She entered the darkness.
Not bravely. Not even willingly. Just inevitably.
The walls weren't solid. They moved—breathing, perhaps, or twitching in some unseen wind. The hallway she passed through was narrow and slick with moisture. Every step echoed like she was walking inside a throat.
At the end, she emerged into a room that shouldn't have existed.
It looked like a child's bedroom. Hers. At age eight.
Wallpaper peeling in flowered curls. A stuffed rabbit missing an eye on the pillow. The closet door open just a crack, as it always had been.
Except this version was wrong.
The bed was too clean, like no child had ever slept in it.
The floorboards had no dust—but no marks either. No scuffs. No history.
Like it was copied from memory. But whose?
Mira knelt beside the dresser. Her old journal lay atop it.
She opened it.
All the pages were blank—except the first.
Written in jagged, childlike scrawl:
"You're not supposed to remember."
Suddenly, the closet door creaked wider.
She turned, but there was no one there.
Only the sound of breathing.
Hers.
And something else's.