He stood in the doorway for a second longer than he should have.
Cold air still clung to his skin, seeping through his shirt, prickling along the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades. The forest outside looked too still, like a photo pasted over something moving.
He shut the door.
The latch clicked.
The sound felt small in the hallway.
He stayed there, hand still on the handle, listening to his own pulse in his ears, to the emptiness of the cabin behind him.
That was when something shattered.
Glass.
He spun around.
The kitchen, which he'd just left, exhaled a new sound: a faint chime of breaking shards settling.
He moved toward it, steps slow, ribs complaining with each breath.
The window he'd almost climbed through earlier was no longer a rectangle of unbroken dark.
It was a ragged wound in the wall.
Moonlight cut straight through the empty frame. Shards glittered across the sink and floor, scattered like ice catching the light. A few pieces still clung stubbornly to the edges, trembling in the wind.
The window stared at him like an open mouth.
No going outside… because that thing was there, he realized.
If he'd ignored the voice and forced his way through earlier, he wouldn't have hit freedom.
He would've hit that.
His voice had told him not to.
His voice.
Except… not just his.
The thought lodged in his mind like a splinter.
Something else is talking with my mouth, he realized.
He didn't have time to unpack that.
A sound slid out of the dark kitchen.
Not footsteps. Not a clumsy human stagger.
Not dragging.
Something between a wet slide and a slow scrape. Like meat being pulled along wood. Like something too heavy for its own movements, but moving anyway.
Every instinct he had screamed at him to walk away.
He stepped closer.
His hand found the doorframe, fingers curling around the edge as he leaned just far enough to see.
The thing that emerged from the dark barely fit into the word shape.
Moonlight from the hallway windows reached in and touched it in thin streaks, picking out pieces of its body in pale silver. The rest was swallowed by shadow.
His brain tried to stitch the glimpses together and failed.
It had height. Its upper body towered above the doorway, hunched just enough to keep it from scraping the ceiling beam. Four arms supported it, grotesquely long limbs digging into the floor and walls, each ending in too-thick fingers that pressed into the wood like they wanted to root there.
Its lower body wasn't legs at all, but a dense, coiled trunk. Something between a tail and a column of muscle, pushing it forward with horrible, patient weight. Each flex carried it a little closer.
Its chest sank inward, caved in as if the inside had been scooped out and nothing had bothered to fill it back in.
Its head—
Its head was wrong.
Sitting atop the broken stump of its neck was a perfectly round ball of twisted black branches. They were woven into a sphere, each stick shifting and tightening, loosening and curling, as if the whole thing breathed.
No eyes. No ears. No nose.
Just a circular mouth in the center.
Teeth ringed its edge and spiraled inward like drill blades, crowding over each other in damp, jagged rows. They glistened faintly in the light, wet with something he did not want to name.
Hao's breath jammed in his throat.
Every time he tried to focus on one part of it, something blurred. Limbs seemed too many, then too few. Distances lied. Parts of its body stretched, shrank, or skipped sideways between blinks.
His mind slid off it like it was covered in oil.
A quiet sound echoed out of his memory.
Tac… tac… tac…
The attic rope tapping against the floor.
That rope…
It's tied to this thing. To this whole nightmare.
He swallowed. His throat felt dry and raw.
"I'll just lock myself in the attic with it," he muttered, voice low and almost calm. "Whatever happens, happens. I'm done with this."
Even he wasn't sure if he was joking.
He turned.
Then he ran.
This time, he didn't bother being quiet.
His feet hammered the steps, each one jarring his ribs and sending dull shocks through his skull. His hands skimmed the railing without really gripping it, just using it to keep his balance as he took the stairs two at a time.
The creature followed.
He could hear it.
The scrape of limbs along the walls as too-long arms dragged its bulk forward.
The wet, dense drag of its trunk against the floor and steps.
The soft, muffled grind of its teeth as they turned inside that circular mouth.
It didn't scream.
It didn't roar.
It didn't need to.
It just chased him, patient and relentless, as if it had all the time in the world and he was the only thing worth spending it on.
And for the first time, running up into the dark felt safer than anything waiting below.