The blackness was absolute. It wasn't an absence of light; it was a substance, thick and velvety, pressing against her eyes, her skin, filling her mouth and lungs with the taste of dust and static. The slam of the door had been a sound of such finality that it felt less like a noise and more like the severing of a limb. The world she knew was gone. There was only this.
Lane stood frozen, one step inside the threshold, her back pressed against the door. The wood was unnaturally cold, seeping through her jacket. Her breath hitched, coming in shallow, panicked gasps that sounded obscenely loud in the perfect silence. She fumbled for her phone, her fingers numb and clumsy. The screen glowed to life, a tiny, pathetic sun in an infinite night.
The beam of the flashlight cut a trembling swath through the darkness, illuminating motes of dust dancing in a frantic, silent ballet. It did not, however, illuminate the room. The light seemed to die just a few feet in front of her, swallowed by the oppressive gloom. She swung the phone left, then right. The beam revealed nothing but more darkness, a void that refused to give up its secrets.
"Hello?" Her voice was a dry croak, swallowed by the house the moment it left her lips. There was no echo. The sound just… died.
The thing she had heard—the scraping, the clicking, the breathing—was gone. The silence in its wake was somehow worse. It was a listening silence. A hungry one.
Pushing away from the door, she took another step forward. The floorboards beneath her feet were bare wood, gritty with dust. Her light caught the edge of something—a wall. She moved toward it, her hand outstretched. The wallpaper was cold and damp to the touch, a faded floral pattern of bile-green and bruised purple. It was peeling at the seams, and as her fingers brushed against a loose flap, she recoiled. Underneath, the plaster was not white, but a deep, ugly black, as if stained by some profound rot from within the walls.
She was in a hallway. The beam of her phone traced a path down its length, but the light could not find the end. It stretched away into nothingness, a tunnel of peeling wallpaper and shadows. Doors lined both sides, all of them closed, all of them identical dark wood with tarnished silver knobs.
This was impossible. From the outside, the house, though large, could not contain a hallway of this length. The geometry was wrong. The angles of the walls seemed to shift subtly when she wasn't looking directly at them, the perspective warping and bending in the corner of her eye.
A sound.
She froze, her heart hammering against her ribs. It wasn't the scraping. This was different. A faint, rhythmic tick… tick… tick… from somewhere deep within the house. A clock. A familiar, almost comforting sound. It was utterly out of place, and that made it all the more terrifying.
It was a lure. She knew it with a certainty that chilled her blood. But what choice did she have? To stand in this spot until she died of thirst? The hook in her ribs was still there, pulling her deeper in.
She chose a direction, following the faint, ticking sound. Her footsteps were muffled, the dust on the floor absorbing the sound. She passed door after door, each one identical. She tried one of the knobs. It was locked fast, not a flicker of movement. She moved to the next. Also locked. She tried a third, and as her fingers closed around the icy brass, she heard it.
A wet, ragged inhalation from the other side.
She snatched her hand back as if burned, stumbling backward. The ticking sound seemed to grow a fraction louder, impatient.
Keep moving. Don't stop.
She continued down the hall, the beam of her phone jittering with her trembling hand. The wallpaper patterns began to change. The flowers twisted into thorny, unrecognizable shapes. Then the pattern vanished altogether, replaced by a dark, wood-paneled wall. Then, abruptly, it changed again to garish, blood-red stripes. The house was not consistent. It was a patchwork of different eras, different rooms, stitched together into this impossible corridor.
The ticking was closer now. She rounded a slight bend and the hallway ended at another door. This one was different. It was newer, made of pale, unfinished pine. It looked raw, like a wound in the older architecture of the house. And from behind it, the ticking was loud and clear.
This door was unlocked.
Her hand hesitated on the knob. This was what the house wanted. This was the source of the sound. To open it was to play its game. But the alternative was to remain in the shifting hallway, with the thing breathing behind one of the other doors.
She turned the knob and pushed.
The room was small, square, and blindingly bright after the oppressive dark of the hall. A single, bare bulb hung from a wire in the center of the ceiling, swinging slowly, casting moving shadows. The walls were bare concrete. In the center of the room sat a small, wooden school desk, the kind with a flip-top lid and an iron frame.
On the desk sat a wind-up alarm clock, its white face and red second hand stark in the light. Tick. Tick. Tick. It was the only thing in the room.
Lane approached it, a sense of surreal dread building in her chest. This was a memory. Her memory. She'd had a desk just like this in the second grade. As she got closer, she saw something scratched into the desktop's surface. A word, carved with the clumsy effort of a child.
LANE.
Her blood ran cold. She reached out a trembling hand and slowly lifted the desk's lid.
Inside was not a collection of pencils and crumpled worksheets. There was only one thing. A photograph.
It was a Polaroid, faded with age, the colors bleached to a sickly yellow. It showed a young girl, no more than seven years old, sitting on the floor of a hallway. She was wearing a nightgown, her face pale and tear-streaked. It was her. It was Lane.
She was staring at something just outside the frame, her expression a perfect mask of pure, unadulterated terror. Behind her, on the wall, was a strip of the same bile-green and bruised-purple floral wallpaper from the hall outside.
She didn't remember this. She didn't remember any of this.
Her eyes were drawn to the background of the photo, to the deep shadows behind her child-self. At first, she thought it was a trick of the light, a stain on the photograph. But it wasn't. The shadows were coalescing, taking form. A tall, impossibly thin shape was emerging from the darkness behind her. It had no discernible features, only a elongated, blurred outline and two patches of deeper black where eyes might have been. One of its long, shadowy arms was stretched out, its fingers—too long, too many joints—were inches from the little girl's shoulder.
Tick. Tick. T—
The clock stopped.
The sudden silence was a shock. In the frozen quiet, she heard a new sound. A soft, shuffling step directly behind her in the hallway.
Lane whirled around, the photograph fluttering from her fingers. The doorway was empty. The hall was dark. But the sound came again. Shuffle. Drag. Shuffle. Something was coming. Something slow, and patient, and inevitable.
She backed away from the door, her eyes fixed on the empty frame. The light bulb above her head flickered once, twice, and then died, plunging the little room into blackness.
The shuffling sound stopped right outside the door.
She could hear it breathing. The same wet, ragged inhalation she'd heard through the first door. It was here.
A long, silent moment passed. Lane pressed herself against the cold concrete wall, trying to make herself small, trying to disappear.
Then, a voice. It was a dry, rasping whisper, like pages turning in a long-forgotten book. It came from the darkness just beyond the door, and it spoke a single sentence that filled her with a primordial terror she did not know she possessed.
"I've always loved hide and seek."