J Cooper

            Logan staggered through the doorway, breathing hard, the flashlight trembling so severely in his hand that the beam jittered across the room like a nervous heartbeat. The chamber was suffocatingly still, yet the walls themselves seemed to inhale and exhale in slow, uneven pulses, as if he had stepped into the chest cavity of some enormous sleeping creature. The faint scent of dust mingled with old lavender—a perfume that should have been comforting but instead felt like something dead trying to mask its own decay.

            When he swept the flashlight beam along the walls, he saw tall shapes draped in thick white sheets, the outlines of forgotten furniture. The fabric loomed like ghostly sentinels, frozen in place. Then the light drifted toward the far corner, and stopped.

            A figure stood there.

            For a moment, Logan’s mind tried to make it into anything else—a mannequin, a dress form, a trick of the shadows—but the longer he stared, the more wrong it became. The figure was the size of a woman, dressed in a long ivory gown that might once have cascaded gracefully across ballroom floors. Now the gown hung in ragged tatters, streaked with long, reddish-brown stains that had seeped in deep and dried into the fabric like old wounds.

            Her porcelain skin gleamed under the wavering light, too smooth, too polished, unnervingly perfect in a room thick with dust. Everything else had aged, cracked, and yellowed with time.
            She hadn’t.

            And her glass eyes…
            They followed him.
            Every small shift of his flashlight, every nervous shuffle of his feet—they tracked him with eerie precision.

            He stepped closer, breath held tight. The doll’s delicate lips were fixed in a painted smile, soft and unchanging. He told himself it was just a creepy collectible. Rich people were weird, and the Winchesters were weirder than most. But then he noticed the hands.

            The fingernails weren’t painted on porcelain.
            They were real.

Logan stumbled back, his flashlight flickering wildly as panic spiked through him.  “Nope,” he whispered shakily. “Nope, nope—nope.”

            Something cracked.

            A faint, brittle pop, like porcelain beginning to split. Logan stared, frozen, as the doll’s head turned toward him. Slowly. Deliberately. It moved only an inch at first, like it was testing its joints… then farther… and farther, until the doll’s face was angled directly at him. The neck creaked with the sound of straining wood.

            “What are you?” Logan croaked, barely audible.

            The doll’s painted smile stretched wider. A thin crack splintered down her cheek, spreading like a spiderweb. Beneath the porcelain shell, something shifted, something soft, dark, and disturbingly alive.

            She stepped forward.

            It was not a human footstep. Instead, a delicate series of high, brittle clicks echoed through the room, like China plates tapping against one another. Each sound crawled up Logan’s spine.

            “Stay back!” he shouted, swinging the flashlight in a wide arc. The beam caught the mirror behind her.

            And he froze.

            In the reflection, she wasn’t porcelain.

            In the mirror, the doll appeared human—skin pale and paper-thin, lips colorless, eyes black pits that seemed to open endlessly inward. Her head tilted with a sickening snap, smiling at him from inside the glass even as the porcelain version faced him in the room.

            His flashlight gave a soft pop and burst. The bulb went out instantly, plunging him into suffocating darkness.

            Silence didn’t follow.

            Porcelain fingernails scraped across the vanity tabletop. A slow drag. A curious tap. The whisper of fabric sliding across the floor as something tested its weight. Then came the shuffling steps—jerky, hesitant, like something learning how to move in a new body.

            Click.
            Clack.
            Click.
            Clack.

            Logan’s heart slammed against his ribs. Blind, he backed up until his spine hit the wall. His fingers brushed something cold—a curtain rod leaning against the plaster. He curled his shaking hand around it, pulling it free as quietly as he could, forcing himself not to breathe too loudly.

            A soft, playful voice drifted through the dark, smooth as silk and filled with an eerie childlike delight.

            “Stay… and play.”

            The doll lunged—faster than anything that should have been made of porcelain. The rhythmic click-clack of its feet became a rapid clatter as it hurled itself across the room. Moonlight flashed across its face in a brief, silver arc, revealing a disturbing duality: half of it still beautiful, a delicate porcelain cheek untouched by time; the other half fractured, a web of cracks splitting across the surface as the creature slammed into Logan with crushing force.

            The impact drove the air from his lungs. His back collided into the wall, pain shooting through his ribs. The doll’s fingers clamped around his throat, cold as sculpted marble but strong enough to bruise. The tattered ivory gown swept across his torso, whispering like dry leaves dragged along pavement.

