Days turned into weeks, and Elena stopped leaving the house. She stopped answering her phone, stopped responding to concerned texts from her sister. She became consumed by the thing in the attic, by the stain that seemed to grow larger every day.
And then the dreams changed.
They became memories, but not her own. She saw a young boy hiding under a table, his hands clamped over his ears as the stain swallowed his family whole. She saw a woman in a tattered nightgown, her face streaked with tears, standing at the edge of the attic window before throwing herself into the void. She saw a man, staring at the stain with hollow eyes, whispering, "It's not death. It's worse."
Elena began to understand. The house wasn't haunted by ghosts. The house itself was alive. The stain was its heart, a doorway to something beyond death, something that fed on fear, on despair, on the very essence of the living. It consumed the people who lived there, twisting them into shadows of their former selves, trapping them in the in-between.
But why? Why did it hunger?
That answer came one night, when the whispers grew deafening, and the shadows coalesced into a form. A woman stepped out of the darkness, her face gaunt and familiar. It was Elena's mother.
"Elena," the shadow said, its voice like dry leaves. "You have to leave. It will take you, too."
Elena shook her head. "Why are you here? You died years ago. You were buried. I saw you buried."
Her mother's face twisted, and for a moment, it was not her mother at all, but something monstrous, something with hollow eyes and a mouth that stretched too wide. "Death is not an escape," the thing rasped. "Not from it."
"From what?!" Elena screamed. "What is it? Why does it do this?"
"It is what waits," the shadow replied. "For all of us. Life is borrowed. We owe it back. And when we die, we are not free. We are its hands, its voice, its bait. We haunt because it makes us. We torment because it feeds. And when you die, you will haunt, too. The cycle must continue."
The shadow began to unravel, its form dissolving into smoke, but its voice lingered: "Run while you can. Or join us in the hungry quiet."