The trapdoor slammed shut as his hands slipped.
The edge missed his fingers by a breath. The impact jolted the boards under his knees and sent a dry puff of dust into the air. Hao stumbled backward until his spine hit the sloping attic roof.
His heart hammered against his ribs, too fast, loud enough that for a second he swore something else in the dark would hear it. His lungs stuttered, misfired, then finally remembered how to drag air in and out.
He stayed there in the dark, shoulders pressed to the wood, breathing hard.
This is fine, he told himself. Totally fine. It's just a dream leaning a bit too hard into the atmosphere.
He raised his hand and slapped his own cheek.
A sharp sting bloomed across his skin, bright and immediate.
"Should I just stay here until this ends?" he muttered. His voice sounded thin in the attic. "How do you even wake yourself up from this kind of dream…"
He slapped himself again, more out of stubborn routine than actual hope. The second hit landed harder. His skin burned. His eyes watered on reflex.
The pain was real enough.
The situation didn't care.
It's my dream, he thought, pressing his palm to the offended cheek. So why does it feel like something else is driving?
He tried to will something to change. To force the ceiling to crack open into sky, or to make a window appear, or to drag himself back to his bed by sheer focus.
Nothing moved.
No convenient fade to white. No glitch. Just the attic, the dark, the dust, his own pulse in his ears.
"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. Damp and heavy in a way that didn't belong in clean cabin air. Wrong in a way his mind didn't have a word for, but his body understood immediately.
His stomach tightened. His tongue went dry.
He climbed down from the attic, each step slower than the last, listening between creaks.
Nothing.
No voices. No footsteps. No clatter of bottles or scrape of chairs. The music that had once filled the cabin was long gone, cut clean off.
Just that smell, curling through the dark like something alive and curious, slipping into his nose and throat, refusing to leave.
He reached the bottom and paused, one hand on the wall.
If he stayed ignorant, it wouldn't make anything less real.
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, just borrowed from somewhere.
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 biting at his skin.
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 that told him to stop, to get up, to walk away and pretend he'd felt nothing.
If something in the dark wanted him dead, the least he could do was figure out how it liked to work. Better to know how he might die than let his brain invent something worse.
His fingers found skin, and he had to force himself to keep going.
His hand slid along the arm, feeling for breaks. No jagged edges under the skin. No obvious angle that screamed bone snapped here. Not crushed, then. Not caught under something heavy.
He moved up to the elbow, then the upper arm. The muscle felt slack, boneless in a way that had nothing to do with actual bones. No swelling. No torn chunk missing. No clear bite mark there.
His palm drifted to the shoulder, then across the torso.
Ribs beneath a shirt. He pressed a little harder, feeling for anything out of place. Nothing jutted out, nothing felt caved in. If something had hit them hard enough to break the whole front, it hadn't left the kind of damage he was expecting.
He spread his fingers, searching along the fabric for slashes or holes. No clean line where a blade might've gone in. No ragged tear wide enough for claws.
He found small things instead. Snags. Tiny punctures in the cloth like teeth had tested it, then moved on without committing.
Whatever had done this hadn't just stabbed, or clawed, or hit and run.
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, like it was trying to throw itself out of his chest.
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.
Wake up, he thought, not even forming the words with his mouth. Come on. Reset. Menu. Something.
Nothing happened.
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, in one vicious motion, torn everything important loose.
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 and hadn't quite accepted the answer.
"…What the hell…"
If he had to describe it, he'd say it looked like too much force had been poured into too small a place, until everything in her neck tore loose at once and tried to escape in different directions.
Great. My brain finally lets me have fun while dreaming, and this is what happens later, he thought.
The joke barely landed in his own head. It scraped past the edge of hysteria, a thin, brittle line pressing at the back of his mind like something waiting to crack it open.
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 or stare back.
This was too warm. Too recent. Too real.
If it was a dream, his brain had serious problems.
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 someone had propped up and forgotten.
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 shattered like 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 without bothering to tidy up.
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. It had been efficient and silent.
"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, like the house was listening to it.
He forced himself to move.
In another room, the one the couple had probably hidden in earlier, everything looked almost normal at first glance.
A tall, old mirror stood against the wall, its wooden frame so worn it looked like part of the cabin rather than furniture.
It reflected the room back at him in one clean piece: the bed, the open wardrobe, the faint outline of his own silhouette in the doorway. No cracks. No blood. No message scratched into the glass. Just him and an empty room.
The only thing out of place was the window.
It was open a little wider than it should've been, curtain pulled to one side like someone had yanked it out of the way in a hurry. Cold air slid in through the gap, carrying a thin ribbon of forest smell: leaves, damp earth, smoke from the chimney below.
On the floor beneath the window, a faint smear of dirt marked where a shoe had caught the boards. The kind of subtle, scuffed line you only noticed if you were looking for it.
He stepped closer. The mirror didn't reveal anything new, just echoed the scene from a different angle: a dark room, an open window, and no one left inside.
The couple was gone.
No shoes left by the bed. No phones on the nightstand. Just the draft from outside, the quiet creak of the window frame, and the unsettling possibility that they hadn't been dragged out.
They'd climbed out on their own.
He turned slowly, listening.
Nothing. No breathing except his own. No whisper of movement behind the walls. No creak that couldn't be explained by settling wood.
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, waiting for his next move.
Watching.
He stood there, framed by his own reflections and the slow draft from the window, 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. And somehow survive."
He patted his pockets.
Phone.
His fingers met nothing.
Not "it's not there," not "maybe it fell under a couch."
It simply wasn't a thing that existed. Like the dream had decided he'd never owned one.
The lack of it sent a small, sharp spike of panic through him that the gore hadn't. No easy light. No call for help. No proof this was connected to anything outside this building at all.
His gaze drifted back toward the hallway.
Toward the basement door.
It waited there like a quiet threat, patient and solid. Like it knew he'd keep ending up near it no matter which way he tried to walk.
"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.
But something about him was off.
His gaze didn't track Hao right away. It slid past him, unfocused, like he was following a silent instruction whispered from somewhere behind his eyes.
He held a butcher knife dangling from his hand. Not raised. Not guarded.
Just… there.
Obedient.
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. Once. Slow.
"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. Like someone had forgotten to turn that part on.
Hao didn't change expression.
Kevin didn't blink.
Silence tightened between them like a drawn wire.
If this is my dream, Hao thought, why does it feel like I'm the one following a script?
Then Kevin lunged.