The house greeted Iris Moreau like an accusation.
Its windows stared down at her, streaked with coastal grime, and the ivy clinging to its stone skin trembled in the wind like the long fingers of a dead woman.
The front gate gave a screech of protest as she pushed through, dragging her suitcase across the pebbled drive.
Her boots crunched with each step, each one reminding her that she hadn't been here in fifteen years.
Not since the night she'd slammed the door on her mother and never looked back.
Now her mother is dead, and Iris is back.
The iron key was cold in her palm, heavy with history.
She slid it into the lock, half-expecting the house to resist her entry, maybe by twisting the key or biting her hand, but it clicked with a quiet finality.
The door swung open as dust sighed out like breath held too long.
Inside, it smelled of wood rot, perfume, and something bitter underneath, almost like old smoke that had seeped into the wallpaper.
She didn't call out, because there was no one to answer.
Just silence and the echo of her boots on warped wood floors as she walked into the heart of the place she used to call home.
The sitting room was nearly untouched, with Ivory drapes yellowed with age.
A crystal ashtray filled with curled petals and something that might have once been a moth.
And then she saw them, lined neatly along the fireplace mantle.
Matchsticks.
Dozens of them, with each one burnt, blackened down to the tips.
Each tied with a faded strip of paper.
She stepped closer to read the inscriptions:
A. Langdon — Sept 3, 1989
Another:
C. Reyes — Feb 12, 2001
And then:
I. Moreau — (unburned) — Oct 27, 2025
Her own name seemed scheduled for next week.
She didn't breathe for a full three seconds as the room pressed around her.
The fireplace seemed deeper than it was, the mirror above it skewed slightly, as if the house itself had flinched.
"I don't have time for this," Iris whispered, but her voice didn't sound like hers anymore.
She pocketed the match and backed away.
The library was worse, standard Victorian ceiling-high shelves shadowed the room like sentinels.
It was the only part of the house her mother had forbidden her from as a child, but now, it was unlocked.
Drawers filled with ledgers, notes, clippings, names, death notices and rescues.
She scanned one entry:
R. Monroe — Feb 3, 2007 — Pulled from the river minutes before hypothermia.
Underlined: Match burned Jan 12, 2007
Each "match" came before a miracle, or a death.
That night, Iris couldn't sleep, she lay in the old bedroom, the ceiling cracked like veins, her heart pacing.
Her name on the match haunted her, she had never believed in her mother's "gifts" despite being told countlessly, she'd called them delusions.
But now, the matches seemed like more than ritual.
Was her mother saving people? Trading time?
What was the cost?
She rolled onto her side, staring at the dust motes floating in the moonlight from the cracked window.
Her mother had once said, "Fire is truth, it shows up in the smoke." Iris had laughed at the time, but now she wasn't so sure.
The answer didn't come in the dark, but the sound did.
A soft knock on the front door, not thunder nor wind.
Someone was knocking.
She crept down the stairs, barefoot, heart thrumming.
Through the peephole, she saw a man in his late 30s, putting on a rain-soaked jacket with eyes wide open and slightly reddened from the rain eater's caress.
"I'm sorry," he said when she opened the door. "I know this is going to sound insane… but years ago, your mother pulled me off a bridge."
He lifted something from his pocket.
A burnt match.
"I was told to give this to you today."
They sat at the kitchen table, the man dripping water onto the old tiles while Iris brewed stale tea.
His name was Devon Hale, at least that's what he identified himself as.
He had the look of someone who'd seen the inside of his own helleyes too hollow, with a voice just a notch too careful.
"She mailed me a match in '09," he said. "No letter, nor explanation, and I was going to burn it out of spite, but something made me hold onto it.
Two weeks later, I tried to jump from the Ashton Street bridge."
"She found you?"
"She didn't just find me, she was already there just sitting on the guardrail, as if she knew."
Iris stared at the match he'd laid on the table, it was cracked at the base.
The handwriting on the label matched the mantle tags, her mother's cursive, neat and looping.
"She told me I'd know when to return it," Devon continued. "That I'd feel something. A heat behind my eyes."
Iris didn't want to believe him at first, but she remembered that phrase.
Her mother had said it once to her, when she was five, maybe six.
"When the time comes, you'll feel it behind your eyes, like a match waiting to burn."
She'd screamed at her mother then, as she threw a vase at her and called her crazy.
But now her hand tingled where she held the unburned match with her name on it. October 27, 2025.
Seven days from now.
"What happened after?" Iris asked. "After she saved you?"
Devon looked up, mouth tight. "She lit a match. Told me it meant my time wasn't up yet. Then she walked away."
Iris was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, "There are hundreds of matches in this house, some labeled others burned whereas some aren't, why?"
Devon hesitated. "Because she wasn't just saving people, iris she was choosing them."
That word chilled her.
"Choosing?"
"She told me the match only burns for one. That if she lit yours, someone else would go out in order to maintain a balance."
The alternate sacrifice.
She suddenly felt cold for the fire had long since died in the hearth, but she didn't move to relight it.
"Why bring me this now?"
He stood, slowly, "Because she told me that when I returned the match, it would mean your mother was gone.
And that the choice… would be yours now."
************************************************
Later, when the rain had passed and the house had gone still again, Iris opened the closet in her mother's study.
Behind the coats was a box, one plain, wooden, locked with a bronze latch shaped like a flame.
Inside were blank tag, about a dozens of them with new matches which stayed unburned.
Waiting.
And at the bottom, folded like a secret, was a single photograph, it was faded and curled at the corners.
An image of a girl, obviously not Iris nor Devon.
Someone else.
On the back, scrawled in that same looping script:
"You were my final match."