25 Sep The Seven Doors Challenge

My name’s Ariana, and I wasn’t supposed to be the responsible one. That’s usually Mom’s job. But when my mother and father, Elaine and David, left for a week-long work trip, the responsibility of keeping an eye on my sixteen-year-old sister fell squarely on me.

I figured it wouldn’t be too bad. Maya’s always been restless, glued to her phone, chasing whatever trend is blowing up TikTok this week. Most of the time it’s harmless—dances, lip-syncs, goofy “storytimes.” Annoying, sure, but nothing I couldn’t tune out.

This time, though, she picked the wrong challenge.

We live in an old farmhouse, the kind of place people joke about being haunted when they see it from the road. Long gravel driveway, chipped white paint, cellar doors that stick when it rains. It’s been in the family since my grandparents. As a result, I know every creak of its floorboards, every drafty window, every corner of the basement.

Or at least, I thought I did.

The first night after Mom and Dad left, Maya came bounding into my room, eyes wide and phone in hand “You have to see this!” she said, shoving the screen at me.

On it was a grainy video from some horror-themed account. In it, a girl stood in a dark basement holding a ring light. Behind her were seven doors in a stone wall. The caption read: THE SEVEN DOORS CHALLENGE: ONE DOOR PER NIGHT. DON’T STOP. DON’T LOOK BACK.

I rolled my eyes. “So it’s just another spooky ritual trend.”

“No, Ari. Look.” She scrolled through the comments, filled with rows of usernames I didn’t recognize. Some were normal: this is so fake lol, nah, I’m not doing this. But others gave me chills: you can’t quit once you start, don’t open 7, they’re already watching you.

Maya grinned like she’d struck gold. “Our basement has seven doors. It’s perfect!”

I frowned. “You mean all the storage nooks? I don’t think those coun-”

“Yes, they do! There are seven total, if you count the door to the basement. It’s perfect!” She tugged me downstairs, ignoring my protests.

The basement smelled of damp stone and mildew, as always. A single pull-chain bulb cast weak yellow light. Maya excitedly counted them out with her finger, confirming there were in fact seven doors. The main entrance door at the top of the stairs. The one that led into the laundry room. The old coal chute door. Three low, narrow storage doors built right into the foundation, which I’d always assumed were just crawl spaces.

And one more, a small, square door near the back that I swear I’d never seen before.

“Seven,” Maya whispered.

I told her it was just a stupid internet hoax. But something about that seventh door gnawed at me. I knew this house. I’d lived here my whole life. And yet there it was, plain as day—red paint peeling, a rusted latch that looked untouched for decades.

Maya filmed a quick intro for her followers that night, giggling as she explained how she was going to do the challenge. I stood behind the camera, trying not to look at that last door.

Later, when I scrolled TikTok before bed, the original video was gone. Deleted. But the comments on Maya’s teaser clip were already pouring in:

She’s perfect for it.
Don’t let her stop.
Tell Ariana hello. 

* * * * * *

Maya couldn’t wait until the next night to start. She wanted to film immediately, like the algorithm would collapse if she didn’t get her first clip up by midnight. I told her it was ridiculous, but she was already arranging her ring light at the bottom of the stairs.

“Door one,” she said, spinning the camera toward a squat wooden hatch in the foundation wall. “Wish me luck.”

The door creaked open to reveal a dusty storage alcove lined with shelves that hadn’t held anything in decades. Just cobwebs and chunks of old mortar.

I breathed easier. “Wow. Terrifying. Your followers are going to lose their minds over dust.”

Maya laughed, shut the door, and stopped recording.

Later that night, though, when she replayed the footage for me, the image stuttered in and out. Static bled across the screen in sharp, jagged streaks. And for just a second, in the corner of the frame, something moved.

“See that?” she whispered.

“It’s compression,” I told her. “Low light. Cheap phone camera.”

But I didn’t believe it.

Her video got a couple hundred likes within hours, with comments ranging from “so fake,” to “this feels real,” to “look behind you.” And one that stopped me cold: “Ariana doesn’t believe. She’ll see soon.”

I hadn’t appeared in the video. Maya hadn’t even said my name while recording. I forced a laugh, told myself it was a troll who’d guessed, but the pit of my stomach twisted.

* * * * * *

The second night, she opened a door closer to the laundry room. The hinges squealed as the dark space beyond yawned open. Maya laughed nervously for the camera, saying, “Door two. What’s behind it? Hopefully not a rat.”

I didn’t hear anything unusual while standing there, but when she replayed the footage afterward, her voice caught halfway through her sentence. The audio picked up another voice—low, close, whispering in her ear.

She swore she’d heard it in the moment, but I hadn’t.

And there, on the video, just over her shoulder, was the outline of something tall and thin standing in the darkness. It didn’t move. It didn’t blink. But it was there.

“Okay, this one you edited,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

She shook her head, eyes wide. “I didn’t. Ari, I swear.”

By the next morning, her clip had gone viral. Tens of thousands of views. Hundreds of comments. And tucked between the normal “so scary” and “it’s fake” chatter were the ones that made my skin crawl.

Door two likes you.
Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.
Tell your sister to smile next time.

