The house was silent. Too silent. After the last night, when whispers had torn through the darkness like broken thread, Yuki hadn't slept. Every step he took on the creaking wood floor felt like the walls were holding their breath.
From the second floor, where the curtains hung tattered and half-drawn, he watched Rei in the garden. Motionless. As if speaking to something only he could see. But this time, Yuki didn't feel fear. He felt something else—a quiet, creeping empathy. Something inside him remembered a long-buried feeling: loneliness.
Rei returned slowly. His gaze, distant and hollow, brushed against Yuki's, and without a word, he moved toward the hallway that led to the forgotten wing.
Rei's Voice
The dust still clung to the doorframes, but memories needed no cleaning. As he walked, names resurfaced like bubbles breaking through stagnant water. How much laughter once lived here. Where now only broken floorboards and abandoned toys remained, there had been voices. Life.
"Anya," he whispered, passing a chipped wooden door. And as if the whisper had activated a hidden mechanism, the door slowly creaked open.
Inside, it smelled of damp rot—and something else. Something familiar. The bed was covered in a faded quilt, and atop it lay a red notebook. Rei picked it up, recognizing it instantly. The registry. The one Yuki had written before everything had started to decay.
Yuki's Voice
"You're in the forbidden wing," he said, just above a whisper from the threshold. But his voice had no strength. Seeing the notebook fractured something inside him.
"You wrote this before you forgot..." Rei spoke without looking at him. "Every child had a story. Anya, 7, orphaned after the mountain crash. She never spoke again after arriving. She only wrote. Drew spirals and windows that didn't exist."
Yuki trembled. The handwriting was his, but he didn't remember writing it. On the next page: "Marcel, 5. He said he heard a voice from the basement. One that said his name backwards. When he disappeared, the house turned cold."
Omniscient Narrator
The registry was a map of unraveling. Children who had come seeking refuge and became fragments instead. Each entry a descent into the mundane hell the house had imposed on them.
Yuki sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the past cling to his skin like mold. Rei stepped closer, and for the first time since they'd met again, their fingers brushed. The contact was brief, but charged. Not love. Not affection. Recognition. Of a shared wound.
Behind them, the window fogged. In the mist, a word appeared, written from the outside: "RETURN".