The House We Couldn't Leave

The next morning, Lina didn't speak.

That alone wasn't strange—she was the quietest among us. But there was something different this time. She wasn't simply silent.

She looked… blank.

Her eyes didn't follow us. Her hands didn't fidget the way they used to. She sat on her bed, unmoving, staring at nothing in particular.

"She's tired," Mina said. "We all are."

But I watched her for hours.

And Lina never blinked.

Reya was the one who snapped first.

We were gathered in the attic again, trying to piece together what the mirror room had shown us. Reya had brought her sketchbook, flipping through it as we spoke—until she froze on a page she didn't remember drawing.

"What is it?" Sofi asked.

Reya's face drained of color. She turned the sketchbook to show us.

It was the nursery we'd found—the hidden one below the stairs—but drawn in incredible detail.

And in one of the tiny cribs was a girl with dark curls.

Lina.

There was her name, scratched onto the wood.

"I never drew this," Reya whispered. "I swear. I never even saw this crib."

We all stared at the image.

And then Mina said, "There's something behind her."

A shape.

Just behind the crib, almost invisible.

Not fully drawn, like Reya's hand had refused to complete it.

It looked… feminine.

Long hair. No face.

The same shape we'd seen in the mirrors.

The seventh girl.

Or the wife.

Or both.

That was when we decided to go back.

Not to the mirrors—those were gone.

To the nursery.

We needed to know what else was hidden beneath the stairs.

The hallway was colder than before. The air stuck to our skin like film. The spiral key Tara had used still hung from a ribbon around her neck. She led us.

No one wanted to be first.

No one wanted to be last.

The ramp creaked as we descended.

I noticed something strange: there were now seven steps, not six. I counted twice.

Tara unlocked the door.

The nursery hadn't changed—at least not at first glance.

The tiny beds, the broken mobile, the heavy silence.

But Reya walked straight to the crib she'd sketched and stood very still.

"It's here," she said. "Just like the drawing."

She knelt beside it.

Tara followed her gaze and paled.

There, scratched into the wood—Lina.

But Lina didn't react.

She just stood at the doorway, blinking slowly, her face blank.

Sofi approached her gently. "Lina?"

No answer.

Then her lips parted.

"I already slept here," she whispered.

We all froze.

"What did you say?" Mina asked.

But Lina turned around and walked straight to the far wall of the nursery—the one lined with decayed shelving.

She ran her fingers along the mold-black wood.

Then she pressed inward.

And a section of the wall slid open.

Behind it: stone stairs, spiraling down.

"I dreamed about this," Lina said softly.

No one else had ever seen it.

Not even Tara.

We looked at each other, then followed.

Down.

Deeper.

At the bottom was a round room—dusty, windowless, circular.

Like a vault.

There were seven small beds arranged in a ring.

Six of them were occupied.

Dust-covered, but clearly shaped by bodies once laid there.

The seventh bed was bare.

But in the center of the room was a small raised dais.

A coffin.

We approached slowly.

The coffin was carved from pale, sea-worn wood. No lid.

Just a name etched across its edge.

"Mina."

Mina froze.

"That's not—"

But it was.

Same spelling.

Same curve of the "M" she used when signing the attendance sheet on our first day.

Sofi took a step back. "Is this a grave?"

"No," I whispered. "It's a placeholder."

Reya looked up at the ceiling. "This place isn't real. It's a memory loop. A simulation of something that already happened."

"But we're still living it," Aria said.

"What if this isn't our first time here?" Mina asked. Her voice shook. "What if we've been here before—and forgot?"

The idea settled in like poison.

What if the house didn't trap you once?

What if it trapped you again and again, until you broke enough to stay?

What if this wasn't the first time Mina had come down those stairs?

What if it wasn't even her first death?

Lina walked to the seventh bed—the empty one—and sat.

Her blank stare didn't change.

Tara moved to pull her up, but Lina turned suddenly.

"I don't want to leave," she said.

"You're tired," Tara whispered.

"No. I remember now."

Lina looked at each of us. Slowly.

"Last time, I left. The others stayed. But the house followed me. It always does."

The air shifted.

The walls groaned.

One of the beds—the one labeled with a name long worn away—collapsed into dust.

Then the seventh bed made a sound.

It sighed.

Like it had been waiting.

We ran.

Not because someone told us to.

Not because we understood what was happening.

Because every part of our body screamed to flee.

We didn't stop until we reached the ground floor again.

We slammed the baseboard shut.

Tara locked it with the spiral key and didn't speak for a long time.

Reya was shaking.

Sofi was crying quietly.

Mina stood still.

"I'm not going back down

there," she said.

"Neither am I," I whispered.

But behind us, the nursery's door—once sealed—stood wide open.

And Lina was gone.