I scrolled through them twice, pulse quickening. “Maya, why are they talking about me?”

“What do you mean?”

“They keep saying my name.” I jabbed at the screen. “I’m not even in your videos.”

She shrugged. “Maybe I mentioned you before? Or they’re just guessing?”

“They’re not guessing.”

When I tried to tap on the usernames, most vanished as soon as I pressed.

* * * * * *

By night three, I was ready to drag her phone out into the field behind the barn and bury it. Maya was glued to it, scrolling through comments like they were gospel.

“This is it, Ari,” she said, pacing the kitchen. “This is the challenge that’s going to blow me up. I’ll hit 100K by the end of the week.”

“You’re gonna blow something up, all right,” I muttered. “Probably your brain cells.”

She ignored me, heading downstairs with her ring light.

Door three was another narrow crawl-space door, lower to the ground. Maya crouched down, camera on, and swung it open.

The recording cut off abruptly after she laughed and said, “Guess what? Nothing in here either.”

But when we replayed it, there was a noise.

Scratching. Not like a mouse or a rat. Louder. Deliberate. Nails dragged hard across wood.

It went on and on, long after the door had been opened.

Maya’s hands shook as she set her phone down. “You heard it this time, right?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Not when you filmed it. Only on the replay.”

Her eyes searched mine, desperate, almost hopeful. “So you admit it’s weird.”

“It’s not weird. It’s… TikTok.”

But I couldn’t explain why my stomach clenched, why I couldn’t stop looking at that dark doorway. Or why the newest comment pinned to her video read: Don’t argue with Ariana. She’ll open hers soon enough.

And again, I had never once appeared on her feed.

* * * * * *

That night, lying in bed, I heard the faint sound of scratching. Not from outside, not from the walls, but from under the floor. From the basement.

I sat up, phone in hand, ready to text Mom. But what was I going to say? Hey, Mom, everything’s fine, except your youngest daughter’s summoning demons on TikTok while strangers online know my name without reason.

I put the phone down.

The next morning, Maya’s video had tripled her follower count.

And all I could think about was how they knew me.

Part III

By the time night four rolled around, I was already on edge. I’d barely slept the night before, kept jolting awake at the faint scrape-scrape-scrape under the floorboards. Every time I went to check, the basement was silent.

Maya didn’t seem tired. If anything, she looked more alive than ever. Her eyes were bloodshot, her skin pale, but she moved with the restless energy of someone running on adrenaline alone.

“Door four tonight,” she chirped, like she was announcing the next episode of a TV show. “This is where it starts to get good.”

“Good?” I asked. “For who? Not you. Not me.”

“For everyone watching.” She smiled.

We went downstairs.

The fourth door was wider than the others, nailed shut with two rusted brackets. Maya pulled them loose with a hammer she’d dragged down from the kitchen. She set up her ring light, pointed the camera, and flung the door open.

The smell hit us first.

Rot. Damp earth. Something long dead. Maya gagged and covered her nose, laughing it off for her viewers. “Ugh—okay, ew. This one’s nasty. Who left a dead raccoon down here?”

There was nothing inside. Just another stone alcove.

But when we watched the video back, the shadows weren’t empty.

Faces pressed out of the darkness. Twisted, warped, mouths open in silent screams.

I froze when I recognized one of them. Thin hair, sagging jowls, cloudy eyes.

“Grandma?” I whispered.

Maya glanced at me. “What?”

“That face.” My finger trembled as I pointed at the screen. “That’s her.”

“Grandma died three years ago, Ari.”

“I know that.”

Maya tilted her head, studied the screen. “Doesn’t look like her to me.”

But I couldn’t unsee it. I couldn’t un-feel the way my chest tightened, as if that pale face had looked straight through the camera and into me.

* * * * * *

Maya posted the clip anyway. Her followers ate it up.

The comments rolled in faster than ever.

They’re waiting for you, Ariana.
Door four wanted to see her too.
Don’t hide from us.

I slammed the phone onto the table. “How the hell do they know my name?”

Maya flinched, startled at my outburst. “I don’t know, Ari! I don’t control what people comment!”

“These aren’t people.”

She rolled her eyes. “You sound insane. Maybe one of my friends is trolling you.”

But her voice cracked when she said it.

* * * * * *

By night five, I was done arguing. I begged her not to go through with it, even threatened to lock the basement door. She shoved past me, muttering, “You can’t stop me,” like she was possessed by the words themselves.

The fifth door was another crawl-space. Narrow, but tall enough to crouch inside.

Maya swung it open, laughing nervously. “Door five. If this doesn’t go viral, nothing will.”

She held her phone up, panning the camera across the empty stone recess. I stood behind her, arms crossed, sick to my stomach.

When we replayed it later, I wished I hadn’t looked.

Her reflection in the phone screen lagged half a second behind. Not much, but enough. And while Maya stood stone-faced, her reflection smiled.

The smile was wide, crooked, wrong.

“Jesus,” I muttered. “That’s fake. That has to be fake.”

“I didn’t edit it,” Maya whispered.

Her reflection’s mouth opened wider, teeth too sharp, before the screen glitched and cut.

