Chapter 3: The Stain That Breathes

Chapter 3: The Stain That Breathes

Leo slammed the bathroom door shut, the sound echoing hollowly through the house. He didn't board it up. He couldn't bring himself to. That would be admitting defeat. Instead, he wedged a towel tightly against the bottom of the door, a flimsy, pathetic barrier against the biological horror he knew pulsed within the walls. Out of sight, not quite out of mind.

He stumbled back into the living room, his heart a frantic, trapped bird against his ribs. The image of the warm, pulsating veins was burned onto the inside of his eyelids. This wasn't a renovation project anymore. This was an autopsy on a creature that was still alive.

He needed to ground himself. He needed a win. A simple, straightforward task that obeyed the laws of physics. His frantic eyes scanned the room, landing on the dark, ugly stain on the floorboards near the center of the room. It was one of the first things he’d noticed when he bought the place—a sprawling, deep brown discoloration, roughly the size of a large rug. The realtor had claimed it was just water damage from a long-forgotten roof leak.

Yes. That was it. A solvable problem. Wood, stain, cleaner, effort. He could conquer this. He could sand it down, bleach it, refinish it. He could erase this one small piece of the house’s sickness and reclaim a patch of territory for himself.

His desire for control was a physical ache. He marched to the kitchen, grabbing a bucket, hot water, and a stiff-bristled brush. He poured a generous amount of heavy-duty cleaner into the water, the sharp chemical scent a welcome assault on the sweet, underlying smell of decay.

He started at the edge of the stain, scrubbing with a vengeance. He put his entire body weight into it, his arm moving in a furious rhythm. The bristles scraped against the old wood, a satisfyingly normal sound. See? he told himself, the thought a desperate mantra. This is normal. This is how things work. You apply force, you see results.

But he saw no results. The soapy water seemed to vanish the moment it touched the stain, sucked into the wood without leaving a trace of moisture. The color didn't lighten. If anything, the area he scrubbed seemed to grow a fraction darker, the brown deepening to a rich, loamy black.

He switched tactics. He poured bleach directly onto the wood, the acrid smell stinging his nostrils. The liquid pooled for a second before it too was absorbed, vanishing into the thirsty floorboards. The stain remained, defiant and unchanged. He tried a paint scraper, trying to physically shear the discoloration from the surface of the wood. The metal blade screeched, but only succeeded in gouging the floor, the revealed wood beneath just as dark as the surface.

Frustration mounted, tipping over into a cold, creeping dread. This wasn't right. He knelt, exhaustion and fear making his limbs tremble. He leaned closer, his face inches from the floor, examining the patch he’d abused with chemicals and tools. The grain of the wood within the stain seemed different—finer, more complex, like a network of tiny capillaries rather than simple cellulose.

He held his breath, staring intently. And then he saw it.

It was subtle, so subtle he thought his exhausted eyes were playing tricks on him. A slow, rhythmic expansion and contraction. The entire dark patch on the floor seemed to swell upward by a millimeter, hold for a silent beat, and then recede. It was a pulsation. A slow, deep, sleeping breath.

He snatched his hand back as if the floor were red-hot. His mind reeled, connecting this terrible new discovery with the warm, pulsing veins in the wall. This wasn't a stain. It was an organ. Exposed, dormant, and embedded in the very structure of his living room. The house wasn’t just a creature; he was inside it, crawling on its skin, standing on its flesh.

The frantic logic he had clung to shattered completely, leaving him adrift in a sea of impossible horror. He scrambled backward on his hands and knees, away from the breathing floor, his back hitting the opposite wall with a dull thud.

As if summoned by his terror, a sound cut through the silence.

Clack.

It was the metallic flap of the mail slot on the front door.

Leo froze, his gaze darting from the pulsing stain to the door. No. Not again. It was too soon. He didn't want another command, another riddle written in that spidery, insane script. He stayed motionless, hoping that if he didn't acknowledge it, it wouldn't be real.

But it was real. Lying on the dusty floor just inside the door was another folded piece of yellowed paper. It seemed to mock him, a pale square of malevolence in the gloom. The house had watched him fail. It had felt his efforts to harm it. And now, it was giving him a new task.

With a sense of grim inevitability, he forced himself to his feet. His legs felt like lead. He walked over and picked up the note, his fingers numb. The paper was dry and brittle, ancient to the touch. He unfolded it.

The message was three simple words.

FEED THE LUNG.

He stared at the words, his mind blank with shock. Feed it? What did that even mean? He looked from the note to the breathing stain on the floor. The lung. That's what it was. An exposed, slowly respiring organ of this monstrous architecture. What could he possibly feed it? Spackle? Wood polish?

Before his panicked thoughts could spiral further, a new sound began.

It was faint at first, so quiet he almost missed it. A thin, tinny thread of sound weaving through the thick silence. It was music. A cheerful, lilting melody played on a piano, the kind of tune you'd hear on a crackling old record. It was coming from upstairs.

From the master bedroom.

Leo's blood turned to ice. He looked up at the ceiling, his entire body rigid with a new, sharper terror. The radio. The impossible, unplugged bakelite radio was playing. It had been silent for two days, a dormant idol in an empty room. Now, awakened by the arrival of the third note, it was serenading him.

The cheerful, innocent tune floated down the stairs, a grotesque counterpoint to the horror of his situation. He was standing on a living lung, holding a command to feed it, while a ghost radio from the 1950s played a jaunty tune from the room where it had impossibly appeared.

The house was no longer just giving him instructions. It was providing a soundtrack. The puzzle was becoming more complex, its rules more perverse. And Leo was no longer just a player; he was the main attraction in a symphony of decay.