"Aya… come back."
Her voice stretched through the dream like a thread, thin and trembling, and for a moment it felt like a hand on the edge of my mind — gentle, patient, asking me to cross a line I hadn't thought I would cross again.
The white dissolved to gray, the gray to shapes, and I woke with a taste of iron and the sound of a bell that had no place to hang. I lay in the hollow afterimage of light and tried to remember which world I was supposed to carry with me: the small, breathing village made of petals and memory, or the house with the floorboards that had learned how to whisper my name.
Morning wasn't a time so much as a temperature. The air in my room was the same as the one in the dream — thick and slow, like honey diluted until it moved at its own pace. The sprout under the floorboard near my bed had pushed a new leaf through a hairline crack and was bending toward the window. When I touched the leaf, it shivered as if startled awake and then settled, damp and warm under my fingertip.
I dressed without thinking much about the collarbone that sometimes felt too heavy and sometimes felt hollow. The line beneath the skin pulsed faintly when I moved — not a heartbeat, but a rhythm that could be read like weather if you listened long enough. It told me there was weather below the village, that storms could be tracked by the way the green throbbed under my skin.
Outside, the street looked like an afterimage of itself: the same curve of the road, the same leaning telephone pole, the same bakery window with its chipped display. But everything wore an insistence, a new neatness as if someone had redrawn the edges to make them easier to remember. The blossoms that had fallen and blackened were mostly gone; in their place the air held a fine, glittering dust that made the sunlight hum.
People moved through the day with small, polite motions. When they glanced my way, they didn't look quite like they had before — their faces were a fraction too slow to form a greeting, their eyes balanced on the horizon of something I could not see. Aya was at the school gate when I arrived, the same light in her hair but sharper around the edges, as if the sun had been cut and set there.
"You look..." she started, then closed her mouth and smiled. "Like you didn't sleep."
"Neither did you," I said. The words were flat. She tilted her head, that slow, listening motion that had become a private language between us and the village.
She laughed, small and careful. "Of course not. The bloom keeps us awake sometimes, when it's thinking of a new idea."
I watched her for a long moment. "What does the bloom want to think about?"
She didn't answer directly. "Every season it remembers. We help it." Her fingers brushed a petal that had settled on the school gate and the petal opened, like an eyelid finding light. For a second I thought I saw a face in its center, but the sound of the bell in the distance swallowed the thought.
Inside the classroom, the teacher wrote in a slow, circular script that made the letters look like seeds. Students took notes with the kind of absorption that looks like worship. When the lesson ended, they folded their books and left in pairs, their steps measured, leaving the air between them still. The sound of their feet on the floorboard had a cadence I could taste in my mouth.
I didn't follow them out. I stayed on the periphery and watched the dust drift in the shaft of light until it seemed to form words: remember, remember, remember. It was not the class speaking; it was the air remembering what had been taught here in other seasons, in other lives.
After school, I walked the long way home because the path through the square felt like a page someone had turned too fast. Families had small bundles, each wrapped in a scrap of floral cloth. The market stalls were fuller than I remembered, with jars of preserved roots and ribbons of dried petals. The clerk at the general store—his face I had watched fold into roots and rise again—met me at the counters with a greeting that was a little rehearsed, like a song he'd hummed for years.
"You should come by later," he said. "We'll have a small ceremony by the well. The house with no door will be honored."
My step faltered. "The house with no door?"
He smiled like a man repeating a proverb he'd been taught. "Yes. The one down the old lane. It keeps the memories that don't fit anywhere else."
I'd heard whispers of that house before — an empty frame without an entry, a shell that kept its rooms closed and still. But the clerk's voice carried none of the old fear; his tone treated the house like something reliable, like sun in winter. I nodded because it felt like the right motion and left with change jangling inside my pocket, a small, cold weight.
The lane to the house with no door was narrower and steeper than it had any right to be. The maples arched overhead in a way that made a tunnel, and light poured through like thin coins. The house's silhouette rose at the end of the street, but as I approached I understood why no one ever spoke of walking inside it. There were walls where a door should be, windows that winked blankly. The threshold existed only on paper.
A sign hung crookedly in front: The House With No Door — Keeper of Remnants. The letters had been carved into wood, and someone had rubbed green pigment into them until the words looked as if they pulsed.