I felt cold all over.

That night, I scrolled through the comments again. The usual mix of laughing emojis, jump-scare fans, and skeptics. But beneath them, always beneath them, were the ones that chilled me:

Door five loves her smile.
Let Ariana try next time.
She can’t hide forever.

I didn’t realize I was shaking until my phone slipped out of my hand and clattered to the floor.

* * * * * *

I tried to reason with her again before bed. “Maya, listen to me. This isn’t fun anymore. Whatever this is, it’s not a game.”

She didn’t look up from her phone. “You don’t get it. You don’t see the comments.”

“I see them.” My throat was dry. “I wish I didn’t.”

“No, I mean the real ones.” Her eyes were wide, glassy, fixed on the screen. “They’re telling me things. Stuff I can’t explain. They’re showing me what comes next.”

I leaned over her shoulder. The screen was blank. No text, no usernames, no hearts or shares. Just the faint glow of the app’s interface.

“Maya,” I whispered, “there’s nothing there.”

She smiled faintly. “You just can’t see it yet.”

* * * * * *

I barely slept. Every time I drifted off, I dreamed of that reflection grinning back at me.

When I woke up, Maya’s video had doubled her followers again. Her face was plastered across “creepy TikTok” compilation channels.

And pinned at the top of her feed, above the avalanche of comments, was one single message:

Six is waiting.

Part IV

By late afternoon I’d made up my mind: we were done. No more midnight theatrics. No more comments that knew things they shouldn’t. I would be the boring older sister, the killjoy, the one who yanked the plug before something worse crawled out of the walls.

Maya spent the day on the couch, phone inches from her face, eyes flicking in tiny, mechanical jumps. She didn’t laugh at memes or send me clips like she used to. She didn’t react at all, just scrolled, occasionally tilting her head as if listening to someone whisper next to her.

“Take a break,” I said, setting a glass of water by her elbow. “Your brain needs oxygen.”

“I can’t,” she murmured. “They’re counting.”

“Counting what?”

Her gaze slid toward the basement door. “Down.”

I took the phone from her hands. She didn’t fight me—didn’t even blink—just stared past me at nothing. On the screen: the app, Maya’s profile, the video grid. I went straight to settings and tried to delete the account.

Password required.

I typed the one she’s used since she was thirteen. Wrong. I tried the backup. Wrong again.

“When did you change it?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” she said.

“Tell me the new one.”

She frowned like I was speaking another language. “They said I don’t need it.”

I logged out and tried to reset the password. The confirmation email never arrived. The “send text code” option spun for a few seconds, then the app froze and closed itself. When I reopened it, the account was already logged back in, as if nothing had happened.

I put the phone in my pocket and locked the screen. “You’re done tonight.”

Maya blinked. “You can’t stop me.”

“I can. I’m older. And I’m meaner.”

That earned me a tiny, crooked smile—almost the old Maya. It didn’t last.

* * * * * *

I cooked dinner early to keep her upstairs, hovering like a prison guard. She picked at her food without tasting it. Every so often she jerked her head toward the basement, as if she were hearing a bell I couldn’t.

At eleven-thirty I made coffee and handed her a mug. “We’re staying up here. Movies. Stupid comedies. I’ll even watch that one guy who does unboxings with puppets.”

“It has to be midnight,” she said, ignoring the mug. “The rules matter.”

“Says who?”

“They do.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

She didn’t answer.

At eleven fifty-eight she stood and walked to the basement door. I reached it first, flattened my palm against the wood.

“No.”

She stepped close enough that I felt the heat coming off her. “If I don’t open it, they’ll come upstairs.”

“You’re letting a hashtag bully you.”

Maya tilted her head, studying me with that glassy stillness I’d started to hate. “It’s not a hashtag.”

I held my ground until the old grandfather clock in the front room began to chime midnight. Maya’s pupils widened. She didn’t shove me; she didn’t have to. Something in me gave way, and I stepped aside like I’d been rehearsing it for years.

The basement smelled like damp stone and metal. Her ring light waited exactly where she’d left it—I didn’t remember her setting it up. She walked past me and switched it on. White glare splashed across the rough foundation. The shadows beyond seemed thicker, like syrup.

“Door six,” she said softly to the camera. “Thank you for waiting.”

I moved behind her, grabbed her wrist. “Turn it off.”

She looked at my hand on her skin, then at me. “You’re shaking.”

I let go.

Maya framed the shot, then crossed to the sixth door. It was one of the narrow ones, the latch stiff with rust. For a heartbeat I thought it wouldn’t open. Then it did.

Blackness beyond. Not the kind you get from an unlit room, but the kind that swallows the light reaching for it. The edges of the doorframe glowed in the ring light, and everything past that was a perfect, hungry void.

“This is stupid,” I said, too loud. My voice bounced off the concrete and came back thinner. “Close it.”

Maya leaned forward. The ring light hummed. The camera in her hand adjusted exposure and produced a little sigh of plastic. The darkness didn’t change.

Something touched her.

It was so fast I didn’t see a shape, only the effect: her forearm snapped down a few inches as if caught by a clamp. The sound she made didn’t sound like my sister. I lunged, grabbed her other wrist, and pulled.

