Yet both of them understood the unspoken truth: this was more than a strange odor. They had found the first crack in a secret the house never meant to reveal. The next morning, neither of them bothered with coffee. Daniel rolled out of bed already tense, and Megan had barely slept at all. The smell had crept into her dreams, turning every shadow into something damp and breathing. By sunrise, she’d made up her mind.
“We’re figuring that wall out today,” she declared, tying her hair into a messy knot. Daniel grabbed his tape measure, stud finder, and flashlight. “Yeah. We need to.” He was heading toward the suspicious corner when Megan suddenly froze mid-step, her eyes narrowing at the window beside it. “Dan… look at this.”
He joined her, following her gaze to the space between the right side of the window frame and the corner wall. It wasn’t a normal gap. It was huge—almost a foot and a half of dead space that defied the room’s logical layout. The window was centered on its wall, but the wall itself was not where it should have been. The corner was too deep, a sheer, unbroken plane of plaster that swallowed far more space than the house’s exterior dimensions could possibly allow.
Daniel ran his tape measure from the window frame to the corner, then across the room to the opposite wall. His calculations were quick and rough, but the conclusion was inescapable. “This is wrong,” he muttered, measuring again. “This wall… there’s at least eighteen inches of space behind it. A void.” Megan touched the cold plaster, her fingers tracing the seamless join where it met the ceiling. “A secret room?” she whispered, a mix of dread and fascination hollowing her voice. Daniel shook his head, not in denial but in confusion. “Not a room. A space. A pocket. It doesn’t make structural sense.” He tapped the wall with his knuckle. The sound was dull, thick, and utterly dead—no echo, no hint of what lay beyond except for that persistent, cold dampness and the faint, rotten scent that now seemed to pulse from the very spot they were examining.