I stood in front of the blank face of the house and felt the pulse under my skin swell, not from fear but recognition. The house was like a mouth with its lips sealed; you could tell it had much to say if you only had a way to pry it open. The air here smelled like old paper and sap, like the inside of a book someone had left under a tree. The fine dust — that glitter that made the sun sing — hung thicker, hanging like a net.
A woman in a faded coat stood to one side, her hands clasped. She looked up at the wall as if peering at a picture. "It remembers differently this season," she said to no one and everyone. Her voice made a small hollow in the air. "You can feel it in the bones."
"What does it remember?" I asked, though I already knew the answer would be wide and wrong.
"Names that were never spoken," she said. "Doors that were never opened. The quiet things people tried to hide. The house keeps them all safe."
Her eyes slid to me, and for a second I felt like a leaf adrift on a river. "Do you live here?" she asked.
"No." My voice sounded small. "I don't live anywhere now."
She nodded as if I'd given the correct answer. "Most of us don't." Then she smiled, a bare sound like wind. "Come by tonight. Bring something small you're willing to forget."
I didn't know what one was willing to forget. My aunt's laugh? The way she had braided my hair? The exact shape of the hole at the base of the shrine torii? Would you hold it gently, hand it to the house, and it would tuck it among the whispers until the memory itself softened and stopped aching? Or would it take the memory and do something else with it — press it into a petal and let it bloom as something else?
I moved closer to the wall, so close my forehead almost touched the cold surface. Under the moss the timber breathed a little — a soft, folded sound that matched the green line on my skin. If I pressed my face to the wood, I could feel a voice trying to push through, like someone trying to speak from behind a curtain. I pressed my ear and listened until the village blurred and the clerk's distant laughter turned into thin threads.
It said a name I didn't know. Then another. Then the shape of an old promise. The house was cataloguing and sorting, making neat piles out of sorrow. A part of me wanted to run away and bury my hands in the river to scrub the hum from my bones. Another part — the part that had folded a seed into dirt and watched the world answer — leaned into the wall and wanted to hand over the last of my small, private things.
I stopped myself. The memory of the dream last night — the mirror, the other me, the way the garden had offered me rest — still sat like a stone in my throat. Rest, it had promised. Remember, it had demanded. The house with no door wanted to keep what wouldn't be remembered anywhere else. The garden wanted to remember. The house wanted to store.
A child's voice rang out behind me. I turned. A boy no older than eight stood clutching a jar of petals, his eyes huge. He lifted the jar and peered at me as if I were an answer.
"You gonna put your thing in tonight?" he asked.
"My thing?" I had to think of what they might mean.
He nodded solemnly. "My grandpa said you bring a thing you don't need to carry. Keeps the house fed."
I felt oddly unmoored. The urge to gather up everything and make a sacrifice of it like a rusty coin or an old photograph was sudden and fierce. But I also knew hunger — that patient, ancient hunger — could be patient and precise. You handed it something small, and it rearranged the rest.
I moved away from the wall. The house's blank face watched me without expression. In the lane behind me, people were gathering, clusters of silhouettes in coats and shawls, each holding a small bundle or jar. They crossed themselves with practiced gentleness, eyes lifted not toward the house but toward the well behind it — a well with no rim, whose circle was a hole looking down.
I walked the perimeter like a small animal, testing the edges of the place. Around back, there was a narrow alley, and a back wall with an old window masked in grime. Through the glass I thought I saw movement — a curtain shifting though no wind could find it — but when I peered closer the pane reflected my face and the reflection smiled in a way that wasn't mine.
At dusk, the bell three times, then one long note that draped across the lane like a hand. People lit little candles and placed them at the base of the wall. They moved with a rhythm I had learned to mimic: slow bow, gentle placement, step back. They spoke in whispers as though sound might disturb the house's sleep, and then they turned away to leave it to its task.
I stayed.
When the last candle flickered its last, I set down something small into my palm — not an object I'd meant to forget so much as an object I'd meant to keep close until this moment: a scrap of my aunt's apron, the one that smelled of ash and tea, with one loose stitch at the hem. I pressed it to my chest as if to see if it still fit there, if the shape of it matched the hollows that had formed while I was away in dream.
My fingers shook when I moved to the wall. The timber was cool, the moss damp as if it had been crying. I placed the scrap against the wood and waited for the house to take it.
For a breath the house did nothing. Then something under the grain shifted, a quiet long intake like a mouth finding air. The moss unfurled minutely, and a thin seam opened — not a door, no — but a small sliver, like a seam in a book where a reader might slip a finger and turn a page.