Cold traveled up my fingers and into my arm, a numbing chill that made my elbow feel hollow. My grip slid like I was holding on to wet glass.

“Let go,” Maya gasped. “It hurts. It hurts—”

I hauled her backward with everything I had. Her heel caught the step behind her, and we both went down hard. The phone skittered across the concrete, clattering to a stop beneath the laundry sink.

For a second the ring light flickered. When it steadied, Door Six was closed.

Maya curled around her arm, breath coming fast. Purple marks rose under the skin, spaced like the impressions of four long fingers and a thumb. They weren’t smudges. They were precise.

I pressed a dish towel to them, my hands refusing to get warm. “We’re going to urgent care.”

“No.”

“Maya—”

“It won’t help.” She stared at the towel, not at me. “They’re stronger when we leave the house.”

“Who told you that?”

She didn’t answer. The ring light hummed. Somewhere upstairs, the grandfather clock resumed its endless, indifferent ticking.

* * * * * *

I took her back to the kitchen and wrapped her arm tighter. She let me fuss for a while—another small mercy—then pulled away and reached for her phone on the table.

“No,” I said, snatching it first.

“Ari.”

“You’re done.”

Her face blanked for a heartbeat, and something like fear crossed it. Not fear of me. Fear of disappointing a roomful of faces I couldn’t see.

“You don’t understand,” she said.

“Make me understand.”

“They wait,” she whispered. “They count. The doors keep them polite. If we stop…” She trailed off, eyes unfocused, as if she were reading lines only she could see. “If we stop, they come as they are.”

“You sound like you’re quoting a rule book.”

Her gaze sharpened. “You read the comments.”

“I read enough.”

“They were talking to you.” She said it like a confession. “They like you. They said your name before they said mine.”

I didn’t realize I’d braced my hands on the counter until my knuckles hurt. “We’re calling Mom and Dad. Now.”

Maya’s lips moved around the words don’t, don’t, don’t without sound. The phone in my hand vibrated once—no notification on the screen, no caller ID, just a phantom buzz that traveled through my bones.

I opened Messages and typed: Come home. Something’s wrong with Maya. I hovered over send. I pictured Mom’s face pinching with worry in some hotel elevator, Dad’s voice going tight over a bad connection. I pictured trying to explain a bruise shaped like a handprint and a door that opened onto nothing.

I deleted the text.

Instead, I opened the app one more time, went to account settings, and hit “Deactivate.” The button greyed out, then brightened, then greyed out again like a heartbeat. A line of text appeared I’d never seen before: Action not permitted during sequence.

I took a step back. “What sequence?”

Maya’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling, as if listening. “Six is done.”

Her arm throbbed under the towel. The marks darkened to an ugly maroon. I wanted to wrap her in blankets and drag her out to the car. I wanted to board up the basement and call a priest I didn’t believe in. I wanted the house to be ordinary.

“Tomorrow we’re ending this,” I said. “I don’t care what your… viewers think. We’re smashing the doors, smashing your phone, whatever it takes.”

Maya smiled a little, and for a second I thought she agreed. Then she lifted her injured arm and flexed her fingers. The bruises stood out like ink.

“They don’t care about the phone,” she said. “The phone just helps us see.”

“See what?”

“Where to go.”

She looked toward the basement again. I followed her gaze, and in that instant, I could have sworn the air at the top of the stairs shimmered—heat ripple, mirage, bad lighting. Then it was gone.

Maya lowered her arm and pressed the towel back in place. “We can’t stop at six.”

“You almost got dragged into a hole.”

“It wasn’t a hole.”

“What was it?”

She considered the question with eerie calm. “A mouth.”

I slept on the couch outside the basement door with the lights on, coffee going cold beside me, listening for footsteps that never came and for a ticking clock that refused to be quiet. At some point just before dawn, I drifted off. I dreamed of a handprint blooming under my skin like a flower opening too fast.

When I woke, Maya was in the kitchen, already dressed, hair brushed, the towel folded neatly on the counter. Her phone lay faceup, recording. The screen showed her profile, live for no one—zero viewers, zero chat, just us and a red dot in the corner.

“Why are you streaming?” I asked.

“I’m not,” she said.

The red dot pulsed.

Pinned at the top of her feed, above everything else, a new message sat that hadn’t been there when we went to sleep.

Seven is ready.

Part V

Maya’s bruise should have looked worse by morning. Instead, it looked wrong. The skin wasn’t swollen, just dark, the lines too sharp, like ink beneath glass. She flexed her hand easily, like it didn’t even hurt anymore.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she said when I asked. “It feels… warm.”

The way she lingered on the word made my stomach flip.

I told her we were done—that I’d board the doors shut if I had to. She didn’t fight me. She just sat at the table, quiet, scrolling through her phone.

But every time I walked past, I saw the screen. There weren’t any comments, not the way TikTok normally looks. Just blank space. No usernames, no timestamps. Still, her eyes tracked across the emptiness, lips twitching as if she were reading.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

“The comments.”

“There aren’t any.”

