THE WHISPERS BENEATH THE FLOORBOARDS ARE CALLING OUT FOR A FATHER WHO WALKED AWAY

The instinct to save his daughter banished all fear, replacing it with a desperate, blind fury. Arthur dove headfirst into the empty air where Lily had just vanished, expecting to plummet into the infinite dark. Instead, his hands slammed into cold, splintered wood.

The smoke vanished instantly. The roaring fire was gone.

Arthur gasped, sucking in cold, clean air as he collided hard with the hallway floor of his current suburban home. The grandfather clock was still ticking rhythmically in the parlor. The hallway was quiet, bathed in the soft amber light of the afternoon sun filtering through the front window.

He was lying right in front of the floor vent.

Arthur shook his head violently, trying to clear the lingering hallucinations from his vision. His hands were scraped and bleeding, and the knees of his blue trousers were torn and stained with dark soil.

"Arthur?"

He looked up. Clara was standing ten feet away, rushing down the hall toward him with a look of genuine, frantic panic on her face—the exact expression she had worn when this nightmare had first begun.

"Clara?" Arthur whispered, pushing himself up onto his elbows. "What... what is happening?"

"Get away from that vent right now!" Clara shouted, dropping to her knees and grabbing his arm, pulling him backward away from the brass slats with surprising strength.

Arthur didn't fight her. He let her pull him back, his eyes locked on the metal grate. The air coming out of the vent smelled of fresh dust and copper.

"Did you... did you see the fire?" Arthur asked, his voice trembling as he clutched his bleeding hands. "Did you see the hallway?"

Clara stopped pulling, her eyes wide with confusion. She stared at him, her chest heaving as she caught her breath. "What are you talking about, Arthur? You went down to the basement five minutes ago to check the fuse box. You came running back up screaming about a fire."

"Five minutes?" Arthur stared at her in horror. "I was down there for hours, Clara. I relived the fire from thirty years ago. I saw... I saw the boy."

Clara’s face went rigid. The color drained from her cheeks, leaving her skin chalk-white. She slowly released his arm and stood up, backing away toward the living room archway.

"There was no fire thirty years ago, Arthur," Clara said, her voice dropping to a terrified whisper. "Your childhood home didn't burn down. You told me yourself... you grew up in an apartment in the city."

Arthur froze. The memory of the fire—the smoke, the burning wallpaper, the trapped boy—began to unravel in his mind like rotten thread. It hadn't been a memory from his past. It had been planted in his brain by whatever lived beneath the floorboards.

"Then who was the boy?" Arthur whispered, staring at the floor vent.

From inside the metal slats, a soft, childish giggle bubbled up, followed by the sound of small fingers tapping against the underside of the floorboards in a slow, rhythmic pattern.