It could just be the wind...

So, this is it. The end.

I looked up at the house, and it couldn’t be any creepier. My aunt had always been an eccentric old kook, and this place fit her perfectly. The mansion loomed like something stolen from The Addams Family, its towers leaning down as though judging my worth before I even set foot inside.

On the right, a glass structure clung to the house — a greenhouse, maybe? Hard to tell through the grime and ivy. Whatever it was, it was mine now.

The wind shifted, a cold push at my back, urging me forward. I shivered. It felt less like weather and more like permission, as if something unseen had just granted me entry.

The wrought iron gate groaned when I pushed it open, the sound deep and final. I straightened my shoulders, adjusted my suitcase handle, and stepped through.

If she could live here for fifty years, so could I.

The front door was larger than I remembered. Not that I’d ever been here — just seen photos in brittle albums that smelled faintly of smoke and lavender. But as I stood on the porch, the wood seemed familiar beneath my hand, like the ghost of a memory pressed into my palm.

The key turned too easily. I stepped inside.

The air felt thicker, as though it hadn’t breathed in years. Dust floated in soft clouds that caught what little light slipped through the stained glass, turning it into fractured rainbows.

Something dripped. Slow, rhythmic. I told myself it was a leak; old houses did that. It could just be the wind, I thought, absurdly, though the air inside was perfectly still.

The hall stretched longer than it should have. Each step echoed, but a heartbeat out of sync, as if someone else followed just behind me. I turned. Nothing. Just my suitcase and the door, now closed, though I didn’t remember pulling it shut.

I exhaled and laughed under my breath. “Great start,” I said to the empty hall. My voice came back warped, softer.

I looked up the grand staircase. Shadows spilled across it like ink poured too freely. The second floor was nothing but suggestion, outlines of shapes that might have been furniture. Or people.

I shook it off. Dreams bleeding in again, I thought. It’s fine.

The scent hit me next, sweet, cloying, almost familiar. Jasmine. My aunt’s perfume. She’d worn it every day until she died.

I dropped my suitcase handle, heart thudding, and whispered again, softer this time, almost a prayer: It could just be the wind.

Heavier with every step, the air made a slow cathedral out of my lungs. I left the suitcase by the stairs and trailed my fingers along the bannister. Dust fanned away in little wings. Even that felt familiar: the faint slickness of polished wood beneath the grit, the way the rail curved like a rib. In my dreams, I had climbed this staircase countless times but never reached the top. I always woke on the fifth step, pulse skittering, the scent of jasmine clinging to my nose.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told myself. “You’ve never been here.”

The first landing had a long runner whose pattern repeated roses darkened to rust. Portraits lined the wall, stern people with the soft mouths of the long dead. One woman’s eyes followed me in the way oil paint tends to when you already suspect you’re being watched. Another portrait had slipped crooked, a wedge of lighter wallpaper showing behind it like a bandage. I lifted it to straighten and froze. Someone had pencilled a date on the bare plaster: 3:17. Not a day, not a year. A time. The pencil mark looked fresh, smudged as though a thumb had brushed it. My thumb, perhaps.

“Coincidence,” I whispered, and the whisper came back down the hall a half-second late, like it had to fight its way through a dream to reach me.

The corridor turned left at the top of the stairs and spilled into a small sitting room with a view of the glasshouse. Up close, it was stranger: a ribcage of iron and green glass, fogged from within. The panes were filmed with a mineral white, so the light arrived as if it had already been used somewhere else. In my dream, I had stood in that glasshouse and listened to rain that never reached the ground. A voice spoke through the dripping and called my name. My aunt’s voice, low and fond and intolerably sure.

I pressed my palm to the cold window. The condensation on the inside bloomed under my hand like breath. Something moved within the glasshouse. A shape. The suggestion of weight. I stared until the suggestion stared back and became only a vine shifting its grip on the frame.

“Greenhouse,” I said, too brightly. “I’ll deal with you later.”

The sitting room contained a velvet settee covered with a white sheet, the kind that looks cleaner than anything actually is. A low table held a single object: a journal bound in cracked black leather, banded shut by a silk ribbon the colour of old bruises. My aunt had loved her dramatics. The ribbon resisted and then parted with a sigh.

On the first page, in my aunt’s hand, precise, slanted, a little impatient, was my name. For you. Don’t open unless you are alone. As if this house offered any other option.

I glanced at the doorway; it had drifted partway closed without a sound. The corridor beyond it had that particular hush that announces winter storms—or churches. The drip had stopped. The house was listening.