She tilted her head toward me, still scrolling. “You can’t see them.”

* * * * * *

By the second day after Door Six, I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. It wasn’t normal silence—it felt like the whole house was waiting. Every creak of the floor, every hum of the fridge seemed amplified, as if the house itself were holding its breath.

I jumped when my phone buzzed. Mom.

Hey, you two doing okay?

I typed back: We’re fine. Maya’s glued to her phone, but nothing new there. My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I wanted to tell her about the bruises, the doors, the way people online knew my name. But what was I supposed to write? Your daughter is starring in a ritual disguised as a TikTok trend.

I deleted the second half before hitting send.

Mom replied with a heart emoji and a we’ll be back Sunday.

* * * * * *

That night, I woke to the sound of a notification ping. Except it wasn’t mine. It came from the kitchen.

I padded out, heart pounding. Maya sat at the table in the dark, phone propped upright, camera pointed at her face. She wasn’t filming—at least, I don’t think she was—but the red recording dot glowed in the corner.

Her expression was blank, mouth slightly open, eyes locked on the screen.

“Maya?”

She didn’t answer.

I crossed the room, looked over her shoulder. The screen was still empty, no comments, no viewers. But her eyes moved across the void, left to right, left to right, like she was reading a wall of text.

I reached for the phone. “Enough.”

Her hand shot out, quicker than I’d ever seen her move. She grabbed my wrist.

I gasped. She shouldn’t have been strong enough to hold me in place, but her grip felt like iron. Her bruised arm—the one with the handprint—was the one pinning me down.

“Maya, you’re hurting me!”

She blinked, released me. For a second, her face softened, terrified, like she’d just realized what she’d done. Then the blankness settled back over her.

“They said it’s almost time.”

“Who?”

Her eyes flicked back to the screen. “You’ll meet them.”

* * * * * *

By the next morning, I was half out of my mind. I searched online, typing “Seven Doors Challenge,” “TikTok ritual,” “bruises shaped like handprints.” Nothing. The original videos were gone. Maya’s profile didn’t show up in searches anymore, even though she was posting daily.

But her follower count kept climbing.

Every time I tried to delete the app, it reinstalled itself within minutes. Once, I put her phone in the freezer just to see what would happen. When I checked, the screen was glowing, a faint red light seeping through the frost.

I threw it back to her and told her to keep it. I didn’t want to touch it again.

* * * * * *

That evening, I sat across from her at the table. “We’re calling Dad,” I said. “He’ll know what to do.”

Her eyes flicked up, pupils blown wide. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“They’ll hear.”

“Who?” I snapped.

Her lips curled into the faintest smile. “You know.”

I stood, paced the kitchen. “You’re scaring me. You’re not sleeping, you’re not eating, you—you grabbed me like you weren’t even you anymore. If we don’t stop this—”

“We can’t stop,” she said softly. “We only finish.”

Her voice wasn’t defiant. It wasn’t even angry. It was… certain. Like she was reciting instructions she hadn’t written.

* * * * * *

That night, I locked the basement door. I dragged a chair in front of it and sat, arms crossed, watching. Maya sat a few feet away, phone glowing in her hands, face illuminated in pale blue.

At midnight sharp, the grandfather clock chimed. Maya’s screen flashed. Her eyes shone in the glow. She looked at me, calm, steady.

“They’re waiting, Ari,” she whispered. “And they like you best.”

The seventh door pulsed in my memory, and for the first time I wondered if this whole thing had never been about Maya at all.

Part VI

I don’t know when the house decided midnight would be the true hour, only that, on the seventh night, everything in me counted toward it. Every chore dragged. Every minute gave me a new plan to stop what was coming, then snatched it away as soon as I tried to act. I hid Maya’s phone in the flour bin. I jammed the basement key in my pocket and kept patting it like a talisman. I told myself I’d sit on the steps all night if I had to.

At ten, Maya showered and braided her hair. At eleven, she brushed it out and braided it again. The mark on her forearm had turned a deep wine color, with clean, impossible finger edges. She flexed her hand like an athlete testing a healed tendon. When she caught me watching, she smiled with the front teeth only. It made her look younger and older at once.

“You don’t have your phone,” I said, more to hear the sentence than to get an answer.

She tilted her head. “I never needed it.”

“It’s a TikTok challenge, Maya.”

“It was a door challenge before phones existed.”

I pulled the basement key from my pocket and opened my palm so she could see it. “We’re not going down there.”

“You say that every night,” she said. “And then we do.”

“I’ll call Dad.”

“They’ll answer instead.”

“Who is ‘they’?” The question burst out of me. “Use a real word. Give me something I can call the cops about.”

Maya looked past me, toward the laundry room, toward the floor vent that carried noises up from the cellar. “They told me not to say their names out loud.”

“Convenient.”

“It keeps the house quiet,” she said. “For now.”

* * * * * *

At eleven forty-five, I decided I would cart her to the car and drive until sunrise if I had to. I grabbed the keys from the hook by the back door and shoved my feet into boots. “Put on a jacket,” I said. “I’m serious. We’re going.”

Maya looked up from her empty screen. “If we leave during Seven, you’ll bring them with you. They like road shoulders and bridges. They like places where water moves underneath.”

