The next morning, I found a bruise on my chest shaped like a hand.
Not a normal hand.
The fingers were too long. Too thin. And they curved like claws.
It was a mark—his mark.
I covered it with a hoodie, but I could feel it burning beneath the fabric all day, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Whatever The Watcher was, it had touched me. Claimed me.
Sarah was waiting at the back of the library, eyes wild. She didn't even say hello. She just pulled out her phone and showed me a photo she'd taken from the school's archives.
It was a scan of an old student ID.
The name read: Emily Harper.
And the face...
She looked just like Sarah.
"It's not possible," Sarah whispered. "But I've been having dreams—burning walls, screaming kids, that same classroom again and again. And I remember things I shouldn't."
"You think you're… her?"
She nodded slowly. "I think I was her. In another life. I think I died here. And I think I came back."
My stomach twisted.
The fire, the fear, the whispers… this wasn't just haunting us. It was replaying.
We weren't random. We were pulled here.
Ashford High was repeating history.
Mike found something too—something hidden beneath the basement.
He snuck us in during lunch through an old maintenance tunnel that led to a sealed hatch beneath the school's foundation.
Inside was a room that didn't belong in a school.
It was round, built of stone, with black runes carved into the walls. An altar sat in the center, burned and cracked, with dried blood caked in the grooves.
Sarah covered her mouth. "It's a ritual chamber."
Mike held up a journal he'd found nearby. The same handwriting as the files we saw.
"Experiment 43 has breached containment. Subject manifests through emotional trauma, particularly adolescent suffering. Requires a vessel to remain anchored. Previous hosts perished in fire. Next cycle predicted within 60 years."
I did the math.
The fire happened in 1965.
Sixty years later?
2025.
Now.
Us.
Suddenly, the door slammed shut behind us.
Our flashlights flickered and died.
In the pitch dark, a voice rasped from the walls:
"It begins again."
We ran.
As we stumbled into the hallway above, I could feel something rise behind us—a shadow stretching across the floor, following us with a slow, patient hunger.
We burst out into the daylight, gasping, shaking, nearly collapsing on the grass outside the school.
But the door behind us never reopened.
It was gone.
Walled up like it had never existed.
Sarah clutched my arm. "We were brought here for a reason. We're not just victims. We're the only ones who can end this."
I nodded. My voice was barely a whisper.
"But how do you destroy something that isn't alive?"
That night, I dreamed again.
But it wasn't a dream.
I was back in the burning classroom. The air choked with smoke. Screams echoing down the halls.
And standing in front of me, watching with lidless eyes, was The Watcher.
Its voice crawled into my head like insects under the skin.
"You will finish what they began. You are the doorway."
I woke up gasping.
The bruise on my chest had spread.
I didn't go to school the next day.
Not because I was sick—though something inside me was sick—but because I was afraid of what I might become while I was there. The Watcher had started to whisper in full sentences now. Not just fragments or images, but full, coherent thoughts. And worst of all?
They made sense.
They left us to burn.
They buried the truth.
You are the reckoning.
It didn't feel like a possession. It felt like awakening. Like something ancient was blooming behind my ribcage, spreading slowly, deliberately, through every nerve.
I stared at myself in the mirror and barely recognized the reflection. My eyes were darker—almost black in low light. And my shadow… didn't move when I did.
Sarah came over that afternoon.
She looked exhausted. Hollow. Like something had been feeding on her dreams too.
"I remembered more," she said quietly, pulling her sleeves down over bruises that hadn't been there yesterday. "In the fire… I tried to stop it. I tried to warn the others. But it wasn't just a fire. It was a ritual."
I sat down slowly, heart pounding.
"They weren't trying to kill us," she continued. "They were trying to trap it. Sacrifice the students to bind The Watcher."
"But it didn't work."
She nodded. "It worked for a while. But the seal broke. And now… it wants a new sacrifice."
I felt my pulse in my throat. "It wants me."
That night, the dreams came again—but I wasn't alone this time.
I saw Mike.
