~a fun little game~

The house stands at the end of a narrow road no one has bothered to maintain—half-buried in weeds, half-claimed by the forest that creeps a little closer every year. From a distance, it looks abandoned. Up close, it looks wrong, as if every beam and brick remembers something it wishes it could forget.

Inside, the air feels heavy, thick like the breath of something sleeping. The floorboards sag with age, but the way they creak never seems to match the footsteps that created the sound. The wallpaper—once a soft cream patterned with delicate vines—has curled away from the walls like peeling skin, revealing splintered wood beneath. In the corners, paint bubbles and cracks as if exposed to constant heat, though the house is cold enough to numb your fingers.

A long hallway stretches through the center, lined with doors that never stay exactly where you left them. Some sit slightly ajar even when you know you shut them. Others are firmly closed but tremble softly, as if someone on the other side is breathing against them. The walls here seem to lean inward, warping in the dim light, and sometimes the shadows look like hands stretching across the floor.

The living room is the largest space—the ritual room. Its ceiling is high enough that the darkness above always looks bottomless. Old furniture sits covered in sheets, but the sheets are never clean; they’re stained with long, dark smears that reappear no matter how many times they're washed or torn away. The chandelier overhead hangs crooked, swaying gently even when the air is still. Lights don’t work here. Any bulb that’s turned on burns out instantly, leaving the room lit only by the weak glow of the moon through fog-streaked windows.

The bathroom, where the ritual begins, feels colder than the rest of the house. The mirror is cracked in several places, reflecting your face in broken shards that don’t quite line up with your movements. Sometimes something else appears behind you in the reflection—a blur, a silhouette, a shape leaning too close. The light switch has been snapped off, leaving only exposed wiring. The door always shuts on its own.

Upstairs, the rooms are worse. The temperature drops sharply, and the smell of damp wood clings to everything. In one bedroom, the bed is still perfectly made, untouched since the night of the first game, but the mattress sags in the middle as if someone lies there even now. In another room, the windows are completely boarded up from the inside, the nails hammered in at strange angles, as if done by shaking hands during a panic. If you press your ear to the boards, you can hear faint tapping from the other side—too rhythmic to be random, too slow to be comforting.

At the end of the upstairs hall is a door no one remembers seeing before. It’s covered in deep claw marks that gouge through the wood, and when you reach for the knob, it feels warm—almost pulsing. Inside is a small attic-like chamber with no windows. The walls are covered in charcoal drawings: long figures, hollow faces, tall shadows with twisting limbs. Every drawing is facing the same direction—toward the center of the room, where a single circle of soot marks the floor.

The basement is the worst of all. It shouldn’t be as large as it is, but the staircase goes down farther than the house should allow. The air hums faintly, vibrating through your bones. Old tools hang from the walls, rusted and sharp. Chains drag along the floor as if something drifts through them. The darkness here is so thick that even a flashlight beam seems swallowed before it reaches the walls. And in that dark is the faintest sound: someone whispering your name, very softly… and very close.

The entire house feels alive—listening, watching, remembering. It shifts when no one is looking. It breathes when the wind is still. And for the unfortunate souls who return, it already knows their footsteps.

It has been waiting.