Chapter 1: The Trapdoor in the Closet

Chapter 1: The Trapdoor in the Closet

The silence was the first thing he’d noticed, and the last thing to leave him alone. It was a thick, syrupy silence that coated the walls of his new house, dripped from the water-stained ceilings, and pooled in the empty corners. Leo Vance, a plumber by trade and a ghost by disposition, had bought the house for a song, hoping its problems would be loud enough to drown out the quiet in his own head.

He sat on the floor of the living room, surrounded by a cardboard fortress of unpacked boxes. Each one was a tombstone for a life he’d tried to live somewhere else. His back ached, a dull throb that harmonized with the tired, haunted look in his eyes. At twenty-eight, his hair was already thinning, a premature retreat from a world he’d never quite managed to engage with. He ran a hand over the stubble on his gaunt cheeks. The house was a project. A purpose. Something to do with his hands other than wring them.

Books had always been his escape. In the neatly packed boxes marked ‘LIVING ROOM’, hundreds of paperbacks sat waiting, each a portal to a life more interesting than his own. He could be a starship captain, a grizzled detective, a king in a land of dragons. Anything but a lonely man in a silent house. But even the thought of unpacking them felt exhausting. They were just other people’s stories. They wouldn't fix the squeak in the floorboards or the rattling of the windowpanes.

He pushed himself to his feet, joints protesting. A project. Start small. The master bedroom closet door had been catching, its complaint a shrill scrape against the frame. A simple fix. Sanding, maybe planing the edge. Something tangible.

The bedroom was sparse, holding only his mattress on the floor. The air was stale with the ghosts of previous owners. He swung the closet door open, and it shrieked its protest. Inside, the cedar-planked walls gave off a faint, funereal scent. Leo knelt, running his fingers along the bottom of the warped door frame. As he shifted his weight, a floorboard beneath the thin, threadbare carpet gave a hollow knock that was different from the others.

Curiosity, a feeling so faint he’d almost forgotten it, pricked at him. He peeled back a corner of the moth-eaten carpet. The floorboards beneath were dark with age, but one section looked… off. The seams didn’t quite align. He pressed down, and it shifted with a low groan. Tucked into a groove was a small, tarnished iron ring, flush with the wood. A handle.

His heart gave a nervous little stutter. A hidden compartment. A secret. His house had a secret. For the first time since he’d signed the papers, a sliver of genuine excitement cut through his melancholic haze. He hooked his fingers through the ring and pulled. The trapdoor resisted, swollen with a century of humidity, then surrendered with a groan of splintering wood.

A wave of air washed over him, thick and foul. It was a smell of deep decay, of things left to rot in the dark. Damp earth, blooming mildew, and the sharp, metallic tang of rust. It was the smell of a forgotten grave. Leo recoiled, his hand flying to his nose. Peering into the abyss, he saw nothing but a square of absolute black.

He fumbled for the flashlight on his belt, the cheap plastic cool against his trembling hand. He clicked it on, and the beam cut a cone of light into the darkness. It was a crawlspace, no more than three feet deep, with a dirt floor. Spidery cobwebs, thick as cotton, hung from the joists like funeral shrouds. The ground was littered with the detritus of the past—a shattered porcelain doll’s head, a rusted can, the brittle skeleton of some small animal. Filth and decay.

But in the center of the beam, sitting atop the damp earth, was something that didn't belong.

It was a stack of paper. Plain white, crisp-edged, held together by a simple black binder clip. It was pristine. Impossibly clean. There wasn't a speck of dust on it, not a hint of mildew or water damage. It looked as if it had been placed there only moments ago, a pearl nestled in a bed of rot.

A strange compulsion seized him. Leo lowered himself into the crawlspace, the foul air clinging to him like a wet coat. He ignored the scuttling sound in the corner and the dampness seeping into the knees of his jeans. His focus was entirely on that stack of paper. He reached out, his fingers hesitating just above the top page, then snatched it up.

The paper felt cool and smooth, its weight solid and real in his hands. He climbed out of the crawlspace, his heart thudding a strange, frantic rhythm against his ribs. He pushed the trapdoor shut, the hollow boom echoing in the silent room. He needed to put distance between himself and that hole.

Back in the living room, surrounded by his unopened boxes, he sat and stared at his discovery. There was no title on the first page, no author’s name. It just began. Black, laser-printed text on perfect white paper.

The rain didn’t so much fall on the city of Veridia as it did lay siege to it.

Leo started to read.

He read one page, then two, then ten. The project, the house, the crushing weight of his own solitude—it all dissolved. The world around him faded to a grey periphery. The only reality was the one coalescing from the words on the page. It wasn't just a story; it was an experience. He could feel the slick cobblestones under the protagonist's boots, smell the coal smoke and river sludge of Veridia, hear the strained murmur of a conspiracy in a shadowed tavern.

The prose was flawless, each sentence a perfectly crafted hook that pulled him deeper. The characters were not ink on paper; they were living, breathing people whose hopes made his chest ache and whose fears made his own skin crawl. He’d read thousands of books in his life, devoured them to escape himself, but none had ever felt like this. This story wasn't an escape; it was a replacement reality, more vivid and compelling than his own.

He read for hours, oblivious to the sun arcing across the sky, its light fading outside his windows. His throat was dry, his stomach empty, but the hunger for the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page, was the only appetite he had. The stack of pages dwindled under his thumb. He was nearing the end, a knot of anxiety tightening in his gut. He didn't want it to be over. He needed it to continue.

He turned the last page. The story was reaching its crescendo. The protagonist, a disgraced inquisitor named Kaelen, had finally cornered the elusive puppeteer behind the city’s corruption. He held the key to the villain’s secret chamber, the rain plastering his hair to his face as he faced the ancient, iron-studded door. Every thread of the narrative was pulling tight to this single, explosive moment.

Leo’s eyes devoured the final lines, his breath held tight in his chest.

Kaelen slid the heavy iron key into the lock. It turned with a deafening, grinding click. He pushed the door inward, into the suffocating darkness, and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he finally saw the face of—

That was it.

The page ended. The story stopped. Not with a resolution, not with a cliffhanger, but as if the writer had simply vanished mid-thought.

Leo stared at the final, incomplete sentence, his mind refusing to accept it. He frantically flipped the page over. It was blank. He riffled through the stack, his hands shaking, thinking he’d missed a page. Nothing. It just… ended.

A feeling of profound loss crashed over him, so intense it was physical. It was followed by a different sensation, something sharper and more terrifying. A gnawing, desperate hunger. An itch in the back of his brain that he couldn't scratch. He needed to know what happened next. It wasn't a want; it was a biological imperative, as urgent and undeniable as the need for air.

The perfect, beautiful world he had inhabited for hours had been ripped away, leaving him stranded back in the silence of his empty house, with an ache in his soul so vast and so deep it felt like a wound. And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that he would do anything, absolutely anything, to get another taste.