He stood in the corridor, unmoving. A silhouette shaped like Ansel, draped in shadows too thick to be natural, like the darkness had chosen him as its vessel. The dim, sickly-yellow light overhead flickered, casting long, spidery shadows across the walls, and with each flicker, Mira saw him differently. One moment, he was Ansel—the terrified, trembling man she remembered from the room beyond the screaming door. The next, he was… something else.
His spine was wrong. Curved too much, or not enough. His hands hung strangely, fingers a little too long, arms a little too stiff, as if they were attached by threads instead of muscle and bone. But it was the eyes that told her the truth.
Not Ansel.
Not anymore.
"Ansel?" she called softly, testing the air between them. The name felt strange in her mouth, like a word spoken in a dream.
He blinked, once, slowly, then took a step forward.
Mira's back met the wall. Cold stone greeted her skin, a bitter reminder that there was nowhere left to run.
The figure tilted its head slightly, birdlike, curious. Its lips moved, but the voice that emerged was not Ansel's. Not fully.
"He's… underneath now," it said.
The sound was wrong. Not just in tone—though it was deeper, rasping, layered—but in origin. It came from within the hallway itself, as if the voice had detached from the mouth and slipped into the walls, bouncing back toward her from every direction.
"Underneath," Mira repeated under her breath. "What does that mean?"
The thing that had once been Ansel didn't answer. It smiled, and the expression was a jagged imitation of humanity—too wide, too tight. The skin at the edges of his mouth stretched like cloth over wire.
"Why are you showing me this?" she demanded, clenching her fists. "Why now?"
"Because…" the voice hissed, "he still remembers your name."
That landed like a punch. Mira's breath hitched. The shadows trembled at the edges of her vision, as if the hallway itself responded to the tension rising in her chest.
She took a slow, cautious step forward. "Ansel? If you're still in there, listen to me. Fight it. You can—"
"No." The voice was clear now. Ansel's. Real Ansel. Broken, weak, slipping between the cracks. His body spasmed, and for a moment, Mira saw the truth behind the mask. A flicker of him in the way his hands clenched, the panic rising in his face.
Then it was gone again, like a candle snuffed out.
The thing's eyes rolled back in its skull. When they returned, they weren't human.
The irises were obsidian, ringed with a faint glow like dying embers. A scream built in Mira's throat, but she buried it deep. She had seen worse. Been worse. Whatever the building wanted from her, it hadn't gotten it yet.
Not all of it.
The Ansel-thing tilted its head again, then began walking. Not toward her—past her. Slow, deliberate steps. The lights overhead flared as he moved beneath them, like each bulb reacted to the presence of the corrupted soul below. The walls rippled slightly, ever so faintly, as though they were exhaling in his wake.
Mira stood frozen. Her instincts screamed to run, to hide, but some deeper part of her—the part that had endured too many nights in this living tomb—whispered:
Follow.
And so she did.
Down the corridor, past doors that bled faint red light from beneath their thresholds. Past murals etched into the stone—faces she didn't recognize, mouths open in frozen screams, eyes gouged from their sockets. The hall twisted, as if space had forgotten how to remain linear.
Finally, the figure stopped.
A door loomed ahead, taller than the rest, built of wood so old it seemed fossilized. Strange carvings covered its surface—symbols that shimmered like oil in candlelight. Mira's skin prickled at the sight of them.
The figure turned to face her again, and this time, it looked almost… expectant.
"This is the Rewrite Room," it rasped. "Where names die. Where flesh forgets itself."
Mira's voice cracked. "You want me to go in there."
"No," it said. "You already have."
She flinched. The door moaned, not from wind or force, but as if it were remembering being opened.
She took a cautious step forward, staring into the carvings. They began to shift, subtly—shapes bleeding into one another, becoming things she did recognize. A hand. A scream. Her face.
Memories poured in like a flood: a girl not yet broken by the hallway. A scream swallowed by the dark. A mirror she had smashed, only to find her reflection still watching. Something had happened in this room.
Something that had begun her unraveling.
"You were rewritten," the voice said behind her, quieter now. "But not finished."
She turned sharply. "Then what am I?"
The figure moved closer. Inches from her. His voice dropped to a whisper that didn't reach the air, but slid directly into her mind.
"You are the proof that the rewrite can fail."
And with that, it reached out, slowly, not with violence—but with something worse.
A kind of reverence.
Its fingers brushed her shoulder. And Mira—
—remembered.
The pain. The machine. The faceless ones circling her as her memories were pulled apart and reordered. Names taken, voices inserted. She had screamed herself hoarse as something ancient and malicious dug through her identity like a butcher through flesh.
She had resisted.
That was the beginning of everything.
She yanked herself away, gasping, her knees buckling beneath her.
The figure didn't pursue.
It turned and walked back into the hallway's embrace. The lights dimmed behind it. The shadows swallowed it whole.
She was alone again.
But not lost