The scrap of cloth loosened from my hand and disappeared between the seam. It didn't feel taken. It felt received, like when you pass an object into the hands of a trusted friend. The house sighed, and the sound was a leaf falling through water. From that sigh, images rose in my head — my aunt laughing by a window, a child's scuff on a back step, a lullaby hummed under breath — and then they folded away like pressed flowers in a book.
I stepped back, breathless. People around the lane murmured, and the boy with the jar of petals nodded at me as if I had fulfilled a kind of duty I didn't know I had. Someone handed me a candle; I took it without asking and kept it lit until the flame steadied.
When I finally turned to leave, the house was unchanged on the surface. Its face remained closed, impenetrable. But the seam where my scrap had been received glowed faintly with a green thread, as if the seam itself had been stitched with memory. The pulse under my collarbone stuttered and then slowed, aligning with that new stitch, as though the house had taken one of my rhythms and woven it into its walls.
On the walk home, the lane felt narrower, the air thicker with scent. I kept touching the spot on my chest where the scrap had lain, as if I could find its presence beneath the skin. The garden's pulse thrummed in the soil beside my feet. Somewhere not far off, someone was humming the lullaby that I now recognized and that now belonged to the house and not to me: an old cadence that remembered things without asking for permission.
Back in my room, the sprout had settled into the morning air and the leaf had turned a shade deeper, like a small, private oath. I lay on the floor and listened to the slow, assured rhythm under the boards. The house with no door had received my scrap and, with it, a strand of the world I had carried inside me. Whether it kept it safe or repurposed it, I could not say.
Outside, in the hush of sleep soon to come, the village breathed as if it were aware of its own pulse. The bell tinkled in the distance, twice, then once, and the last note hung and vibrated all the way through my bones. I let it sink into me.
When I drifted toward sleep, Aya's voice came again — softer now, like a chord under the other music. "We remember together," she said. "Not by force, but by choice."
And I dreamed of a door that never opened and a house that kept its rooms full of things people forgot they had lost.
---
The hallway didn't end.
That was the first thing I realized when I turned back—there was no back. The place where I had just walked from, the narrow corridor with the pale wallpaper peeling like dead skin, was gone. Vanished. Only another hallway stretched there now, identical to the one in front of me.
Same walls. Same faint dripping sound. Same impossible length.
And the same smell.
That sweet, rotten-flower smell that had been following me since the garden first woke.
I don't know what made my throat tighten more: the feeling that I was trapped, or the sensation that the house itself was waiting for me to understand something.
I took a step.
The floorboards creaked—not like wood, but like ribs bending.
Another step.
The sound repeated perfectly.
My pulse synced with that slow, humid breathing coming from inside the walls.
I whispered, "Aya…?"
My voice felt too loud here. It pressed against the hallway like it didn't belong.
No answer.
Only the faint rustle of something moving far behind the wallpaper.
I kept walking.
---
The light began to dim again.
Not like electricity failing—there was no electricity here. No lamps. No bulbs.
The dimming felt alive, like eyelids closing.
The corridor ahead shrank as the shadows gathered, and suddenly the walls felt closer. Closer than they had any right to be. They leaned inward, like they were listening to my footsteps, curious, patient.
Then I saw it.
A crack.
Thin at first, then widening slowly, like a mouth opening in the wall.
Inside the crack, something pulsed.
Faint green light.
Familiar. Wrong.
I reached out before I could stop myself. My fingertips hovered a breath away from the splitting wallpaper.
A voice whispered behind the wall:
> "You were here before. You always come back."
I stumbled backward.
My heel hit the opposite wall—cold, wet, almost soft under my weight.
"No," I whispered. "This isn't real. This isn't—"
The crack widened with a sound like wet leaves tearing.
The voice came again:
> "We remember you."
---
I ran.
The hallway stretched endlessly under my feet—longer than it should, longer than any structure built by human hands. I didn't look back, afraid the crack in the wall would follow me, sliding across the wallpaper like a wound.
My breath echoed. My footsteps echoed. Even my heartbeat echoed.
But not in sync.
The echo was half a beat behind.
Like someone running with me.
Just out of sight.
I turned a corner—one that shouldn't have existed—and the hallway changed.
The wallpaper was gone.
The floor was no longer wood.
Now the walls were smooth, pale, breathing in slow pulses.
Like the inside of a throat.
And the floor beneath me was damp.
Each step left an imprint that filled with faint green light before fading.
