if you haven’t read part 1 yet, go read that first.

go.

The house feels tighter now.

Not smaller—closer. Like the walls have leaned in while I wasn’t looking, the wallpaper damp and puckered like healing scar tissue. When I walk through the hallway, my shoulders brush the air on both sides, even though there’s nothing there. The floor creaks beneath my feet in places it never did before, responding like something hollow and bloated underneath has shifted its weight, a wet thud-slop echoing in the crawlspace that shouldn’t exist.

My hands are worse.

The fatigue has deepened into something wrong. My fingers feel swollen when I wake up, stiff and uncooperative, as if they’ve been forced to bend the wrong way for too long. Sometimes, when I try to straighten them, they hesitate. They tremble. They remember resistance. The skin is beginning to split at the joints, the fissures deep and bloodless, revealing a glimpse of something yellow and porous where the bone should be.

I find faint marks along my knuckles—darkened skin, pressure impressions that don’t quite fade. Not cuts. Not bruises. More like my hands have been pressed hard against something that pressed back. There are flecks of grey, necrotic tissue embedded in my pores, and the scent of old meat clings to my palms no matter how hard I scrub.

At night, the dreams no longer feel like dreams.

I am underground again, but this time I understand the rules. Every movement is careful. Every breath is measured. The space is too narrow to turn around. The ceiling scrapes against my shoulders, peeling away strips of skin that hang like wet ribbons. Dirt collapses into my mouth if I open it too wide, grit grinding between my teeth until I taste the salty tang of my own shredded gums.

There is no screaming. Screaming wastes air.

The hands beneath me—pale, multi-jointed, and slick with a cold, viscous slime—guide mine with desperate precision. They force my fingers into narrow gaps of jagged stone and sharp, broken roots, pulling them back raw and aching. I feel the nails being pried upward, the beds weeping a dark, blackish ichor as they are dragged against the earth, again and again, as if repetition might eventually mean escape.

When I wake, dirt spills from beneath my nails onto the floor.

Mixed with something darker. Sticky. Warm. I find small, jagged shards of what look like fingernails—thick, yellowed, and definitely not my own—deeply embedded in the meat of my palms. My own skin is sloughing off in wet patches, leaving the muscle exposed and twitching in the morning air.

I don’t clean it immediately.

I sit there shaking, staring at my hands, aware—truly aware—for the first time that they don’t feel like mine anymore. They look like tools that have been reshaped by a master I haven’t met yet.

Later that day, I find the old floor plans.

According to the records, there is no space beneath my living room. No crawlspace. No basement. Nothing. But the measurements leave room for it. A gap of four feet between the floorboards and the foundation—a hollow, secret gullet filled with the history of the house.

That night, as I lie in bed listening to the house settle, I feel a faint vibration beneath the floor. Not movement. Scratching. Slow. Patient. Familiar.

The sound is accompanied by a new noise: the wet, rhythmic tearing of wood being turned into flesh. I can hear the floorboards moaning as they are saturated from below, the wood grain soaking up a fluid that sounds like heavy, rhythmic breathing.

And I realize the thing beneath my house isn’t trying to escape anymore.

It’s trying to finish. It’s knitting itself into the joists, stitching its cold, pale nerves into the plumbing, and using my own borrowed hands to pull its bloated, weeping body through the seams of the world.