The trapdoor slammed shut as his hands slipped.
The edge missed his fingers by a breath. Hao stumbled backward until his spine hit the sloping attic roof.
His heart hammered against his ribs, lungs stuttering for a few seconds before they remembered how to work.
He stayed there in the dark, breathing hard.
Then he raised his hand and slapped his own cheek.
A sharp sting bloomed across his skin.
"Should I just stay here until this ends?" he muttered. "How do you even wake yourself up from this kind of dream…"
He slapped himself again, more out of habit than hope. The pain was real enough. The situation didn't care.
"It's just a dream," he told himself. "What's the worst it can throw at me?"
Somewhere below, whatever lived in the cabin answered that question.
The smell reached him before anything else did.
Iron. Thick and sharp. Wrong in a way his mind didn't have a word for.
He climbed down from the attic, each step slower than usual, listening.
Nothing.
No voices. No footsteps. No clatter of bottles or scrape of chairs.
Just that smell, curling through the dark like something alive.
He rounded a corner and stopped.
Leaving it alone wouldn't change anything. Not knowing wouldn't help.
"Better to know," he muttered.
His voice sounded small in the dark. Like it didn't really belong to him.
He lowered himself to the floor, one knee pressing into the rough wood. The boards were colder than he expected, chill seeping through denim. Dust scratched at his throat with every breath.
He let his hand slide forward, palm sweeping slowly across the floorboards.
Nothing.
More dust. A stray splinter.
His fingers brushed fabric.
Thin. Soft. Not the heavy weave of a couch or curtain. Clothes.
He swallowed and kept going, pushing past the instinct telling him to stop. If something in the dark wanted to split his head open, it could do it while he was learning something useful. Better that than dying stupid.
His fingers found skin.
Not at the hand, like he'd expected, but higher up. Forearm. Cool, with a faint stickiness clinging to the edges of his touch. The hairs on his own arms rose.
He didn't jerk back.
His throat clenched hard enough to hurt, but he swallowed it down and kept moving, tracing the shape because the alternative was pretending he'd felt nothing and walking away.
His hand traveled over ribs beneath a shirt. A chest that didn't rise or fall. A collarbone. A shoulder that felt slightly twisted, like it had been dropped there instead of someone lying down naturally.
No obvious knife wound. No neat slice he could point at and say that's where it ended. No single line his mind could file under "cause" and be done with it.
"If this is one of them…" he whispered, barely breathing the words. "Then whatever did this didn't just stab them."
His fingers kept moving.
Higher. Warmer.
They reached the neck.
Or where the neck should've been.
His hand sank into something soft that shouldn't have been soft. Hot and slick, like warm dishwater mixed with jelly, except it clung to his fingers when he tried to stop.
Hao froze.
Every muscle locked. Even his heartbeat felt too loud.
For a second, he stayed like that, hunched in the dark with his hand buried in something that was absolutely not where a normal, intact human neck should be.
Slowly, he pulled his hand back.
Skin, shredded. Something stringy dragging against his knuckles. Then air.
He lifted his hand toward the faint, greyish light leaking from the nearest window. It was barely enough to outline the shapes in the cabin, but it was enough for this.
The dark sheen coating his fingers told him everything he didn't want to know.
Blood. Too much of it.
The head was still attached.
Technically.
As his eyes adjusted, he made out the shape: her body sprawled wrong across the floor, head hanging at an angle it had no business being at. It clung to the rest of her by torn strands of flesh and tendon, less like a clean wound and more like something had clamped down and shaken her until everything important gave way.
The shy girl.
Or what his dream had turned her into.
Her hair, which he vaguely remembered as neat and tied back, was now matted into a sticky halo around her face. Her eyes stared past him, wide and glossy, like she was still trying to see what had hit her.
"…What the hell…"
If he had to describe it, he'd say it looked like some huge animal had bitten into her throat, then pulled and shook until bone and muscle tore apart, the way a dog worried a toy until it broke.
Great. My subconscious finally lets me talk to my type, and this is what it does with her, he thought. The joke barely landed in his own head, a thin, hysterical edge pressing at the back of his mind like something waiting to crack.
He forced in a slow breath.
The smell of blood rushed in with it, thicker now that he knew what he was smelling. Heavy, metallic, cloying. It coated his tongue, slid down his throat, made the air feel syrupy.
He had never touched anything like this before.
