October 16
The house is cocooned in a fog so dense it feels alive, pressing against the windows. I smear condensation from the windowpane, searching outside for definition or edges, but everything has dissolved into a void of gray. The air inside is stagnant, heavy with silence. The refrigerator hums a solitary note, anchoring me to a reality that feels increasingly distant. I haven’t seen the neighbors for days now; shadows flicker behind their curtains but evaporate when I dare to look. Loneliness warps the space around me, bending the air into unfamiliar shapes.
October 17
The fog has lifted, but what's left behind is worse: complete silence, total stillness, and I am a frightened creature with blood rushing in my ears. Footprints snake around the house. The kind of steps that drag, like their maker was injured, or hesitating. They terminate at the porch, the last impressions pressed deep into the mushy grass, as if someone stood there for hours. No letters, no junk mail, not even a flier. The door remains unknocked. The sky hangs low, heavy with waiting.
October 18
The power flickered and died in the early hours, but that’s not what woke me. It was the scratching, a tentative rasp at first, escalating to relentless claws raking against the walls. I lit a candle, but its flame cast shadows that twitched and contorted into monsters. I went to the basement, thinking I’d find signs of rats, but there was no sign of anything. Just empty air thick with rot, rising through the dark, wet earth beneath my feet. I set traps, but nothing came—nothing I can see.
October 19
I think I dreamt—the walls bled in the dark, sluggish rivers of black seeping from the ceiling and pooling around my feet. I wanted to scream but I couldn't catch my breath, I was pinned beneath the weight of the house itself, or something far greater. I woke sweaty and shivering, my fingers caked in dirt. I scrubbed it away under the sputtering tap, but some mycelial quality of the soil still digs into me.
October 20
The air is full of swirling dust, infused with a scent sweet and rotten. I knocked on the neighbors’ door. Nothing. Silence answered me, and yet, through the wood, I heard the faintest rustle. Something shifting. Or breathing. I should leave—I packed a bag—but even as I switched the ignition I knew the sputtering engine would fail me. As I turned back, the house loomed larger, its windows like unblinking eyes. How long has it been watching?
October 21
More footprints, pressed half an inch deep into the earth, circling the house in tight, predatory patterns. I've sealed every door, every window, but I know it doesn’t matter. The walls are closing in. The silence is punctuated by groaning, rasping under the floorboards—a sound of wood and nail, the house murmuring in a tongue I don't understand.
October 22
The voice is unmistakable now. It whispered my name last night, maybe from just outside the window. I didn’t dare move, didn’t breathe, but I heard it close, curling through the air like smoke. This morning, a dead bird lay on the doorstep, its body grotesquely flattened, bones protruding through mangled feathers. There were no footprints this time. Only the stench of decay rising with the dawn.
October 23
Another dream—I was buried deep beneath the walls, suffocating in the damp earth of the basement floor. The voice was louder there, echoing through the bones of the house, inviting me to come closer. A part of me wanted it. I woke again with muddy nails, my throat raw as if I’d been screaming. Memory blurs; reality feels porous.
October 24
The power is still out, and the house is darker than it’s ever been. The neighbors are gone. I went there today, walked through their empty living room, wiped the dust off their little porcelain dogs. Their food is still on the table, their coats still hanging by the door. A noise upstairs startled me and I ran back, but it didn’t feel like running away. More like running toward.
October 25
I haven’t slept. The walls are full of scratching things digging out, or maybe in. I hear my name called with a lover's inflection, full of hunger. My hair hangs in tangled clumps; I don't remember how I got the scratches that snake my arms. I don’t remember anything, really. The house inhales, and the air that moves through the halls takes my breath away. The walls pulse with growing need.
October 26
The house swallowed in the night, and the windows are gone. I know they were there yesterday, but now it’s just walls—endless, blank walls. I can’t leave. I tried. The doors don’t open any more. I don’t know where the keys are, although maybe I never did. The voice swells within the walls, a cacophony of whispers and wails. It demands an answer.
October 27
Last night, the scratching was inside the room—or perhaps inside me. It's almost a relief that I'm not alone. Space has lost its meaning; there are no corners, no ceiling. Only unending, breathing walls that ripple with color when I look away. Exhaustion weighs down my body, and I fall into sleep like drowning.
November 3
There is no house, but now I know its language.
Photo by Nastasia Makfinova on Unsplash
