The sound hung in the air, rhythmic and deliberate—tap, tap, tap—reverberating directly through the plaster of the master bedroom's walk-in closet wall.

The stench was suffocating, instantly coating the back of my throat with a metallic, sickening taste. It was the exact same perfume bottle I had found sitting untouched on the vanity the day we moved in—the one Vanessa claimed belonged to the previous owner who had "moved to Seattle."

With a sickening splinter of old timber, a hand burst through the cracked wooden panel.

It was grotesquely pale, the skin stretched so tightly over the bone that it resembled parchment paper, and the fingernails were caked in dried, dark-brown plaster dust and blood. The hand groped blindly in the air before latching onto my wrist with an iron grip that felt impossibly strong.

"Help me..." a voice rasped from the dark cavity, sounding like dry leaves dragged across concrete. "She... she locked the cage."

"Let go of him!" Vanessa shrieked. She wasn't looking at the hand; she was staring at the floor near the vanity, where Sophie’s small SD card lay glinting in the LED light.

Before I could wrench my arm free, the entire wooden partition caved inward with a thunderous crash of collapsing drywall and wooden studs. A figure tumbled out of the suffocating darkness onto our plush bedroom carpet, sending up a billowing cloud of gray insulation and decades-old dust.

Sophie screamed, burying her face in my shoulder.

I dropped the flashlight, my knees buckling slightly as I took in the creature sprawled on the floor. It was a woman, emaciated to the point of skeletal, wearing a tattered silk dress that matched the vintage style of the 1970s. Her hair was impossibly long, cascading in tangled, dusty ropes down her back. But it was her face that made my blood run cold: she looked precisely, hauntingly like Vanessa—older, gaunt, and ravaged by starvation, but carrying the exact same bone structure, the exact same amber eyes.