Raw meat, when cooking, came close. But that had always been cold. Dead in a way that didn't argue back.
This was too warm. Too recent. Too real.
He dragged his gaze away from her face and forced his hand off the floor, every instinct screaming to get it away from her, away from this.
He wiped his fingers on his jeans.
The streaks smeared into the fabric, spreading instead of disappearing. He knew it didn't fix anything, but doing nothing felt worse.
He pushed himself back up to his feet, knees complaining, fingers trembling just enough that he noticed.
Then he kept going.
If this was what the thing did to people, he needed to see all of it. Or at least enough of it to not be completely blind.
On the second floor, he found the short guy.
The stairs creaked under his weight, every step threatening to give away his position to something that didn't need sound to find him. The hallway upstairs felt narrower than it had when everyone was alive, flimsy doors lining it like cheap teeth.
The body sat slumped against the wall, knees bent, arms limp at his sides. His head lolled slightly to the left, chin tipped toward his chest, like a broken doll.
For a heartbeat, Hao almost expected him to look up.
He didn't.
His chest was open.
Not cut.
Scooped out.
The torn edges of skin and muscle curled inward, stiffening as they dried. The ribs were visible in places, but they weren't broken in the way he'd imagined. It looked less like someone had smashed their way in and more like something had pushed through, taken what it wanted, and left.
As if someone had reached in and taken everything inside by the handful and walked away with it.
No organs. No wet pile of anything on the floor. No glistening coils or messy heap.
Just a hollow cavity where a person was supposed to be.
Hao watched for a long second, eyes tracing the empty space, the way dried blood had formed thin, flaking lines down the guy's sides before simply stopping. Whatever had done this hadn't been messy by accident.
"You're supposed to wake up from a nightmare before it gets this far."
His voice died against the wallpaper.
The air felt heavier upstairs, pressing on his shoulders, trying to make him smaller. Every breath sounded louder than the last.
He forced himself to move.
In another room, the one the couple had claimed earlier, the big mirror lay shattered across the floor. Earlier, it had reflected them back in warm, drunk slices of light.
Now it reflected him.
Broken.
The shards caught fragments of his silhouette when he stepped inside, turning one tired boy into a dozen warped strangers. In some pieces he looked taller, in others older, in one just a stretched blur with too-long limbs.
Blood streaked through the broken glass, forming jagged trails that almost made a pattern if he stared too long. Lines intersected, curved, doubled back. Like something had been dragged across the mirror, or had tried to step through it and failed.
There were no bodies in that room.
The couple was gone.
No shoes. No toppled chair. Just the mess.
He turned slowly, listening.
Nothing. No breathing except his own. No whisper of movement behind the walls.
The cabin felt bigger without people in it.
Bigger and emptier and somehow narrower at the same time, like the halls had stretched a little but the ceiling had dropped lower. Like the walls were closer together, leaning in.
Watching.
He stood there, surrounded by broken reflections and dried streaks of red, and realized he didn't feel alone.
The problem was, nothing else felt alive either.
By the time he reached the entrance again, his pulse had steadied.
Not because he wasn't scared.
Because something in his brain had quietly shifted from What is happening to How do I not die here.
"No lights," he whispered, eyes on the locked front door. "No going outside. Survive till sunrise."
He patted his pockets.
Phone.
His fingers met nothing.
Not "it's not there," not "maybe it fell under a couch."
It simply didn't exist.
Like the dream had decided he'd never owned one.
His gaze drifted back toward the hallway.
Toward the basement door.
It waited there like a quiet threat, patient and solid.
"Hey, Hao. Why are you not hiding?"
Kevin's voice slid out of the darkness to his left.
Hao turned sharply.
Kevin stepped into view from a shadowed corner, that familiar easy grin pasted across his face.
He held a butcher knife.
The blade caught what little light there was, gleaming faintly in the dark.
"Isn't the game over?" Hao asked, frowning. "I'm supposed to be the one seeking."
Kevin blinked. "Wha—?"
"Why are you still walking around?" Hao said flatly. "I found you. I win."
For a moment, Kevin just stared.
Then his grin stretched.
Too wide.
"Hahahahaha…"
The laugh sounded normal. So did his voice. But his eyes didn't match anything else on his face. They were too still. Too empty.
Hao didn't change expression.
Kevin didn't blink.
Silence tightened between them like a drawn wire.
Then Kevin lunged.