The House of Echoes 

Chapter 1: The Return of Elias

Elias returned to the village after twenty years. The wind blew with the same fury as back then, when he had fled as a child in the dead of night. His uncle had been found dead, his face twisted in terror, eyes wide open staring into nothing. Since that night, no one had dared enter the “House of Echoes,” a decaying villa on the edge of the woods.

But Elias needed answers. The nightmares wouldn’t let him rest: every night he dreamed of the house, of his mother’s voice calling to him from inside — even though she had died there, years ago. The villagers avoided him, whispering prayers as he passed. One told him, “If you want to die talking to yourself… go in.”

The front door was half open, as if it had been waiting for him. Elias stepped inside, and the silence was deafening. Then… his own voice called to him. But he hadn’t spoken

Chapter 2: The Voice Inside the Walls

 "Elias... you finally came back." The voice seemed to come from the walls. It was his voice — identical. But he hadn’t said a word. The house smelled of mold, dust, and rusted iron. Every step on the creaking floorboards seemed to awaken something dormant, hidden.

He ventured into the main hall. The old photographs were still there, yellowed and faded, hanging on the wall. Portraits of his family, his father, and of that very room. But… one of the men in the photo he had never seen before. And yet, he looked just like him.

As he stared, a sharp thud echoed behind him. He spun around: a chair had moved on its own, as if someone invisible had just sat in it. Then the voice returned, this time from behind him: "You let us die, Elias."

His heart pounded in his chest. It was a voice full of anger and sorrow. Something — or someone — was still there. And it had been waiting a very long time.

Chapter 3: The Hidden Diary

Elias climbed the stairs slowly, each step groaning beneath his feet, as if the house were protesting his return. The air grew colder the higher he went. On the ground floor, at least, the fading sunlight filtered through the dusty windows. But upstairs… there was only darkness.

He opened the door to the old bedroom. It looked untouched, as if no one had been there in years. The furniture was draped with white sheets, yellowed by time, and on one of them, something caught his eye: an old black leather diary, sealed with a broken clasp.

With trembling hands, he opened it. It wasn’t his. It wasn’t his mother’s. It had belonged to his father.

The first pages spoke of a “voice that answered thoughts,” and a “presence that mimicked family to deceive the mind.” The further he read, the more disturbed the handwriting became — shaky, obsessive, frantic. On the last page, it said:

"It’s not an echo. It’s something else. Don’t speak to it. Don’t trust your own voice."

At that moment, he heard a faint whisper from the hallway:

"Daddy... is that you?"

The diary slipped from his hands. That voice… was his own, as a child.

Chapter 4: The Voice in the Hallway

Elias froze. That voice couldn’t be real. It was his — the voice he had when he was maybe six or seven years old. How was it possible? "Daddy... come play with me..." The voice called out again, sweeter now, more insistent.

He took a step back, tripping over the diary he had dropped. As he bent down to pick it up, the pages flipped open on their own. A drawing. It was him as a child, with the same expression he remembered from an old photograph. Beside him was something formless. A shadow. It looked like it was holding his hand.

Elias's heart was pounding. “I need to get out of here,” he thought. But when he turned to the door — it was shut. Not slammed. Locked. From the outside.

"Daddy... why won’t you answer me?" The voice was now behind him.

Elias spun around, but saw nothing. Only darkness, stretching from the door deeper into the room — like a living shadow slowly creeping forward.

He heard a footstep behind him. Then another. But no one was there. And then he understood. That thing… it wasn’t just mimicking his voice. It was trying to recreate a memory. To lure him in. To become him.

In the corner of the room, the mirror began to fog up on its own. And in the mist that formed, a message appeared — written by invisible fingers:

“Shall we play again?”

Chapter 5: The Unfinished Game

Elias stood frozen in front of the fogged mirror. The words "Shall we play again?" glowed faintly, as if slowly dissolving into the condensation. He tried to wipe it away with a trembling hand — but there was no smear. The mirror wasn’t wet. It wasn’t even cold. It was... alive.

On the other side, a figure began to take shape. It was his own silhouette, but younger. The height of a child, with the same tousled hair he had as a boy. Elias screamed — but no sound left his mouth.

"You can't leave until we finish the game," whispered the reflected figure, its eyes black as bottomless wells. Then it smiled — a twisted, unnatural grin, far too wide for a human face.

Suddenly, the door burst open with a violent slam. The hallway was there — just as dark as before. Elias grabbed the diary. The mirror shattered into a thousand shards as he ran. There was no wind. No visible force. Only the sound of glass breaking like a scream.

He sprinted down the stairs, but each flight looked exactly like the last. He was looping. Trapped. The house was disorienting him. Changing as he moved.

At last, he found himself in another room. The walls were covered in children’s drawings. In every one, a child was playing with a shadow. Always the same shadow. Always getting closer. In the final drawing… the shadow had replaced the child.

Elias heard the voice one last time — farther away now, but crystal clear: "You promised you'd never leave me alone."

Chapter 6: The Lost Children

The room seemed to breathe. The walls, covered in children’s drawings, slowly contracted as if alive, pulsing to the rhythm of an invisible heart. Elias approached one of the drawings: it clearly showed a little girl crying while a shadow dragged her toward a dark well. Above it, written in shaky block letters, were the words: "I don’t want to play anymore."

Elias began reading the pages of the diary he had found. Each line was more disturbing than the last. It spoke of an “Echo Game,” invented by children many years ago. A game played by whispering your own name to a mirror at midnight, asking, “Who are you really?” In return, the mirror answered with a dark double — a part of the soul that came to life and demanded to continue the game… forever.

But when a child refused, the echo took them.

One by one, they vanished.

The last pages were written by a trembling hand: "There are three of us left. Me, Lena, and Yusuf. But tonight it was his turn. I heard his reflection laugh, but the voice was no longer his."

