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.”