Lena slammed her shoulder into the front door again. Her breath was ragged, heart thundering behind her ribs like it wanted to escape her chest.
Nothing.
The door didn't even rattle. No creak, no give. It might as well have been part of the wall.
Behind her, Darren grunted as he hurled a dining chair at one of the tall parlor windows. The glass cracked—just barely—but refused to shatter. No shards. No satisfying break. The chair bounced back with a dull thud, landing at his feet like it had struck rubber.
"This is impossible," he muttered, breath fogging. "Physics doesn't just stop working."
But the manor didn't seem to care.
It made its own rules.
Lena staggered back from the door, shaking out her arms as if that would loosen the rising panic slithering into her chest. "Try the side entrance," she said, voice sharp with urgency. "Or the kitchen door. Anything that leads out."
Darren nodded and took off down the hallway, his shoes skidding over the warped floorboards. The corridor seemed to stretch as he ran, every step lengthening the distance to the next doorway. The walls pulsed subtly, shifting like lungs inhaling. Doorframes blinked in and out at the corners of his vision, flickering like damaged film.
The wallpaper peeled back at the edges like old stage curtains.
Back in the foyer, Lena rested her forehead against the door, forcing her eyes shut and trying to draw a full breath. The wood was cold, slick with condensation.
Then a sound drifted down the stairwell behind her.
A laugh.
High-pitched. Feminine. Familiar.
Eden.
Lena froze.
It wasn't distorted or ghostly—not the tortured wail of some horror-movie banshee. It was real. Bright. That specific delighted little hiccup Eden used to let out when she cracked herself up during rehearsal. A sound full of life.
It made Lena's insides twist, sharp and sudden.
"Eden?" she whispered.
The air changed.
It thickened around her like wet velvet, each breath harder than the last. She backed away from the door slowly, drawn toward the stairwell even as dread curled around her spine.
A flicker in her peripheral vision. A shadow dancing along the staircase wall—graceful, sinuous, like a dancer warming up backstage.
She turned toward it.
Nothing.
But she was no longer alone.
From the corners of the hall, shadows stretched and shifted. They moved with purpose, but weren't connected to any objects. No light source cast them. They flickered like projections, skipping frames.
Lena stumbled back, voice cracking. "Darren!"
Silence.
The hallway ahead twisted like celluloid film burning in a projector. The ceiling dipped, and a chandelier overhead pulsed with a dull, rhythmic light. Not flickering—throbbing. Like a heartbeat.
The windows showed nothing outside. No stars. No moon. Not even night. Just blackness.
She ran.
Darren slammed his shoulder into the kitchen door, growling under his breath. It flexed, groaned—but didn't break.
He grabbed a cast-iron skillet off the counter and brought it down on the small glass pane in the center of the door.
The glass didn't shatter.
It rippled. Absorbed the blow like water.
"What the hell?" he muttered, backing away.
He turned—
And the kitchen wasn't the kitchen anymore.
It was a tour bus.
Narrow aisle. Overhead lights buzzing dimly. Velvet benches lined both sides, faded and stained. Posters of Eden were taped haphazardly to the walls, worn with time, curling at the corners.
A shrine on wheels.
The air buzzed low, like the engine was running, though he felt no vibration in the floor.
"No," he said, backing up. "No, no, no."
He blinked. For a split second, the kitchen flickered back—just for a breath—and then it was gone. The bus returned, solid and claustrophobic.
Overhead, Eden's voice crackled through unseen speakers.
"Sometimes the only way out… is the punchline."
He stumbled down the aisle, hands raised like he was warding something off.
Then he saw them.
At the far end of the bus—figures.
Not real ones. Flickering shadows caught in loops: a roadie lighting a cigarette with a head that never turned, a stage manager counting silently with twitching fingers, a warm-up comic mouthing jokes into a hairbrush microphone. Familiar faces, distorted.
They weren't people.
Just echoes. Old memories stuck on rewind.
The bus doors hissed open behind him.
He turned.
It wasn't outside.
It was the manor again.
The hallway he'd left just minutes—seconds?—ago.
He stood there frozen, mind scrambling for logic.
Then: "Darren!" Lena's voice, shrill and distant.
He ran.
Lena turned a corner too sharply and slammed into Darren. They both gasped, startled more by each other than anything else.
"I saw—" she began.
"I know," he cut in. "The bus. The shadows. Her laugh. Nothing makes sense anymore."
"We have to find the others," Lena said. Her voice was tight, fraying at the edges.
Darren nodded. But the hallway in front of them shifted again. The walls stretched upward. Doorframes narrowed like funhouse mirrors. One door clicked shut all by itself. Another blinked out of existence completely.
"This place is changing," he whispered.
"And sealing behind us," Lena said.
She looked back.
The hallway they'd just come from was gone. In its place hung a heavy red velvet curtain, slowly drawing closed.
She rushed forward and yanked it aside.
Behind it—only wall.
"Welcome to the show," she said bitterly.
The manor laughed.
Not Eden.
The house.
A deep, guttural chuckle that reverberated through the walls, the floor, the bones beneath the plaster.
Darren grabbed her wrist. "We don't split up again. That's what it wants."
Lena didn't argue.
They moved faster now, clinging to each other, trying to retrace steps that no longer existed. Every turn brought a new corridor. Every stair led somewhere different. They passed the
same framed photo of Eden—smiling with lipstick-red teeth and hollow eyes—three separate times.
Time warped, too. There were no clocks. But the weight in their limbs, the ache in their lungs, suggested hours had passed. Or none at all.
Finally, they found them.
Marla. Kay. Theo.
Huddled in the darkened parlor, all three staring at the fireplace, unmoving, like statues caught mid-thought.
Lena and Darren slowed as they entered, suddenly aware of how quiet it was.
On the mantle sat a single object.
The broken microphone.
Black, jagged at the stem, wires splayed like veins.
Behind it, scrawled in thick, wet red paint across the wallpaper:
"LAUGHTER IS FOREVER."
No one spoke.
The house breathed.
And somewhere, faint and fading, Eden laughed again.