CHAPTER 2 — The Final Page Was Waiting
Emma staggered backward.
"No..."
She whispered.
"This can't be real."
Someone was playing an elaborate prank.
They had to be.
She searched every corner of the basement, expecting hidden cameras or evidence that another person had been there recently.
Nothing.
Only silence.
And the steady ticking of the pocket watch.
Tick...
Tick...
Tick...
She returned to the diary.
Each page became more terrifying than the last.
The writer described conversations Emma had with people earlier that morning.
Her coffee order.
The song playing in her car.
Even the voicemail she had deleted without listening.
No one should have known those details.
Near the end of the diary, several pages had been violently torn out.
Only the final page remained.
Its edges were stained with something dark.
Blood...
Or ink.
A warning written across the top screamed:
"DO NOT READ THIS UNTIL THE CLOCK STOPS."
The pocket watch suddenly slowed.
Tick...
...
Tick...
...
Then...
Silence.
11:47.
Exactly.
Against every instinct, Emma turned the final page.
Instead of words...
She found a photograph.
It showed a terrified young woman kneeling beside the same wooden table.
Holding the same diary.
Wearing the same clothes.
Emma stared closer.
The woman wasn't just similar to her.
It was her.
Behind the woman stood a shadowy figure whose face had been scratched away.
Written beneath the photograph were twelve chilling words:
"The diary never predicts the future... it remembers every time you failed to escape."
Emma dropped the book in horror.
She suddenly realized something impossible.
The cracks in the basement floor...
The table...
The pocket watch...
Even the dust...
Nothing had changed in one hundred years.
Because no time had passed at all.
And somewhere in the darkness behind her...
Someone whispered,
May you like
"Welcome back, Emma."
To be continued...
