everything else felt ghosted. The undeniable proof that Tyler was still alive. Still here.

But Josh didn’t turn to look. He couldn’t.

His body remained frozen, breath shallow, eyes locked on the branching cracks overhead. The taste of the house was still thick on his tongue, bitter and metallic, like rust scraped from old pipes, like mold blooming through wallpaper. He could still feel the echo of the walls breathing around him, that slow, rhythmic flex like lungs under floorboards, like the house had spent the night exhaling against his skin. His body was coated in that memory. Slick with it. And somewhere deep inside, he was afraid that if he looked now, if he met Tyler’s eyes, they wouldn’t look back the way they should.

Because part of him wasn’t sure Tyler was still Tyler.

He lay motionless. Waiting. Braced for something to break.

Tyler sat up with a groggy sigh, rubbing at his face like the night hadn’t touched him at all. His hair stuck out in soft, uneven waves, half-matted to one side, wild on the other. The blanket fell to his waist, bunched around him like a cocoon being shrugged off. He stretched, slow and easy, vertebrae rising under his hoodie, ribs lifting, arms folding overhead like he’d woken from the best sleep of his life.

And when he spoke, his voice was rough with sleep, low and warm, like a river dragging silt, unbothered, unbroken.

“I had the weirdest dream,” Tyler said, the words lazy and soft. “But it felt so real.”

Josh finally turned his head. His neck moved like it had been rusted in place. Muscles protesting. Bones stiff. The light had changed while he wasn’t watching, brighter now, but thinner, bleached-out and cold, like morning painted in watercolor. It fell across Tyler’s face, across his hair and cheekbones and open mouth, and it looked almost golden. Almost warm.

But the gold didn’t reach his eyes.

Tyler was smiling down at him. That same crooked grin. The one he always gave when the worst was over, when the storm had passed, when they’d made it somewhere safe. It was familiar. Comforting. But here, in this room, in this light, with the house still wrapped around them like a throat slowly tightening, it looked wrong. Like a mask fitted too perfectly. Like something trying very hard to look like home.

“You were there,” Tyler said, his voice light, almost dreamy. “We were sitting at the piano. Playing that one song I made up when I was a kid, remember?”

Josh blinked slowly, like waking from something half-remembered. “What?”

Tyler’s brow furrowed, just a little, but the smile stayed on his face. It wasn’t confident now, just delicate . Like a thread pulled tight, one wrong word from snapping. “You know,” he said gently. “The one I used to play every night? You were trying to harmonize, but you were singing off-key on purpose, just to piss me off.”

Josh pushed himself up on one elbow, the movement stiff and awkward. His body felt brittle, his joints slow to respond, like he hadn’t moved in hours. His back ached. His chest felt hollow. The mattress beneath him still held Tyler’s warmth, but none of it reached him. It clung like residue. Like something left behind after a fire.

“Tyler,” he said, voice low and brittle. “What the fuck are you talking about? What song?”

Tyler blinked once. The movement was slow, too slow. And then something behind his expression shifted, not drastically, not like something breaking, but like a mirror being turned ever so slightly askew. The smile didn’t vanish. It just… faded inward. Like it was being pulled down, softly, into something deeper.

“The lullaby,” he said quietly. “The one I wrote when I was a kid. My mom used to hum it to us. Every single night. You don’t remember?”

Josh sat up fully now, his heart beating hard, ears roaring like wind through a tunnel. The blood in his body felt wrong. Heavy. Moving too slow. Like it was trying to reverse itself. He stared at Tyler, the words sticking in his throat like shards of glass.

“Ty,” he said, careful now. Measured. Like speaking too fast might tip the balance of something sharp. “I don’t remember you ever writing a lullaby. And I definitely don’t remember your mom humming anything. Not to us. Not to you.”

Tyler stared at him, eyes wide, pupils a little too big in the gray morning light. His lips parted slightly, and for a moment he didn’t breathe. “I know what I’m talking about, Josh,” he said.

The certainty in his voice wasn’t loud, but it was complete . Solid. Like stone lodged in the throat. And that was what made it worse.

Josh couldn’t look away.

There was something gathering in the room. Not noise. Not shadow. Something else . The kind of pressure that made the skin itch and the chest feel too tight. The silence had thickened. It wasn’t passive anymore, it had turned toward them . Watching. Weighing. As if the house was listening with its teeth bared, waiting for the next word to draw blood.

Josh swallowed, slow. His voice came out low and flat. “You were asleep last night,” he said. “Maybe you just… dreamt that.”

“I remember, ” Tyler said. Sharper now. Like the memory had anchored itself in him. Like it was real because he’d claimed it, and anything that didn’t match was the lie. “We played together. You told me you liked how the house sounded when it was quiet. You were laughing.”

Josh didn’t respond. He just looked at him. Really looked.

And what he saw made his stomach knot in a way that felt primal. Like recognizing something inside a loved one that shouldn’t be there. A shape behind the eyes. A shift in rhythm. Something almost imperceptible, but wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong.

Because this wasn’t Tyler misremembering a dream. This was Tyler recalling something that never happened at all.

“No,” Josh said. Sharper now. Louder than he meant. The word came out like a slap. He shook his head hard, fast, as if he could rattle the memory loose before it sank too far. “You were just humming in your sleep. You were talking, but the words didn’t make sense. It’s just the song from that stupid music box . ”

And even as he said it, he realized how thin the explanation sounded. How useless. The kind of thing you told yourself just to stay upright.

Tyler didn’t argue. He didn’t say anything at all. But the quiet that followed felt colder than the room had any right to be.

Tyler frowned, his eyes falling to his hands. He turned them over in the light like they might hold proof, like maybe something was written in the lines of his palms that would make all of this make sense. But they were just hands. Empty. Pale. Trembling, almost imperceptibly.

“Why don’t you remember?” he whispered, barely audible.

Josh’s chest clenched. A sharp, involuntary thing. He stood too fast, the blood rushing to his head, the floor tipping slightly beneath him. His balance faltered, and he staggered back a step, then another, his whole body reacting before his mind could catch up.

That familiar sensation surged through him again, that trapdoor feeling, the sudden drop into the gut, dread unspooling from the base of his spine. He tried to shove it down, clamp a lid over it, but it didn’t stay buried for long. It clawed its way back up, hot and sour and inevitable.

“Because it didn’t happen,” he said, too loud, too firm. “Because the house is doing something to you.”

Tyler stood too, slower. Smoother. No alarm in his movements, no surprise. Just a quiet rising, like the weight of the moment had pulled him upright. He didn’t step forward. He didn’t raise his voice. He just looked at Josh across the room with that unreadable expression, eyes soft, almost sleepy. Or maybe not sleepy at all. Maybe just… inhabited .

“Or maybe it’s doing something to you ,” he said.

Josh froze. The words hit harder than they should’ve. His heart lurched in his chest, one deep, thudding beat that echoed in his ears like a warning bell. “What?”