            Logan reacted on instinct. He swung the curtain rod in a wide arc and smashed it across the doll’s face. The blow struck with a brittle explosion. Porcelain shattered outward, shards skittering across the wooden floor. The scream that ripped from the doll’s throat was high and metallic, a ringing shriek that vibrated painfully in Logan’s skull, as though someone were dragging knives across glass inside his ears.

            He didn’t stop. He drove the rod hard into the doll’s ribs, expecting it to crack hollowly like pottery. Instead, the rod hit something beneath the shell—something wet, twitching, and alive. The doll’s torso jerked, a spasmodic ripple coursing under the broken porcelain, and Logan felt a wave of nausea realizing there was something, or someone—inside that shell.

            Before he could process it, the doll’s hand snapped upward. Its fingers—each tipped with a real, human nail, raked down his chest with terrifying force, slicing four deep furrows through his shirt and skin. Heat bloomed in his chest as blood soaked into the fabric.

            “Get off me!” Logan yelled, twisting the rod and slamming it upward into the doll’s jaw. The impact split the porcelain head clean in half. A jagged crack raced across its face, separating it into two pieces. For one heartbeat, the creature froze, suspended in unnatural stillness.

            Inside the fracture, faint mechanical gears ground to a halt—small, intricate pieces ticking against one another, clogged with a dark, tar-like fluid that oozed down in thick droplets. The grinding stuttered, weakened, then stopped entirely. The doll collapsed backward, its limbs folding awkwardly and logan fell to his knees in exhaustion.

            Logan shoved himself upright, pressing a hand to the bleeding gouges across his chest. His breaths came in sharp, ragged bursts as he forced himself to stand. He staggered toward the door, every step sending a jolt of pain through his ribs.

            Just as he reached for the handle, a sound broke the silence behind him.

            Tick…
             Tick…
Tick-tick-tick-tick…

            The noise was faint but rhythmic, coming from inside the doll’s chest—too steady to be random, too familiar to be misunderstood.

            Logan turned slowly.

            The doll lay in a twisted heap, but not motionless. Its remaining eye rolled toward him in its shattered socket. The porcelain around its painted smile cracked open wider, like it was trying to grin again.

            “Fuck this,” Logan breathed.

            He yanked open the door and bolted into the hallway. The broken flashlight swung wildly in his grip, flickering in frantic bursts that illuminated a nightmarish patchwork of shifting architecture. The hallway was no longer a hallway—it was a jagged collage of spaces fighting for existence. Doorways appeared where none had been seconds before. Staircases jutted up only to dissolve into darkness. Wallpaper peeled itself back from the walls like something alive wriggling free of its skin.

            Behind him, the ticking grew louder.

            Not one tick.
            Not one clock.

            Dozens.
            Hundreds.

            The house was ticking.

            The sound echoed from every direction—from vents, from the floorboards, from inside the walls—as though the entire building were filled with winding gears struggling to stay alive.

            Logan turned a corner at full speed and skidded to a halt.

             The hallway ahead was folding.

The floor rippled in waves beneath his feet, rising and falling like the swell of a living thing breathing. The walls groaned and twisted, stretching into impossible angles as the house rearranged itself. Wooden panels split open and reattached somewhere else. Paintings melted in their frames, the colors dripping down in long, bloody rivulets. A nearby window sagged and softened before melding into the wall like wet clay, sealing shut with a wet slurp.

            The house wasn’t shifting anymore.
            It was breaking itself apart.

            And rebuilding.

            Around him.

            “No, no, no—” Logan whispered as he backed away, his voice swallowed by the low, rhythmic pulse vibrating through the walls. The sound throbbed in the floorboards, in the wallpaper, in the very air around him, like a heartbeat hidden deep inside the bones of the house. Before he could make sense of it, the floor beneath him bulged upward. Something massive pressed against the boards, crawling beneath the wood in slow, deliberate movements, following the path of his retreat.

            Then he heard it.
             A scream.

High. Raw. Human.

            Trent.

            Logan froze mid-step, blood roaring in his ears. “Trent!” he shouted, voice cracking under the weight of fear. “Trent, where are you?”

            A second scream answered, closer this time, but twisted, stretched thin as it echoed through the warped geometry of the hallway, as though the sound itself was being dragged through a tunnel full of broken glass.

            He ran.

