some story i made

You wake up with dry throat and racing heart to an uncharacteristic quiet. Your household is all absent. The air is thick, sour, and off. The electricity's gone, the faucets groan with rusty quiet, and all the doors and windows are closed from the outside. You have no idea when you slept. You don't even know if you went to bed.

Each move through the house is outlined. Wall paint torn, faces slashed with some sort of serrated edge. A stench of rotting bursts out from beneath floorboards, and unexplained scratches ride high up walls—too high for any animal, too wild for a human.

The house itself seems to breathe, just beneath the surface.

And then, looking around the bathroom mirror, you hear a drippy whisper:

"You're not supposed to be awake."

You stand frozen, breath trapped like a hook in your chest. That whisper—gurgling, wet—wasn't an illusion. The mirror, ripped down the center, pulses weakly like skin stretched too tight over something that writhes underneath. You step back, but the floorboards groan in protest, curving as if whatever lies beneath doesn't appreciate your stepping back.

The corridor is chillier now. Your own breath misting in front of you. Wallpaper curled back like festering skin, to display walls that respire—veined and throbbing, wet with black fluid that seeps like bile. The kitchen symbol replicates itself, inscribed now on the house's own bones, burned with the sickening hue of infected tissue.

You limp to the front door, fingers sliding over planks that ooze warm fluid, pulsating like veins. Behind you: the thud of footsteps. Inhumanely heavy. Inhumanely slow. Deliberate. Heavier than a human.

You climb the stairs, each step quieter, reduced, as if the house itself is attempting to devour you.

On the top, the attic door is open.

Inside, crouched in the darkness, is your mother's body—frozen in a scream. Her skin is cracked, hair matted in clumpy strands, adhered to her head like dry roots. Her arms are stretched wide, hands grasping in mid-air, frozen. Her mouth is open, yet she has no breath.

And then the eyes shift—dry, beady in sockets. And through parched, iced-over lips, the voice leaks out, distorted, vibrating, as if breath forcing its way from a grave:

"You were never supposed to wake up."

Your legs lock. You need to scream, run, shut the attic door and trap whatever that is inside it forever—but you can't budge. Your mother's voice, as brittle as rotting stone, echoes through your skeleton, not your ears. The attic reeks of decay and dust and something old, something that wasn't ever meant to be found.

The light fogs—or maybe they are your own eyes weakening—and the corners of the attic stretch and twist. There are bodies that move in the dark: forms, bent and integrated into the walls, their arms half-forged into wood and stone. You recognise them. Your sister's locket glows faint from a body slumped in the corner. Your father's hand dangles from a spot no body should occupy.

The symbol once more—this time etched onto your mother's breast, searing, pounding, pulsing. You seethe with it behind your eyes. Something is attempting to intrude.

The corpse sits upright. The rock splits around her lips as she speaks once more, louder, deeper, a hundred voices reverberating behind her own:

"We etched the seal to keep it out. But now. you're the crack."

The attic floor splits apart.

You plummet into the darkness.

You are falling through an un-air-ness but one more substantial—a cold, clammy, vital something. Around you are screaming sounds but not yours, so many, so many, forced through lifeless wood. You try to crouch and armor yourself against shock, but impact never comes. Only falling still. 

Then, abruptly—you don't.

You are on your back on what appears to be your living room, but wrong. The angles are off, the walls too high, the ceiling too far away. Everything is dust-covered, as if decades have gone by without a single thing being moved. The family photos are again on the wall—but their eyes have been scratched out, and in your place there is vacant emptiness.

Your mother's voice sounds once more, distant now, as though from the depths of a well:

"You brought it through."

The TV goes on by itself. Static. Then an image—your face, looking back at you, but blinking out of sync.

There is something breathing behind you.

You turn. Gradually. Too late.

In the black hallway, something moves towards you—limbs bent the wrong way, face blurring in and out of focus, as if reality can't quite keep up with it.

It speaks in a voice you almost recognise:

"Home is open now."

Your limbs feel heavier, as if the weight of the house itself is spreading into your limbs. You try to scream, but your split lips remain still. The air around you becomes thick with horrible tension, and you can feel your own skin shrinking, toughening. The creature in the hallway closes, its mangled limbs collapsing into impossible folds. Its dead, cold eyes fix on yours, and you're certain—horrifically certain—it's coming for you.

The change begins at your fingertips, crawling up your arms, spreading like ice, freezing you from head to toe. Your skin cracks and petrifies, hardening. You try to move, to run, but you can't. Your body is stolen from you. You are a statue—frozen in terror. Your lips stretch wide in a silent scream, but only the faintest whisper escapes.

As the house shuts in upon you, you're drawn upwards, drawn to the attic. Somewhere you never thought you'd be.

And there in the attic, you understand finally. You're not dead, not exactly. You're worse than that—a living, long-dead kind of something, a cycle that just won't end.

Your eyes snap open. The attic is still as cold and clammy as before. Walls seem to pulse with malevolent life. And you see it in the darkness—that dead body of your mother, still tied to the wall, still looking.

Whispering in a voice like stone against stone, your lips tearing as you speak:

"Someone's awake."