Chapter 3 - The Empty Room
David lunged forward, throwing his shoulder against the heavy wooden door of the storage room. It gave way with a loud pop, the smart lock grinding as the internal mechanism shattered under his weight. He swept the high-powered flashlight across the small, enclosed space, his breath pluming in the sudden drop in temperature.
"Hello?" David demanded, his voice echoing off the plastic storage bins and cardboard boxes. "Who's in here? Show yourself right now!"
The room was completely empty. There were no hidden alcoves, no open windows, and no secondary doors. The air smelled faintly of ozone and old dust, thick and heavy like an attic sealed shut for decades. David stepped inside, his boots crunching on something small and hard scattered across the floorboards. He knelt down, shining the beam directly at his feet, and felt his stomach violently heave.
Dozens of small, white buttons, identical to the ones sewn onto Mia's t-shirt, were scattered across the floor in a neat, deliberate circle. In the very center lay a second plush bunny, wet with fresh mud and completely devoid of its left glass eye.
"David! Get out of there right now!" Elena shrieked from the hallway, her panic piercing through the walls. "Look at the front porch camera!"
David bolted backward out of the storage room, nearly tripping over his own feet. He ran to the kitchen island where the main security tablet rested. Elena was frantically swiping backward through the event logs, her hands shaking so badly she dropped the stylus twice.
"What am I looking at?" David asked, grabbing the edge of the counter to steady himself.
"Look at the timestamp," Elena whispered, her face completely drained of color. "This footage was recorded twenty minutes ago. Before we even sat down for dinner. Before Mia started crying."
David stared at the screen. The exterior camera showed the front porch bathed in the amber glow of the porch light. But there was no street, no driveway, and no neighborhood visible beyond the wooden steps. The entire outside world had been replaced by a dense, unmoving wall of gray fog that pressed directly against the glass of the front door. And standing right on the welcome mat, staring directly into the camera with empty, dark sockets, were three identical little girls in white t-shirts, all holding muddy plush toys against their chests.
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"They're not trying to get in," Mia whispered from beneath the kitchen table, her voice entirely devoid of childhood warmth. "They're waiting for us to open the back door."
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