            The hallway convulsed with him. The floor heaved under each step, boards splitting open to expose black, pulsing gaps beneath. They weren’t empty. They throbbed like open wounds in a living thing. Logan leapt one, then another, his shoes slipping on the groaning boards as the whole corridor tilted sharply to the side, nearly pitching him into the darkness.

            “Trent!” he shouted again, fighting for balance.

            This time the answer came instantly, ragged, panicked: “LOGAN!”

            Then a sound like fabric tearing.
            Or skin.

            Logan’s chest clenched painfully. He ran harder, lungs burning, until a staircase abruptly uncoiled from the wall—a spiral of steps that hadn’t existed a moment before, leading down into utter darkness.

            “Hang on!” he cried, plunging down after the voice.

             The deeper he descended, the narrower the staircase became. The walls crowded inward, suffocatingly close. Wallpaper peeled away in long, curling strips, revealing a damp, moving mass beneath—flesh-like, pulsing, breathing. Faces pressed outward from within the membrane, distorted and stretched as they mouthed silent screams. Their eyes bulged blindly through the thin layer of tissue before sinking back into the shifting mass.

Logan gagged and forced himself onward.

            At the bottom stood a single door.

            The same crooked door he’d seen before, the impossible one, but now its edges pulsed faintly as if veins ran beneath the wood, a dim light beating in slow rhythm.

            A scream erupted from behind it. Wet. Broken.
            Trent’s scream.

            Logan tightened his grip on the curtain rod. His palms were slick with blood. He swallowed hard, braced himself, and shoved the door open.

            It peeled back with a long, wet groan, as though it were attached to something organic rather than hinges. Logan stumbled into the room and froze.

            Cold swallowed him. Instantly, his breath fogged into trembling white clouds. The beam of his flashlight swept over what resembled a teenager’s bedroom, only distorted beyond recognition. Furniture sagged inward, half-consumed by the walls, as though the house had begun digesting it long ago. A dresser leaned sideways, sunken into the plaster up to its drawers. A bed lay twisted, mattress bowed inward like something heavy had slept on it and never risen.

            Clothes covered everything. Piles of jackets, shirts, jeans, and sneakers filled the floor knee-deep. Backpacks lay scattered, some torn open violently, others neatly zipped as though their owners had left them behind in mid-step. Their contents littered the debris: notebooks sprawled open, pages yellowing; broken phones with spiderwebbed screens; cracked glasses; brittle candy wrappers frozen with age.

            Logan’s throat tightened until it hurt.

            None of it was recent.

            Every object was a tiny biography cut short. A child’s backpack with cartoon patches worn smooth from years of use. A varsity jacket with a name half-faded by time. A purse crusted with dried blood across the clasp.

            Then he looked up.

            The walls were covered floor to ceiling in newspaper clippings. Hundreds, maybe thousands—layered so thickly the original wallpaper had long vanished beneath them. Headlines overlapped in a frantic patchwork as though someone had torn them out and plastered them here the moment each disappearance occurred.

            LOCAL TEEN STILL MISSING AFTER HALLOWEEN PARTY.
            THIRD BODY FOUND IN WOODS NEAR TARAMACK DRIVE.
            POLICE BAFFLED BY SERIES OF UNSOLVED DISAPPEARANCES.

            His flashlight drifted across increasingly older clippings. The pages grew brittle, browned with age, the ink smeared. Some were so faded they were barely legible. But one headline stopped him cold.

            It showed a photograph of a boy about his age, smiling awkwardly in a crooked suit and tie.

            “Fourteen-Year-Old Vanishes on Way to Halloween Dance — 1983.”

             His stomach knotted. He leaned closer.

Beneath the photo, the caption read:

            “Authorities believe he was last seen near the Winchester property.”

             Logan’s hand trembled as he reached out. The edges of the clipping crumbled beneath his fingertips, flaking away like dead skin.

Something creaked behind him.

            The sound was soft, too soft to be furniture, but sharp enough to cut through the silence. Logan’s entire body went rigid as he slowly turned, the flashlight shaking in his grasp, the breath freezing in his lungs.

            He froze, every muscle going rigid as the hairs on his arms bristled. The sound came again, a faint, deliberate click… clack… click… clack—like porcelain tapping gently against wood.

            His stomach plunged.

            “The doll…” he whispered.