I whispered, "This isn't the house. This is—"
"The garden," someone said.
I stopped.
Aya stood at the far end of the corridor.
But she wasn't the Aya from before.
Her outline flickered. Her hair floated upward like she was underwater, and her eyes glowed the same pale green as the veins beneath my skin.
"Don't run anymore," she said softly. "You know what this place is."
My voice came out cracked. "What do you want from me?"
She smiled.
Not cruel.
Not human.
"Not want," she said. "Remember."
The corridor throbbed around us, a pulse rolling through the walls like breath.
Aya lifted her hand and pointed behind me.
I didn't want to turn.
I didn't want to look.
But my body moved anyway.
Slowly.
Against my will.
---
Behind me stood another door.
Except…
It wasn't a door.
It was a frame.
Empty.
A doorway carved into the living wall—a hollow space leading into darkness. The edges pulsed faintly, veins contracting and expanding like a heartbeat.
Aya's voice came from beside me now, close enough that I felt her breath against my ear:
> "This is where you came in."
My throat closed. "I never entered anything like this."
"You did," she whispered. "You just forgot the way out."
Her fingers brushed my shoulder—warm, too warm—and the veins beneath her skin brightened until her arm looked translucent.
"It's time to see the rest. You can't stay halfway."
"I don't want to go in there."
"You already did."
The darkness inside the frame quivered—as if something within it heard us.
Then the pulse beneath my feet quickened.
The house breathed in.
And the doorway exhaled a faint, cold wind that smelled of dead petals.
Aya stepped behind me and placed both hands on my back.
Her voice was soft. Almost kind.
> "Go on, Mizu."
"The house has been waiting for you."
And the wall behind me began to push.
---
The hallway didn't open behind me.
It simply… wasn't there anymore.
Where I expected the corridor to stretch back into the dream-geometry of the house, there was only a flat wall of colorless wood—smooth, cold, and pulsing faintly like something alive beneath it. My breath caught in my throat, not from panic this time, but from the realization that the house wasn't just changing around me.
It was responding to me.
The floor vibrated beneath my shoes—faint, rhythmic, like a heartbeat muffled under layers of soil. The vibration traveled up my legs, into my spine. My pulse synced with it for a moment before I forced myself to inhale sharply and break the rhythm.
I stepped forward. The wood rippled under my fingertips as if recoiling, as if recognizing me.
"No door," I whispered. "No way back. So… forward."
My voice was swallowed instantly, eaten by the silence.
I turned toward the narrowing throat of the corridor. The walls had pulled closer while I wasn't looking—now barely a meter apart. If I exhaled too deeply, my chest brushed both sides.
The air smelled damp. Old.
And something else… familiar.
Soil.
The scent of the garden.
The scent beneath the floorboards.
The scent of the bloom.
I pressed forward.
Every step made the boards creak—not like wood, but like roots stretching.
The corridor leaned slightly left, slanting in a way that made my balance tilt, as though gravity was shifting. I kept one hand on the wall for stability. The surface under my palm warmed, throbbed, then cooled again.
Like breath.
Like the house was inhaling and exhaling around me.
The light dimmed.
Not by fading gently, but by blinking—sharp black flashes that lasted just long enough to disorient me. Every time the darkness came, it stayed a second longer.
The hum under the floor deepened.
Something whispered from the far end of the corridor.
A voice.
Not Aya's.
Not the other me.
Not my aunt.
This voice was rougher—older—dragging across the silence like something pulled from underneath the soil.
> "Mizu…"
I froze.
The corridor did not.
The walls pushed inward—subtle at first, then enough that I felt wood press against my shoulders. I stepped back instinctively, but the boards behind me swelled forward, stopping me.
No going back.
Only forward.
The voice came again—closer this time, crawling along the air like fog.
> "You're late."
My throat tightened. "Uncle…?"
A low chuckle—broken, as if filtered through roots—echoed from the darkness ahead.
> "You shouldn't have climbed out."
My heartbeat thundered. My fingers dug into the pulsing wall. For a moment, the light flickered bright, revealing the corridor's end—
A shape stood there.
Tall.
Still.
Silhouetted by a pale glow that didn't come from any visible source.
His arms hung at his sides. His head tilted slightly, just like he used to when listening to the radio in the evenings. Only now—his outline shimmered, blurred, like the edges were dissolving into the air.
I took a step toward him.
The floor creaked—long, trembling.
He didn't move.
But the walls did—pulling wider, finally giving me space, coaxing me forward.