I turned another page. Not a proper diary. Fragments, aphorisms, little sketches of plants with their roots exaggerated into veined hands. In the margin: Dreams are doors. Don’t use the keys you find inside them. On a torn half-page: 3:17. Beneath it, a line that had been erased and written again with stubborn pressure: You will wake there.

Something cold folded itself into my spine. The clock on the mantel read 3:17. There was no ticking. And yet the hands sat at that time with the smugness of accuracy.

“That’s enough,” I said, closing the journal. “Old clocks stop. Old women write nonsense.”

From somewhere down the hall, a soft scrape. The sound of a chair being pushed back, or a shoe lifted from old floorboards. My mouth went dry. It could just be the wind, I thought, though nothing moved the curtains.

“Hello? Is someone there?” I called. The house kept my voice. Then, delicately, it returned a version of it, quieter, pitched slightly higher.

I set the journal on the table and went toward the sound. The corridor opened into a bedroom with a high ceiling and an iron bed that could have anchored a ship. The bedstead was draped in lace, turned the colour of tea. My aunt had arranged three pillows like a sleeping shrug. On the dressing table sat a triptych mirror, the kind that multiplies your face into variations of the same mistake.

I avoided mirrors usually. But the perfume drew me across the room as if by the hem of my coat. Jasmine again, and underneath it something bitter, like the rind of sleep.

In the mirror, I had already entered the room. I saw the doorway empty behind me and my own reflection standing where I stood. But the ‘me’ in the centre pane blinked a fraction after I did. The ‘me’ in the right-hand pane had a strand of hair tucked behind her ear that I hadn’t moved. The ‘me’ in the left looked tired in a way I could not feel yet. I lifted my hand. Three hands lifted, lagging, leading, aligning, misaligning.

“Stop,” I told myself. The left-hand ‘me’ stopped. The other two didn’t.

I took a step back, and my heel struck the corner of a rug. The sound that came out of my throat surprised me with its smallness. The dressing table rattled; the little tray of hairpins chimed. I bent to pick them up and saw, in that dislocated mirror glance, someone standing behind me in the doorway.

I straightened so fast my vision went white. The doorway was empty. But my name hung there as if spoken and not yet heard.

“Don’t,” I said to the room, to the air, to the throat that wanted to say my name again in my aunt’s voice. “Don’t do that.”

I turned toward the sound of wings tapping at the window and found myself looking at the glasshouse instead. From this angle, I could see a path, a table, potting soil, the hunched silhouettes of citrus trees left to their own ghostly devices. The door from the house to the glasshouse sat at the end of a narrow passage off this room, barely more than a closet.

In my dream, I walked that passage, and the glasshouse door opened before I touched it. I heard rain. I heard her in the rain, not speaking a word but shaping my name with the soft edges of water. Come along, the way she had when I was small.

My hand looked like every hand I had ever used to close something I should have left open. The hallway gave a warning creak, like a groan caught halfway. I told myself I would only look. Just to prove to the part of me that kept waking on the fifth stair that nothing waited at the end of this one.

“It could just be the wind,” I thought, almost fondly.

The passage smelled of damp earth and old glass. When I reached the door, the jasmine was stronger, nearer, as if the perfume had been applied on the other side only moments ago. The latch was cool under my palm. The hinges had been oiled recently. They would not protest if I opened them. They would not protect me if I did not.

Behind me, the clock that did not tick moved no hands and still arrived at the same time. 3:17. In the journal upstairs, the pencilled note lay waiting. You will wake there.

“Fine,” I said, but not to the house. To myself. “We’ll see.”

The door yielded like a held breath as I lifted the latch. Air moved over my face, cool, damp, layered with the green, sour scent of things that want light. The glasshouse held itself very still. Somewhere high in the ironwork, a thread of water trembled and did not fall.

From that suspended drop, or from the soil, or from the bones of the house bending into the glass, a whisper rose. My name, very gently. Not pleading. Certain. The way the family says your name when it’s time to come home.

“It could just be the wind,” I thought, and stepped through.

The air changed as soon as I crossed the threshold.

Not colder, not warmer, just thicker. It pressed close to my skin, a slow exhale of soil and memory. The glasshouse was a cathedral made of breath and rot. Moonlight fractured through the panels, scattering across the leaves and pooling in silver puddles on the flagstones. Each droplet of condensation trembled, alive with reflection.

Something moved between the rows of overgrown plants. A shadow, or a person, or both. I could hear the faint drag of cloth, the hush of feet that didn’t disturb the dust.

“Aunt?” I said. My voice sounded young again.

Silence. Then, faintly, the sound of rain, impossible, because the roof was dry. It pattered and paused, as though trying to remember what falling felt like.

I took a few steps forward. My shoes left no prints.

