Chapter 10: The Escape.
They climbed the stairs.
The sound above them echoed through the walls — a colossal heartbeat reverberating through rotted beams and crooked corridors. With every step upward, the pounding grew louder. Closer. Like the house itself was closing in around them.
The staircase shuddered beneath their feet.
“Go,” Trent urged, pulling Matt higher, his hand locked around his brother’s wrist. But even as they climbed, the steps began to change. The wood warped under their weight, bowing inward like something breathing through the planks.
Then—
CRACK.
One step split open beneath Matt’s foot, unfurling like a jaw. Jagged splinters jutted up like teeth, twisted nails lining the edges of the gaping hole , a wooden mouth snapping shut inches from Matt’s boot.
“RUN!” Trent shouted.
They scrambled upward as more steps fractured open, gnashing and clattering like some ravenous beast beneath them. The railing twisted into gnarled shapes, wood bending and writhing like fingers clawing for their arms.
Matt gasped, dodging a grasping slat that scraped past his shoulder.
Then came the insects.
A black cloud erupted from fractures in the wall — a living storm of stinging bodies. Thousands of them. They poured from between floorboards, from holes in the ceiling, from cracks in the steps, filling the air like choking smoke.
Matt screamed, swatting at his face and hair. Trent ripped off his jacket, whipping it through the swarm as they pushed upward, stumbling blind, skin crawling and bleeding from a hundred bites.
Behind them, the house laughed.
Low at first — a childish titter.
Then more voices joined, twisting together into a chorus of shrill, deranged giggles that no longer sounded human.
The stairs ended in a splintered landing. They practically fell onto the second floor, gasping for air. The pounding — THUD… THUD… THUD… — grew deafening now, rattling the walls around them.
Until they saw it.
An enormous grandfather clock stood against the far wall, too large for the hallway, shoved in at an angle like the house had grown around it. Its pendulum swung with a slow, heavy rhythm — a heartbeat in wood and brass. The glass face was cracked from corner to corner, its hands ticking wildly out of sync.
With every swing of the pendulum, the floorboards beneath them seemed to inhale.
Matt stumbled forward, still brushing insects off himself, his skin mottled with bites and scratches. “That’s what we heard…” he whispered, voice trembling.
The clock groaned — a deep, mechanical cry that reverberated through their bones.
Then it struck a single bell tone.
GONG.
The sound rattled their teeth.
The hallway temperature plummeted instantly, breath turning to mist in the air.
The house inhaled.
“Come on,” Trent rasped. His voice was raw, scraped thin by smoke and panic. He pointed to the old iron ladder jutting from a broken ceiling panel ahead, leading into nothing but blackness.
They climbed.
Gasping. Bloodied. Trembling.
The ladder groaned under their weight. The walls around them buckled and stretched outward, bending like warped rubber, the space distorting until the hallway below looked impossibly far away. The house was making itself larger… or they were becoming smaller.
Above them, something skittered.
Shapes darted between the rafters, too quick to see, but their laughter—high, wet, and hungry—echoed through the dark like something wading through thick mud.
Then, from below…
Voices.
Their voices.
Crying. Begging. Pleading.
“Matt, help me…”
“Trent, please don’t leave…”
“Don’t you remember?”
Matt froze mid-ladder, chest heaving. “Trent… that’s us. That’s us.”
Trent didn’t dare look down. “Don’t listen to it. Keep climbing.”
The house groaned, a long, shuddering sound that trembled through the rungs beneath their palms. The laughter above them dipped lower, closer. The grandfather clock behind them tolled again—a slow, deliberate bell that felt like time itself cracking.
Each chime was a promise: You don’t leave. Not yet.
They climbed.
The ladder stretched on far longer than it should have, an endless iron spine vanishing into blackness. Their arms burned. Rust scraped their palms. Every breath tasted metallic, each inhale like dragging shards of ice down their throats.
“Keep… going,” Trent panted.
The air grew colder the higher they climbed. Frost began to cling to the edges of the rungs. Matt’s breath trembled white in the dark.
Then came the whispers.
Soft at first, like someone brushing past dried leaves.
Then sharper.
Then everywhere.
Laughter swooped around them, shrill, gleeful, wrong. The dark thickened, swirling. Shadows peeled themselves free from the void above, spinning together in the air.
They took shape.