"Why… are you here?" My voice cracked against the silence.
The silhouette lifted its head slowly, as if the motion required remembering how muscles worked.
His face emerged from the dim glow—
And it wasn't my uncle's face anymore.
The skin was pale, stretched thin like paper soaked then dried. Green veins glowed beneath it, branching across his cheeks. His eyes were hollow pits filled with faint light. And his mouth…
His mouth still formed the shape of a smile I remembered.
But the smile didn't reach the eyes.
It didn't reach anything.
The hum under the floorboards intensified, vibrating my ribs. The house seemed to lean closer, listening.
He spoke again—lips tearing slightly as they parted.
> "You came home."
My legs stiffened. The corridor behind me sealed completely—smooth, seamless wood. No escape.
I forced myself forward, though every instinct screamed at me to run.
"Home," I repeated softly, "was never this."
A twitch passed through his jaw—small, almost imperceptible.
Then—
A sound like roots tightening beneath soil cracked through the walls.
His smile widened.
> "It is now."
And the floor beneath him split open.
He sank into the darkness—not falling, but pulled, dragged downward by something unseen. The boards closed behind him, sealing without a trace.
Silence returned.
The hum stabilized.
And in the quiet, something else began to echo—distant, faint, but unmistakably familiar.
The sound of petals falling.
I lifted my hand to the wall.
It pulsed once beneath my palm.
Alive.
Waiting.
The house wasn't done with me.
Not yet.
And neither was whatever waited beneath it.
---
The scraping didn't stop.
It circled me — sometimes above my head, sometimes behind my ear, sometimes beneath the floorboards even though I wasn't standing on any floor I recognized anymore.
I didn't move at first.
I just breathed, slow and shallow, waiting to see if the sound belonged to something alive or something the house was simply remembering.
But then the walls began to pulse again.
Softly.
Wet.
Like lungs trying to inhale a room they hadn't finished building.
I finally stepped backward.
The ground rippled beneath my shoe, trembling like something soft pressed from the other side.
And then — a whisper.
Not from the hallway.
From the wall itself.
> "Don't go."
I froze.
The voice wasn't Aya's.
It wasn't my aunt's.
It wasn't even the garden's whispering chorus I'd grown used to.
It sounded like me.
My voice — but thinner, drenched in exhaustion, as if spoken by a version of myself that had been stuck in this place far longer.
"Who's there?" I whispered.
The wall closest to me quivered.
Something pushed against it from the other side — not strong enough to break through, but enough to form a faint outline.
A head.
Shoulders.
Hands.
Pressed flat into the surface like someone drowning beneath ice.
I stumbled backward, but the hallway bent with me, folding my path in a slow spiral.
There was no escape.
Not forward.
Not backward.
Not even up — the ceiling pulsed with the same outline, now mirrored overhead, as if the house were turning the figure around me in circles.
> "Don't leave me here," the voice whispered again.
My throat tightened.
"Leave you where?"
More scraping — frantic this time.
The figure's outline thrashed softly under the surface, but the walls held it in place like thick, breathing clay.
> "I can't move without you."
The words sank into me like cold water.
Because they weren't just familiar — they were the exact words I had said inside the garden's dream, months ago or minutes ago or eternities ago, when Aya's shape flickered in the dark and the bloom pulled us apart.
The thing trapped wasn't just me.
It was something the dream had taken from me.
A piece I'd left behind.
The house wasn't trying to scare me.
It was trying to give me back what it thought I had lost.
---
The hallway shifted.
Slowly, the walls knit together behind the trapped shape, sealing off the space like flesh closing over a wound.
Ahead of me, a narrow path opened — one I hadn't noticed before.
The scraping stopped.
The whisper quieted.
The figure dissolved into the wall like dissolving petals.
And then — silence.
Not peaceful silence.
A listening silence.
A silence with breath behind it.
The house was waiting for me to move.
So I did.
---
The new hallway was impossibly narrow, bending inward and downward until I had to crouch. The air thickened the deeper I crawled, heavy with the smell of burnt flowers. Every motion made the walls tremble as if my movement was stretching veins inside the house.
Halfway through, I heard it again — not the whisper, not the scraping.
Something else.
A rhythmic tapping.
Deliberate, slow, like someone knocking from the other side of a coffin.
Tap—
…
Tap—
…
Tap-tap—
The pattern wasn't random.
It matched the hum beneath my skin.
My own heartbeat, reflected back at me.
