The mud was ice-cold. It didn't just feel like wet earth; it felt like thousands of tiny, microscopic fingers pulling at Rayan's socks, his skin, his very resolve. As the floor of his apartment liquefied, the smell of the city—the exhaust fumes, the wet pavement, the neighbor's burnt toast—was violently replaced by the scent of ancient cedar and stagnant water.
Rayan lunged for the doorframe, his fingers clawing at the wood, but the pale, elongated hand of the figure gripped the door's edge with a strength that defied biology. The figure didn't pull him; it simply existed there, a static horror in a shifting world.
"Get away from me!" Rayan roared, his voice trembling. He swung the heavy wooden box, the one that had contained the key, at the pale hand.
The box connected with a sickening thud, but the figure didn't flinch. Instead, the wood of the doorframe began to sprout thick, black moss. The transformation was accelerating. His apartment was being digested by a forest that shouldn't exist. Rayan looked down; his waist was already submerged. The mud was thick, viscous, and moving with a life of its own.
Suddenly, the rusted iron key in his other hand flared with an agonizing heat.
The metal didn't just get hot; it began to glow with a dull, bruised purple light. The vibration he had felt earlier turned into a high-pitched scream that echoed not in the room, but inside his skull. Instinctively, Rayan jammed the glowing key toward the pale hand on the door.
The moment the iron touched the skin, a sound like a thousand dry leaves shattering filled the air. The figure hissed—a sound of escaping steam—and retracted its hand into the darkness of the mist.
The pressure on the door vanished. Rayan threw his weight forward, trying to scramble out of the sinking mud, but the floor gave way entirely. He didn't fall down into the apartment below. He fell sideways.
Gravity inverted. For a heartbeat, he was weightless, suspended in a void where the only thing visible was the glowing purple key. Then, impact.
Rayan slammed into a bed of damp leaves. The air was knocked out of his lungs, leaving him gasping, his chest burning. He rolled onto his side, coughing up a mouthful of gritty, black water.
He wasn't in Seattle anymore.
He was lying at the edge of a dirt road. Above him, the sky was a bruised shade of grey, Perpetual twilight hung over the landscape. There were no stars, no moon, just a thick, rolling fog that tasted like copper. To his left stood a wooden sign, rotting and tilted at a precarious angle.
WELCOME TO OAKHAVEN. POPULATION: --
The numbers had been scratched out, replaced by deep gouges in the wood that looked like claw marks.
Rayan stood up, his legs shaking. He checked his pockets. His phone was gone. His wallet was gone. All he had was the leather jacket on his back, the rusted key clutched in his white-knuckled fist, and the Polaroid photograph. He pulled the photo out.
The image had changed.
Earlier, it showed him standing in front of this very sign. Now, the Rayan in the photo was looking over his shoulder, pointing toward a line of trees behind him.
Rayan slowly turned around.
The forest was silent. Not a bird chirped; not a cricket hummed. The trees were massive, their bark white and peeling like diseased skin. And there, standing between two thick oaks about fifty yards away, was a house.
It was a two-story Victorian, or it had been once. Now, it was a skeletal remain, its windows shattered like broken teeth. Rayan recognized it instantly. It was the house from his nightmares—the one he had spent ten years in therapy trying to convince himself was a hallucination from a childhood trauma he couldn't remember.
"House number 412," he whispered. "The Miller estate."
He began to walk, drawn by a force he couldn't explain. Every step felt heavy, as if the ground itself was reluctant to let him move. As he reached the rusted gate of the estate, he noticed something peculiar. The grass inside the garden wasn't dead. It was vibrant, a lush, neon green that looked almost radioactive against the grey world outside the fence.
In the center of the garden sat a tea table. Two chairs were pulled out. On the table, a porcelain pot was steaming, sending a thin ribbon of white vapor into the stagnant air.
"You're late, Rayan," a voice called out.
Rayan froze. It wasn't the distorted voice of the faceless entity. It was a woman's voice. Soft, melodic, and terrifyingly familiar.
He turned his head toward the porch. Sitting in a rocking chair was a woman in a floral dress. She looked to be in her late twenties, her hair pinned back in a style from the late nineties. She was holding a book, her face partially obscured by the shadows of the porch roof.
"Mom?" Rayan's voice was barely a whisper.
His mother had died in the "tectonic shift" twenty years ago. He had seen the reports. He had attended a funeral with an empty casket.
The woman stood up, the rocking chair continuing to move with a rhythmic creak-thud, creak-thud. She stepped into the dim light. Her face was perfect, exactly as he remembered it, except for one thing.
Her eyes. They weren't eyes. They were two perfectly round, polished silver spheres that reflected Rayan's own terrified face back at him.
"Dinner is almost ready," she said, her smile widening until it reached too far across her cheeks, revealing too many teeth. "But you brought a guest. You know I don't like strangers in the house."
Rayan stepped back. "I'm alone. There's no one—"
"Not behind you, Rayan," his 'mother' said, pointing a slender finger at his shadow. "Inside your shadow. He's been hiding there since you picked up the key."
Rayan looked down at his feet. The grey twilight cast a long, thin shadow behind him. But his shadow wasn't following his movements. While Rayan stood perfectly still, his shadow was slowly reaching out its hand, mimicking the act of strangling someone.
And the shadow's hand was closing around Rayan's real throat.
Rayan felt the phantom pressure. His windpipe began to constrict. He clawed at his neck, but there was nothing there—only his own shadow mimicking the kill. He looked back at the woman on the porch, but she was no longer smiling. She was pointing at the rusted key in his hand.
"Use it, Rayan! Or the silence will take you!" she screamed, her voice cracking into a discordant screech.
The shadow pulled tighter. Rayan's vision began to blur into black spots. With the last of his strength, he didn't run. He looked at the Victorian house's front door. There was no keyhole. Instead, there was a mouth—a carved wooden mouth in the center of the door.
He lunged forward, falling onto the neon-green grass, and thrust the rusted iron key into the wooden mouth of the house.
The house screamed.
The sound was a mixture of a train wreck and a human sob. The ground shook violently. The shadow's grip on his throat snapped. Rayan tumbled forward as the front door swung open, not into a hallway, but into a blinding, searing white light that smelled of ozone and burnt sugar.
As he was sucked into the light, he heard one last thing—the sound of a telephone ringing. A modern, digital ringtone.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
He hit a hard, tiled floor. The white light faded.
Rayan blinked, his eyes stinging. He was in a bathroom. A clean, brightly lit, public restroom. The air smelled of cheap bleach. He looked in the mirror. He was covered in mud and dead leaves, but his neck bore the distinct, dark purple bruise of a handprint.
His pocket vibrated.
He reached in and pulled out a phone. It wasn't his phone. It was an old Nokia burner phone. There was one unread message.
"Wrong door, Rayan. Look behind the mirror."
Rayan looked at the mirror. He saw his reflection. But behind his reflection, in the third stall of the bathroom, he saw the bottom of a pair of legs hanging a few inches off the floor.
The legs were wearing the same boots Rayan was wearing right now.