The House That Listens Back
The mirrors blink. The stairs breathe. And the girl in your memory isn’t you anymore.
Written for the 30 Days of Fright Horror Story Writing Challenge. Come and join us!
The compass wouldn’t stop spinning. Not wildly. Not in panic. It turned slow and deliberate, like it was remembering how to want something. I didn’t recall picking it up, but there it was in my hand, warm, a little damp. The glass was smudged. The metal felt sticky, like it had grown there, pulled from under my skin instead of placed in my palm. It pulsed once, like a borrowed heartbeat.
The room was dim and wrong. Photographs hung at uneasy angles, their subjects blurred just enough to feel intentional. A few weren’t photos at all but drawings: spiral towers, doorways with no hinges, silhouettes with their eyes scratched out. One frame showed a girl I never was. Another showed me—older, smiling, eyes empty.
The carpet felt soft beneath me. Too soft. Like a towel left wet too long. My shoes were gone. I hadn’t noticed taking them off. The air smelled like burnt sugar and wax, like hair singed by candlelight. Like the moment before you open a forgotten attic box and realize you shouldn’t have.
The candle was already lit. Beside it, a matchbox with one stick left. The others: used, blackened, counted. I didn’t remember striking any of them. I didn’t remember arriving. Only the compass in my hand, and the way it refused to let go.
It pointed toward the open door. Not north. Not anywhere a compass should point. Just forward, into a sky without weather. The trees leaned inward like gossiping bodies. Behind me, the house exhaled. Soft. Long. As if it had finally recognized me.
I stepped outside.
The wind didn’t move. The trees didn’t stir. But the world tilted forward, offering something it couldn’t name. The ground dipped into a narrow path that pulsed like a throat. Roots pressed up from the soil like knuckles. The leaves above held their breath.
The path should have been familiar. I’d come here before. Hadn’t I? The bend near the stone wall. The broken fence post. The hollow where we used to bury coins for wishes we didn’t say aloud. Only now the post was whole. The wall unbroken. The hollow full of teeth.
The compass shivered once. The needle twitched. Beneath the glass, something had been scrawled in ink. One word.
RETURN.
I walked.
The forest curved with me, bent in ways that felt anatomical. The air tasted like chalk and citrus peel, sharp and stale. I passed a tree I’d carved as a child—or thought I had. There should have been initials. A heart. Instead, there was a name. Mine. Still wet. Still bleeding.
No birdsong. No insects. No distant animal calls. But I heard breathing. Not from the canopy. From below.
The path narrowed.
I remembered him walking beside me. The boy. My friend. The one who gave me the compass. Or maybe I gave it to him first. Or maybe we never existed at the same time. We’d sat behind the school, sketching shapes that didn’t belong to the world. He drew buildings with too many windows. Roofs that caved inward. Doors that opened onto more doors.
“They aren’t drawings,” he said once. “They’re instructions.”
“It doesn’t work yet. But it will. You’ll know when.”
He smelled like graphite and paper and the inside of a room after rain. I remember that better than his face. I remember how he pressed the compass into my hand like a secret and smiled like it already hurt him.
There are no photos. I’ve looked. No one else remembers. His name slips every time I try to write it. But the compass remembers. It warms when I think about the shape of his shoulder beside mine. About how I never said goodbye. About how I stopped returning and never asked why.
—
The clearing was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe the house had grown. It looked unfinished and overgrown at once. One turret bent inward, moss crusting its seam. The windows were warped, smeared, as if something inside had tried to look out and lost its shape. The roof bowed low in the center, sagging like paper softened by breath.
It hadn’t been finished before. Last time, there were beams exposed. A wall not yet painted. A staircase without railing. But now it was whole. Not new. Not aged. Just inevitable.
It didn’t wait for me. It had prepared.
The porch creaked with softness, not age. My foot pressed into wood that remembered weight. The door was tall, too tall, and pale. Translucent, almost. A film stretched across it like skin over something that had stopped pretending. There was no handle. Just an impression. A handprint. Smaller than mine by half a finger. But I knew it. The way you know your name whispered from another room.
I pressed my palm to it.
The surface yielded. Gently. It wasn’t temperature I felt. It was recognition. The way a body leans toward something familiar. The door opened without sound. Or maybe the sound was too intimate to hear.
The breath that met me wasn’t air. It smelled like an old wool sweater. Like tears on paper. Like the exact shade of my mother’s hair, the day she didn’t come back. It was the smell of everything I had forgotten deliberately.
Inside, the dark wasn’t empty. It pulsed.
I stepped across the threshold, and something behind me sealed shut. Not slammed. Not even closed.
