On the edge of the northern woods, past where the gravel road turns to moss and the moss turns to silence, there stands a house that is always almost gone.

No one remembers who built it. No one lives there. And yet, it waits.

The paint has long since peeled into curled whispers. The windows blink with dust. The front porch sags like a sigh. But the house does not decay. Not completely. Just enough . . . to seem forgotten.

Some say it’s the house you dream of when you’re about to make the wrong choice.

Others say it shows up in the corner of your eye the moment someone who used to love you forgets your voice.

But it is always there.

Once, a woman named Ana followed a thread of music through the trees — music she hadn’t heard since her father disappeared in 1986. It was a lullaby, played on an old turntable, skipping every seventh beat.

The house was waiting for her.

Ana didn’t knock. She just opened the door and stepped inside.

The air was the temperature of breath. The hallway stretched longer than it should have. The wallpaper pulsed slightly with a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.

Inside, the house remembered everything she had tried to forget . . .

Her father’s last words, rewritten in his own handwriting across the mirror.

The teddy bear she’d buried when she was six, sitting upright on a chair.

A voicemail from a number no longer in service, playing faintly through a radio with no power.

In the living room, the television flickered — static forming the shape of a face she almost remembered.

Then, a voice from nowhere said:

“You came back too late.”

Ana ran.

But the house never leaves you after you enter. Not entirely.

Now, sometimes, when Ana walks into a room, a picture frame is crooked in just the same way. Or the clock ticks backward for a few seconds. Or she wakes to find muddy footprints on her carpet that lead . . . nowhere.

The house does not punish.

It remembers.

And it waits.

Because one day — not soon, but someday — Ana will be tired, or curious, or lonely enough to listen to the lullaby again.

And this time, the house won’t let her go.

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© Secret Agent Man
info@secretagentman.net