Tyler didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. “You’re scared of everything,” he said softly. “You’ve been afraid since the second we got here. Maybe the house doesn’t like that. Maybe it’s showing you something else. Something worse, just to prove a point.”

Josh let out a sharp, humorless laugh. It cracked off the walls like broken glass, ugly in the stillness. “Don’t do that,” he snapped. “Don’t start talking like it’s choosing what we see.”

“But what if it is?” Tyler’s voice didn’t rise. If anything, it gentled. Like he was trying to comfort a frightened child. Like none of this was strange. “What if it’s showing me what it wants me to remember... and showing you what it wants you to fear?”

The silence that followed was too thick. The kind that presses into the spaces between your ribs. The kind that makes you feel like something else is in the room with you.

Josh glanced at the window. The light had dimmed, not much, but enough. The shadows were different now. Longer. Deeper. Stretching in places they hadn’t before, like the room had tilted ever so slightly toward something darker.

He didn’t answer.

Because he could feel it. Not just the air changing, not just the silence shifting, but the house itself, listening. Eavesdropping. Breathing.

And the worst part? He wasn’t entirely sure that Tyler was wrong.

Josh turned sharply, like the movement alone might shake the feeling off. He paced toward the far wall, needing space, needing distance from whatever was happening in Tyler’s eyes. His breath came shallow. His voice cracked when it finally broke free.

“This isn’t some weird therapy trip, Ty,” he said, the words scraping out of his throat like gravel. “This is real. ”

He reached the nightstand, gripped the edge like it might anchor him. His knuckles went bone-white. “We’re not losing time because we’re tired. We’re not forgetting things because we’re stressed. The house is…” He stopped himself, teeth clenching. For a second, it felt like saying it out loud might make it worse. Might feed it.

Still, he forced it out. “It’s alive. It’s watching us. It’s playing games with our heads.”

Tyler didn’t answer. Not right away.

And in the space that followed, the silence returned to full attention. The house listening. Waiting. Holding its breath.

Josh turned back, his throat cinched tight like something had wrapped around it.

Tyler hadn’t moved. Still standing near the dresser, one hand draped over its edge like it was the only thing anchoring him to the floor. His body was relaxed, posture loose, but it wasn’t peace. Not really. It was closer to surrender, an eerie kind of stillness that felt more like giving in. Like he’d handed himself over to something older, something heavier, and decided not to fight.

“You know,” Tyler said, his voice soft as dust, “I used to have a dream about this place when I was a kid. A big house with red windows. I was always safe in it. Nothing could get me there.”

Josh felt the cold ripple through him instantly. A jolt up his spine like icewater poured down the center of his back. He didn’t shiver, but every part of him wanted to. “What are you talking about?” he asked, breath short.

Tyler didn’t look at him. His fingers drifted lazily across the top of the dresser, tracing faint circles in the worn wood. His eyes were distant and unfocused, like watching something through a thick pane of glass. Something Josh couldn’t see. “I think maybe I was born here,” he whispered. “I think I came back.”

Josh’s lungs forgot how to pull air. He stood motionless, staring across the room at the boy he knew, at the boy he thought he knew, while the house seemed to lean in closer around them. No sound. No shadow. Just pressure.

An invisible shift in the atmosphere. A subtle, smothering weight. Like the walls were listening. Like they were pleased .

Josh stepped forward carefully, inching closer like Tyler was made of smoke. Like one wrong move might scatter him across the floor. The room felt smaller with every breath. The air thickened, dense enough to feel. Like gravity had changed direction, and everything was being pulled inward.

“You don’t sound like you,” Josh said, voice barely there, shaking at the edges.

Tyler tilted his head. Not a sharp motion. Not dramatic. Just a slow, thoughtful lean, his expression remaining perfectly neutral. Calm. Wrong . “I feel like me.”

Josh swallowed, throat raw, the burn like static. “No,” he whispered. “You feel like someone who wants to forget everything. Even me.”

For the first time, Tyler’s eyes dropped to the floor. A flicker of movement. Something almost like guilt. “I’m not forgetting you,” he said.

But the words felt brittle. Like cracked porcelain barely holding its shape. Like they could shatter if breathed on too hard.

Josh stepped closer. One pace. Careful. Heavy. The floor creaked under his shoe, a long, low groan that echoed more than it should’ve. His heart was beating so loud now it sounded like it belonged to the house.

“Then why does it feel like I’m the only one left who remembers who you really are?”

Tyler didn’t answer.

His fingers moved along the edge of the dresser in slow, repetitive motions. Scratching gently at the peeling wood. A sound almost too soft to hear, but constant. Steady. Too steady. Like a clock ticking just slightly out of sync. Like a ritual learned through observation. Like something pretending to be human, practicing the rhythm of familiarity.

Josh stared, eyes burning, as something inside him pulled tight.

 And outside the window, the red in the glass deepened just a little more.

Josh’s voice barely left his throat, thin, dry, more breath than sound. “You’re not sleeping, Tyler. Not really. You’re disappearing. You hum in your sleep. You talk to things that aren’t there. You dream about lives we didn’t live. I think the house is using you. Feeding you whatever you want.”

Tyler let out a small, broken laugh. Not mocking. Not cruel. Just hollow. Tired. Worn around the edges like a memory handled too many times. “And what if it is?” he murmured. “What if that’s the first good thing I’ve ever been given?”

Josh felt it hit like a stone to the gut, sharp and cold and too heavy to move around. Something in his chest split wider, the ache turning to something jagged. “You’re not thinking straight,” he said. His voice cracked on the last word.

Tyler looked up.

And Josh hated the way his eyes looked in that light, clearer than they should’ve been, too bright, too open. Like windows scrubbed clean after a storm. But there was something off in the shine. Something unnatural in the steadiness of his gaze. The stillness. “I’m thinking clearer than I ever have,” Tyler said. “Doesn’t it feel like we’re supposed to be here?”

Josh was right in front of him now, close enough to see how the light bent in Tyler’s pupils. Close enough to see the way the shadows behind his eyes moved when he didn’t. They didn’t shimmer, they crawled.

He swallowed hard. Forced the words up through the tightness in his throat. “No,” he said. “It feels like I’m supposed to lose you here.”

Tyler didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t breathe.

And the silence that unfolded between them was no longer just quiet, it was alive . Listening. A pause with teeth. The house waiting, watching, like a predator crouched just outside the edge of candlelight. Waiting to see which of them would falter first.

Josh stepped closer. His heart beat so hard he could hear it in his ears, like thunder caught in his ribs. There was barely a breath of space between them now. He could’ve reached out. Could’ve touched him. But he didn’t. His hands remained clenched at his sides, nails biting into his palms. Holding himself in place. Holding himself together.

“You’re my best friend,” he said. The words came out broken, splintered at the edges like bark peeled from a dead tree. “You’re the only person who ever made me feel like I wasn’t something wrecked. Like I wasn’t just some piece of someone else’s leftovers.”

And something flickered across Tyler’s face. Small. Faint. The crack of something almost remembered. Guilt, maybe. Regret. Recognition. But it passed like smoke, gone before Josh could reach for it.