It ended.
It smelled like my childhood room. The one I never returned to. The one they cleaned out while I was away. Dust and fabric softener. The waxy scent of old crayons. But wrong. Too clean. Too preserved. Like someone had tried to rebuild it from memory and missed just enough to make it worse.
The hallway stretched long and hungry. The wallpaper shimmered faintly when I blinked, as if it hadn’t decided what it wanted to be. I kept walking. The floor pressed up against my soles in places. Elsewhere, it gave, like a breath drawn inward. The light came from nowhere. Not above. Not behind. Just a glow—diffuse, patient.
Mirrors appeared along the wall. One after another. Each framed in something that might once have been wood but now looked grown. Organic. Knotted.
The first showed me now. My hair slightly off. My expression just behind. The second showed me at twelve, wearing the hoodie I’d mourned like a sibling. She blinked once. Her mouth moved. I didn’t stay to read it.
The third was empty. But only at first. A silhouette emerged, slowly. Familiar. Not.
Her teeth were too straight.
I walked faster.
—
At the hallway’s bend, a table grew from the floor like a bone refusing burial. On it sat a notebook.
His.
I recognized it before I touched it. The torn corner. The smudged pages. It had once smelled like him. Now it smelled like damp paper. Like something too long buried brought back into air.
I opened it.
The first page showed me. Head turned toward the wall. One hand pressed to something that looked like breathing wallpaper. The next page showed my back. The third was a drawing of a hallway, and in it, a chair. Empty.
Then a sentence:
You promised you wouldn’t come back.
I turned the page.
It began to bleed. Not ink. The paper softened at the center and wept something pale. I tried to drop it. It clung to my palm like it had grown there.
The hallway behind me disappeared. Not with sound. Not with motion.
With certainty.
I kept walking.
The walls drew closer. Not tighter. Just more intent. Their texture grew skin-like. The pattern more like veins. Every few steps, I felt my name whispered not in air, but inside me. Something old remembering.
A door waited ahead. Tall. Slightly open.
Not a door.
A wound.
Not torn. Not broken.
Made.
The stairs rose behind me. I hadn’t seen them before. They coiled up like a throat mid-swallow. The railing glistened. The first step sighed beneath my foot.
I began to climb.
Each step adjusted under me. Too soft, then too hard. The wood flexed with memory. With muscle.
A window opened in the wall beside me.
I looked in.
My old bedroom. Again. But altered. My backpack in the wrong place. The music box open. A different girl asleep in the bed. Not me. Not quite. She mouthed something. I didn’t stay to see what.
The next window showed the hallway I had just walked. The mirrors blinked in slow sequence. The notebook was gone. Or maybe it hadn’t been there yet.
The staircase grew narrower. The light behind me folded. The house was closing.
My knees ached. My teeth felt loose. The air thinned.
My hand slipped on the railing. A slick trail marked my palm. Not blood. Something clearer. I wiped it on my jeans. The fabric drank it in.
One more bend. A landing.
The wall ahead had peeled open. Not like a door. More like skin. Just wide enough to enter. It smelled like a memory I hadn’t had yet.
At my feet, the notebook. Open again.
This time, diagrams.
Not of me. Of something like me. A spine in profile. My jaw, labeled. My hands, measured. Beneath one sketch:
We kept the shape. We waited.
Inside, humming. A voice like mine. And beneath it, something older. A second voice, unfinished.
—
Here is Part 4 (Final) of The House That Listens Back – Version 3.4 (Final Copyedited Text):
I stepped forward.
The attic was round. Not circular—round like the inside of something living. The walls glistened. There were no windows. The floor was too soft.
She was already there. She looked like me. She sat in the chair, back too straight, hands too still. Her skin had a shine that wasn’t sweat. Her smile was quiet. Her eyes didn’t blink when mine did.
The mirror behind her pulsed. It didn’t reflect. It showed. Me as a girl. Me as a stranger. Me as I might have been if I’d never left. Me as I was becoming now.
She spoke. Or maybe I did.
There was no difference anymore.
I sat. Or I was already seated.
The chair wasn’t wood. It was flesh folded to fit me. It sighed when I settled. It exhaled through my spine.
The humming continued.
The notebook lay in my lap.
Its words were already inside me.
I am
I was
I asked
I offered
I remembered
I returned
The air bent. The house adjusted. The attic softened like a held breath.
I heard footsteps downstairs.
A new voice. Calling out. Someone younger. Familiar.
Another one coming home.
I smiled. Not because I remembered. But because now, I listened back.
THE END
Written for the 30 Days of Fright Horror Story Writing Challenge. Come and join us!