It was behind him.

He knew it before he turned. Knew it in the way the air thickened—pressing in like water flooding a sealed room. The mirror hadn’t lied. The figure had been there. Tall. Still. Watching.

He turned, slowly, toward the door that had not existed moments before.

The pale wood was pulsing faintly—like something breathing behind it. No handle. No hinges. Only that slow, living rhythm, as though the house itself had grown this threshold around him.

A whisper coiled through his skull, the same voice that had slithered from the mirror:

You forgot again.

His breath caught. For a heartbeat, he thought of running. But there was nowhere left to run. The hallway behind him had folded into itself—walls shrinking, ceiling bowing low. The only path left was forward.

His hand lifted without permission.

When his fingers touched the door, it didn’t swing open—it simply… dissolved. The surface peeled inward like rotting fruit skin, revealing glistening strands of fibrous tissue that snapped and recoiled, exhaling a warm draft that smelled of metal and old flowers.

John stepped through the quivering membrane.

---

The hallway vanished.

The floor beneath him, the ceiling, the walls—all erased in a single blink. Darkness swallowed everything. Not darkness like midnight, but a void without edges or depth. Sightless. Smothering.

He was nowhere.

He was not falling.

He was not standing.

He was simply there.

Then—

A sound.

Wet. Slow. Like something dragging itself across polished bone.

He felt it before he saw it.

Not with his eyes—those no longer worked—but with something older. The part of him that remembered fear before he had a name for it.

It did not walk.

It arrived.

The Harrower.

Tall. Silent. Its body a cathedral of human ruin—stitched from pale flesh, charred fabric, and things John had no words for. Translucent skin stretched too tight, veins webbing beneath like cracks in porcelain. A smooth face regarded him—blank, almost serene—until it shifted.

A scream.

A weeping woman.

A laughing man, mouth split too wide.

Faces flickered across it like reflections in water, never lasting long enough to understand.

He tried to step back.

There was no back.

Dozens of arms unfolded from its spine. Some were almost human. Others were jointed in ways that hurt to look at. Hooks, needles, blades glimmered where fingers should have been. But none reached for him. They only spread out, as if to remember him.

The Harrower tilted its head, listening to something John could not hear.

He knew—without knowing how—that it was listening to him. To the slow machinery of his guilt. The stains he could never wash away. The things he had done. Or failed to do.

The darkness trembled. Then split.

A scene erupted in the void:

A woman screaming. Fire swallowing a house. A locked door shuddering under tiny fists.

A child’s voice, muffled and thin:

Daddy? Please—open the door…

“No,” John rasped. “No, I didn’t—”

The Harrower glided closer.

Reality buckled.

The scene replayed—again and again—until the scream became a rhythm, until John’s own voice joined it. Pleading. Denying. Drowning.

He tried to close his eyes.

The visions were inside them now.

You forgot again, the Harrower whispered—though its voice was not sound at all. It simply arrived in his thoughts like a truth he had always known.

Another memory rose:

A kitchen. A woman bound to a chair, her eyes bright with terror. A knife in his hand. Her belly—round, full of life.

His whole body shook.

”I didn’t—”

One of the Harrower’s arms lifted.

Not to strike.

To show.

A mirror unfolded in the dark.

And in it, he saw himself.

Not as he was.

As he had been.

What he had done.

What he had prayed to bury in oblivion.

“No… please…”

The Harrower leaned closer, its faceless head almost brushing his.

They beg for justice, it whispered, patient and cold, but when justice answers… they scream.

John couldn’t look away.

I am not cruel, the Harrower murmured, gentle as sleep, ancient as the first lie. I am fair.

He felt the words pressing into every cell, like a blade too sharp to feel.

I only give what they have earned, it continued, measured in silence… in neglect… in the lies whispered behind closed doors.

Somewhere in the dark, laughter rose—thin, childlike. Broken. It echoed in the emptiness, belonging to the house itself.

I strip them bare, the Harrower said, not to hurt them… but to show them what they are beneath the masks.

John tried to answer.

No words came.

Only a thin, rattling breath.

Do not blame the flame for burning, the Harrower finished, blame the rot that made it necessary.

And as it watched him, the darkness inside began to unravel—thread by thread—until he could no longer tell if he was remembering… or already being punished.