Aarav blinked—once, twice—and the hospital corridor shivered, like someone shaking a sheet from underneath. The fluorescent lights buzzed, then glitched, freezing mid-flicker. For a split second, everything stood unnaturally still.
Then the walls breathed.
A slow, dragging inhale.
The kind that didn't belong to a building… or a human.
Aarav stepped back, and the tiles beneath his shoes rippled like liquid. His heart hammered. "No… no, this isn't real."
It wasn't.
He finally understood.
He had never escaped the house.
This "hospital" was a mask, an illusion stitched over the true shape of the abyss he had entered. Every room, every nurse, every doctor—programs. Puppets. Decorative wallpaper on a shape-shifting cage.
And the cage was awake.
A soft creaking echoed down the hallway.
A neck bending. A spine twisting. A jaw unhinging.
She appeared from around the corner.
The woman with the broken neck.
Her head dangled sideways, nearly backward, held in place by nothing but tendons. Her eyes were bright white, glowing like lit candles under water. And her footsteps didn't match the movement of her body—her limbs moved wrong, off-beat, as if her bones argued with gravity.
"Aarav…" she whispered, but her voice came from behind him, not from her mouth.
He spun around.
Empty.
He turned back.
She was closer.
The corridor behind her bent like a tunnel of stretched skin.
"You've gone too far," she whispered again—this time her jaw didn't move at all. The voice crawled into his ear like a hot breath.
"What is this place?" Aarav shouted, stepping back.
The woman's face twitched into an unnatural smile.
"This place is you."
The lights above them warped, twisting into spirals of white. Ceiling tiles melted into dripping black ink. The walls peeled away, revealing the faint outline of… wood?
Old wood. Familiar wood.
The walls were slowly turning back into the house.
Aarav's chest tightened. "No… I left that place. I walked out."
She tilted her broken head further, until one ear touched her shoulder blade.
"You walked deeper," she said.
Suddenly, the entire corridor convulsed. Hospital beds slammed into the walls. Doors fell flat like cardboard. A loud grinding noise erupted, as if the whole dimension scraped against something much larger.
And then—
Aarav saw it.
A glimpse.
Through a tearing wall, like peeling fabric—
The house's real hallway.
Dark. Breathing. Waiting.
"No—no—NO!" he screamed, rushing to the opposite end.
But the corridor stretched, becoming longer with every step. A treadmill of reality. The house wasn't letting him run.
The woman's limbs bent backward as she crawled toward him—fast, sharp, insect-like—her nails clicking across the tiles.
"You shouldn't resist," she said without speaking. "The abyss chose you."
Aarav grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, swinging wildly.
It passed through her like smoke.
Then she solidified and slammed him backward. His spine hit the wall—no, not the wall. The surface felt like skin.
Warm. Pulsing.
He choked back a scream.
"Aarav," she whispered, inches from his face, her broken neck dangling. "Do you remember the real door you opened?"
His eyes widened.
The attic door.
The carved one.
The one he wasn't supposed to touch.
"Good," she said, reading his expression. "Because every door you walk through now… leads back to it."
The corridor collapsed into darkness.
Lights turned red.
A roar echoed from deep within the structure—a monstrous, ancient groan, like the house itself was stretching awake.
Aarav crawled backward, breath trembling, and felt something under his palm—a handle.
A door handle.
A new door. Wooden. Carved.
Exactly like the attic door.
He froze.
It shouldn't be here. It couldn't be here.
He stood up slowly, staring at the handle.
The woman smiled, her jaw cracking loudly.
"Open it," she whispered. "Or stay trapped in the lie."
Aarav's hand trembled.
The house was forcing him.
The entity wanted him to choose.
He swallowed hard and gripped the handle.
The moment he turned it—
A roar erupted behind him.
Something enormous. Something crawling. Something he couldn't face.
He yanked the door open.
Darkness pulsed like a heartbeat.
Cold air rushed out.
The woman's whisper slid across the back of his neck:
"Welcome home."
Aarav stepped inside
—and the door slammed shut.