They never saw it coming. Trapped. The forever house, as it’s called now, was once an ordinary home. Or so it seemed. A quaint, old mansion standing at the edge of the woods. The Whitfield family moved in, expecting to start a new chapter. They were wrong. Dead wrong. The house had other plans.
It all started with the hallway. Narrow, dimly lit, and impossibly long. The kind of hallway that makes you feel watched, though no one’s around. Mrs. Whitfield, Sarah, noticed it first. She swore the hallway grew longer every time she walked down it. She’d take two steps forward, but the end seemed to stretch farther away. Her husband, Mark, brushed it off. Old houses, he said, had quirks. But Sarah couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. She wasn’t wrong.
The Hallway That Never Ends
The rooms were the next clue. Each one different, yet familiar. The first room they explored was filled with old, dusty furniture. Victorian, Sarah thought. Velvet drapes, carved wooden chairs, a grand piano in the corner. But there was something unsettling. It was as if they’d walked straight into another century. The air was thick with the scent of decaying flowers, the kind that had died and dried, but never left.
The second room was worse. 1920s décor, bright, but too bright. Like a photograph overexposed to the light. The wallpaper was peeling, and there was a photograph on the mantle. The Whitfields stared at it, frozen. The photo showed a family, their family, but in clothes from a hundred years ago. The faces were wrong. Eyes too wide, smiles too strained. Mark felt his heart pound. His grandfather had once lived in a house like this, he remembered, but never spoke about it.
Reflections of Fear and a Future
And then the third room. Empty, but not quite. There was a mirror on the wall. It reflected something else. A time they didn’t recognize. Yet, the reflection moved. They saw themselves, but older, worn, and terrified. Mark grabbed Sarah’s hand, pulling her back, but they couldn’t tear their eyes away. It was them, yet it wasn’t. Older, yet the same. Desperate, yet defeated. The reflection whispered, “You can never leave.”
That’s when they tried to escape. They ran, clutching their children close. Down the stairs, through the hallways. But the doors led them back. Always back. Back to the rooms, back to the same corners, back to that horrible mirror. They never found the front door. It was gone, swallowed by the house. Sarah screamed, Mark cursed, but their voices were lost in the endless corridors. Every step led them deeper, each turn brought them closer to the heart of the mansion.
The heart of the house. Where it all began. Sarah stumbled into a room filled with memories. Not objects, but memories. Their childhoods, their regrets, their sins. Laid bare for the house to see. The floor was cold under their feet, the walls pulsed like a heartbeat. Mark fell to his knees, realizing too late what had happened. The house wasn’t a house. It was them. A part of them. Feeding on their fear, growing stronger with each second. The walls expanded, the floors creaked, the ceilings rose higher.
Sarah knew they were trapped. Not in a physical sense, but in their own darkness. The house was their guilt, their secrets, their failures, made real. It had been waiting for them, calling them, drawing them in with its whispers. The Whitfields weren’t the first, and they wouldn’t be the last. The house always found a way.
The House That Feeds
Their children cried, but the house was already devouring them. Consuming their innocence, their hope, leaving behind only echoes. Echoes of laughter, of tears, of promises broken long ago. The rooms shifted again, new hallways opened, new doors appeared. But there was no escape.
Years passed. Decades. But time no longer mattered. The Whitfields became part of the mansion, part of its endless labyrinth. They roamed the corridors, shadows of their former selves, forever searching, forever lost. New families came and went, drawn in by the same allure, falling victim to the same curse.
If you ever find yourself at the edge of the woods, and you see a mansion standing there, turn away. Don’t go inside. Don’t listen to the whispers. Because once you step into the forever house, you’re never coming out. You’ll become another story, another shadow, another room in its endless, growing halls. And the forever house will continue to wait. For its next victim. For you.
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