            The curtain rod slipped slightly in his sweaty grip as he forced himself to turn. His flashlight trembled in his hand, its beam slicing through the dust-thick air just in time to catch the door he’d entered through creaking open.

            Something stepped through.

            The porcelain doll stood framed in the doorway.

            Her once-perfect face was half-mended, shards of her earlier wounds fused together by veins of something black and tar-like. The substance pulsed faintly, seeping through the cracks as though it were blood thickening beneath her skin. Her gown, torn and stained, whispered across the scattered clothes as she glided forward.

            Her one intact glass eye rolled toward him.
            The cracked smile widened.

            Logan backed up instinctively and collided with an ancient bookshelf. The shelves groaned under the weight of decades of belongings, old backpacks, scuffed sneakers, faded yearbooks, and piles of worn jackets stuffed together so tightly the wood bowed under the load.

            The doll’s voice drifted toward him, soft and lilting, a child’s nursery cadence undercut with something hollow and predatory.

            “Don’t leave yet…” she crooned. “I still want to play.”

            Then she moved.

            Not walked—jerked.
            A series of sharp, unnatural motions punctuated by the crisp snap of inner mechanisms grinding against bone. Her limbs twitched with puppet like momentum as she lunged for him.

            Logan reacted on instinct. He wrapped both hands around the edge of the overstuffed bookshelf and yanked with every ounce of strength he had. The shelf trembled, groaned—and toppled forward.

            A tidal wave of clothes, backpacks, and random junk crashed down, burying the doll beneath an avalanche of forgotten lives. The shriek that tore from beneath the pile was high-pitched and metallic, porcelain cracking violently against wood as she thrashed and clawed through the debris.

            Logan didn’t stay to watch.

            He sprinted for the second door at the far end of the room, slipping on loose papers as he ran. Behind him came the unmistakable sound of something shifting through the wreckage—dragging itself free, limbs scraping, bones clicking as something inside the porcelain husk tried to reassemble its frame.

            He grabbed the doorknob and twisted.
            It didn’t budge.

            “No—no, come on—!”

            He wrenched it again. The swollen wood groaned but stayed locked, as if the house itself was holding it shut.

            Then a porcelain arm burst free of the debris.

            The fingers were no longer smooth and white. The porcelain had shattered away, revealing something sinewy and red beneath—tendons glistening like wet wires, twitching independently as the hand clawed toward him across the floor.

            Logan screamed.

            With every ounce of strength, he threw his shoulder into the door. The frame splintered, wood cracking, and suddenly it gave way. He tumbled through, slamming into the opposite wall of the hallway.

            As the door swung shut behind him, a sliver of the room remained visible—just enough to see the doll’s ruined face rising from the mound of clothes, her reassembled smile stretching impossibly wide.

            Her voice drifted through the narrowing gap, soft, patient, certain:

            “Run all you want… you’ll come back. They always come back.”

Chapter 7: The House That Breathes

            Logan moved cautiously down the corridor—though corridor was hardly the right word anymore. The hallway ahead of him was wrong in ways that made his stomach tighten, stretching longer than it should have, warping subtly as though it had been pulled and twisted by unseen hands. The walls slanted inward in places, outward in others, shifting with a slow, rhythmic motion that made it look disturbingly like the entire house was breathing around him. The peeling wallpaper curled in thick strips, its faded pattern torn away to reveal layers of damp plaster beneath, the scraps hanging like shreds of old skin. His flashlight flickered weakly, sputtering like something drowning in the dark, then died completely, plunging him into a faint, sour yellow glow cast by a single swinging bulb farther down the hall.

            Every step forward produced a creak from the rotted floorboards, each one loud enough to make him wince. The air carried the stench of wet fur and iron—a metallic tang that made the back of his throat tighten. Somewhere nearby, something shifted, a heavy, deliberate drag across the wood that sent a jolt of terror through his veins. Logan swallowed hard, trying to keep his breathing steady.

            “Trent… Matty?” he whispered, though his voice cracked embarrassingly on the second name.

            A growl answered him from the dark.

            It wasn’t human. It was low and wet, as though something were breathing through a mouthful of blood. The air chilled instantly; his next breath streamed out in a faint white haze. His trembling fingers smacked the flashlight instinctively, and for one merciful second it flickered back to life, just long enough to show him the shape crouched ahead.

            A hulking, half-man, half-beast figure crouched in the shadows, its massive claws dragging lazily along the wall and leaving deep, jagged trenches in the wood. Its jaw hung open too wide, its fur matted thick with something dark and sticky. Its eyes burned with a sick, feral yellow hunger that froze Logan where he stood.