Tattered silhouettes of women with snarled hair, claw long fingers, and empty, hollowed-out eyes.
Witches.
Dozens of them.
They circled the ladder like vultures around a dying animal, laughing in fractured, broken voices—voices that echoed like screaming through glass.
One swooped so close Trent felt her nails skim his cheek, freezing cold.
Matt whimpered. “Trent—”
“I know,” Trent said, jaw clenched. “Don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t stop.”
Above them, the witches tightened their circle. Below them, the house’s stolen voices called and cried. Between them, the ladder groaned as though it might snap.
And still—
They climbed.
One of the witches darted close, raking her blackened nails across Trent’s shoulder, leaving a burning streak of pain. Another swooped beside Matt’s ear, her lips peeling back to reveal ruined teeth, broken and stained. Their laughter rose in shrill, overlapping pitches as the boys scrambled faster, arms trembling, lungs burning.
“Don’t look at them!” Trent yelled.
But Matt already had.
He froze on the rung below Trent, his eyes going glassy, unfocused. The ladder beneath him twisted—barbed iron bending into impossible shapes. Faces bulged from the metal, stretching out in agony. Hands reached from the rungs, grasping for Matt’s ankles.
“Mom?” he whispered. His voice was small, bewildered. “Mom, is that you?”
Trent’s heart lurched. “Matt! No! Look at me!”
He grabbed his brother’s wrist and shook him hard. “It’s not real! It’s NOT REAL!”
Matt gasped like someone breaking the surface of deep water. The illusion shattered, faces melting, the iron snapping back to its cold, rusted form. The witches shrieked in fury, swooping lower now, their claws sparking against the ladder.
The boys climbed, faster, blindly—driven by terror more than strength. Time dissolved into the endless rhythm of their gasping breaths and the clatter of their shoes on iron. Their muscles screamed. Their fingers went numb. The air thinned until every breath came ragged and sharp.
The ladder rattled violently with every blow from the witches overhead.
Then—
Trent’s hand hit solid wood.
He hauled himself onto the attic floor with a desperate sob of relief, then reached down and dragged Matt up beside him. Together they stumbled into a vast, shadow-drowned expanse.
The attic shouldn’t have been that big.
No attic was that big.
It stretched outward like a cathedral swallowed by darkness. Cobwebs the size of sails draped the rafters, glistening with something thick and dark, blood, or something worse. Broken beams jutted from the floor like ribs.
But there was no time to breathe.
The witches poured through the opening after them, their shrieks rattling the beams. They circled, claws outstretched, robes fluttering in the air.
Then came another sound—a piercing, chittering screech.
Bats.
Hundreds of them erupted from the rafters in a tidal wave of leathery wings. They were wrong—far too large, eyes glowing red, mouths bristling with needle teeth. They swarmed the boys, brushing their faces, tugging their hair, slicing at their clothes.
Trent pulled Matt close, shielding him as best he could while witches clawed at their backs and bats tore at their sleeves. Dust and ash exploded around them with every flap of wings.
Matt stumbled.
His foot caught on a broken beam hidden beneath the debris and pitched sideways with a scream, arms flailing as he crashed into the splintered floor.
“Matt!”
Trent dropped to his knees, grabbing for him—his fingers catching a fistful of fabric at the last possible second. He hauled his brother upright with a ragged, desperate pull.
“I got you,” he gasped.
Matt didn’t speak. He just clung to Trent as he dragged him toward the far end of the attic, toward the single window glowing faintly through the swirling darkness.
Behind them, the witches wailed—high, furious, a storm of shrieks. Bats screeched in the rafters, brushing their faces with leathery wings.
And then a voice cut straight through the chaos.
“Trent! Help me!”
Trent froze, chest heaving. The voice came from behind him.
Matt’s voice.
He shook his head hard. “No. No, you’re not tricking me again.”
He tightened his grip on the boy’s arm and forced himself forward.
The window was close now. So close he could almost feel the cold night air bleeding through the cracks.
Trent turned, panting, bloodied, to make sure Matt was still behind him.
Only—it wasn’t Matt.
The shape beside him had his brother’s frame, but nothing else was right.
Its face sagged and melted as if sliding off the skull. Its eyes were pits of tar.
Its hands, too long, nails too sharp shot forward and buried claws into Trent’s stomach.
