Shelter in the Mist
There is a house that does not belong.
A house that remains unfinished.
Its foundation was laid in a moment out of time and some of its walls are already raised.
Its windows watch; too many. Crooked and blinking. As if they remember things you cannot.
It always arrives wrapped in a mist that breathes like a thing alive.
It comes when needed the most. It finds the desperate, the scared, the exhausted and offers them comfort.
The door is open - always open - to hands that reach. But none have ever turned the handle from within.
There is a house out in the fields, not of this world. A house alive with memory. A house with a single desire.
To be finally finished.
Materials are scarce, so it adapted.
The hands of its builders are transparent, yet the house taught them how to build regardless.
It offers shelter beneath its roof. Smoke curls from its chimneys.
It always welcomes strangers.
But it never let them leave.
"If the fog finds you and there is a door in it, don't knock. And whatever you do, don't enter the crooked house. It offers no shelter. It only takes."
The Fog
He had no idea how far he’d run, only that the forest was behind him now, and whatever came out of it hadn’t followed him into the thick, unmoving fog. He gripped the shotgun under his heavy coat like it still mattered. Blood from the new wound at his forearm pulsed warmly down his side, but it wasn’t the worst thing. The venom from the beast that had attacked him was already surging through his veins, peeling his thoughts away. He staggered. He mumbled nonsense to himself just to anchor something in his head. Trees bent in the mist, gnarled like fingers. His legs buckled.
And then it appeared.
First, just a shape. Then the wind shifted.
A crooked house loomed ahead; half-swallowed by vines and moss, sagging like it had grown tired of standing. Balconies jutted out at impossible angles. Windows blinked from the sides like confused eyes. Three chimneys leaned in different directions. A round, wooden door sat too low on the wall like a misplaced mouth. Above it, a half-built third floor spiraled upward, unfinished, and somehow, when he looked from the side, it folded downward again, becoming the second.
The man fell to one knee, shivering, gasping as the mist around him came closer, suffocating him.
He had to run. Again. The house, no matter how strange, was a necessary shelter. He had seen stranger things that a half-finished house after all.
He stumbled up the steps, flung the round door open - now somehow just large enough to fit him - and disappeared inside.
The house closed the door gently behind him, as the fog exhaled.
The Threshold
The Threshold of the entrance is no mere doorway as it seems at first. It is a boundary, a twisted gate where the world outside fades away and the house’s will begins to take hold. Visitors who pass here find their senses twisted; sound dulls, sight distorts, and time fractures.
The Threshold remembers all who have entered. Escape is uncertain here; often impossible. The door that brought you in may be nothing but an illusion, a trick of a place that haven't yet decided where the exit lies.
Crossing the threshold felt like slipping beneath water. Suddenly, the damp chill of the fog was replaced by dry, stale air that clung to his skin like a thin, suffocating veil. The faint scent of old wood and something faintly metallic filled his nostrils, grounding him for a moment. For the first time in what felt like hours, the pounding in his chest slowed; the oppressive weight of the shadows seemed to lift.
Beneath his boots, the floor groaned and creaked with a slow, deliberate rhythm, as if the house was breathing beneath him. The walls stretched upward into darkness, swallowing what little light there was. Faint echoes - too soft to be footsteps, too rhythmic to be random - filled through the air. Somewhere, water dripped, but the sound was distorted, stretched into a slow, eerie pulse.
He glanced back. A cold terror swept through him, replacing the fleeting comfort.
The door was gone.
The Foyer
The narrow walls of the Foyer bear the ghostly imprint of the builders’ lost intentions; empty frames meant to hold memories never forged, carvings abandoned mid-stroke, paint dried in patches, leaving spaces uncolored here and there. The floor here resists certainty, shifting subtly to unbalance those who tread upon it.
