The space between the walls was a vertical coffin, choked with the dust of decades and the dry, sweet smell of termite-rotted wood. It was a secret world, the house's skeleton laid bare. Fingers of pale light stabbed down from cracks and knotholes high above, illuminating motes of dust their climbing stirred into a frantic dance. The air was dead and still, a stark contrast to the organic violence unfolding in the rooms on either side of them.
They could hear it, though. The wet, tearing sounds of the roots consolidating were muffled but omnipresent, a reminder that the walls themselves were becoming alive. Occasionally, a black, glistening tendril would snake through a gap in the lath, blindly questing, before retreating back into the house's deepening flesh.
Lane led the way, climbing with a grim determination. The horizontal beams provided precarious footholds. She moved by feel, her world reduced to the next handhold, the next breath of stale air. Elias followed, his movements slow and pained, his breath a constant, wheezing accompaniment to their ascent. The climb was a brutal ordeal for his starved body, but the alternative—being sealed in the root-choked study—was a powerful motivator.
"Where… are we going?" he gasped, his voice echoing softly in the narrow space.
"Up," Lane replied, her voice tight with effort. "The new rooms are always higher. It builds on top of the old ones." She remembered the feeling of the house breathing in, pulling everything inward and upward. The room from her nightmare, the one built from her fear, would be a recent addition. A penthouse of terror.
They climbed past the ghostly outlines of rooms they knew. Through a wide crack, Lane caught a glimpse of the study's ceiling from above, a web of black roots now covering it like ivy. Further up, she saw the rotting floorboards of the family gallery, a single, faded photograph visible between the gaps. They were archaeologists in a cursed tomb, seeing the strata of their own torment.
The higher they climbed, the newer the construction felt. The wood was paler, the smell of fresh sawdust stronger, cutting through the age and rot. The house's heartbeat, which had been a distant, pained throb, grew louder here. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. It was a sick rhythm, but a steady one. The beast was healing faster than she'd hoped.
And then they reached it.
A wall. Not the outside of the house, but an interior wall that shouldn't have existed in this between-space. It was made of the same pale, unfinished pine she remembered from the journal. It blocked their way upward, sealing off the top of the house. The smell here was unmistakable: fresh sawdust and the cloying, funeral-parlor scent of violets.
This was it. The back of the new door. The room it had built for her.
There was no way around it. The wall was seamless, stretching into the darkness on either side.
Lane pressed her ear against the cool pine. Silence. A deep, waiting silence that felt heavier than the chaos below.
"It's here," she whispered. "The key is in there."
Elias looked at the solid wall, then at his own frail hands, a despairing expression on his face. "We can't get through. It's too strong."
Lane's eyes scanned the wall in the dim light. Her gaze fell on a knothole, a dark eye in the pale wood, about level with her chest. It was large enough to fit her hand through.
"It doesn't want us to break it down," she said, a plan forming in her mind, cold and reckless. "It wants us to open the door. To play the game properly." She looked at Elias. "It's a test. The final test."
"What are you going to do?" he asked, his voice filled with dread.
Instead of answering, Lane did something that felt both insane and inevitable. She shifted her weight on the beam, leaned forward, and pushed her hand into the knothole.
The moment her fingers passed through the opening, the world dissolved.
She was seven years old. The hallway was endless, the floor cold beneath her bare feet. The doors stretched on forever, each one identical, each one closed. She was crying. She wanted her mom. The air was thick and still, and from the very end of the hall, she could hear it. The wet, rhythmic breathing. Something was behind the last door. Something that loved to play hide and seek. Her heart was a tiny, frantic bird beating against her ribs. She was lost. She was alone.
The memory was a riptide, pulling her under. It wasn't a vision; it was a reliving. The terror was fresh, absolute, and paralyzing. She was a child again, small and helpless.
She took a step forward. The floorboard creaked. The breathing at the end of the hall stopped. It was listening. She froze, her breath catching in her throat. The silence was worse. It was a listening silence. A hungry one.
Lane tried to pull her hand back, to break the connection, but her muscles were locked. The memory had her. The house was feeding her own deepest fear back to her, using the knothole as a conduit.
From behind one of the doors, a new sound. A scratch. Then another. Long, slow scrapes, like claws on wood. It wasn't at the end of the hall anymore. It was right next to her.
The adult part of her mind, the part that had eaten the peaches and faced the thing in the sunroom, screamed in protest. This was the trap! The key wasn't in the room; the room was the key! It was a lock made of memory, and her fear was the mechanism!
She had to break the cycle. She had to change the memory.
With a Herculean effort of will, she fought against the paralyzing childhood terror. She wasn't seven years old. She was a woman. She had a weapon.
In the memory, the little girl stood frozen, tears streaming down her face, staring at the door where the scratching came from.
But then, something new happened. Something that had never happened in the nightmare before.
The little girl's hand tightened. In her small fist, a fireplace poker appeared, heavy and real and impossibly there.
The memory shuddered. The hallway flickered, like a film strip jumping its spool. The house's perfect imitation hit a snag. An anomaly.
The scratching on the door stopped. The breathing hesitated, confused.
And the little girl, instead of waiting to be found, took a step forward. And then another. Her small feet were firm on the floor. She raised the heavy poker.
She spoke, her voice not a child's whisper, but a woman's clear, defiant tone layered over it.
"I'm not hiding."
The memory shattered.
Lane was thrown back into her own body, gasping, her hand snapping back from the knothole as if burned. She clung to the beam, her heart hammering.
The pale pine wall in front of them was changing. The wood was darkening, sweating a black, tarry substance. The sweet smell of violets was turning acrid, burning. The knothole she had touched was melting, widening, the edges curling back like a flower blooming in fast-motion.
A sound came from the other side of the wall. Not a memory. Not an imitation. Real.
It was the sound of something large, and heavy, and profoundly angry, slamming against the inside of the door.
THUMP.
The entire wall shuddered.
THUMP.
It was trying to get out.
The house hadn't just hidden the key in the memory. It had locked the memory in the room. And she had just tampered with the lock.
Elias stared in horror as the pine wall bulged inward with each terrible impact. "What did you do?" he cried.
"I cheated," Lane said, her voice shaking but fierce. "I didn't play its game. I changed the rules."
The wall splintered. A long, jagged crack split the pine from top to bottom. Through the crack, she could see not the hallway of her childhood, but impenetrable darkness. And in that darkness, something moved.
The thing was in there. Not an imitation. Not a memory. The real thing. And it was furious.
It had been contained in its own perfect trap, and she had broken the seal.
The final door was opening. Not to let her in.
But to let it out.