The scratching behind the white door made my blood run cold. It was a small sound, quiet and close, which made it worse. It sounded like a child waiting on the other side, then it stopped.
The silence that followed felt even heavier.
We moved toward the door carefully, Liam walked first, holding his candle forward, and the rest of us stayed close behind him.
As we got closer, I noticed something important. The handle was a simple brass knob, but above it was a thick iron bolt.
The bolt was locked from the outside.
"The nursery is locked," I said quietly.
"Maya was right," Liam said.
A disturbing thought followed immediately.
Was the father locked out, or was the child locked in?
Chloe focused on the physical details.
"So this is the point of the puzzle," she said. "The diary and the box were meant to lead us here. We need the key."
"There isn't a keyhole," Liam replied after checking the door. "Just the knob and the bolt. The bolt is on our side."
He looked at all of us.
"We could open it right now."
"No," Maya said immediately.
Her voice was stronger than before.
"Don't open it. It was locked for a reason."
"Maybe he locked it after she died," Noah suggested nervously. "Maybe he couldn't handle seeing the room again."
Before anyone replied, I noticed a butterfly and went to the door frame and at there something near the door frame a small folded piece of paper was wedged into the wood. Carefully, I pulled it free.
It was another page from the diary.
We gathered closer as I held it near the candlelight. The handwriting was the same, but this time it looked rushed and uneven.
"September 3rd, 1888," I read.
"The fever does not stop. She no longer recognizes me. She laughs at shadows and scratches at the door asking to be let out. But I cannot open it. The doctor was wrong. This sickness is not of the body. Something has taken hold of my daughter. It looks like her and speaks like her, but it is not her. They are all telling me, I am insane and I have no daughter, My Wife ignore me and I have barred the door. My home has become a prison, and her room is now a cage. God forgive me. I am afraid."
The paper shook slightly in my hands.
The story had changed.
Eth was not only sick.
Her father believed something else had taken control of her.
The scratching we heard suddenly meant something different.
We slowly stepped away from the door.
"So he went insane," Chloe said quickly. Her voice sounded strained. "He lost his daughter and convinced himself she was possessed."
But none of us looked convinced.
"Did he imagine the scratching we just heard?" Liam asked quietly.
Chloe did not answer immediately.
"There could be explanations," she said finally. "Animals inside the walls. Strange acoustics."
"That was not an animal," I said.
Everyone looked at me.
"The sound was controlled. And the laugh we heard earlier sounded human."
Chloe stared at me in shock. I was usually the one defending logic.
"So what are we saying?" Noah said nervously. "There is a demon child behind the door and the father is still walking around the house?"
No one laughed.
Then a floorboard creaked behind us, and we all turned around instantly. The hallway was empty, but something had changed.
There was an object lying in the middle of the corridor.
A doll.
A small porcelain doll with wide painted eyes and a cracked smile when her eyes went to my face but I cannot understand why i didn't feel fear.
The doll wore a faded blue dress.
None of us had seen it before.
We had walked through this hallway minutes ago.
It had not been there, no one moved.
"The dollmaker," Maya whispered.
"The diary mentioned it."
I remembered then.
Valentino.
That was the father's name.
He made dolls.
Now one had appeared in the hallway, placed where we could not miss it.
The house was showing us something, and the message was becoming clearer.
Whatever truth waited behind that nursery door was going to be far worse than we expected.
The appearance of the porcelain doll was a turning point. It was a physical, tangible manifestation of the house's strangeness, something that couldn't be dismissed as a draft or a shared hallucination. It lay there on the dusty floorboards, a silent, smiling testament to the impossibility of our situation.
For a long moment, we could only stare at it, our fear so profound it had become a kind of paralysis.
Liam was the first to break the spell. He took a slow, deliberate step towards the doll, his candle held out in front of him like a weapon.
"Don't touch it," Maya warned, her voice sharp with dread. Liam paused, looking back at her. "We have to," he said, his voice a low growl. "It's a clue. It's part of the story." He was fully invested in the narrative now, the detective in a supernatural mystery.
