Fear Changes Faces

Sometimes silence isn’t peace; it’s war. They say. They say about the house, that her presence is everywhere, that her influence sits in the corners like dust. Her ghost is you.

I’d heard the rumours. I stayed away. But how can you be free from anything if you keep running from it? How can you claim your convictions if you pray something will disappear without confrontation, if you hope you’ll never have to deal with it again? I thought about that. I’ve been here before. Everybody who runs only ends up in the wilderness. The best way to deal with something is to get through it, even if you do it afraid.

No: 88. Eight for infinity. If you believe the rumours, it goes on forever, the humming, the sense you can’t shake, the feeling that somebody’s always watching. She’s near— here. I gulped, tightened my grip on the suitcase. For one night, I told myself. Staring at the knob. It was wooden glass with the ghostly prints of someone who’d gone before. I was next. This was the only way.

Click. The turn of the lock sounded like an alarm to the spirits. If you believed the rumours.

The floorboards complained as I stepped inside; old wood, old life. Cracks showed the building’s age. What had it been? Three decades since its conception. Nobody’s home. At least, nobody in sight. If you believed the rumours. Wait until it’s darker, I’d heard. That’s where the magic begins.

I moved forward, dragging my weight, careful. My shoulders were tight; my heart ride an animal on a rollercoaster, waiting for the stillness to speak. My voice stayed trapped in my head. This is what living afraid looked like, I told myself, using thought to tame the tremor and convincing my heart that everything was normal. Everyone knew different.

Air. A breeze. A window left open somewhere. I shut the door behind me and followed the current as it hissed through the rooms, revealing their hollows. The place was narrow, compartmentalised, each room with its own small identity: very little furniture, different wallpaper, its own disappointments. The living room held a chaise, black-polished and coated in dust. Death lived here. The walls had declared themselves gray in resignation to the world. I heard a song. The humming whispered. A pain uncovered, as if to say: nobody’s home. I had to remember that. There were no windows, but a mirror stood where a television should be. It reflected me. Or I thought it did. I felt unrecognisable. Fear alters a face, etches new lines into skin.

It goes on forever, I remembered again, the rumours saying.

The dining room wore yellow wallpaper; an odd, hopeful yellow, liberty-shaped motifs and faded flourishes that pretended at illumination and higher thought. The room’s ambience was expectancy: a wooden table at the centre, a chair at every corner, dusty china laid as if for a feast that would not arrive. Windows were barred, each tightly shut behind barbed wire. Whoever had done this wanted the message clear: nobody ever came in. I leaned closer, examined the brittle stains on the wire, the prickly knots that pinned it, the rust blooming at each staple. Nothing was ever expected to get out, either.

I looked for signs of life; a pet, a nest, a bed, a bowl. Anything. My heart leapt—

It was only my reflection. From the mirror across the room, up the staircase. Again, fear changes faces. It ages you in a second. I stared at myself and barely recognised the person looking back. And then stared out the window. This was darkness, I heard the rumours, the kind swallowing the day as the final room waited.

I watched my reflection in the mirror, a version of myself I barely recognised. Each creak underfoot tightened something in my chest. I watched for cracks and holes I might fall into. At the top of the stairs, face to face with myself, plain as I came: eyes raw from sleeplessness, skin drained by thought. Then what was little of the light died. I could hear it… like a needle to its carpet. And what I saw next was not me. A slow, impossible transformation: pupils dilating, veins mapping my forehead, a stitched, bloodied scar along the throat. If I screamed, the reflection screamed with me, answering a pain I hadn’t lived but somehow remembered. It felt unbearably real— she appeared in the glass: the same sheer white negligee, a chemise exactly. The same silk, the same print, the same cut she’d worn the night she was last seen. Here. No. 88.

I turned away from my image and toward the room to the left, marked by a curtain the colour of chartreuse: jarring, alive, an omen. Every colour in that room felt like a storm. Fierceness and direness crowded it, a wildness that had once been hers. There was no bed, only a mattress on the floor. No wardrobe, only a small cupboard for clothes. This was where she had lived.

My breath hitched. Her soul seemed to coil around me, furious; the humming rose. Lightning flashed in my head; a voice, hot and pleading, filled the air.

“Stay through, or I will haunt you forever.”

Darkness pooled in the corners, indifferent to moon or star. The house had been her prison. Nights stacked one on another until they blurred. No one came. No one was coming. A window exploded against its frame. Wind rushed in, violent and raw. I felt the same shove downstairs, the house answering me. She was here. She’s here.

I looked at my hands. They were … her’s: a ring on my finger, bloody marks where cuffs had cut my wrists. My nails chewed to the quick, grey at the edges. I sneezed; dirt sifted through my hair, skin flaking where it rubbed.

“What happened to you?” I whispered.

“What happened to me?” the house seemed to answer, the hums thrumming my heart into jagged beats.

“You must tell me,” it demanded.

The wind slammed me backward, pinning me to the wall, driving my face into the mattress. The floorboards groaned. Something moved between the planks, a small, secret thing scraping for space.

“Tell them what happened to me. Find me.”

Survive the night and I would leave a saviour, closing the coldest case in the village. I knew why I’d come. To find her…

 Run, and I would end up like the rest, borrowed into the wilderness, haunted by her memory until I found myself in her grave.