I stood there, keys biting my palm, imagining a stalled engine on the county highway and a red shine blooming up from a culvert. I put the keys back on the hook.

At eleven fifty-eight, the grandfather clock in the front hall muttered in its throat, preparing to strike. I looked around the kitchen for the flour bin. The lid sat in the sink. The bag was on the counter. The phone wasn’t inside.

“Where is it?” I asked.

Maya lifted her empty hands and turned them over. “You keep thinking it helps them. It only helps you see them.”

“I don’t want to see them.”

“Then close your eyes.”

“No.”

Maya stood, the chair legs whispering across the floor. She walked to the basement door and stopped, waiting as if for a cue. When the clock began to chime, she placed her fingers on the knob without looking at me.

I stepped between her and the door. “Please.”

Her pupils were wide enough to swallow the brown of her irises. “Move.”

I didn’t move. I set my foot against the baseboard and gripped the knob from the other side. “I won’t let you.”

She didn’t shove me. She didn’t threaten me. She reached out with her marked hand and touched the inside of my elbow, where the skin is thin and nerves sit close to the surface. The heat of her fingers shocked me. It felt like the first lick of water when you stand too near a stove kettle, not painful yet, just a warning of pressure building. My arm loosened on its own. I stepped aside because my body wanted distance.

Maya opened the door and the breath of the basement slid up the stairs—metallic, damp, edged with cold like the inside of a refrigerator that hasn’t been opened in months. She clicked on the light at the top of the steps. It made no difference beyond the first landing. Darkness waited as if it had been saving its strength.

“I’m going first,” I said, and surprised myself by meaning it.

Maya shook her head. “You’re second. They told me.”

She started down. I followed, one hand on the rail, the other on her shoulder, trying to pretend that made me the one in control. The ring light on its tripod stood where it always did, a white circle propped in front of the line of doors. I hadn’t put it there. I hadn’t plugged it in. The outlet strip at its base glowed green anyway.

I reached to turn it away from the doors, but the ring light was already pivoting, motor faintly purring, drone-smooth. It settled on Door Seven, the small square one with the peeling red paint. Condensation had formed on the paint tonight, tiny beads like sweat on a cold glass. I wiped the back of my knuckles across it and came away wet.

Maya raised her empty hands, palms out, as though to show she wasn’t hiding anything. She said, to no one and everyone, “Door seven.”

“It ends here,” I said.

“It begins,” she said.

“Don’t do it.”

She set her fingers under the rusted latch. It lifted with a neat, obedient click.

The door opened on stairs I had never seen, never could have existed: narrow steps spiraling down, carved into something that wasn’t quite stone. The ring light should have thrown light down. It didn’t. The glow rose from below—soft red, like brake lights seen through fog.

I tasted copper under my tongue. The hair on my arms lifted. There were no sounds of a subterranean place—no plumbing thrum, no ground-water drip—only the faintest shuffle, as if a crowd had shifted its weight to get a better view.

Maya took one step, then another. Her bare feet made no sound. She held her marked arm close to her ribs, like a dancer cradling her own body.

I grabbed her wrist. “Stop.”

She looked back. For a moment I saw my sister. The girl who stole my sweaters. The kid who used to fall asleep in the backseat on road trips with a book open on her chest. Then the red light from below caught her eyes and turned them dark again.

“You’ll only make it worse,” she said.

“For who?”

“For you.”

I wanted a fight. I wanted something I could win. Instead, she addressed the empty air and said, “She’s ready,” and the red glow brightened, just enough to sketch silhouettes at the bottom of the spiral.

Figures were waiting—if figures is the word. They stood shoulder to shoulder where the stairs ended, not crowding, not reaching up, simply present. Some were taller than any person I’d seen. One seemed to tilt, like a coat hung from a peg, more outline than body. None had faces I could focus on, but I felt the moment they all turned toward me. It was the precise sensation of stepping into a room where a television is on mute and finding the news anchor’s eyes already fixed on you.

“Don’t,” I said, though I don’t know which of us I was speaking to.

Maya’s foot found the next stair down. My fingers slipped on her skin. She was too warm. The warmth made my grip slide. I caught the handrail instead and burned my palm on the cold of it—wrong, disorienting opposites layered together in a way that made my stomach lurch.

“Come back up,” I said. “We can finish this by not finishing it. That’s allowed. Rules are fake.”

Her mouth twitched. “They aren’t fake. Just old.”

She moved again. I followed because there was no choice left that didn’t end with me hating myself. The red light pulsed at the rhythm of the old clock upstairs. I could count the beats in my jaw. Every time I blinked, the silhouettes below sharpened, then blurred, like they were deciding on a shape to wear.

Halfway down, the staircase narrowed. The wall pressed my shoulder. Heat rippled through the air in a long slow wave. It wasn’t fire heat. It was breath heat, as if something very large had exhaled from deep within the earth.

I flinched at the thought and forced myself to use a different word.

Maya paused and looked up, not at me but past me, toward the ring of light at the top of the stairwell where the basement waited. Her profile was clean and still in the glow. Her braid lay against her back like a dark cord.

