For a moment, no one could move.
The ceiling above them bulged and cracked, the sound low and brittle like the groan of ice shifting on a frozen lake. Dust rained down in slow, glittering spirals. The face above the plaster—if it was a face—pressed closer, features sliding like reflections on water. Its mouth worked silently, forming shapes no throat should shape.
Then the ceiling breathed in.
The air in the room rushed upward, stealing warmth, dragging loose paper, ash, and the remnants of their breath toward the widening fissure. The lantern's flame stretched thin, then vanished in a final flicker.
Darkness swallowed them whole.
Evan's voice came ragged through the dark. "Clara! Where—where are you?"
"Here!" she called back, but her voice seemed to scatter, reflected from impossible angles. It didn't echo—it multiplied.
Dozens of Claras whispered back from the walls, from the ceiling, from beneath the floorboards.
"Here.""Here.""Here."
Marcy screamed.
The floor tilted, subtle at first, then sharply—like the room itself had decided to invert. Furniture slid. Ben grabbed for the door, but it had melted into the wall, wood flowing like wax in a furnace. He struck it with his shoulder and felt it give under his weight—not open, but yield, like pushing through fabric.
He stumbled forward—and disappeared.
"Ben!" Clara lunged toward where he'd been, but the wall was solid now, seamless.
Noah reached out and caught her wrist. "Don't. It's shifting. It's not real anymore."
But the floor continued to move, pitching them forward. The ceiling yawned open above, a black mouth rimmed with splintered beams and curling paper. Beyond it wasn't the attic. It wasn't sky. It was… motion—slow, swirling, immense.
Shapes moved within it like a current under glass.
Evan stared up, trembling. "Is that—clouds?"
Clara shook her head. "No. It's inside the house."
The air vibrated, low and resonant, the same thrumming pulse they'd heard beneath the cellar. The walls shimmered, seams of light crawling across them like veins under thin skin.
And then gravity lost its meaning.
The room folded upward, turning on itself. Floor became ceiling. The torn wallpaper streamed down like ribbons in water. Clara felt her feet leave the ground. For a moment, she was suspended—weightless—watching fragments of the room drift beside her: a shattered chair, a teacup, a portrait frame spinning silently in the dark.
Marcy's hand brushed hers, cold as marble. Their eyes met, and for a heartbeat, the entire house seemed to hold its breath.
Then they fell.
Not down—not really. Just through.
Through light that wasn't light, and space that wasn't space. The sensation was like tumbling through a thought, through memory made solid and air made liquid.
When Clara's eyes opened again, she was lying on cold stone.
The room was vast—cathedral-like—but wrong in its dimensions. Columns rose and twisted into arches that met no ceiling. Paintings hung in the air like suspended ghosts, their frames glinting with impossible geometry. The portraits from the gallery were here—hundreds of them—drifting, turning, whispering softly to one another.
Evan was beside her, coughing, bloodless but breathing. Marcy and Noah lay nearby, dazed but conscious.
"Where are we?" Marcy's voice was small, trembling.
Clara pushed herself up on trembling arms. "Still in the house, I think."
Noah pointed toward the distance. "Then why can't we see the walls?"
The floor stretched on and on, vanishing into a pale, shifting fog. Somewhere far away, a faint rhythmic pulse echoed—the same slow heartbeat that had haunted the house.
Evan wiped dust from his face. "It's—It's alive. All of it. We're inside it now."
Clara turned toward him. "No," she said softly. "It's not alive. It's remembering us."
Something stirred in the fog—a ripple, as if something vast had moved just beneath the surface. The portraits turned their faces toward it, every painted gaze lifting in silent reverence.
Marcy took a step back, shaking her head. "It's coming closer."
Clara's lantern, cracked but still faintly glowing, flickered once. The light stretched across the stone, and for an instant, she saw it—the silhouette of the mansion itself, inverted above them, its foundations suspended like roots hanging from the sky.
And beneath those roots, something immense stirred.
The heartbeat quickened.
The portraits began to whisper in unison, their voices overlapping until the words lost meaning—just sound, rising, merging with the pulse of the house.
Noah covered his ears. "Make it stop! Please, make it stop!"
But Clara didn't move. Her eyes were fixed on the dark horizon, where the fog had begun to part.
There—half-formed, emerging from the void—was the outline of a door.
And painted across its surface, in the same fine hand as the journal entries, were five names.
Hers was the last.