Tyler looked away. His gaze fell to the floor, voice softening to something brittle. “You don’t have to protect me from this, Josh.” His fingers twitched slightly against the dresser. “It doesn’t hurt. It feels… quiet. Safe.”

Josh’s jaw clenched hard enough to sting. His teeth ground together with the effort of not screaming. “It’s not real,” he said.

Tyler’s response came back without hesitation. “It is to me.”

And that landed like a blade. Right between the ribs.

Josh’s hand lifted, hesitant, aching, like his arm no longer belonged to him. He reached out slowly, like touching a ghost, and brushed his fingers against the inside of Tyler’s wrist.

Cold. But not dead. A living pulse. A tether.

“Come back to me,” he whispered. The words trembled on the way out. “Please.”

Tyler’s eyes followed the touch, studying it like it was an artifact he didn’t remember owning. Like it was something half-familiar from a dream already slipping away. There was no recognition. Just stillness.

And then, slowly, gently, finally , he pulled his hand back.

Not harsh. Not violent. Just final.

Josh’s hand dropped. He didn’t reach again.

The silence that followed was not just silence. It was absence . The sound of something being pulled away and not returned. A hollow that pressed into the bones. It was not the sigh of the walls, or the creak of old beams, or the hush behind the wallpaper. It was deeper. Heavier.

Something had changed. And the house was listening.

Josh didn’t say goodbye when he left the room.

He just slipped out, slow and soundless, like the air itself might splinter if he moved too fast. Each footfall was deliberate and measured, like he was trying to keep something inside from breaking loose. His chest ached with every beat, his heart knocking unevenly against his ribs, confused and desperate, like it couldn’t understand why he was walking away from Tyler, like it still believed he could be saved.

The hallway had changed again.

It was colder now, with a stillness that didn’t feel like quiet, but like absence. The kind of cold that made its home in the hollows of joints, behind the teeth, deep in the spine. It settled in without announcement or permission.

Every window along the corridor had fogged over completely. Glass bowed with age and moisture, warping the world beyond into something vague and dreamlike, as though the outside no longer existed, or had never really been there. Just a memory turned soft with time.

A door stood ajar to his right. Only an inch. Maybe less. But it hadn’t been open before. He was sure of it.

Josh didn’t look. He didn’t need to. Whatever was behind it, whatever had opened it, wasn’t meant to be seen. Not yet.

He needed space. Distance. A room that didn’t hum with Tyler’s voice, that didn’t echo with half-dreamed lullabies or smell like something familiar turned wrong. He needed to breathe air that didn’t taste like decay and grief soaked into the drywall.

Above him, the house exhaled.

A groan rolled through the rafters, slow and resonant. Not like the casual complaints of old wood, but like something enormous was stirring above the ceilings. Something heavy, alive, and dreaming.

Josh moved down the stairs without thought, the carpet beneath his feet soft and threadbare, the texture of long-unlived places. The baluster groaned under his hand. The stained glass of the foyer dripped fractured light onto the floor like blood caught in ice. Reds, greens, blues, all dulled, all wrong.

He passed through it like a ghost, like a thought the house didn’t quite catch.

And somehow, he was in the parlor. He hadn’t meant to go there. But the room opened around him anyway, wide and waiting.

Dust lay over everything like a second skin, thick, settled, undisturbed. It dulled the world into grayscale, muted the edges of furniture and fixtures until it all blurred together into something shapeless.

A long couch hunched near the center of the room, its middle bowed as if someone had once sat down and never gotten back up. The fabric was cracked, seams gaping open like flesh that had split from pressure. The stuffing showed in tufts, yellowed and brittle.

At the far end, the fireplace had been nailed shut with warped boards, blackened around the edges. The nails were rusted. Bent. Driven in like a warning. There was no warmth here. No hearth. Just a dark mouth with its teeth pulled.

Josh ran a hand through his curls, fingers catching in the knots. He didn’t stop pacing.

But the silence in this room wasn’t like the silence upstairs. It was thicker. Hungrier. It didn’t press. It waited. Patient. Coiled. Not quite pretending it wasn’t watching, but watching all the same.

His stomach twisted, sour and thin, like acid curling through a hollow pit. His throat burned.

He wanted to scream, wanted to punch through the drywall, to split open a mirror, to kick down every door and demand the house show him its face. He wanted to make it bleed.

But he didn’t. Because deep down, he knew the house wouldn’t flinch. It would swallow that pain too. It would savor it.

Josh didn’t know when he’d found his way into the kitchen.

There was no memory of turning the corner, of crossing the threshold. He was simply there, surrounded by the sour breath of the house, the floor groaning beneath him like it recognized him now, like it had been waiting.

Each board beneath his boots let out a brittle, aching creak, louder than before, each sound sharp and deliberate, like a warning spoken through old teeth. The air felt denser here, heavier. It pressed against his skin, clung to his throat. The single thread of light that bled through the cracked windows stretched thin across the floor, more shadow than illumination. It ran like liquid silver over broken cabinets, caught and fractured by splinters and curled wood, traced along hinges rusted red and sagging from their frames like dislocated joints.

The room smelled like everything that shouldn’t be unearthed. A deep-rooted stench of mildew and metal, the tang of old rust fused with something darker underneath, wet earth, rotted wood, something organic left to decay in the dark. And beneath that, a sweeter note, nearly hidden. Overripe. Sick. Like fruit left too long in a cellar no one dared enter.

From inside the walls, something shifted. A faint scurry. A tap-tap-pause . Too soft to be threatening, too steady to be random. Rats, maybe. But Josh wasn’t convinced. Not anymore.

Then his eyes caught on a shape that seemed to pulse for his attention.

A door. Painted the same color as the wall, blistered beige, flaking in long strips, it had nearly vanished into the wallpaper, as if the house had drawn a veil over it. But now, just barely, the doorknob caught the light. A tiny gleam. Subtle. Intentional. A beckoning glint where there hadn’t been one before.

Josh stared. It felt old. Familiar in that way certain nightmares were, ones you couldn’t place, but that still left claw marks behind.

He should’ve turned back. Should’ve called out. Should’ve left the house altogether. But his body moved without asking. Like the kitchen had looped a wire around his ribs and tugged. Like something had slipped its hand inside his chest and was gently guiding him forward by the strings.

He crossed the room, each step sticky with the sound of soles dragging over warped linoleum. The light dimmed the closer he got, until even his shadow gave up and fell behind him. He reached out, fingers pale in the gloom, and touched the knob.

It was cold. Not metal-cold. Not night-cold. Cold like breath on the back of your neck in a sealed room. Cold like stone left buried too deep.

The door opened without resistance. No creak. No groan. Just a smooth, obedient swing inward, like it had been waiting for his touch.

Beyond it, a stairwell dropped into blackness. Not shadow. Not darkness like you get at night. This was absence. A void so complete it felt like it had weight. It breathed out at him, wet and slow, a damp exhale that kissed his face with rot and bone-deep chill.