We were standing in the ash-covered classroom together, staring at the chalkboard. Except this time, the words were different:
"THREE MUST BURN TO CLOSE THE DOOR."
When I turned to him, Mike was weeping blood. And behind him, The Watcher stood with one hand on his shoulder.
I jolted awake, chest heaving.
My phone buzzed.
A text from Sarah: "Mike's missing."
We found him in the school basement.
Barefoot. Eyes vacant. Sitting in front of the old sealed door to the ritual chamber, muttering to himself in a voice that didn't sound human.
"Flames cleanse the blood.
Ash remembers pain.
The seal must drink.
The seal must feed."
When we touched his shoulder, he screamed like his skin was on fire, then collapsed into unconsciousness.
We carried him to Sarah's garage and laid him on the floor. She began digging through the journals we had collected, piecing together the fragments of history like a jigsaw puzzle soaked in gasoline.
"The Watcher was never meant to be here," she said, flipping through pages. "It came through a breach… something the founders of Ashford opened in the 1800s. They thought they could control it."
"Typical," I muttered.
Sarah didn't laugh.
She found a final entry, written in the scrawl of someone dying:
"If it cannot be banished, it must be bound. Three souls. Fire-born. Bound in blood. Only then can the breach be sealed again."
Three souls.
Three of us.
I looked at Sarah. "You think we're supposed to die?"
"No," she said, her voice trembling. "I think we're supposed to choose."
Mike woke up that night.
But it wasn't Mike.
Not fully.
His eyes were black as oil, his veins shadowed. When he spoke, it was The Watcher's voice:
"You opened the door. You read the words. You stepped into the hall. You are mine now."
I grabbed him by the shoulders. "Fight it, Mike. You're stronger than this. You don't belong to it."
His expression flickered.
For a second, just a second, he looked like himself again. His eyes welled with tears. "Kill me," he whispered.
Sarah cried out, pulling me back. "No—we can't. There has to be another way!"
But deep down, I knew Mike was right.
The old wing was waiting for us.
We returned, one last time, after midnight. The air buzzed with static, thick and heavy like before a storm. The iron doors swung open on their own.
Inside, the hallway flickered with torchlight that wasn't real. Shadows danced along the walls, writhing like fingers.
The classroom—the original site of the fire—had changed.
It looked new. Untouched. Like time had peeled itself backward.
Emily's desk was still there.
So was her journal.
Mike stepped into the center of the room and turned to face us. "This is where it ends."
Sarah held my hand. "Or where it begins again."
The Watcher's voice filled the room. Not from a single point, but from everywhere. It echoed through the walls, the floor, the ceiling, even our bones.
"Burn again.
Three for the seal.
One must stay."
We looked at each other.
I understood then. The Watcher didn't want death.
It wanted binding.
It needed one of us to remain behind—to suffer forever within its grasp, to anchor it to the breach.
A living tomb.
Sarah stepped forward.
"No," I said. "You were the warning. You remembered. You don't deserve this."
She shook her head, tears sliding down her cheeks.
"I was the start. Let me be the end."
Before I could stop her, she stepped into the center of the ritual circle carved into the scorched wood.
She took Mike's hand.
Looked at me.
"Close the door."
I spoke the words from Emily's journal, now fully revealed in ink I couldn't see before. Blood dripped from my fingers. The room howled.
The fire began.
Not from flame—but from memory. The screams of the past, the burning pain, the betrayal—it all ignited around us like reality itself was combusting.
Sarah screamed.
Mike wept.
And The Watcher screamed, a sound like dying stars.
Then… silence.
The room was empty.
No scorch marks. No blood. No ghosts.
Just me.
Alone.
I woke up in the nurse's office.
They said they found me collapsed in the hallway. No sign of Mike or Sarah. No evidence of any old wing.
The administration denied the fire ever happened.
The basement didn't exist.
The ritual chamber was gone.
But I remember.
And every night, when the lights go out… I hear a faint voice behind the walls.
Sarah's voice.
"We closed the door… but it still has the key."