He saw the house not just as a prison, but as an antagonist with motives and a script we had to follow.
He knelt beside the doll, his movements cautious. He didn't touch it, not yet. He just examined it in the flickering candlelight. I moved closer, my own analytical curiosity overriding my weird feelings. The doll was old, the porcelain of its face webbed with fine cracks. One of its blue glass eyes was slightly askew, giving its smile a deranged, unsettling quality. The blue dress was faded and frayed at the hem. It was clearly handmade, with small, neat stitches. The work of a craftsman. The work of a dollmaker named Valentino.
"There's something in its hand," Liam murmured. He pointed, and I saw it. Tucked into the doll's tiny, porcelain fist was a small, tightly rolled piece of paper. It was another clue.
The house was practically force-feeding them to us now, rewarding our journey upstairs with a new piece of the puzzle.
With the tip of his finger, Liam carefully pried the paper from the doll's grasp. The porcelain was cold, unnaturally so. He unrolled the small scroll. It wasn't a diary page.
It was a drawing, done in charcoal on a scrap of yellowed paper. The drawing was crude, childlike. It depicted a tall, dark house with a crescent moon floating above it, this house. Next to the house, it showed a stick figure of a girl with long, blonde hair, and a boy bit taller than her with blond hair . And next to them, a much larger, darker figure, rendered as a chaotic scribble of angry black lines. The boy was holding hands with the scribble-monster. Below the drawing were a few shakily written words: 'MY NEW FRIEND'.
"Eth? And this boy?," Chloe whispered, her voice filled with a horrified awe. "She drew this. Before she, before she got sick." It was a chilling insight into the little girl's mind. The 'canker of the soul' her father wrote of hadn't been a sudden invasion. It had been a seduction. Something had befriended her, gained her trust, before taking root.
"So, what, she made friends with the Boogeyman?" Noah's voice was laced with a hysterical edge. "And he's still in her room? Is that what we're supposed to believe?" He ran a hand through his hair, his knuckles white.
"This is a game. It has to be. Someone is messing with us. A very, very sick person with a flair for the dramatic is in this house, moving things around, playing sounds, trying to drive us insane."
"And how did they get the doll there, Noah?" I asked, my voice calm and steady, a counterpoint to his rising panic. "We were all watching the hallway. There was no one."
"I don't know!" he yelled, his voice echoing down the corridor. "A hidden panel! A string! I don't know! But it's a better explanation than a ghost who's also a delivery service!" His outburst was pure fear, a desperate rejection of the truth that was staring us in the face, smiling its cracked porcelain smile.
The house seemed to respond to his outburst.
From behind the locked nursery door, the scratching sound began again, but it was different this time. It was faster, and more frantic.
An angry, desperate sound, like a caged animal scrabbling for purchase. And then, a voice. A little girl's voice, muffled by the thick wood of the door, but clear enough to be understood. "Let me out," it whined. "I want to play with my new friends."
The voice was a perfect imitation of a petulant child. But underneath it, there was a discordant, grating quality, an unnatural resonance that made the hairs on my arms stand up. It was the sound of something ancient and evil trying to sound small and innocent, and it was failing. The voice from behind the door shattered the last vestiges of our composure.
Noah let out a strangled cry and stumbled backward, his face a mask of pure terror. Chloe, the steadfast skeptic, pressed herself against the wall, her eyes wide and unblinking, her carefully constructed wall of rationalizations reduced to rubble.
Maya was openly weeping, her hands clasped over her mouth as if to hold in a scream. Even Liam, our unshakable leader, had gone rigid, his gaze locked on the white door with a mixture of fear and horrified fascination.
My own reaction was colder, more detached.
The voice was a new, crucial piece of data. It confirmed the presence of an intelligence. It confirmed a desire: to get out. And it confirmed a motive: us. We were the 'new friends' it wanted to play with. The drawing, the doll, the diary pages, they weren't just a story. They were a lure, and the entity in that room was communicating, trying to manipulate us into opening the door.