Josh swayed. The scent hit him hard, thick with mildew and old stone, tinged with something more feral, more ancient. Something unclean.

It smelled like a crypt. Like grave dirt packed around teeth. Like roots strangling what should have stayed buried.

Every instinct he had screamed no. But he didn’t stop. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and thumbed the screen on. One flicker. A dim, dying glow. And then… nothing.

The light failed. No flashlight. No signal. No map. No help. Just the stairwell. The black. The breath of the house, drawing him closer.

Josh stepped forward, and the door closed behind him.

One hand pressed to the damp, shivering wall for balance, the other held out before him like a shield. Josh eased his foot into the dark, and the stair groaned under his weight, a long, hollow moan that felt too deliberate, too sentient, like the house wasn’t just warning him, but grieving his choice.

Another step. The second stair was slick. Treacherous. Something cold and wet clung to the bottom of his boot, thin as oil, thick as rot. He slipped, not far, just half a breath, but it sent a bolt of panic through his chest before he slammed his palm harder against the wall to steady himself. It gave slightly under his touch. Not like plaster. Like flesh remembering bone.

The third stair was sticky. His foot sank a little, just enough to feel it hold on. Something tugged, faint, resisting, before letting go with a reluctant sound. He didn’t look down. He didn’t want to see what had touched him.

Josh moved slowly. Deliberately.

Each breath pulled sour air into his lungs, thick with mildew and something coppery beneath. His fingers dragged along the wall, scraping against a surface that kept changing under his touch, slick stone turned to splintered wood, then to something softer, almost pliable. Everywhere, the same clammy moisture coated it, as though the walls were sweating. In some places, the texture changed again, grooved, pitted, as though long claws had raked through it, again and again.

His other arm hovered in front of him, fingers wide, grasping at the dark like it might part if he touched it gently enough.

There was no light. Only the memory of it, faint and dying, the last echo of brightness trailing down the staircase like the tail of a falling star. It wasn’t enough to illuminate, only enough to cast suggestion. Faint impressions of movement at the corners of his eyes, shifting shapes that danced away the moment he tried to focus.

Still, he kept going. He didn’t know why.

Each step felt heavier than the last. Not with fatigue, but with something harder to name. Like the weight of memory. Or consequence. Like the house had started charging him a toll, something intimate, something vital, for every inch he moved deeper.

And still, beneath the gnawing dread, something else stirred. Not panic. Not even fear. It was older than that. A pressure behind his ribs, deep and steady. Not terror, but pull. Not alarm, but longing. A distant thread tugged taut in his chest, like some part of him had been asleep down here for a very long time, and it was beginning to wake.

The stairs curved. A slow, unnatural twist to the left, then again, tighter now, winding in on itself like a drainpipe swallowing the light. The cold here had teeth. It didn’t brush his skin, it bit. The air thickened until it dragged against his throat with every breath. It tasted metallic. Decayed. Like blood left in water. Like leaves rotting in a shut-up room.

And then, suddenly, the stairs ended. His boot hit flat ground, and the sound changed. No more wood beneath him. Instead, cracked stone. Uneven. Unforgiving. He shifted his weight and felt the surface buckle just slightly, like something beneath it had flinched.

He was there. Wherever there was. But the air had changed again.

It didn’t move. It didn’t shift. It had no life at all. It simply existed, massive and unmoving, like the vacuum left behind in a cathedral after the candles have all gone out. The silence wasn’t just absence, it was presence. Watching. Waiting. A hush so complete it felt holy. Or funereal.

It reminded him, absurdly, of the inside of a womb. Or a tomb. Something sleeping. Something breathing slow and deep just beyond his reach.

Josh didn’t breathe for ten seconds. Maybe longer. His chest locked, ribcage turned to glass, and only when he forced the air out did it leave him in a curl of pale vapor.

He took another step and the dark closed in around him like a mouth finally sealing shut.

The basement unfolded around Josh like a forgotten cathedral, too vast, too still, a space that should not have existed beneath a house. The air pressed against his skin like damp cloth, thick with silence and something heavier underneath. He stopped just past the final step, throat clenched around a breath that didn’t want to leave. Above him, the ceiling arched high into shadow, a black vault that gave no end, no reassurance, only the sensation of being watched from above. Great beams crisscrossed the darkness like the bones of something ancient. From them hung thick knots of root, slick and glistening with moisture, knotted like veins or intestines, twitching now and then with the slow, subtle motion of something not quite dead. Each shift was small, almost imperceptible, like the settling of flesh around breath.

He stepped forward. Slowly. Carefully. The ground yielded beneath him, not quite soil, not quite rot. Something soft and pulpy that gave like bruised fruit beneath his boots, swallowing the weight of him like it wanted to keep it. He didn’t hear his own footsteps. There was no echo. No rhythm. Just the sensation of sinking, of being absorbed by the floor itself. Each step slower than the last.

The air clung to him. Dense. Wet. Rotted. It stank of things that had never seen the light, mold and fungus and the sour, sweet stench of decomposition. Beneath that, disturbingly faint, was something out of place. Something human. Perfume, maybe, powdery and stale. Like the breath of an attic long sealed. Like memory gone wrong. Josh inhaled without meaning to and tasted dust and sugar and the sickly softness of something he hadn’t smelled since childhood, and now wanted desperately to forget.

He looked up. Then froze.

The walls weren’t stone anymore. They were alive with color, texture, murals stretched across every surface, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, frantic and looping, carved into the rock like the desperate record of something trying to claw its way free. Symbols. Circles. Lines like screams. Crude figures painted in thick strokes of black, brown, and red so dark it could only be one thing.

He moved closer. Not by choice. Something pulled him, some soft insistence under the ribs, like the house had wrapped fingers around his spine and was guiding him forward. His body obeyed. His mind screamed.

The first image was a child. Alone. Spindly arms, spidery legs, a round, blank face. Standing in front of the looming shape of a house, its lines jagged, its roof steep and bent at unnatural angles. The child’s arms were outstretched, and from the ground beneath them, black roots coiled up their legs, veins turned outward, crawling, burrowing. The lines here were pressed in deep, dug into the wall with a kind of manic pressure, as though the artist had scraped it in with fingernails or bone.

Josh’s pulse pounded in his ears.

The next panel bled sideways, wider, messier. The same child again, but this time inside the house. Only the face was gone. Not blank now. Erased. Scrubbed until only smudged darkness remained where the eyes should be, the mouth nothing more than a line dragged too long. The house around them curved in on itself, windows bowed into round, unblinking eyes. The doorway stretched in a toothless grin that bent the walls around it, a warped mouth hungry and grinning. Everything leaned inward, toward the child. A home made into a trap. A shelter made into a predator.

Josh took another step. He didn’t want to. He couldn’t stop.

