Chapter 12: The Breathing Walls

The ceremony began before any of us truly realized.

We didn't chant.

We didn't light candles or speak forbidden words from the spiral-marked book.

We simply stood there—in the circle around the pit, the book open before us, the air thick with memory and dust and silence older than bones.

And the house breathed.

It was no longer pretending.

Every floorboard swelled and released in rhythm.

The walls pulsed like lungs. The ceiling creaked in time with our own beating hearts. The lightbulbs in the ceiling hummed low, flickering like nerves exposed to cold.

The six of us stood in perfect stillness.

I could feel them behind me.

The old woman. The librarian. The man from the bakery. Liam.

And something else.

Walter.

He wasn't visible, but he was there. Not inside the house anymore.

Inside me.

His silence was my breath now.

And tonight, the silence would break.

---

The book flipped its page again.

Not from wind—there was none.

It moved like a creature, as if the pages were wings stretching for the first time in centuries.

A new set of words appeared—not ink, but blood rising from the paper:

"Loose the mouths. Free the buried sound."

I stepped forward.

The others didn't stop me.

I knelt before the pit in the floor. Dirt crumbled from its edges, roots twitching below like veins beneath torn skin.

Inside the depression were faint grooves—like something had once been shackled there. Something with a body. And a mouth.

I placed my hand into the hollow.

The moment I touched it, I heard everything.

---

Every scream Walter ever swallowed.

Every betrayal the town ever buried.

Every sob from his mother, every plea from his tongue, every scratch against the inside of that coffin as he begged for the dirt to stop falling.

I became him in that moment.

Buried alive.

Flesh rotting around a screaming soul.

My body arched backward. My spine cracked. My fingers clawed at the wood.

And through my teeth, a voice that was not mine exploded into the room:

"THE SILENT HAVE BEEN HEARD."

---

The house convulsed.

The floor groaned like a whale surfacing after a century underwater.

The walls buckled.

Paint peeled from every corner.

A window shattered—spiderwebbed from the inside.

The librarian collapsed to her knees, clutching her ears. Her mouth opened wide—and another voice came out. A child's voice, sobbing.

Not hers.

The bakery man stared upward and began to laugh.

Long.

Loud.

Horrible.

But it wasn't joy—it was grief. The kind that rotted.

And the old woman? She simply whispered one word over and over:

"Forgive… forgive… forgive…"

I couldn't take it.

I backed away from the pit.

But my feet didn't move.

I looked down and realized: the house had me.

My toes had sunken into the floor. Not through cracks. Into the wood.

The grain had opened like mouths, swallowing skin.

I screamed.

Liam rushed forward, grabbing my arms, pulling—but it was no use.

The floor wanted me.

It didn't want just a speaker anymore.

It wanted a vessel.

The cost of opening the mouth… was becoming it.

---

"Let go of him!" Liam shouted.

The house answered.

A sound like wind through dead trees blasted through the room.

The book rose into the air.

Pages flipping rapidly.

One final page—blank—landed open.

And something began to write itself.

Not letters.

A drawing.

My face.

But not as I am.

My mouth was gone.

In its place: nails.

Driven deep. Jagged. Endless.

---

The wood creaked louder.

Splinters split across the floor.

Blood leaked from the pit like something had bled out long ago and never stopped.

And then the voice returned.

Walter's.

But this time, it wasn't angry.

It was… tired.

"You were the only one who listened," he said. "Now you must remain."

I shook my head. "No… no, I brought the three. I answered the call."

"And now… you carry the silence."

Liam pulled harder.

My body gave way.

My feet tore free of the floor.

The wood screamed.

A thousand nails clattered from the walls like a storm of iron teeth. They embedded in the ceiling, the walls, the book—everything.

Liam and I collapsed backward.

The others were gone.

Not vanished—consumed.

The librarian. The baker. The old woman.

All melted into the shadows now breathing through the cracks.

Witnesses returned to the earth.

Only Liam and I remained.

---

The book slammed shut.

The pit sealed itself—wood groaning, folding in, replacing what was lost.

The room went silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

Not even the wind moved outside.

Liam helped me to my feet.

He stared at the now-empty floor.

Then at me.

"What the hell did we do?"

I looked at my hands.

They were stained black. With ink? Blood? I didn't know.

"I think… we finished what they started."

"And what was that?"

I opened my mouth to speak.

But no words came.

Just dust.

Falling.

Soft.

Final.

---

That night, Liam left.

He didn't say goodbye.

I don't blame him.

If I could've left, I would've too.

But the house wouldn't let me.

The doors still opened. The windows still showed stars.

But something inside me was anchored now.

Something that kept me here.

A voice with no mouth.

A scream with no end.

I am not just a man anymore.

I am the echo of a buried truth.

The house doesn't creak at night anymore.

It speaks.

Through me.

And soon…

It will need a new tongue.