Some houses are built on secrets. Others are grown from them.
Elias didn't sleep that night. He couldn't. Not after what he'd seen.
His body trembled as he crouched beside the fireplace, clutching the hunting knife in both hands, eyes darting from corner to corner of the dim, rotting cabin. The floor creaked on its own. The wind outside howled, but it didn't come from the trees. It came from below.
From under the floorboards.
His mother hadn't left her room since he returned from the tunnel. But he could hear her. She was laughing. Singing. Sometimes sobbing.
And then whispering.
Words that sounded older than the world.
He stared at the trapdoor in the kitchen.
It had always been there. Always locked. He'd asked about it once as a child. His father had stared at him like he'd asked about death. "We don't open that," he'd said, and that was the end of it.
But now…
Something was opening it from the other side.
He heard the click of nails on wood. The soft rasp of breath. The weight shifting on old beams. He moved closer, stepping on the boards slowly, knife raised.
The trapdoor groaned. The latch twisted.
He slammed his boot down on it.
The whispering stopped.
Then he heard his mother speak, clear as a bell:
"You shouldn't have left it open, Elias."
He turned—and she was there.
Standing in the hallway. Except it wasn't her.
Her eyes were gone. Empty sockets oozed black fluid down her cheeks. Her mouth had split too wide, cracked open to her ears, lined with teeth that were too long, too sharp. She had torn open her chest, skin peeled like wet bark, and inside her ribs, something pulsed.
Something *moved.*
"You've brought it back," she said. "You've fed the forest."
Then she collapsed. Limp. Bones cracking like wet wood.
Elias rushed to her, trembling. Her body was still warm, still breathing—but the thing inside her chest had stopped moving.
He turned her over—and found symbols carved into her back.
Hundreds of them.
Carved in with something jagged. Symbols he didn't recognize. They glowed faintly, like embers beneath skin. As he touched them, they *whispered.*
Not in his ears. In his blood.
He stumbled back.
The trapdoor creaked again.
This time, it opened.
The smell hit first—like butchered meat and wet soil. Elias gagged and staggered away as a draft of damp, decaying air hissed from the basement below. The darkness under the floor wasn't just the absence of light—it was a presence, thick and fluid, brushing against his ankles like a breathing fog.
He shined his flashlight down.
Something moved at the base of the stairs.
A long, slick limb—too thin, too long, ending in fingers that flexed without sound. They didn't grasp. They beckoned.
Elias screamed and slammed the trapdoor shut, twisting the bolt into place and dragging the kitchen table over it. His hands shook. His pulse roared in his ears.
Then his mother *laughed.*
It came from her room. Not just laughter—*mimicking* laughter. Her voice stuttered and looped in unnatural ways, like a damaged recording.
He rushed to her door. It creaked open with a push.
She lay on the bed, but now her limbs were wrong—bent backward, fingers jointed like spider legs. Her face was split into a grin that tore all the way to her neck, revealing rows of jagged teeth like rusted needles.
The symbols on her back had spread.
They now pulsed across the walls, carved into the wood by unseen hands. They dripped a black tar that sizzled on the floor. Every syllable twisted in Elias's mind, warping his thoughts like a fever.
The room was wrong. Larger than it should've been. The walls had shifted. There were no windows. The ceiling arched up like the inside of a throat.
"Elias," she said in a thousand voices. "Come closer."
He turned and ran.
He bolted out of the room, down the hallway, into the bitter cold of the night. Snow clawed at his skin like shards of glass. But he didn't stop until he reached the edge of the woods.
He had to find help.
But the world was changing.
The forest looked different now.
The trees bent inward toward the cabin like skeletal fingers. The snow was tinged with a strange gray film, like soot. The sky pulsed with dim, alien light that shimmered like a heartbeat.
Elias stumbled through the woods, unsure of where he was going. Every direction looked the same. He screamed into the silence, but no voice answered.
And then he saw the thing in the trees.
It was tall. Towering. Its limbs were too many—dozens of them, some thin and wiry, others thick as trunks. Its head—or what passed for one—was a shifting mass of twitching antlers and blind, wet eyes. It didn't walk. It floated just above the ground, dragging a wake of black rot behind it.
It spoke without a mouth.
"Why did you leave the door open?"
Elias fell to his knees, sobbing. The words weren't sound—they were heat, vibrating through his bones.
The thing reached toward him with a hand made of teeth.
Then—it vanished.
So did the trees.
He blinked—and he was back in the kitchen.
On the floor. Alone. The trapdoor open again.
Had he ever left?
His flashlight lay on the floor, dead.
And now there were *stairs.*
Not the old wooden ones he remembered. These were made of black stone, slick with something wet. They spiraled down, impossibly far.
Something *waited.*
And something behind him *pushed.*
He tumbled into the dark.
He landed hard, bones rattling. Everything hurt. He lay on cold stone in a chamber vast and circular. Dozens of doors lined the walls—arched, mouth-like, pulsing. Each one whispered.
They knew his name.
He stood, limping, bleeding, and turned to look up—there was no trapdoor anymore. Just more ceiling. Just more whispering.
The floor was alive.
Veins pulsed beneath it. Faintly glowing. They led toward one door, larger than the rest.
He followed.
Inside the chamber, something waited.
A figure sat in a throne of bone and root. Its face was draped in stitched skin. Its voice was like wet leaves in wind.
"You opened the mouth, Elias Graye."
He shook his head. "I didn't mean to—"
"You *fed* it."
Images flashed in his head. His mother, her chest open. The tunnel. The forest. Himself as a child—following something into the woods. Something calling his name from beneath the roots.
"You belong here," it said.
Elias fell to his knees. Blood pooled beneath him.
The floor cracked.
From the cracks, *hands* emerged. Tiny. Child-like. Grasping. Pulling.
He screamed as they dragged him down—into the roots. Into the dark.
The last thing he heard was his mother singing.
And beneath her song, the trees whispered:
"Home."