The third image was worse. The house was split open now, not broken, opened , like something had peeled it back from the inside. The walls stretched jagged and raw, like torn muscle, exposing a wound that wasn’t quite a room. A mouth. A maw. Inside, another figure, taller now, less childlike, maybe not a child at all, was halfway in. Its limbs were twisted, too long, too soft, flowing into the open house like syrup or shadow. The arms hung loosely at its sides. No resistance. It wasn’t being dragged.

It was walking in. And the house was making space. Everything bent. Everything wanted it.

Josh stared, unmoving, heart hammering against his ribs, his breath coming thin and fast. There was no denying it. These weren’t stories. They weren’t decoration.

They were warnings. Or worse, they were instructions.

At the center of the back wall, larger than anything else, hung the final panel. It loomed like a monument, like a conclusion written in blood. Two figures stood side by side, dwarfed by the grotesque outline of the house behind them. But they weren’t crude like the others. These had been drawn with care, precision, reverence. The lines were deliberate and painstaking. One of the figures had curls that spiraled with recognizable shape, the slope of their shoulders familiar, the jaw carved just so. A likeness Josh had seen in the mirror more times than he could count.

But it was the second figure that made his knees falter and his lungs forget how to breathe.

It was Tyler. Not a suggestion. Not a trick of shape or memory. Him . The soft arch of his brows, the particular tilt of his smile, the fall of hair that curved just so over his temple. His expression was serene. Knowing. A calmness that felt wrong in this place. Not peace. Something deeper. Something colder. The smile of someone who had seen and accepted. The eyes of someone who had been chosen.

Josh staggered back half a step, heart hammering so loud it hurt. The chamber blurred around the edges as nausea swelled up from somewhere deep, primal. His mouth had gone dry. His fingers twitched at his sides. He didn’t blink. Couldn’t. Because it felt like the mural was watching him. Not the way eyes follow you from a painting. Something worse. Something beneath .

Behind the paint, behind the stone, something shifted. Something old. Something awake.

His breath snagged in his throat. He dropped to a crouch, instinct, panic, gravity. His fingers pressed into the earth, spongy, cold, and felt it give. It rippled like old flesh. Like burial dirt. Something moved beneath his palm. Something too solid. Too real.

He brushed it clear. A bone. Long. Thin. Pale. Unmistakably human. Not fossilized, not old enough to forget what it had been. Just white and dry and hollow, like it had been waiting . Not hidden deep. Just beneath the surface. Inches down. Like the dirt had only just started to cover it.

Josh swallowed hard and didn’t move. Then he reached again, the tremble in his hands growing violent. The dirt parted like breath, and more emerged, another bone, and another. Ribs, curved and brittle. A tangle of tiny finger bones, warped and delicate like bird claws. A jaw, split along the hinge, teeth still set in a silent grimace. Vertebrae scattered like beads, threading through the muck.

There was no pattern. No rest. The bones were layered, crammed together in a collage of death. Not buried. Abandoned. Dozens.

Josh stood too fast, body lurching away, breath caught sharp behind his teeth. His stomach surged upward, a wave of bile and panic, but he forced it down. Swallowed it like poison. His vision tilted, then settled.

Behind him, the mural towered, red and black and brown, alive with meaning he didn’t want to understand.

The air pressed heavier now. The walls inhaled. The whole basement exhaled slow, deep, and satisfied.

And then, a voice . Soft. Familiar. Threaded with something deeper than sound.

“You found it.”

Josh whipped around, his breath lodged in his throat.

Tyler stood at the base of the stairs, half-illumined by the light leaking from above. Barefoot. Pale. His arms hung limply at his sides like they’d forgotten purpose. His shirt was twisted on his frame, collar hanging askew, sleeves bunched at the elbows. Hair damp and matted to his forehead, like he’d climbed out of sleep, or something older.

But his eyes. Wide. Not with fear, not with confusion. But with recognition. Like he’d stepped into a memory that had finally come back to him. Like awe, tinged with reverence. Like he'd been waiting for this. For Josh to find it too.

He stepped forward, and the earth didn’t protest. No crunch of bone. No squelch of rot. Just silence, like the dirt itself was parting for him. And if his bare feet touched the ribs, the jawbones, the scattered remains littering the floor, he didn’t flinch. Didn’t seem to see them. Or maybe he saw only them. Maybe he’d always known they were there.

Josh’s mouth opened. His lungs pressed against the cage of his chest, but no sound came out.

Tyler smiled faintly, a slow curve of lips like a memory surfacing. Like he was remembering something Josh hadn’t even learned yet. His eyes never left the far wall. He kept moving, not toward Josh . Toward the mural. Toward them.

Josh didn’t breathe. The air wouldn’t let him. It had thickened around them, viscous and heavy, no longer just the stench of old stone and rot. It had shape now. Grief. Memory . Like the room itself was grieving something it had forgotten how to name.

Tyler walked like he belonged there. Like the dirt had softened for him. Like the basement knew him.

“I used to come here,” he murmured, his voice smaller now, like a confession whispered through the mouth of a dream. “In my dreams, when I was little. I thought it was just a story I made up to help me sleep. But it was this. It was always this.”

Josh stumbled back a step. His boot caught on something buried and solid, and he nearly went down. He looked, another rib. Bleached. Clean. Dry. 

“Tyler…” he rasped, voice breaking like a rotted beam. “What is this?”

But Tyler didn’t turn. His gaze stayed locked on the mural, the center panel. The one that had them . Two figures, hand in hand, standing before the bleeding house. His hand rose slowly, reverent, and pressed against the dried paint. Thick as scabs, cracked like dried skin. Beneath his fingers, the shape of his own face stared back at him.

The house behind them loomed in dark strokes, windows weeping red, mouth yawning wide like it had always planned to eat them whole.

“It remembers us,” Tyler said.

“No.” Josh’s voice was a ghost, thin and shaking. “It’s not remembering you. It’s making you remember. It’s showing you what you want to see. That’s what it does. ” His voice broke. “You didn’t grow up here, Tyler. You grew up next door to me. We rode bikes down the cul-de-sac. We fought over Pokemon cards. We used to sneak out and walk railroad tracks. That was real.”

Tyler turned then, and the eyes that met Josh’s were too bright. Too clear . Wiped clean. Not empty, but rewritten .

“But what if the gaps were always mine?” he said gently. “What if this is the only place that ever made sense?”

Josh stared at him, and the ache behind his ribs cracked wide open. “Ty… this place is filled with bones. ”

Tyler’s smile didn’t change. It stayed soft. Heartbreakingly soft. 

“Every house is,” he said. And behind him, the roots hanging from the beams above swayed, slow and thoughtful, like they were listening. Like they were agreeing.

Josh stared at the mural, eyes locked on those jagged little figures, their bodies crudely drawn, hunched and skeletal, clasped beneath the looming bulk of a house too big, too wide, windows screaming red. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. His hands trembled at his sides, fingers twitching with the impulse to claw the paint from the walls, to scrape it away until nothing was left but dust. But it wouldn’t matter. The house would remember. The house wanted to be remembered.

“No,” he said, hoarse, barely audible above the weight of his own heartbeat.

