Chapter 18: I Am the House
The moment I stepped through the door, I stopped being human.
Not all at once.
But piece by piece.
First my name.
It unraveled like thread, floating behind me in the spiral wind.
Then my memories, not gone — but muted. Blurred at the edges like photographs caught in a fire that never fully burned.
And finally… my shape.
My skin still felt like mine.
But when I touched it, it didn't respond.
No warmth. No pulse.
Only grain.
Only wood.
---
The seventh stood across from me.
Not my son.
No longer pretending.
He had grown tall, his limbs impossibly thin, fingers fused into sharpened spirals of bone.
He had no mouth anymore.
Only a keyhole carved into the center of his face.
And from within that keyhole, a voice not made of sound:
> "This is not where you die.
This is where you begin."
He raised one long arm and placed a nail gently on my chest — over the spiral scar that had opened there nights ago.
The nail burned.
Not fire.
Memory.
It pierced the center of me, and every face I'd ever seen flashed through my mind.
Walter.
Liam.
The girl.
The others I never knew.
My own reflection, hollow-eyed and praying to be forgiven.
---
Then the house spoke.
Not through words.
Through structure.
The spirals around me began to bend.
Ceilings of air collapsed into corridors.
Floors of starlight solidified into rotting wood.
Windows blinked open, showing rooms that didn't belong in this world — an empty church made of tongues, a kitchen where the stove breathed, a nursery with a rocking chair that rocked to the rhythm of a scream.
And in the center…
A room I knew.
My living room.
---
The seventh pointed at it.
I stepped forward.
My feet didn't land on floorboards.
They sank into memory.
Each step I took re-lit the lights of the house back on Earth.
I felt it happen.
The bulbs crackling on.
The mirrors healing.
The cradle resetting.
The mouth-door sealing itself again, ready for the next knock.
I was walking backward through time.
Not to return.
To replace.
---
When I opened the door of the spiral room, I was inside the house again.
But it wasn't the same house.
It was me.
The walls breathed with my lungs.
The floor hummed with my heart.
The staircase groaned with the sound of my bones cracking.
And the windows wept.
Just like I did, the first night the voices began.
---
I stepped into the hall.
The mirror greeted me.
I no longer had a reflection.
Only a silhouette.
Outlined by nails.
Framed in black breath.
And from deep inside the glass, I heard a knock.
Then a voice.
Small.
Familiar.
"Is this your house?"
I turned.
No one there.
But I answered anyway.
I said:
"It is now."
---
The book was gone.
I no longer needed it.
The spiral had moved.
Not into my chest.
Not even my head.
It had become my spine.
I could feel it twist every time I turned.
Could feel it tighten whenever the house hungered.
---
That night, someone knocked at the real door.
Not the spiral one.
The front.
I opened it without hesitation.
A man stood there.
Early forties. Pale. Trembling.
"I… I don't know why I came here," he said.
I did.
The house called him.
Like it called all of us.
I stepped aside.
Said nothing.
He walked past me into the dark hallway.
Disappeared behind a corner.
And then I felt it:
The house feeding.
Not on him.
On his regret.
---
Another knock.
This time, a woman.
Eyes red. Carrying a photograph.
"I had this dream," she whispered. "This address was burned into my skin when I woke up."
She lifted her sleeve.
The spiral was there.
Fresh.
Beating.
Like a heart under the flesh.
I welcomed her in.
The house moaned with gratitude.
---
It's been three days since I returned.
Or maybe three years.
Time bends around the spiral.
But the visitors keep coming.
Each one arrives with something broken.
A name they forgot.
A scream they swallowed.
A child they buried.
A silence they never escaped.
And the house gives them a place to put it.
Into the walls.
Into the pipes.
Into me.
---
Sometimes, I can feel Walter.
Deep beneath the floor.
He's not trapped anymore.
He's part of the foundation.
His bones are the nails in the windows.
His heart is the furnace.
His scream is the hum in the hallway at night when everyone else sleeps.
He's free.
Just like I am.
---
But freedom here is not release.
It is transformation.
The price of listening was never death.
It was becoming.
Becoming what the silence needs.
A vessel.
A voice.
A hallway that never ends.
---
Tonight, I hear something new.
Not a knock.
Not a whisper.
A song.
Soft.
Low.
From the cradle in the basement.
A lullaby, hummed in reverse.
And I know what it means.
The eighth is coming.
And with them, the spiral will turn again.
A new room will grow.
A new voice will split its lips on these walls.
And when they ask me:
> "Is this your house?"
I will say:
"No. This is your echo.
You live in me now."