"Stop," I whispered, gripping the walls.
The tapping stopped instantly.
I froze.
The house responded to me.
Not like a haunted place.
Not like a monster.
Like it was listening.
Waiting for instruction.
Waiting for me.
I crawled forward again, my breath ghosting pale in the air even though the space wasn't cold.
When I finally reached the end of the tunnel, the walls opened into a small chamber — a perfect circle, smooth and glowing faintly from within.
There was no ceiling.
Only an endless shaft stretching upward into darkness.
And in the center of the chamber
sat a chair.
A simple wooden chair.
My aunt's.
The same one she used in the garden shed when trimming dead branches.
The same one I used to sit on when I was a child, listening to her stories with my chin on my knees.
And sitting in that chair
was Aya.
Or —
something wearing her shape.
Her head was tilted upward, as if listening to something far above.
Her hair hung perfectly still.
Her fingers were curled in her lap, motionless.
"Aya?" I whispered.
She didn't blink.
Didn't breathe.
Didn't move.
Her skin glowed faintly — the same soft green that illuminated the room.
I stepped closer.
And without warning, her head snapped toward me.
Not turning — snapping.
Her neck didn't break.
It folded
like a flower stalk bending toward light.
Her eyes locked onto mine.
Empty.
White.
Glowing.
"…you came back," she said.
But her lips didn't move.
The house said the words for her.
And the walls behind me sealed shut.
---
The stairwell exhaled again.
A warm breath rolled up the steps, brushing against my face like the air inside a throat. The walls around me pulsed — not visibly, but in the way a heartbeat pulses beneath skin, subtle enough to pretend it isn't happening.
"I shouldn't go down," I whispered.
The stairs answered with a low groan, wood shifting like vertebrae twisting back into place.
But I couldn't go up either.
There was no up anymore — the floors I had climbed were gone, sealed behind me in a seamless wall of plaster that looked untouched by hands or time. The house erased its own history as easily as breathing.
So I did the only thing I could.
I took the first step down.
It sank under my weight, soft instead of solid. Almost welcoming.
The hum deepened.
Another step.
Then another.
Halfway down, the air grew warmer, humid, thick like a greenhouse before a storm. My lungs tightened. Each breath tasted faintly metallic.
And then—
A whisper.
Not from ahead.
Not from behind.
From inside the walls.
> "You finally came home."
I froze.
The voice wasn't my aunt's.
Wasn't Aya's.
Wasn't mine.
It was layered — dozens of tones speaking at once, rising and falling in uneven rhythm, like a choir trying to remember a song.
The walls trembled.
Petals drifted down the stairwell, pale and translucent, flickering like embers.
I swallowed hard.
"I'm not here for you," I said.
The house laughed. Soft. Almost polite.
> "You are always here for me."
A hand pressed against the back of my neck.
Cold.
Not human.
I spun around — but there was no one behind me. Only darkness stretching upward, swallowing the floor I had stood on moments before.
The stairwell was shrinking.
The walls inching closer.
A pulse ran through the wood — a shiver that traveled from the top step to the bottom.
The house wasn't breathing anymore.
It was waking up.
I ran.
The stairs softened beneath my feet, turning pliable, bending as I moved as if trying to hold me in place. Vines whipped across my ankles. Something warm dripped onto my shoulder — a thick, viscous sap that glowed faintly green.
At the bottom of the stairs, a faint light flickered.
A doorway.
My chest tightened. The air smelled like damp soil and old memories. I reached the final step just as the stairwell convulsed behind me, slamming shut like a giant mouth snapping its teeth.
I didn't look back.
I stepped through the doorway—
And into something impossible.
A room filled with mirrors.
Hundreds of them.
All facing me.
All reflecting me—
But none of them moved when I did.
Some versions of me smiled.
Some cried.
Some stood perfectly still, staring with empty eyes.
And one — directly across from me — leaned forward, placing her palm against the glass.
Her lips moved.
Slowly. Deliberately.
> "I found the door."
My blood ran cold.
Because I finally understood:
The house never had a door for people to enter.
It had a door for something to leave.
And now… it wanted me to open it.
The mirror-Me pressed harder against the glass.
Cracks formed around her hand, spiderwebbing outward in violent, living lines.
The hum rose to a scream.
The house shuddered.
And my reflection whispered:
> "Let me out."
The glass exploded.
Light swallowed the room.
Something stepped forward.
And the house — the whole house — inhaled sharply, preparing to bloom.