Tyler turned toward him again, that same unreadable softness clouding his features. “Josh-”

“ Shut up. ”

It came out sharp, ragged, cut from the center of his chest like broken glass. The echo rang too loud in the space, bounced off the ribs beneath them, off the vaulted ceiling, off the soft meat of memory bleeding into stone. Josh didn’t care. His mouth was dry and sour. His throat felt scalded from the inside. And his heart was a hammer, slamming against bone hard enough to make the world blur at the edges.

“You’re not thinking,” he said, voice cracking under the weight of fury and terror. “You’re just letting it in. Letting it crawl into your head and build a nest there like you want it. Like you asked for it.”

Tyler’s brow furrowed, not angry, worse. Confused. Like he didn’t understand why Josh was fighting so hard. Like the truth didn’t burn the back of his throat every time he tried to speak it. “I’m not scared of it,” he said quietly, as if that settled anything.

Josh surged forward, fingers snapping around Tyler’s wrist, the contact sharp, electric, real . The bones beneath his grip were too thin. Too cold. “Well I am,” he snarled. “And I’m not letting it take you.”

Tyler didn’t resist. Didn’t flinch as Josh pulled him backward, stumbling toward the stairs. The air thickened around them, syrup-slow, pressing in from every side like the walls had exhaled. Every step up felt like wading through muck, like pushing against gravity that didn’t obey the laws of anything human. The stairs groaned under their weight, wood swelling like lungs, joints creaking like old bones too long buried.

Halfway up, the light from the kitchen flickered, sputtered once like a dying match and returned, colder. Paler. False.

Josh didn’t slow. He gripped Tyler tighter, like that alone might keep him tethered to this version of himself, to reality, and kept climbing.

“Let go,” Tyler murmured behind him. His voice was soft again, impossibly gentle, like he still didn’t understand what was at stake. “You don’t have to-”

“I’m not leaving you down there,” Josh snapped, without turning. “I don’t care if you think it’s real. I don’t care if you think it’s home. It isn’t. It never was.”

The final step cracked beneath his boot, deep and sharp like something biting down. But he didn’t fall. He didn’t stop.

He shouldered the door open, the wood reluctant under his grip, and dragged Tyler through it with a final desperate pull. He slammed it shut behind them with both hands, chest heaving, ears ringing. The sound echoed like thunder in the quiet kitchen.

And then he realized he was crying. Hot tears slid down his cheeks, uninvited and unacknowledged, stinging as they carved tracks through dust. He hadn’t felt them come. It was like they’d been waiting in him all along.

Tyler touched his shoulder, light, hesitant.

Josh jerked away, spine stiff and breath broken. “ Don’t. ”

The word was a wound. Tyler didn’t argue. Didn’t ask questions. He just watched him for a long, still moment, the air between them swollen with something too heavy to name. Then, slowly, quietly, he sank to the floor, cross-legged on the cracked linoleum like it meant nothing. Like they hadn’t just clawed their way out of something that wanted to eat them whole.

Josh stayed standing, his back to the door, one hand braced against the peeling frame like he needed it to hold him up. Because if he let go, he wasn’t sure what would be left of him to catch.

Josh stood frozen in the kitchen, shoulders heaving, lungs pulling in breath like they didn’t trust the air. His chest rose and fell too fast, too shallow. The silence pressed against him on all sides, dense, alive. Not quiet like peace, but quiet like the moment between lightning and the thunder it brings. The kind that crackles. The kind that waits.

Everything felt wrong . The walls didn’t stand anymore, they loomed, bowed in toward him like ribs around a heart that wasn’t beating right. The wallpaper curled at the edges like skin blistering under heat. The ceiling groaned softly, a sound like joints stretching after long disuse. Josh could feel the house breathing again, slow, humid exhalations from the cracks in the floorboards.

“I can’t do this,” he whispered. His voice trembled and cracked open with it. “I can’t keep pretending you’re still you.”

Tyler didn’t look up. He sat like a statue on the floor, back curved, arms loose at his sides, as though the words barely brushed against him.

“I am me,” he said, softly.

Josh let out a sound, somewhere between a breath and a laugh, but it was raw, broken, scraped across the inside of his ribs. “No,” he said, harsher now. “No, you’re not. You haven’t been since we walked through the fucking door.”

Tyler’s gaze finally lifted. His eyes were calm. Serene. Unmoved. “I feel more like myself now than I ever have.”

Josh’s stomach twisted. The voice was Tyler’s, but the rhythm was off. The inflection, wrong. It was too smooth, like something mimicking him. “That’s not you talking,” Josh said, stepping back. His voice rose in spite of him, desperation fraying the edges. “It’s the house. It’s in you. It’s speaking through you.”

“It’s always been me,” Tyler said, and that landed like a stone in the pit of Josh’s gut.

He backed away, boots scuffing the floor, every step like dragging himself through wet cement. His hands shook. His breath wouldn’t settle. “You’re not hearing me,” he hissed. “You’re not even trying . You’re just.. you’re just letting it in . Letting it crawl inside and make you forget . ”

Tyler rose to his feet. Slow. Controlled. His limbs loose but balanced, like his body belonged to the space now. He didn’t blink. Didn’t tense. Just stood with eerie stillness, like something watching from inside the meat of him didn’t need to pretend anymore.

“I’m not giving in,” he said. “I’m going home.”

Josh froze. His chest ached. His heart hammered once, twice, like it had skipped a step.

He looked at the boy in front of him, the boy he’d grown up with, shared food and fears with, chased down summers and stayed up whispering in the dark beside. And now that boy was gone, hollowed out with a smile. Something else was inside him now. Wearing him like a memory.

“This isn’t your home,” Josh said, and the words came out like a plea more than a fight. “This house is a parasite. It eats people. It fucks with them. It’s already swallowed you, and now it wants me too.”

Tyler didn’t argue. He didn’t need to. His silence said everything.

The kitchen stretched around them, the overhead light dimming as if shadows were crowding closer. The house didn’t groan anymore. It didn’t need to. It had already made itself heard.

And Josh realized, with a coldness that seeped into his spine, that whatever was happening wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

Tyler stepped forward, bare feet silent on the warped floorboards. The shadows behind him reached like fingers.

“I want you to stay,” he said softly, and the words landed like a stone dropped in still water, quiet, but devastating.

Josh’s back met the wall. He hadn’t meant to retreat, but the house pressed behind his spine like it had grown taller in the last breath, like it wanted to fold him in.

“You don’t mean that,” Josh said, voice thin, barely able to hold itself upright.

“I do,” Tyler answered, not blinking. “I always have.”

Josh’s lungs stalled. Something in him lurched sideways. “You don’t love me,” he said, and it tasted like blood in his mouth. “The house does. It wants me quiet. Still. Easier to keep. That’s not the same thing, Ty.”

Tyler’s expression faltered, just a flicker, like a mask slipping. A crack spiderwebbing through polished calm. His mouth parted, and for a second, there was something else in his face. Not the house. Not the calm. Just Tyler.

