Mara jolted upright, her breath catching mid-gasp. Her eyes darted toward the open bedroom door, the hallway beyond a tunnel of blackness. The three gentle knocks seemed to reverberate inside her chest, each one deliberate and patient. She clutched her phone, its screen dark and silent, a false comfort in the gloom.
Mara stared at the glowing screen: UNKNOWN NUMBER. The text pulsed at her, chilling her blood. "Why aren’t you answering the door?" She recoiled, her stomach dropping as the knocking resumed—slower, heavier. Each sound matched her quickening heartbeat. She whispered to herself, trying to anchor her sanity, "Maybe I imagined it," though her voice trembled with doubt.
The knocking continued, and Mara’s phone buzzed in her hand. Another message slid across the screen: "I can hear you breathing." Her hand flew to her mouth, muffling a gasp. Thoughts of calling for help or running flickered in her mind, but dread rooted her feet to the hardwood floor. She forced herself toward the door, step by agonizing step.
With shaking hands, Mara leaned forward, pressing her eye to the peephole. The outside porch should be bathed in moonlight, but all she saw was a dense, impenetrable blackness. She tried to laugh off the fear—"This isn’t funny," she muttered—but her words went unanswered. Her phone buzzed once more: "Step back from the door."
Mara stumbled backward, heart pounding so loudly she feared it would betray her presence. From the thin gap, a voice slithered through—soft, eerily familiar, calm in its terror. "Mara… you finally came home." Her blood froze, her mind scrambling for sense. She hadn’t told anyone she had returned early; the voice on the other side was unmistakably her own.
Mara turned, desperate for escape, but her gaze caught on the hallway mirror. In its depths, something smiled—a smile too wide, too knowing, stretching across a face that was hers but impossibly wrong. The silence pressed in, broken only by the lingering echo of her own voice, promising that she would never truly be alone in this house again.