This liminal space hums faintly with a memory of hands that once labored here, now transparent and trembling, forever trapped between creation and oblivion. Muffled voices echo here, giving guidelines in a foreign tongue; perhaps the proud architect whose masterpiece remained unfinished, or merely the fading echo of one. Many who pause here find themselves caught between relief and dread, sensing the house’s unfinished promise and its endless demand.
The Spiral Staircase
The Spiral Staircase is the heart of the crooked house’s incomplete design; a twisting helix caught between construction and collapse. The railing’s rough edges whisper of hands that have long since faded, their purpose frozen mid-motion. The stair bends physics and perception, confusing direction and disorienting the mind.
It is said that those who ascend the Spiral Staircase feel the weight of the unfinished house crashing upon them, each step folding the past and future into an indistinguishable present. The stair moves independently, guiding them down when they try to go right, leading left when they attempt to go down, right when they try to climb, and somehow arriving at the bottom when they think they ascend. An insidious trap or a guide that delights in riddles, no one can say for sure.
The air here was heavier, thick with the scent of aged timber and dust long undisturbed. His footsteps echoed oddly, each tap uneven; a warning to turn back. Shadows clung to the corners, pooling where angles should have met but didn’t quite. The walls were lined with empty frames, their surfaces rough and unfinished, as if someone had started to carve memories but left them incomplete.
A chill ran down his spine when a faint whisper flickered through the space; indistinct words slipping like smoke between the silence. He reached out, fingers grazing a wall where the texture shifted under his touch: soft, almost like fabric, then suddenly rigid and cold. The house felt alive here, yet he had no choice but to move on.
The stair spiraled endlessly, the space around him folding and stretching unpredictably. His breath grew shallow, the air tasting faintly metallic and cold, pressing against his skin like a tightening shroud. The echoes above and below were distant whispers or half-remembered sighs. He wondered if this climb led up or down, forward or backward, or nowhere at all.
The Cornerless Room
The Cornerless Room is a void of angles, a place where geometry unravels and reality bends. It defies human architecture, its boundaries flowing endlessly, folding in ways that refuse to be named or measured. Here, the house’s unfinished nature reveals itself most plainly: the builders abandoned right angles and stable form, leaving space caught between presence and absence. Visitors lose footing, both physical and mental, as the room erases certainty and embraces disorientation.
Some say the room echoes fragments of memories long forgotten, half-formed dreams of spaces that never were, yet still linger in the house’s hungry heart.
He didn’t understand at first what felt wrong. The space looked ordinary, until he stepped inside. Then came the dizziness. The room didn’t spin, but it refused stillness. It took him a moment to realize there were no corners anywhere. The walls met in soft curves, flowing into each other like poured wax, or something grown rather than built. No clear lines, no edges to rest the eye on. Even the floor bent upward into the ceiling in places, blurring where one ended and the other began.
The air was quiet but not silent. It hummed - low and constant - like breath through stone. Something about the slope of a wall, or the way the light moved, tugged at a memory; a dream, or a room he once drew as a child and forgot. Suddenly, a shape flickered in the curve of the far wall. The surfaces pulsed faintly beneath his fingertips; warmer than they should have been. Organic. Yielding for a moment, then resisting.
First he saw a face, then a silhouette embedded within it, half-formed, reaching out, struggling to remember how to be a person. He looked around, trying not to scream. There were more; tall figures pressed against the stone, living imprints of bodies left on fabric. Their hands stretched toward him. Their voices rose in a haunting choir, entangled in a desperate demand:
"Help us finish it.”
The Basement Tower
There are many basements in the crooked house. And then there is this place.
The door to it does not always appear, but when it does dimensions feel wrong even before it’s even opened. Descent is steep, stone-hewn, and often predated by a sense of déjà vu. But the deeper one goes, the less it resembles anything human. Walls reform themselves between blinks. Textures mimic half-remembered places. Childhood rooms are ripped from memory only to be briefly suspended mid-air, distorted and burned into foreign geometry.