“I do love you,” he said. Quiet. Barely a breath. But real.

Josh stared at him, undone. That single sentence tore through him like glass. He shook his head slowly, jaw clenched like it was the only thing holding him together.

“I won’t stay here,” he said. “Not even for you.”

The house moaned above them, louder this time. Violent. Like beams shifting under strain, like it was holding its breath too long and something was about to snap. The chandelier overhead swayed, casting wild slashes of light against the walls.

Tyler blinked once, slow as dusk settling.

“Then you’ll leave alone.”

Josh’s body trembled. He stood in the parlor with his fists curled tight, shaking from the inside out.

“I don’t want to leave you,” he whispered. The words cracked in half in the middle, broken by grief and fear and something deeper still. Love . “But I don’t want to die here.”

Silence pooled around them.

Tyler watched him with that same unnatural stillness, the kind that felt more like waiting than listening. His face betrayed nothing now. No warmth. No anger. Just a cold sort of knowing, like someone watching a rerun of a story they already knew the ending to.

Josh stepped forward. Another. Then stopped just shy of him, hand trembling as he reached out and gently wrapped his fingers around Tyler’s wrist. A soft hold. A question.

“Come with me,” he said, voice frayed. “Please, Ty. Just to the door. Just… just to try.”

And this time, Tyler didn’t pull away. Didn’t speak. Just let himself be moved.

Josh led him through the house like leading someone through a dream turned nightmare. The walls sighed around them. The floor bent slightly, dipping in places it hadn’t before. The hallway stretched on, growing longer with every step, but he didn’t stop. The wallpaper pulsed at the corners of his vision, veins bulging like skin too close to the surface. The chandelier above them flickered wildly, casting fractured light like it was about to burn out completely.

They reached the foyer. Josh reached out and pushed the front door.

It opened.

Cold air spilled in like a gasp of water after drowning. The porch appeared in full, sharp clarity. The front steps. The gravel curling like bone fragments down to the driveway. Beyond that, trees swaying slow in the wind, long and quiet and waiting.

“See?” Josh said, breathless. “We can go. We can still leave .”

But Tyler didn’t move.

Josh turned to him, pleading. “Ty. Please. ”

Tyler looked out past the doorway. Past the trees. Past the night curling at the edges of the porch. And then his eyes settled on Josh, soft and steady.

“I told you,” he said, with no anger. No fear. Just finality. “I’m already home.”

And somewhere deep inside the house, something smiled.

Josh stepped outside. Just one foot.

The porch groaned under his weight, but the air didn’t greet him. It didn’t rush or bite or move at all. The wind sounded in the trees, branches rattling like bones strung with bells, but none of it touched his skin. Not even a whisper. It was like standing in the eye of a storm that didn’t exist.

He pulled Tyler with him, his hand gripping cold skin, desperate.

One step forward. Another. The floorboards creaked again beneath them, too loud. Too hollow.

And then, they were standing back in the foyer.

Same door, sealed behind them. Same walls, breathing slow. The air had returned to its familiar wrongness, thick and still and warm like exhaled breath trapped in a coffin.

Josh froze. His eyes darted to the door behind him, then to the floor, then back again. The porch was gone. The doorknob cold in his hand. The windows on either side dulled to a lifeless gray, their light flat and brittle like it had been painted on.

He turned to Tyler, who stood unmoving beside him. No confusion. No fear.

Josh’s voice cracked through the stillness. “What… What just happened?”

He spun back to the door. His chest squeezed tight. Every breath felt like it had to be dragged in with force.

He yanked the door open again.

Not the outside. A hallway stretched in front of him, impossibly long. Wallpaper bubbled from the walls like blistered skin. Shadows puddled along the baseboards. There were no windows. No exit. No air. Just more house.

Josh’s pulse pounded in his ears. His breath hitched as panic surged.

He slammed the door shut. Opened it again.

A dining room this time. Dust frozen in the air, floating like ash. A table set with plates that still held the smeared remnants of something rotten.

He slammed it again.

A bedroom. The bed was sunken in the middle. The walls sagged like lungs struggling to hold in their last breath.

Slam.

The foyer again.

Josh staggered backward, his whole body trembling. He clutched at his scalp with both hands, pressing his fingers into his curls like he could squeeze reality back into place.

“No,” he gasped. “No, no, no, no.”

He turned toward Tyler. His chest was rising too fast. His vision tunneling. The room twisted slightly around the edges, like the house was laughing, soft and unseen.

Tyler was still. He hadn’t moved. His face hadn’t changed. Only his eyes, they held something like mourning. A gentle, exhausted grief.

“This is how it keeps us,” he said, voice soft as dust settling. “It waits until we try to run. Then it rearranges.”

Josh backed away from him like he’d been struck.

His mouth moved before his thoughts could catch up. “You knew.”

Tyler didn’t argue. Didn’t apologize.

He just stood there, quiet, resigned, unafraid, as if he’d already accepted the house’s terms. As if he’d made peace with the maze that would never end.

Josh stumbled back another step, the silence thickening around him, swallowing his breath.

And behind the walls, something moved. Something large. Something old. The house adjusting again, just slightly. Just enough. Waiting. Watching. Pleased.

Josh sank to his knees in the center of the foyer like something inside him had finally snapped. His body folded in on itself, arms limp at his sides, palms turned upward in defeat. Tears slipped down his cheeks, hot and blinding, carving through the grime like they could cleanse any of this. They couldn’t. His shoulders trembled, his breath hitching in broken gasps that barely made it past his throat.

“I don’t want to die here,” he whispered, not to Tyler, not to the house, just to the stillness. To the thing watching them through the walls.

Tyler knelt beside him, slow and soundless, like he belonged to the silence now. “You won’t,” he said, voice low and gentle. “It won’t let you. You’ll just… stop needing anything else.”

Josh turned his face away, the ache inside him opening wider. His voice broke like glass. “I miss you.”

“I’m right here.”

“No,” Josh said, softer than breath. “You’re not.”

Tyler reached for his hand, fingers cool and familiar, a ghost of comfort, but Josh didn’t take it. He didn’t pull away either. He just stared at the floor like it might split open and swallow him. Maybe it already had.

They sat there a long time. Minutes. Hours. Days. He couldn’t tell anymore. The light bleeding through the stained-glass windows dimmed slowly until it was nothing. Until there was no time at all. The air turned to still water. Unmoving. Weightless. Heavy.

And then, Josh was standing again. Somehow. He didn’t remember moving. Didn’t remember getting up. But now he was in Tyler’s room.

The door shut behind him without a sound.

The bed was made with unnatural care, not a wrinkle out of place. The open window bled pale gray light into the room, but the air didn’t move. The curtains lifted and fell anyway, as if breathing in their own rhythm. Like lungs in a body that no longer needed wind.

Tyler sat on the edge of the bed. His posture was calm, too calm, shoulders slack and spine straight, like he’d been waiting. In his hands, the crumpled drawing, the one Josh had seen him with that first day. Two stick figures. A house. Red windows bleeding color through the page. “T” and “J” scrawled above their heads like a child's blessing. Like a brand.