            His heart stopped for a beat. Then came his only plan.

            “Nope.”

            He spun and ran.

            The creature’s roar erupted behind him, a sound so powerful it rattled the hallway and sent dust cascading from the ceiling. Logan ducked through the nearest doorway, stumbling into what looked like an old bedroom filled with broken furniture and torn bedding. He slammed the door shut behind him and fumbled desperately with the lock, bolting it a split second before something massive crashed into the wood.

            The door buckled under the impact. Once. Twice. Splinters showered the floor as Logan staggered backward, heart roaring in his ears. On the third hit, the door exploded inward in a shower of shattered wood. Jagged shards ripped across his cheek as the creature burst through the frame, eyes blazing, claws slicing through the air as it batted aside a dresser like it was cardboard. One claw hooked into Logan’s jacket and tore fabric free as he threw himself aside.

            “Come on, come on!” he shouted to himself, sprinting toward the far door in blind panic. He grabbed the knob and twisted hard, it didn’t budge.

            “Shit—no, no, no!” He rammed his shoulder into the door. The wood cracked. He hit it again, and the old frame gave way entirely.

            And behind it was nothing.

            The floor simply wasn’t there.

            A yawning pit opened beneath him, swallowing the flashlight’s beam without a trace. Logan teetered on the crumbling edge, the boards beneath his shoes splintering with an ominous groan. He threw his arms forward and caught the doorframe, legs dangling over a black void that felt bottomless. Cold, damp air rose from below, carrying the smell of grave dirt and something older than rot.

            Behind him, claws clicked against wood as the creature approached.

            “Not good, not good…” he hissed through clenched teeth, hauling himself upward inch by inch. His fingers slipped once on the blood-slick frame, but he clung tighter, forcing himself upward even as pain flared down his torn back.

             The werewolf lunged.

Its claws raked across his shoulder blades, tearing fabric and flesh. The sudden, hot burst of pain nearly loosened his grip, and he slid a few inches down the frame. His head dipped dangerously close to the abyss just as the creature struck again, its claws slicing through the air where his skull had been a second earlier. Its momentum carried it forward too fast for it to stop. The beast’s claws ripped through the frame above him, shredding the wood into splinters.

            For a terrifying moment, their eyes met. Its yellow, burning eyes were inches from his—full of fury, hunger, and something almost aware, as if it recognized him just long enough to hate him.

            Then the creature fell.

            The weight of its body ripped a section of the floor free as it tumbled into the darkness, its roar spiraling downward, echoing through the pit until the sound no longer echoed at all. It didn’t crash. It didn’t hit bottom. The sound simply… faded, absorbed completely by the dark.

            Logan clung to the frame, gasping, his fingers bleeding, the gashes on his back dripping blood down his spine. He waited for another sound—any sound—but the house absorbed everything, swallowing the creature’s fall as though it had never happened.

            When he finally dragged himself back onto what counted as solid ground, the hallway he had fled was gone. Only a single crooked door remained, standing in a wall that absolutely had not been there before. He stared at it, chest rising and falling, when a whisper drifted through the wood—his name, spoken in a voice too close to his ear.

            “Shut up…” Logan rasped at the house, though it offered no apology.

            He collapsed onto the splintered floor, panting, every breath a sharp, burning reminder of the claws that had raked him. The world tilted around him as the house moaned and shifted, the walls contracting and expanding like the ribs of something enormous breathing just beneath the floorboards. He forced himself onto his knees, shaking with effort. His flashlight flickered weakly where it lay on the ground, the dim beam aimed directly at that crooked door—the one that should not have existed.

            “Trent… Matty…” he whispered, his voice nearly gone. The house swallowed their names. In the distance, faint laughter, childlike, high-pitched—echoed through unseen vents and cracks in the walls, weaving through the air until it felt like dozens of unseen mouths were giggling just out of sight.

            “I hate Halloween…” Logan muttered under his breath.

            Gritting his teeth, Logan snatched up the fallen flashlight. Pain tore down his back with every movement, but he forced himself upright, staggering as his body protested each step. A dark, uneven trail of blood marked the floor behind him, soaking into the splintered boards like the house was drinking it in. The air grew colder the closer he came to the crooked door—colder and heavier, as though something pressed down on his lungs, urging him to turn back.