“Listen,” she said.

I didn’t want to. I did.

At first I thought it was wind. Then I wondered if the old furnace had come on. Then I recognized syllables at the threshold of sound, the way you do when you hear a familiar voice through a wall. A low chant unrolled without melody, a litany that wasn’t made for tongues shaped like ours. Between it and my ear lay distance, and in that distance something like laughter stitched itself and pulled tight.

Maya’s fingers slid out of my grasp. She took the next step, then the next.

“No,” I said, more to the steps than to her, as if the wood or stone or whatever it was might be persuaded by my voice. I hooked my arm around her waist and hauled. For a heartbeat she yielded, weight rocking back into me. Relief surged. Then her body went slack and heavy, not falling, exactly, but settling, as if the air around her had thickened enough to hold her and I was trying to move a figure in syrup.

“Please,” I said, because the word came faster than any other.

“They promised,” she whispered. “There won’t be any more doors after this.”

“What does that even mean?”

“No more counting.”

I wanted to slap her and I wanted to hug her and I wanted to scream. Instead I set my feet and pulled. The stair under us shivered. The red light brightened, then dimmed, in a slow warning. The figures below shifted in unity, a single tide rolling forward and settling again. When they settled, their line was one step higher.

“Up,” I said. “Up. Up now.”

Maya breathed out a sound that might have been a laugh, or might have been a sob she’d set down and walked away from. “You hear them too now,” she said.

“I hear you,” I said.

“You’re going to follow me.”

“No.”

“You will.” She touched my cheek with her free hand. The warmth of her fingers soaked through my skin. “They like you. They liked you first.”

She turned from me then and took the final curve of the stair. The landing lay below, a pale oval in the red light. The figures had arranged themselves like a receiving line. They didn’t block the way. They made a path.

“Maya,” I said, but my voice came out as a noise any stranger could have made.

She stepped off the last stair and into the pale oval. She was looking straight ahead, not at me, not at them. I wanted her to look back one more time. She didn’t.

Something changed in the air—the subtle shift when an elevator stops and the cable stops trembling. The ring light hummed above me. The red glow pooled in the corner of my eye. The handrail under my palm seemed to sigh.

The small square door at the top of the basement wall swung inward on its own hinges.

The stairwell went very quiet.

Maya didn’t run. She didn’t reach. She just continued forward as if walking into a room where she’d been expected for a long time.

I lurched down the last steps. The figures made room for me. It felt like stepping between the coats of tall strangers in a hallway after a winter funeral—wool brushing my arms, buttons catching, the faint smell of old fabric and iron. When I reached for Maya’s braid, my fingers closed on air.

She wasn’t there.

Not gone in a blink. Gone in the way a word leaves a mouth and becomes sound in a different room. She had gone forward. I had been too slow.

The chant cut off like a tape stopped mid-spool.

I stood alone on the landing, the red glow breathing in the stone, the ring light still humming somewhere above, and the staircase behind me suddenly very steep.

I did the only thing that made sense to the oldest part of me. I ran up.

My knees banged the fronts of the steps. My hand slipped on the rail. The red light chased me, not faster than me, just steady, keeping pace the way a tide keeps pace with a shore. I reached the top and burst into the basement.

The door swung shut in my face with a calm, final click.

I hit it with my shoulder. It didn’t open. I threw my weight again. The latch held. I pressed my ear to the wood and heard—nothing. Not the chant. Not footsteps. Not breathing. Only the soft electric purr of the ring light and, far above, the old clock counting the hour that had already gone.

“Maya!” I shouted.

The door was a square of red paint and a rusted latch. It had always been a square of red paint and a rusted latch.

When I looked down, my palms had smeared the paint. The red wasn’t wet. It only looked that way in the halo of the ring light.

I stood there until the light burned a circle into my vision. I stood there until my legs shook. I stood there long enough to know that if I stayed any longer I would kneel and put my ear to the wood and hear her call my name from the other side, and that if I heard it, I would open the door even if it meant tearing the skin off my hands.

I switched off the ring light. The basement dimmed to its normal yellow.

Upstairs, a phone pinged—a bright, cheerful chime like a timer in a sunny kitchen.

It came from my pocket.

I don’t remember putting a phone there. I pulled it out anyway.

It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t Maya’s. The lock screen was a gray field with a red dot pulsing in the corner and a notification I couldn’t swipe away.

Sequence complete. Begin share.

* * * * * *

I went upstairs because the stairs were there and because if I stayed by the door, I would open it. The kitchen lights were on. The grandfather clock showed twelve twenty-one. I set the phone on the table and watched the red dot throb.

The screen brightened and showed a new video. The angle was low, like a camera propped on a step looking down. Maya stood at the bottom of the spiral, bathed in soft red. She was smiling the small front-teeth smile. She lifted her marked arm and wiggled her fingers at the camera like a child waving from a school bus window.

“Your turn,” she whispered.

The video tagged a username I hadn’t given anyone. Mine.

The red light under the basement door edged the crack like dawn.