Here the true architecture begins to reveal itself. The House, for all its rooms and histories, was not built by hands born of this world. In the Tower Below, the walls begin to remember what they were before they arrived here, and not all of it remains silent. No traveler who has stood here has escaped the feeling that this place is a fragment of another world, a fragment trapped in a half-forgotten dream, folded into our own.
The door was too narrow. When he opened it, a long, wheezing creak spilled out like a breath held too long. Cold sweat crawled down his back. He began to descend. The third step was broken. He remembered it before his foot touched down, though he didn’t know how. A familiar scent bloomed: damp wood, old wine, a whisper of mold. A cellar. It could have been the cellar he knew, the one from his childhood home. The walls had the same uneven grey. His hand brushed the right side of the doorway, and found what he already knew would be there: a light switch.
He flicked it on and the bottom room revealed itself.
It bent in ways he couldn’t follow, shifting with each blink, like it didn’t know which version of itself it wanted to be. Familiar corners slid into shapes that didn’t belong to memory. His breath echoed too far. He walked toward the only window. It was narrow, and so low he had to crouch. His palm touched the glass.
And then confusion turned into dread.
Outside, where he expected a patch of soil or a hedge or the base of the wall, there was only sky. Or a kind of sky. The ground was far, far below, a patchwork of dirt and root veiled in the pale shimmer of the fog that welcomed him here before. He wasn’t beneath the house.
He was above it.
The ceiling remained low. The air still held the damp of the deep earth. But the window refused to lie.
He stepped back, his voice lost.
This house was not made for this world.
The Room of Million Doors
No blueprint could have accounted for this place. This room obeys neither space, nor sequence. Its walls are a patchwork of seams and fractures, from which doors emerge like tumors. Tall, arched, rusted, wooden, glass, trapdoors in the ceiling, hatches in the floor, no two of them are alike. Some hang midair with no support. Others lead only to blank walls or drop into impossible voids. Many do not open at all.
They multiply when unobserved. The house, struggling to complete itself, mimics the memories of passageways and thresholds from those inside, drawing from broken minds and foreign builders. But it misremembers, confuses purpose with presence. What it constructs are not exits or entries, but imitations of intent. Echoes of doors that each was important for someone once.
The Door that wasn't there before
What emerges is a fractured imitation of human places: floorboards that hover in open air, doorframes that spiral into themselves, windows that look into memories no one owns. Each attempt to finish the room introduces another error, as if the logic behind it all is bent by unseen gravity. The builders of this place were not human. Their ghosts - bound in their unfinished project - try to reconstruct the house remember different laws, different weights, times, angles, and truths. So the room exists in a loop of construction and collapse, lurching toward coherence, but never truly reaching it.
He had passed this hallway more than once. Of that, he was certain. The cracked portrait with the blurred-out face. The warped rug bunched near the corner. The flickering lightbulb that hummed but never gave warmth. But now... There was a door. It hadn’t been there before. He stared at it, as if by squinting his eyes could unmake it. The grain of the wood didn’t match the rest of the house. Its handle was too smooth, untouched. New in a way nothing else here was. And there was something behind it. Not noise, not movement - just a suggestion that something waited inside to see him.
He walked in, and the walls breathed like lungs full of water. Shapes loomed in the corners that didn’t connect. At the far side of the room, a broken archway opened onto a hallway that bent the wrong way. He blinked and in that instant, one of the floating boards reshaped itself. Patches of floor floated apart from each other, slats of wood suspended midair, impossible but present. And worse: familiar. A toy shelf from a childhood room. A curtain from a lover’s apartment. A cracked mug he hadn’t seen since she died. Bits of him stitched into the bones of the unbuilt room.
Your Room
He didn’t remember opening another door. Yet the room was here when he looked. And he knew it.
No, not knew. Recognized.
Somehow, that was worse.
The walls were painted in a color he couldn’t name, but had loved once. The air was thick with the scent of old paper and chamomile, a particular shampoo and gunpowder. A desk sat where it had always been, but it was the wrong wood. A stuffed animal sagged on the shelf... was it Zoe's? Or his daughter’s? No... that couldn't be. He never had children.