He stared down at it, unmoving.

Josh stood in the doorway, eyes hollow, his breath shallow and slow like he’d forgotten how to breathe without the house doing it for him.

“I can’t get out,” he said. The words barely formed. A thread unraveling.

Tyler didn’t look up.

Josh took a step forward. Then another. Each one softer than the last.

“I don’t know how long we’ve been here.”

Tyler smiled faintly, lips curling in a way that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”

Josh sat beside him. The mattress didn’t dip beneath their weight. His voice was hoarse, like something had scraped its way through his throat and left only the words behind.

“Maybe I was wrong,” he murmured. “Maybe it’s always been waiting for us.”

Tyler leaned against him then. Just a little. Just enough to blur the line between warmth and weight. His shoulder pressed into Josh’s, steady and cold.

“I’m tired,” Josh whispered, the words breaking like a thread stretched too thin.

Tyler didn’t speak right away. He just leaned in, resting his head gently against Josh’s shoulder, like a child folding into a lullaby. Like the weight of him might anchor Josh to something softer than this grief, this ruin, this surrender.

“You don’t have to be scared anymore,” Tyler murmured, voice low and even. Almost kind. Almost real.

Josh’s eyes burned, but he didn’t blink. He couldn’t. The ache in his chest had grown too big to hold, pressing outward into his ribs, into his throat, into the space between each breath.

“I am scared,” he said. “I’m just too tired to fight it.”

Tyler nodded once, slowly, solemnly, as if something ancient had just been understood. As if the house had whispered its truths to him, and he’d listened.

Overhead, the rafters groaned, a long, low, settling sound that vibrated through the walls. Not just age. Not just wood. It was the sound of satisfaction. Of hunger eased.

Josh lay back against the bed, the mattress sinking beneath him like the earth itself had softened. Tyler moved with him, silent, fluid, curling close like he’d been waiting to do so forever. Like this was the ending they were always meant to reach.

The sheets were warm in a way that didn’t feel earned. Not from body heat. Not from sun. Just warm. Just present. They smelled like cedar. Like dust. Like old paper and sleep. Like nothing at all.

Josh turned toward him, blinking slowly, each breath harder to hold than the last. His voice came in a fragile exhale, nearly lost before it left his lips.

“Do you think it’ll hurt?”

Tyler didn’t answer right away. He reached across the narrowing space between them and found Josh’s hand, threading their fingers together with slow, deliberate care. His palm was cool, smooth, unfamiliar. But Josh didn’t pull away.

“No,” Tyler said. His voice was calm. Certain. “I think it’s already started.”

He shifted closer, pressing their foreheads together. Their breath mingled, shallow and steady, in a space that no longer belonged to either of them.

Josh could feel it, the way Tyler’s chest rose and fell, the quiet rhythm of it, as if he were already dreaming. As if they both were. The weight of him, the shape of him, felt almost like comfort. Almost like home.

And outside, beyond the windows and walls, beyond the red glass and coiling roots, the world had gone completely silent. Like it had never been there at all.

Tyler reached up and touched Josh’s cheek.

His fingers were cold. Not dead, but distant. Like the warmth had been siphoned out slowly, repurposed for something else. His touch was feather-light, but it carried the weight of everything they hadn’t said. Everything they’d lost.

“I never told you,” Tyler murmured, voice barely there, like it had to be whispered to stay true. “But I’ve always loved you.”

Josh blinked. The tears came freely now, no effort to hold them back. They slipped down the curve of his face, hot against skin that had gone numb. He didn’t wipe them away. He just let them fall.

“I know,” he said. And it was true. Somewhere inside, he had always known. Even before the house. Even before the forgetting began.

Tyler’s eyes searched his face, gentle and hollow. “I thought maybe we’d get out someday,” he said. “Start over. Somewhere warmer. Somewhere that didn’t feel like it wanted to keep us.”

Josh let out the faintest laugh, brittle at the edges, his mouth pulling into something shaped like a smile but not quite reaching joy.

“Maybe this is it,” he breathed. “Maybe this is what we get.”

Tyler leaned in. Slow. Careful. Like they were crossing a final threshold. Like the space between them still mattered somehow. The kiss came soft. No urgency. No fire. Just the quiet, aching truth of two people choosing to fall together.

It wasn’t desperate. It wasn’t frantic. It was tired. Full. Honest. Like a lullaby humming its last verse. Like a secret exhaled into the dark.

Josh kissed him back.

The house shifted around them with a sound like satisfaction. The floorboards sighed beneath the weight of their stillness. The walls stretched quietly inward, closer, tighter. Not closing in to crush, but to hold. To cradle. To keep.

The windows fogged with the breath they shared. Light slipped away like a receding tide, drawn back into the bone-deep silence of the house’s heart.

The bed took them gently. The room dimmed until there was no more color, no more time, only weightless dark. They curled into each other, bodies folded like pages in an unread story, hands twined together like a binding spell.

Foreheads pressed. Eyes closed.

The house listened.

And when they finally fell asleep, they did not wake.

Not because they had died. But because the house had made a place for them in its memory, deep and warm and endless. A quiet spot beneath the floor, behind the walls, inside the breath of the thing that had always been waiting.

And it would never let them go.

The wind outside the house had gone still.

Utterly still. Not a whisper through the trees, not a leaf rustled, not a single breath of air moved through the tall, brittle grass. The sky above hung motionless, drained of color. Cloudless. Pale. Like the world had stopped turning.

No birds called from the branches. No insects hummed in the brush. Even the soil felt quiet, as if the worms had stilled in their tunnels. The silence wasn’t peace. It was reverence. Resignation. Like the earth knew not to speak over what had just been taken.

The house stood in the clearing, hunched and waiting, as though it had always been there. As though it had always been watching.

Its roof bowed under the weight of seasons no one remembered. The porch sagged with invisible strain, the wood warped inward like something immense had sat down and never risen again. Ivy crawled across the siding in thick, gnarled ropes, wrapping tight around cracked beams, curling over windows like veins across skin.

It was not abandoned. It was fed.

And at the far end of the top floor, just beneath the sharp slant of the eaves, a new window appeared that hadn’t been there yesterday.

Narrow. Unassuming. Framed in wood darkened with age. The glass tinted a subtle, uncanny red, just enough to catch the color of blood in the right light. It curved slightly, warped like the others, but its reflection was wrong. It caught the sky and gave nothing back. No clouds. No trees. No world. Just absence. A dead mirror.

And behind the glass, high above the clearing, two figures stood.

They did not move. They did not wave. They only watched.

Side by side, held in the stillness. Shadowed shapes blurred just enough to blur the truth of them. But they were there. Pressed into the memory of the house like fingerprints in wet clay. Like murals painted in something old and red beneath the floorboards.

The ivy grew a little higher. The roots beneath the foundation stretched. And the clearing held its breath.