The plants had grown wild, curling up the iron framework and clawing at the panes. White blossoms opened and closed in the half-light, pulsing softly like lungs. One brushed my wrist as I passed, and the petals felt warm, almost human.

“I got your house,” I said. “The will went through. So… thanks, I suppose.” My voice cracked. “You could’ve left me something normal.”

A breath of laughter, soft and brittle, rippled through the air. It came from everywhere and nowhere.

“You always did think normal was safe,” came the reply.

I turned. She stood beneath the largest pane, where the moonlight fell cleanest. Her outline flickered, as if drawn by candlelight on water. My aunt looked exactly as I remembered, same steel-grey hair and the same amused mouth. Only her eyes were different. They weren’t eyes at all but the faint shimmer of glass, reflecting me.

“You’re not real,” I said.

She smiled, indulgent. “Neither are you, not here.”

The jasmine smell deepened until it ached behind my teeth.

“I’m dreaming.”

“Yes,” she said. “And no. Dreams are only doors, my dear. The question is: who keeps walking through them?”

I backed away, bumping into a table that hadn’t been there before. On it sat the black journal, open to a page I didn’t remember writing. My handwriting looped across the lines in restless strokes: I will wake there. I will wake there. I will wake there.

My stomach lurched. “Did I write that?”

“You’ve written it every night,” she said, her voice echoing oddly, like someone speaking from behind glass. “And every night you come back here, trying to decide whether to wake up or stay.”

I stared at her, at the way her reflection shimmered in the panes behind her, three, four, five versions, overlapping like broken film.

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you do,” she said gently. “You’ve been dying for years, piece by piece. You only needed a place to finish it.”

My throat tightened. “I’m not dying.”

“Then wake up.” She tilted her head.

I closed my eyes. Tried to remember the outside world. The smell of rain on pavement. The sound of my phone alarm. But all I could hear was that whisper again, circling me like air through an empty hallway.

It could just be the wind, I thought, desperately.

When I opened my eyes, she was gone, and I was standing in her place. My reflection in the glass looked wrong, faintly transparent, like the light passed through me and not around. The journal page fluttered shut on its own. I reached for it, and my hand moved through the paper like mist.

Panic surged. I stumbled back toward the door, but it was gone. Just another wall of glass. Outside, the garden was flooded with moonlight, impossibly bright. For a moment, I saw someone walking along the path, a figure carrying a suitcase, looking up at the house with the same apprehension I’d had.

Me.

The other me.

She pushed open the gate, and the wind rose, low and sighing.

On my side of the glass, the world stilled. The jasmine scent thickened until I could barely breathe. I whispered it one last time, though it came out as something between prayer and apology:

It could just be the wind…

The figure outside looked up.

And smiled.

Dawn came without colour.

It crept across the panes in shades of ash, draining the night of its pulse. The plants hung limp and silvered, dew-beaded like veins. The world looked rinsed clean, but I couldn’t feel the warmth that should’ve followed. The air around me was motionless, sealed in glass.

I pressed my palm against the nearest pane. It was cold, yes, but beneath that, faintly, I felt a heartbeat, or maybe it was my own.

Beyond the glass, the figure — myself — was still there. She stood at the gate, suitcase by her side, wind tugging at her coat. For a heartbeat, I thought I could call to her, warn her, break the loop. But my breath fogged the glass, and she didn’t look up.

Then, with a shiver of inevitability, she did.

Her eyes found mine through the reflection, and I knew what came next: the hesitation, the push of the gate, the whisper of finality. I’d lived this moment enough times to recognise its rhythm.

Maybe my aunt hadn’t left me a house at all. Maybe she’d left me this. A dream stitched to its own reflection. A cage with a heartbeat.

The wind sighed through the cracks, low and hollow, circling the greenhouse like a mouth learning to speak. It pressed against the glass, whispering fragments of words I couldn’t quite catch. I leaned closer.

It sounded like her voice. It sounded like mine.

Wake up, it breathed.

My throat tightened. “I’m trying.”

The glass beneath my palm warmed. The frost melted in perfect hand shapes. Through it, I saw the new me — the arriving me — mount the steps, look up, hesitate, shiver.

Then the wind rose again, soft and coaxing, as if giving permission.

She smiled.

The key turned in the lock.

The sound echoed through the glasshouse like the toll of a bell, reverberating through every rib of iron and pane of green glass until it reached my bones.

And I, whatever I was, smiled back, because the house was never empty. It was only waiting.

Somewhere deep in its walls, a clock that had never ticked began to move, its hands aligning: 3:17.

The wind settled. The jasmine bloomed anew.

And when the door opened, it sounded almost like a sigh of relief.

It could just be the wind…