Part VII

I didn’t sleep the night Maya disappeared. I sat at the kitchen table with the strange phone in front of me, its screen pulsing like a heartbeat. Every time I tried to shut it off, the display only dimmed before brightening again. I wrapped it in two dish towels and shoved it in the pantry. It still glowed through the cracks.

When the sun rose, the world mocked me with normalcy. Dew glittered on the gravel driveway. Birds bickered in the hedges. A school bus hissed to a stop at the end of the road. I wanted to scream at it all: nothing’s normal, nothing will ever be normal again.

Back inside, I couldn’t bring myself to check the basement. I knew the seventh door was still open. I felt it, a pressure behind my eyes, like when you stare too long at a light bulb and can’t get rid of the afterimage.

So I checked my phone instead.

The notifications almost buried me. Maya’s final video had gone viral, spreading like fire across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. Her account had leapt from a hundred thousand followers to nearly a million overnight.

I opened the clip. There she was, smiling at the bottom of those impossible stairs, her hand raised in that crooked little wave. The caption under the reposts varied—proof it’s real, the scariest challenge yet—but the comments all landed in the same place.

Where’s the sister?
She’s next.
I saw Ariana at :27.
Your turn.

I hadn’t appeared in that video. I knew I hadn’t. But I forced myself to rewatch, just to prove it.

And there, at twenty-seven seconds, in the glossy curve of the wall, a shape stood behind her. My shape.

* * * * * *

I lasted until afternoon before I broke down and called Mom.

Her voice hit me like a gut punch the second she answered—bright, distracted, the same tone she always used when checking in from a trip. “Hi, sweetheart! Everything okay?”

“No,” I blurted. My throat locked. “Mom… it’s Maya. She’s gone.”

Silence. Then, sharper: “What do you mean gone?”

I pressed my palm against my forehead, fighting dizziness. “She… she went into the basement and didn’t come out.”

Mom’s voice cracked. “What are you talking about? Did she sneak out? Did you check her friends’ houses?”

“I checked. She didn’t sneak out.”

Dad’s voice cut in, distant but firm. He must have been on speaker. “Ariana. Stop playing games. Where is your sister?”

“I’m not playing games!” My own voice broke. “She opened the last door, and there were stairs, and—”

“What stairs?” Dad snapped.

“The ones in the basement. They weren’t there before, but—”

I heard him exhale hard, the way he always did when something didn’t add up. “She’s hiding from you. Call the police. Tell them she ran away.”

“She didn’t run away!” My hand trembled around the phone. “You don’t understand—”

“Make me understand,” Dad said. “You’re telling me she disappeared into a door? Ariana, do you hear yourself?”

Mom’s breathing was shaky on the line. “We’re coming home,” she said. “Stay there. Don’t leave the house. Call the sheriff.”

“I can’t,” I whispered.

“Why not?”

Because the sheriff can’t close doors that shouldn’t exist. Because the figures waiting at the bottom aren’t going to file a missing persons report. Because the thing glowing in our basement doesn’t belong in this world.

But I couldn’t say any of that. I swallowed the words, tasting rust. “I’ll… I’ll stay here.”

Mom’s voice broke. “Just… don’t do anything stupid.”

The line went dead.

* * * * * *

That night, I sat outside the basement door, chair wedged against it, flashlight clutched in both hands. Midnight came, and the grandfather clock began its slow chime.

The seventh door creaked open on its own. Red light seeped into the kitchen, thin but steady.

The pantry rattled. The wrapped-up phone inside was vibrating, harder and harder, until it thumped against the door.

I couldn’t help myself. I opened it.

The screen glowed with a live feed of the staircase. Empty now, spiraling down and down. No Maya. No figures. Just waiting.

A notification pinged. Bright, cheerful.

Invite sent: @Ariana.

I dropped the phone. It skittered across the tile, still glowing.

From the basement, the same ping answered. Not from the pantry, not from my phone, but from inside the stairwell.

* * * * * *

The next morning, Mom called again. Her voice was frantic. “The police say she’s not in the system, Ari. Not at school, not with friends. Nothing. How does a girl vanish into thin air?”

I tried to answer, but something else caught my ear. Through the line, faint but clear, came the unmistakable sound of a notification ping.

Mom didn’t react. She kept talking, panicked, unaware of the sound echoing in the background.

Another ping. Then another.

Dad’s voice barked in the distance: “What the hell is that? Is that your phone?”

“No,” Mom said. “I thought it was yours.”

But I knew.

They’d found them. Or maybe they had found my parents.

“Mom,” I whispered. “Get rid of your phones.”

“What?”

“Please,” I begged. “Throw them out. Don’t answer anything. Don’t—”

Another ping cut me off, louder this time, echoing through their speaker like it was in the same room.

Then the line went dead.

* * * * * *

I don’t know how much longer I can resist. The seventh door hasn’t shut since that night. The glow seeps out no matter what I do, staining the kitchen floor. Sometimes shadows move at the bottom of the stairs.

I should leave, but I know the truth. If I run, they’ll come with me.

I keep telling myself I’ll hold out until Mom and Dad come back. But the pings are louder every night. The comments multiply.

And last night, for the first time, one of them wasn’t from a blank account.

It was from mine.

Your turn.