Trent screamed, shoving the creature away with every last shred of strength he had left. It staggered, shrieking—its voice twisting between childish laughter and a mournful wail.
“Trent!”
He turned.
The real Matt was crawling toward him through the chaos, eyes wide with terror.
Before Trent could reach him, a witch slammed into his chest, the blow knocking him backward. His feet slid out from beneath him.
The world spun.
The window shattered around him.
And Trent fell.
He struck the roof hard, the breath exploding from his lungs. Shingles tore into his palms as he tried to stop himself, but momentum took him, rolling, scraping—
Then nothing but open air.
He plummeted into the cold night.
The ground rushed up to meet him. He hit the soft, wet earth with a bone-jarring thud that left him sprawled, dazed, staring up at the looming silhouette of the house.
The broken attic window glowed faintly above him. Witches hovered just inside the opening, their shrieks drifting down like delighted birdsong. Somewhere deeper inside, laughter echoed, soft, distant, cruel.
A scream tore through the night.
Matt’s scream.
Adrenaline jolted Trent upright, pain flaring white-hot through his ribs. He staggered toward the house—
But the ground beneath his feet rumbled.
The soil split open with a deep, grinding groan.
A decayed hand burst from the dirt.
Then another.
Then dozens.
One by one, the dead clawed their way out of the earth—bodies twisted, broken, jaws hanging askew. Their empty eyes locked onto him, forming a grotesque half-circle of corpses between him and the house.
Trent backed away, breath shaking.
Inside the house, the grandfather clock began to chime.
TONG.
The dead jerked toward him.
TONG.
The witches shrieked overhead.
TONG.
The light inside the house flared, as if something enormous had awakened.
TONG.
Midnight.
And the house was no longer just alive—
It was angry.
Panicked, Trent stumbled backward, boots slipping in the wet grass as he sprinted toward the rusted gate. The dead clawed after him, some dragging broken legs, others lurching with jerking, puppet-like steps. Their fingers scraped the dirt inches behind his heels.
He dove through the gate.
The change was instant.
Silence.
Absolute, suffocating silence.
The bells cut off mid-chime.
The wind died.
The ground stilled beneath his feet.
The undead froze where they stood—motionless, empty husks—before collapsing into the earth like puppets with their strings cut. In seconds, the soil swallowed them whole, leaving only the faintest disturbance in the grass.
Behind him, the Winchester House stood quiet and unthreatening, its windows dark, its siding dull and weather-worn, as if it had been asleep for decades. No shifting walls. No screams. No laughter. Just a house. An ordinary house.
As if nothing had ever happened.
Trent stared, chest heaving so hard it hurt. His vision blurred at the edges; his ribs throbbed with every breath. Blood seeped warm between his fingers where he pressed a shaking hand to his stomach.
“Matty…” His voice cracked. He swallowed, tried again, whispering hoarsely into the cold air, “I’ll come back for you. I swear it. I’ll come back for you, Matty… I promise.”
The night didn’t answer.
With trembling legs, Trent turned away and began the long walk home. Each step felt heavier than the last, like his body wanted to collapse but his mind wouldn’t let it—not yet.
The darkness beyond the yard somehow felt lonelier than anything he’d faced inside. No witches screaming. No claws scraping. No warped laughter tracking his every move.
Just silence.
And the painful reminder of what that silence cost.
His friends.
Their laughter.
Their bravery.
Their screams.
What they did to protect him and Matty.
And Matty… still trapped in that attic of horrors.
The cold air bit at his skin as he walked. Trent barely noticed. His thoughts drifted back to the beginning of the night, just a stupid prank. A dumb idea fueled by spite and fear. Something small. Something harmless.
Now it felt like another life.
The world seemed darker, emptied out, hollowed—yet somehow buzzing faintly, painfully, with the memories of the people who didn’t make it out.
His throat tightened. His eyes burned with tears that refused to fall.
He kept walking.
What else could he do?
One foot in front of the other, arms wrapped around himself to hold the pain in. He pressed harder against his wound, trying to slow the bleeding, trying to keep himself upright, trying not to think about Matty’s last scream as the attic swallowed him whole.
By the time the house vanished behind the trees, Trent’s vision swam. His legs shook. But he didn’t stop.
He couldn’t.
Every step whispered the same promise like a heartbeat:
I’m coming back. I won’t leave you there.
J Cooper 