“We shouldn’t be here,” Megan breathed, her earlier resolve cracking. “This isn’t a hidden room, Dan. This is a… a containment.” Daniel’s mind raced, flipping through every horror movie trope, every ghost story, and finding all of them less terrifying than this quiet, bulging reality. Someone hadn’t just sealed a room. They had sealed it with industrial-grade metal, reinforced it with timber, and buried it under a house, and still it was pushing through.
They hadn’t been sure it was enough.
“We have to know,” he said, the statement hollow even to him. He was moving again, drawn toward the door against every screaming instinct. The beam of his flashlight traced the line where the door met the packed earth floor. There was no gap. The veins had grown over it completely, fusing door to frame, frame to earth, in a seamless, grotesque weld. It wasn’t a door you could open. It was a door that was being digested.
Megan followed, her own light joining his to illuminate more of the small chamber. The wooden support beams were not just structural. Carved into them, almost worn away by time and damp, were symbols—crude, repeating patterns of intersecting lines and circles, hacked into the wood with frantic, deep strokes. “Wards,” she whispered, the term surfacing from some half-remembered novel. “They’re trying to keep something in. Or… or keep us out.”
Daniel reached a hand out, not toward the door, but toward one of the throbbing veins on the wall beside it. He stopped an inch from its surface. A faint, sick warmth radiated from it. As he watched, a bead of thick, dark fluid welled from a pore and traced a sluggish path downward. The smell intensified, that coppery rot now overwhelming.