            He reached for the knob.

            The moment his fingers brushed it, he recoiled.
            It was warm.
            Not warm like metal left near a radiator—warm like living flesh. Soft. Yielding. Almost… pulsing.

            Logan froze, breath stuttering, but the house groaned low around him, urging him forward with a pressure he felt more in his bones than his ears. Swallowing back a rising wave of nausea, he closed his hand around the fleshy knob. It shifted slightly beneath his grip, like a muscle contracting beneath skin.

            He forced the door open.

            A rush of stale air rolled over him—thick, humid, and so heavy with rot it made his eyes water. He raised the flashlight, the beam trembling violently as it cut through the murk. The room beyond was unfamiliar, though unfamiliar hardly began to describe it. The walls were damp and glistening, each panel rising and falling with a slow, steady rhythm, as though the entire chamber were part of some enormous breathing organism. Thin black veins pulsed faintly beneath the surface, carrying something sluggish through their branching networks.

            His heart hammered against his ribs.
            This wasn’t a room.
            It was an organ.

            And at the far end, standing perfectly still—something watched him.

            It took Logan a moment to process the shape. A woman’s silhouette stood in the corner, motionless except for the slight tilt of her head. Her outline was small and thin, framed by the quivering walls. The faint beam of his flashlight caught the suggestion of hair hanging over her shoulders, a dress flowing around her feet, and a mouth stretched into a too-wide smile.

            She didn’t blink.
            She didn’t breathe.

            She only smiled at him.

            The door slammed shut behind him with a sound like a snapping spine.

                                                             *

            Meanwhile, Trent and Matt moved carefully through the shifting halls, their steps soft but echoing strangely in the oppressive silence. The sound didn’t fade naturally, instead, it stretched on a moment too long, as if the house repeated their footsteps just behind them, mimicking them with a half-beat delay. The wallpaper didn’t help; its faded floral patterns curled into distorted faces whenever Trent looked away, the shapes dissolving back into harmless swirls the instant he turned his full attention toward them.

            “Keep your light up,” Trent whispered, forcing calm despite the rapid thud of his heartbeat.

            Matt nodded quickly, lifting his flashlight and gripping it with both hands as if it were a weapon. His knuckles were pale, his breathing shallow. “Where are we?” he asked, eyes flicking to every shifting shadow.

            “Same house,” Trent muttered. “Different rules.”

            Before Matt could respond, a soft voice drifted out of the darkness ahead of them. It wasn’t loud; in fact, it was almost gentle. But it made Trent’s blood go cold.

            “You’re getting closer…”

            He froze. He recognized that voice instantly.

            From the darkness, the vampire kid emerged—small, pale, grinning with an expression that felt carved into his face. His eyes were glossy black voids, reflecting no light at all. Blood stained his chin as if he had eaten messily, like a toddler who’d raided a bowl of melted chocolate.

He clapped slowly, mockingly, his smile stretching as though delighted by the moment.  “One down,” he said. “Three to go.”

            Trent’s jaw tightened until it ached. “You killed my friend.”

            The boy’s grin grew sharper, amused. “Friends die here all the time. But I didn’t kill him.” He tapped his temple as if correcting a silly mistake. “I only opened the door. The house did the rest.” His head tilted, listening to the deep creaks and sighs vibrating through the walls as if they whispered directly to him. “It likes you, Trent. It’s been waiting for someone who fights back.”

            Trent lifted the broken table leg, gripping it like a bat, ready to swing until his arms gave out. “Come closer and see how much I fight.”

            The boy’s laugh chimed through the hallway, a high, musical giggle that made the lights flicker violently, like they were afraid of the sound. “Oh, I will,” he said lightly. “But not yet.”

            Then the lights blew out.

            The darkness rushed in, thick and suffocating. The laughter didn’t vanish, it shifted. It slid behind them, then beside them, then above them, circling like a predator playing with prey. The walls expanded and contracted with a low groan, the sound like something ancient and starving awakening from the floorboards.

            “What do you want?” Trent demanded, pulling Matt behind him, pushing him back with trembling hands. His own pulse pounded in his ears.

            “You thought you were so cool…” the boy’s voice taunted. It came from nowhere and everywhere—behind them, at their backs, over their shoulders, whispering directly against the shell of Trent’s ear. “Hiding behind that mask…”

            Trent flinched as something cold brushed his cheek. Before he could react, pain blossomed hot and immediate as claws raked across the side of his face. He stumbled, sucking in a sharp breath, the sting of it radiating down his jaw and neck. Warm blood trickled down his cheek.