"We need to go," I said, my voice coming out steadier than I felt. "Now. Back downstairs."
"Go? We can't just leave it!" Liam argued, though his voice was strained. He was still trapped in the mindset of the game. He felt that to retreat was to forfeit, to lose.
"Leave what, Liam?" I countered, my voice sharp. "A ghost? A demon? It's locked in. The bolt is holding. The safest thing we can do is put as much distance as possible between ourselves and that door."
"He's right," Chloe choked out, finding her voice. "Ethan is right. This has gone too far. This isn't a puzzle, it's a trap. We need to get away from it."
The voice came again, its tone shifting from petulant to sorrowful. "Please," it whimpered, a heartbreakingly convincing sound of a lonely child. "It's so dark in here. I'm scared. Daddy locked me in and he won't come back, he hate me I only want to bring my brother back. Please help me."
It was a masterful performance, and It plucked at the most basic strings of human empathy.
Every instinct screamed to help the crying child, but the diary page, the drawing of the scribble-monster, the unnatural resonance in its voice, it was all a lie. A carefully crafted illusion.
"Don't listen to it," Maya sobbed, shaking her head. "It's not her. It's not Eth. It's the thing that took her."
The entity seemed to sense it was losing us. The sorrowful whimpering stopped abruptly. The silence that followed was brief, and then it was broken by a low, guttural growl.
It was a sound of pure, unrestrained malice, a sound that could not possibly have come from a child's throat. The temperature in the hallway plummeted, and the candle flames sputtered, shrinking to tiny, blue points of light, threatening to go out entirely.
The growl was followed by a loud, violent BANG against the inside of the door, as if something heavy had thrown itself against the wood.
Then another. BANG. And another. BANG. The solid oak door shuddered in its frame. The bolt, our only protection, rattled with each impact.
That broke our paralysis, and fear took over. "MOVE!" Liam yelled, and we didn't need a second command. We turned and fled. We scrambled down the hallway, our candles casting frantic, dancing shadows on the walls. We didn't dare look back.
The banging continued, a furious, rhythmic thunder that seemed to shake the very foundations of the house. We half-ran, half-fell down the grand staircase, the sound pursuing us, echoing in the vast, open space of the foyer.
We didn't stop until we were back in the dining hall, our island of light.
We collapsed into the dusty chairs, panting, hearts hammering, the terrible, rhythmic banging from upstairs still echoing in our minds.
Then poof silent, we stopped in the place then A creak sounded above them.
Then another.
Footsteps.
Measured. Deliberate.
Noah laughed too loudly. "Old houses make noise."
We are look at him with a look saying ' you are saying this after all what happened'
Right on cue, the chandelier above them swayed and all of the house anterior changed.
There was no sound.
Pressure built behind my eyes. Images flickered at the edges of my vision with hands bound with rope, a mouth screaming silently, a dark room lit by a single bulb.
I staggered.
"Ethan?" Maya whispered.
"I've been here," I said before I could stop myself.
Everyone stared.
"What?" Chloe asked.
"I don't know," I said, heart pounding. "It just feels like I have."
The lights flickered on.
All at once.
The chandelier blazed to life, harsh white bulbs burning overhead. Portraits lined the walls with dozens of faces frozen mid-expression.
None of the eyes were painted correctly. Too dark. Too deep. They followed me, and i noticed the doll staring at me, I don't know why but I hold it and I felt it become happy?
A clock stood against the far wall.
It began to tick.
Slow. Loud.
Each second landed like a blow.
Liam swallowed. "Okay. We explore, maybe. We find another exit. We can't panic."
The house answered.
"WELCOME, I am sorry our young lady was little excited to meet new people"
The voice echoed through the walls, layered and distorted, as though spoken by many mouths at once.
Maya collapsed, sobbing.
The clock chimed.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then a man appeared " welcome to Mansion of Echoes and to leave you must finish the game"
They were not guests.
They were contestants.