He stepped forward and the floor creaked like home.
On the dresser beside the bed lay a journal. Opened to the last page. His handwriting; neater than it had been in years. He picked it up. The words rewrote themselves as he read them.
"He comes to the last room. It's the one he swore he’d never return to. He breathes in the memory, chocking on its truth."
He slammed the journal shut as the room held its breath.
The mirror across the room showed a man already standing there. Watching him.
There were no doors. No windows.
He turned, but now the bed was unmade, blood stained the sheets. The closet was cracked open, revealing clothes that weren’t his.
The ceiling sighed. The floor pulsed.
He wanted to scream, but the room had already done it for him.
His chest burned. His eyes welled. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
So he sat down on the bed.
And the house kept observing. Rebuilding around his still figure all it could understand.
There is no corridor to this place. No stairs. You do not arrive by walking, but by being acknowledged. The house leaves this room for last. Not out of mercy, but necessity, because it needs time to know you.
It studies. It steals. It reconstructs.
Fragments of your life, your dreams, your regrets; all sifted through hands that do not understand what they are holding. The floor is the one you first walked on. The bed is too small now. The air smells like tears you never shed. A door you forgot you once opened reappears, warped by sorrow. The photographs on the walls shift when you aren’t looking.
Not all of what you see are real. Some are invented, fabricated memories to see how you’ll react. The ghosts that haunt the crooked house watch closely. Not out of malice, but obsession. A compulsion. They are the architects. The builders. They came with the house when it fell through the veil, when their world spilled like ink into ours. They were never meant to be here. The physics are wrong. The air is wrong. But still they labor. Still they try.
They dwell in the walls of their masterpiece, agonizing to finish what they have started. Only now, their tools are your footsteps. Their materials, your mind.
What this room is cannot be fully explained.
But whatever it is, it is yours.
The Crooked House
The house does not end.
It does not remember every guest, but it keeps something of them. A scent. A tremor in the stairs. A painting barely hunging.
It came into our world like a bruise: sudden and unwelcome.
It is a wound between worlds, stitched together with memory and sorrow, with forgotten architecture and foreign logic. Its crooked angles and unfinished rooms are not signs of decay, but of misunderstanding. The ones who began to build it were not from here. When the veil between realms was torn, they fell through with their tools still in hand and a purpose still burning.
They do not understand this world.
So they keep building, begging memory to become blueprint.
Sometimes, the house sleeps. But even then, it keeps dreaming of completion.
And in its dreams, you are still walking in its halls and its rooms.
Horrifying, utterly horrifying. The circular room....its my own unique brand of claustrophobia I HATE that, it always feels like the room is constantly shrinking, closing in a spiral. Oh goosebumps crawling all over me, ahh I don't like it. The story, the questions, you draw in curiosity whilst parsing threat of danger. Yet you dance the line so well Imagica, you creative mastermind you. You dig the hooks in just enough, just enough, that curiosity overwhelms good sense, one cannot help but believe the risk could be worth knowledge to be gained, treasure to be found or perhaps even something more valuable to be discovered. Its fantastic, I can't praise it often enough this style you approach Crux Umbra with is reminiscent of the best campfire horror stories the ones where you don't turn immediately or simply laugh, but instead find yourself, despite perhaps having a direct understanding of the foolishness of the choice, you find yourself hanging onto every word like a lifeline. You can't stop without knowing how it all turns out. About what comes next. Amazing as always, truly fantastic!
Thank you so much! I am sorry if I triggered your phobia. Honestly, this is probably my favorite article I wrote this SC . I am very happy you enjoyed it <3
Oh its okay, I need to be physically in the space to start actually experiencing like phobia level panic. That just sent me full goosebumps cause like "gah I know how I'd viscerally react" :) Which is good, playing emotions is strong writing, nothing to apologize for there <3