Julian had told me to go to the motel. He had begged me, actually, his voice cracking with a desperation that should have sent me running for the safety of fluorescent lights and vending machines.
But fear is a funny thing. Push it far enough, compress it tight enough under the weight of guilt and trauma, and it turns into something else. It turns into gravity.
I drove up the ridge to the Vance Estate because I couldn’t be anywhere else. This glass cage was where the script was written. If I was going to rewrite the ending, I had to be on the stage.
The house was waiting for me.
At night, the Glass House wasn’t just a building; it was a lantern hanging in the void. I parked the car, killing the headlights, and watched the structure glow in the dark. The interior lights were on—I had left them on. A beacon.
I walked to the front door, my boots heavy with the mud of the crime scene. The mud from the tea party. I didn’t bother wiping them. I wanted to track the filth in. I wanted to stain Richard’s pristine floors with the reality of what he had created.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside.
The silence was absolute, but it wasn’t empty. It was the heavy, pressurized silence of a held breath.
“I’m home,” I announced to the empty room. My voice didn’t echo this time; it was absorbed by the dark glass walls that had turned into mirrors against the night.
I saw a dozen versions of myself staring back—pale, disheveled, eyes wide and frantic. A woman on the edge of shattering.
I walked through the living room, ignoring the view of the black fog pressing against the windows. I went straight to the kitchen. I didn’t go for a knife. Knives were for people who expected a fight. I wasn’t looking for a fight; I was looking for an excavation.
I opened the utility drawer next to the fridge. It was a mess of twist ties, dead batteries, and tools Richard had bought for appearances but never used.
My hand closed around the handle of a claw hammer. It was heavy, the rubber grip cold and tacky.
“Okay,” I whispered.
I marched up the floating staircase, the hammer swinging by my side.
The house groaned. The steel beams contracted in the night air, popping and pinging. Usually, I ignored it. But tonight, every sound felt like a syllable.
I reached the hallway. The door to my bedroom was open, just as I had left it after finding the wet raincoat.
I stepped inside.
The room smelled of damp wool and ozone, the lingering scent of the intruder. The raincoat was gone—I had given it to Julian for evidence—but the water stain on the carpet remained, a dark Rorschach test near the closet.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The canopy above me felt like a shroud.
He was here, I thought. He touched my things. He laid out the clothes for Sarah Miller. He sat in this room and planned the tea party.
I closed my eyes, listening.
Drip.
The sound of the rain on the roof.
Hum.
The HVAC system cycling air.
Scritch.
My eyes snapped open.
It was soft. So soft I almost missed it. Like a dry leaf skittering across pavement.
Scritch. Scritch.
It wasn’t coming from the window. It wasn’t coming from the hall.
It was coming from the wall behind my headboard.
I froze, my grip tightening on the hammer until my knuckles turned white.
Rats. It had to be rats. The house was built into the side of a mountain; nature was always trying to reclaim it.
But rats scurry. They run.
This sound was rhythmic. Deliberate.
Scritch… pause… Scritch.
It sounded like a fingernail dragging against drywall.
I stood up slowly, moving with the fluidity of a predator. Or prey. I wasn’t sure which one I was anymore.
I leaned closer to the wall, turning my ear toward the white paint.
Silence.
Then, a sound that stopped my heart cold.
A sigh.
A long, soft exhalation of breath.
It was right there. Inches away. Separated from me by a half-inch of gypsum and paper.
Someone was inside the wall.
The terror that hit me wasn’t the screaming kind. It was cold. It was clarifying. It washed away the panic and left behind a diamond-hard rage.
I had spent my whole life running from this house. I had spent fifteen years trying to escape the feeling of being watched. And all this time, the monster wasn’t under the bed. He was in the architecture.
“No,” I said.
I stepped back. I raised the hammer.
“I said NO!”
I swung.
CRACK.
The head of the hammer punched through the drywall like it was wet cardboard. Dust puffed out, white and chalky.
I yanked it back and swung again.
CRACK.
A chunk of the wall fell away, revealing the dark space between the studs.
I didn’t stop. I was screaming now, a wordless, primal sound of fury. I smashed the wall. I shattered the illusion of safety. I tore open the skin of the house to see the cancer underneath.
CRASH. CRACK. THUD.
White dust coated my hair, my eyelashes. I coughed, choking on the gypsum, but I kept swinging until there was a hole big enough for a man.
I dropped the hammer. It landed on the carpet with a dull thud.
My chest was heaving. The silence rushed back in, louder than before.
I grabbed the flashlight from my nightstand and clicked it on. The beam cut through the dust clouds, stabbing into the darkness of the void.
It wasn’t just a space between studs.
It was a room.
Richard had built the house with a service chase—a narrow corridor running behind the bedrooms for the HVAC and plumbing. He had called it the “arteries” of the house.
I shone the light inside.
The floor of the chase was lined with insulation, pink and fluffy. But the pink was matted down, compressed into a path.
I leaned in, sticking my head through the jagged hole.
The smell hit me instantly. Unwashed skin. Stale sweat. And the sweet, cloying scent of rot.
To my left, nestled between two vertical beams, was a nest.
It was made of old towels—my mother’s monogrammed towels—and a sleeping bag that looked like it had been dragged through the mud.
“Oh god,” I gagged, covering my nose.
He had been living here. Sleeping here.
I moved the light across the nest. There were objects arranged on a makeshift shelf nailed to a stud. A comb. A toothbrush. A row of polaroids.
I didn’t look at the photos. I couldn’t.
Instead, my beam landed on something drilled into the back of the drywall, right at eye level if you were sitting in the nest.
A hole.
It was small, maybe a quarter-inch wide.
I pulled back into my bedroom and looked at the wall I hadn’t smashed yet. There, hidden in the pattern of the textured wallpaper, was the other side of the hole.
It looked directly at my bed.
He watched me sleep.
When I was twelve. When I was crying into my pillow. When I was whispering stories to myself to drown out the fighting downstairs.
He had been right there. inches away. Listening.
You’re safe now, Princess.
The voice in my head wasn’t a memory anymore. It was a caption.
I looked back into the hole.
On the edge of the sleeping bag, reflecting the beam of my flashlight, was a small burst of silver.
I reached in, my hand trembling, and plucked it from the insulation.
It was a candy wrapper. A fun-sized Snickers bar.
I held it up to the light.
There was no dust on it. The tear was jagged, fresh. The chocolate smear inside was still soft.
He hadn’t just been here twenty years ago.
He had been here tonight.
Maybe he was here when I walked in. Maybe the scratching wasn’t him waking up—it was him leaving. Scrambling away down the service chase like a rat in the walls.
Or maybe he hadn’t left.
I swung the flashlight beam down the long, dark tunnel of the chase. It stretched out into the darkness, winding its way toward the master bedroom, toward the kitchen, toward the heart of the house.
Far down, at the very edge of the light’s reach, I saw something move. A shadow. A shift in the darkness.
“Elias?” I whispered.
The name tasted like dirt.
The house didn’t answer. But the wrapper in my hand crinkled, loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I backed away from the hole, clutching the hammer again.
I wasn’t alone. I had never been alone.
And now, the walls were breathing.