Chased By Shadows

Chapter Thirteen: The Forgotten Room

The fog didn’t lift that morning.

It thickened instead, until even the trees near the house seemed to vanish, swallowed by a gray so dense it looked painted. The barn was gone from view. The road, gone. Even the sun refused to break through.

Kaia stood by the window for what felt like hours. Watching. Nothing moved. Not the leaves. Not the shadows. Not the wind. It was too quiet.

Behind her, Mira flipped through the same notebook she’d been holding since she arrived. She hadn’t drawn anything new.

Only erased.

The pages were torn in places from the pressure of her strokes. All the old drawings the faces, the symbols, the spirals they were fading beneath lines of thick graphite.

Like someone was trying to bury the memories. Kaia turned from the window. “Are you okay?” Mira didn’t look up. She scribbled harder. Kaia knelt beside her. “Hey. I’m here.” Still, no answer. But then Mira did something she hadn’t done before.

She handed Kaia the pencil. And pointed toward a blank page. Kaia hesitated. “You want me to draw something?” Mira nodded. Kaia looked at the blank space, unsure. Then slowly, almost without thinking, she drew the cabin.

The one from her dream. The one she had never seen in real life… or had she? She drew the crooked roof. The chimney. The tree next to it with the rope swing. The cracked front door. Mira’s hand trembled as she watched.

She pointed at the drawing again.

And scrawled one word underneath it: “Home.”

Maren found the room by accident. She had been looking for batteries. The flashlight she carried was dying and she didn’t want to be stuck alone in the dark. Not again.

She checked the hallway drawers. The coat closet. The pantry. Nothing. And then she opened a door she didn’t remember ever seeing. It creaked like it hadn’t been used in years. Inside was a narrow set of stairs.

Dust coated every step, but the air smelled… recent. Used. She called for the others, but her voice seemed to vanish into the walls. Still, something compelled her forward. The steps led downward far deeper than the house should’ve allowed. She passed old light bulbs dangling from cords, none of them lit.

Her flashlight flickered again. Then it died completely. She kept walking. Until she reached the bottom. The door ahead was heavy. Wood reinforced with metal bars. An old sign hung above it, peeling and rusted. “PROJECT EDEN — SUBLEVEL A”

She froze. That name. She had seen it before. Somewhere in Simon’s files. Or was it in a dream? She pushed the door open slowly. The hinges wailed. What she found inside stole her breath. It wasn’t a basement. It was a laboratory.

Broken monitors lined the walls. Papers and files were scattered across metal tables. Tubes of unknown fluids glowed dimly in shattered containers. And in the corner, covered by a plastic sheet, was a large tank.

Maren stepped closer. She pulled back the sheet. The tank was filled with dark, stagnant liquid. Floating in it was something humanoid. Female. But barely. Skin pale, almost translucent. Hair floating like moss. Eyes open and empty.

Maren stepped back, hand over her mouth. It looked like Mira. But it couldn’t be. Right? A sound made her spin. Footsteps. But no one was behind her. Then she saw it, in the reflection of a darkened screen.

A figure standing in the far corner. Too tall. Head tilted at an unnatural angle. Watching. She turned quickly. No one was there.

When Maren returned upstairs, she didn’t speak for a long time. Kaia was the first to notice the blood on her sleeve. “Are you hurt?” Maren shook her head slowly. “I found something.”

Mallory leaned in. “What kind of something?” Maren’s voice was hollow. “Something we weren’t supposed to see.” She led them back down the stairs. But when they reached the hallway—

The door was gone. Not just closed. Gone. A solid wall stood in its place, smooth and untouched. “No,” Maren said, running her hands across it. “No, it was here. I swear, it was right here!” The others looked at her with growing unease.

Simon spoke cautiously. “Maren… are you sure?” She turned to him, eyes wild. “I saw her. Floating in a tank. She looked like Mira.” Everyone turned to Mira. She didn’t move. Didn’t blink.

Kaia stood protectively in front of her. “This isn’t helping.” Mira stared past all of them. Toward something only she could see. And quietly mouthed a single word: “Sera.”

That night, Mallory found something outside the window. A pile of feathers. Not bird feathers. Human-sized. As if someone had been plucked. She didn’t wake the others. She didn’t want to start another panic.

Instead, she grabbed her notebook and wrote: “The dreams are bleeding through. I think we brought them with us.”

Then she paused. And wrote one more thing: “I saw Kaia standing in the woods last night. But she was already asleep in bed.” She crossed the sentence out quickly. Too late. The ink soaked through.

Simon began coughing blood the next morning. He tried to hide it. But Kaia found the tissue in the trash soaked crimson, with something black at the center.

He swore it was nothing. Stress. Lack of sleep. Cold weather. But the blood wasn’t the worst part. He confessed, quietly, that something had spoken to him. In the barn. Through the mirror. “You were always the replacement.”

He didn’t know what it meant. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And that night, someone carved a word into his car windshield: “THIEF.”

Elise still hadn’t come back. But Mira drew her again, this time holding hands with someone they couldn’t identify. A tall, faceless figure with a crown of nails. And behind them, Kaia’s name etched into the sky.

Not once. Over and over and over. Kaia wanted to burn the page. Instead, she folded it up and slipped it into her jacket pocket. She needed answers. But every time she tried to think, her head split open with pressure.

Like a voice pressing against her skull, just shy of language. Almost familiar. Too familiar.

Mallory began acting strangely. She stopped sleeping. Started writing strange things on the walls. Backwards. In charcoal. Phrases like: “She’s inside the glass.” “I can’t forget what I never knew.” “Two made one. One must die.”

Kaia caught her once at three in the morning staring into the kitchen mirror, whispering. Her own name. Over and over.

“Mallory?” She didn’t respond at first. Then slowly turned. Her eyes were glazed. “You shouldn’t be awake.” Kaia froze. “Why?”

“She’s listening.”

By the time dawn broke, the air in the house had shifted again. Mira refused to go near the windows. Kaia found her under the dining table, clutching the pencil so tightly her hand had started to bruise.

Kaia slid beside her. “Hey.”bMira shook her head violently. And mouthed: “She’s coming.” Kaia gripped her hand. “Who?” Mira lifted the notepad again. And wrote two words that made Kaia go cold. “You know.”

Kaia stood up, heart pounding. “That’s not true. I don’t know anything.” Mira just stared. And wrote again. “Then why do you lie in your sleep?”

The mirrors started cracking the next day. One by one. First the hallway. Then the bathroom. Then the one in Maren’s bag. Each broke differently. Not shattered but fractured. Down the center. Like something had tried to crawl out.

Mallory found another photo in the files. A group picture. Date smudged. All of them were in it Kaia, Mira, Maren, Simon, Lana… even Elise.But also, someone else. A girl with white eyes. Standing in the back row. Unnamed. Unsmiling.

Hands clasped in front of her like a doll. Mallory flipped the photo over. In faded ink, it read: “CANDIDATE #6 — rejected, reabsorbed”

Kaia confronted Simon that evening. “You’ve been hiding things.” He didn’t deny it. “There are gaps,” he said. “In all our memories. Things that don’t line up. We weren’t just classmates. We were part of something else.”

Kaia narrowed her eyes. “Like what?” Simon looked scared. For the first time, truly scared. “Like a trial. Like we were chosen for a reason.” Kaia stepped closer. “Chosen for what?” Simon swallowed. “To survive her.” Kaia blinked. “Who is she?”

Simon looked toward the window, where the fog pressed against the glass like a living thing. “I don’t know anymore.”