            He drew Matt closer, back pressing against the wall as he tried to form a plan through the panic. “Just let us out,” Trent said, his voice cracking despite himself. “We won’t tell anyone about you. Just let us go.”

            The boy’s form flickered into view just a few feet away, there one moment and gone the next, his body snapping into existence like a photograph appearing in a developing tray. His head tilted sideways at an unnatural angle, a broken, birdlike motion. His black eyes gleamed with an emotion that wasn’t quite amusement or malice—something deeper and more final.

            “Let you out?” he repeated softly. “There’s no letting you out.” He stepped closer, smiling wide enough that the corners of his mouth cracked. “You came in.”

            The walls pulsed once, like a heartbeat.

            “Now you’re part of it.”

            The boy moved faster than Trent’s eyes could track. One moment he stood several feet away, grinning with that unnatural, too-wide smile. The next, he was on Trent, his small hand clamped around Trent’s throat with the strength of a vice. His grip was iron, unyielding, merciless and his skin felt like carved marble, cold enough to burn. Trent’s breath hitched as the boy lifted him slightly off his feet, his nails digging in just enough to draw thin streams of blood.

            “The house won’t let you leave,” the boy hissed, leaning close enough that Trent could smell the sour reek of dirt and old blood on his breath. His lips curled, exposing long, needle-like fangs. “And neither will I. I hate wolves… and I hate pretenders even more.”

            Trent felt the first prick of fangs pierce his skin—the faint sting, the warmth of blood welling. His fingers spasmed, searching for anything, and brushed against the broken table leg he still held. That tiny flicker of awareness saved him. Desperation surged through him like raw electricity. Summoning everything he had left, he twisted the improvised weapon in his grip and drove it upward with all the force panic and adrenaline could give him.

            The sharpened wood plunged straight into the boy’s chest.

            The sound that tore out of the creature was not human. It screeched like metal being peeled apart, a shrill, ear-splitting wail that vibrated through Trent’s bones. Blood erupted from the wound, hot, thick, coppery—and splattered across Trent’s face in a steaming wave. The boy staggered back but didn’t let go immediately. Even impaled, he clung to Trent’s neck with a deathlike determination, squeezing until the last possible second before hurling Trent across the hall.

            Trent slammed into the opposite wall, the impact knocking the breath out of him. He collapsed onto the warped boards, coughing, vision blurring as he forced himself onto his elbows. Across the hallway, the boy swayed in place, his small body twitching in broken angles, the table leg protruding from his chest like a stake. Dark, tar-like blood leaked from the wound in slow, viscous ropes.

            “The house…” he rasped, his voice fracturing into static. His black eyes flickered like dying embers. “It won’t let you leave. It won’t let any of us leave. We only…” His words dissolved, swallowed by a sudden sharp intake of breath.

            His eyes widened.

            Then he ignited.

            Flames burst from the wound—thin at first, then surging upward in a violent, hungry wave that engulfed his entire body. The fire wasn’t like normal fire; it crawled across his skin in crawling tendrils, devouring him with unnatural speed. The air filled with the thick, sweet stench of burning flesh and melted plastic.

            Matt screamed, stumbling backward until he collided with the wall, his flashlight trembling wildly in his grip. The burning figure collapsed inward, skin blackening, bones curling as the flame consumed him in seconds. His outline twisted into something unrecognizable—a shape crumpled in defeat and frozen forever in agony.

            “What… the hell…” Trent croaked. His throat burned from the boy’s grip and from smoke that didn’t behave like any smoke he’d ever breathed. He forced himself upright and staggered toward Matty, grabbing the boy’s arm and pulling him close once more.

            “Don’t look,” he whispered, his voice ragged and raw. Matty buried his face against Trent’s shoulder, trembling as Trent guided them around the smoldering corpse. The flames sizzled wetly, licking across the charred remains, casting flickering shadows that danced across the walls like excited children.

            Then, from somewhere deep within the structure—behind the floorboards, inside the walls, in the bones of the house itself—a sound rolled outward.

            Laughter.

            It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even clearly shaped. It was the faint sound of amusement, distant and echoing, layered over itself like the giggles of unseen children hiding in the dark.

            And it was pleased.