Elias closed the diary, his heart pounding. Soft giggles echoed in the room. Children. But there were no children, only shadows on the walls. Shadows moving without any light source.

The door slammed shut behind him. When he tried to open it, the handle snapped off with a sharp sound. From the ceiling, burnt feathers began to fall, as if an angel had been torn apart in the attic.

Then, from the far end of the room, a gentle voice called out: "Elias… do you want to play with us?"

Chapter 7: The Echo Game

The floor trembled slightly beneath Elias’s feet. The childish shadows on the walls laughed and ran in circles, like a macabre nursery rhyme. The voice that had called him grew more insistent. “Eliiiiaaas… it’s your turn!”

In the center of the room, a mirror appeared out of nowhere. It was old, cracked, with a wooden frame blackened by time. Elias approached it, drawn by an invisible force. He looked inside… and saw himself. But it wasn’t really him. The reflection was smiling, while Elias stood still, terrified. His double raised a hand before he did, touched his face, and then pointed at him.

“You are the new one. You will play forever.”

Suddenly, Elias was sucked into the mirror. He fell into a liquid darkness, as if the glass had turned into black water. When he surfaced, he was in a hallway identical to the house’s—but everything was reversed: the stairs went down instead of up, the paintings had distorted faces, and the clocks ran backward.

The children were there. All of them. But they had black, deep eyes, like holes into the world. They wore masks made of broken mirrors and danced in a circle around a well.

From the well, a skeletal hand slowly emerged, gripping an old bloodstained rope.

“If you want to get out, Elias,” said the smallest girl, “you have to finish the Echo Game. Or you’ll become one of us.”

Elias was trapped in a world created by lost thoughts and forgotten games. He no longer knew how much time had passed. But one thing was certain: he was no longer alone.

The Game had begun.

Chapter 8: The Room Without Exit

The game had truly begun. Elias felt the echo of his own fears booming everywhere. Every step he took, every breath, multiplied and bounced back—louder, more unsettling. It wasn’t just a physical echo; it was something alive. Something watching him.

He walked through the upside-down corridor, passing broken mirrors that reflected scenes from his childhood, but distorted: his mother with a blackened face, his father crying blood, and himself laughing with a mouth full of teeth that weren’t his.

Then a door opened. Or rather, one slammed shut behind him, and the room he was in began to shrink.

Elias tried to turn back, but the wall behind him had become a smooth, cold, breathing surface—like skin. In front of him, a window showed an absurd landscape: the sky was beneath, the earth above, and the house bent in on itself.

In the center of the room, an old gramophone began to play by itself. A crackling voice whispered:

“If you want to escape, you must remember what you have forgotten…”

Suddenly, the light went out. He was left in total darkness. One, two, three… four cold hands touched him. Voices of children called to him; some wept, others laughed hysterically.

Then, a door opened again. Elias ran toward it. He wasn’t ready to die there. But when he crossed it, he found himself in the very same room he had just left.

Time did not flow. It was frozen. Trapped in an eternal cycle.

And above him, written in bloodied fingers on the ceiling, was a phrase:

“There is no way out of the room where you live your nightmares.”

Chapter 9: The Whisper of the Past

Elias was trapped in the loop, but inside that room without exit, a thought began to take hold in his mind. If he couldn’t physically escape, maybe he could do it through memory. He had to remember.

He closed his eyes and tried to dig deep inside himself, into the darkest depths of his past. Images, faces, and sounds resurfaced confusedly, like a puzzle starting to take shape.

He saw his twin brother, who had disappeared years before without a trace. He relived the last time they were together—the argument, the remorse, and that feeling of guilt he had always hidden.

Then, he heard that whisper again:

“Remember, Elias. Only those who recognize the past can break the chain.”

The room began to change. The walls covered themselves with old photographs, all showing him and his brother, but with distorted details, as if something had been erased or hidden.

With a trembling hand, Elias touched one photo in particular. It was the day his brother vanished. But this time, in the reflection behind them, appeared a dark, faceless figure watching them.

A cold fear struck him, but Elias also felt a push—an urge not to give up.

That ghost from the past, that dark presence, was not just a memory. It was the core of all his torment.

As the room filled with voices and shadows, Elias realized that to free himself, he had to face that presence and uncover the truth buried beneath years of silence.

The terror wasn’t just in the house. It was inside him.

Chapter 10: The Truth in the Light

Elias’s heart raced wildly as the dark figure drew closer, a faceless shadow that seemed to suck all the light from the room. But this time, he did not let terror paralyze him. He had finally gathered the courage to face the past that haunted him.

“Who are you?” he whispered in a hoarse voice.

The figure stopped, as if listening. Then, with a slow and unsettling gesture, it pointed to an old door hidden behind a worn-out cloth. Elias felt that the door concealed the key to breaking the nightmare.

With trembling hands, he opened the door and found himself in a forgotten room, a small altar of memories: his brother’s belongings, yellowed letters, and a diary. As he flipped through it, he uncovered the hidden truth: his brother had been the victim of a cursed ritual, performed right in that house by a cult that wanted to imprison his soul.

The words in the diary explained that the faceless shadow was the manifestation of the ritual, an echo of the evil that had consumed his brother’s life and now sought to consume his as well.

Elias understood that to free himself, he had to complete the ritual in reverse: recite the formula found in the diary, at dawn’s first light, in the center of the main room of the house.

With time rushing, Elias ran to the center of the house while the shadow chased him, screaming a blood-curdling cry. When the first ray of sunlight broke through the broken window, he spoke the ancient words.

A blinding flash of light enveloped everything, and the shadow vanished in a desperate scream.

The house fell silent. Elias felt free, finally.

The past would no longer torment him.