The House That Vanished Each Night

People in the village never spoke of the house at the hill’s edge. It wasn’t fear that silenced them, not exactly. It was something closer to exhaustion. After generations of whispers, warnings, and lost explanations, silence became easier than trying to understand.

The house stood there every morning. Tall, crooked, with windows like eyes that had seen too much. Children walking to school would point at it, daring one another to knock on the door. Farmers paused in their fields, glancing up, waiting for its shape to blur. And always, as the sun set, it happened.

The house vanished.

Not collapsed, not burned, not moved. It simply ceased to exist, swallowed by nothing. Grass spread where its shadow had been, leaving no trace of walls or windows. At dawn, it returned, unchanged, as though no time had passed.

No one lived there. At least, no one anyone admitted to seeing.

But Mara wanted answers.

She was a young journalist from the city, her notebook stuffed with mysteries people dismissed. She had heard stories from her grandmother, who once lived in the village before moving away. “The house isn’t haunted,” her grandmother had said. “It’s cursed with memory. It remembers things that shouldn’t be remembered.”

That was enough for Mara.

She arrived one gray morning, determined to stay until nightfall. Villagers shook their heads when she mentioned her plan. An old man muttered, “If you sleep too close, you’ll wake on the wrong side of the morning.” She asked what he meant, but he shuffled away.

By evening, Mara stood outside the house with her recorder running. The wood smelled faintly of ash. The windows reflected no light, though the sunset glowed behind her. She placed her hand on the door. It was warm.

And then the air shifted.

The ground trembled as if holding its breath. She looked up just as the shingles flickered like candle flames. The walls blurred. Her heart pounded, but she refused to step back. She kept her hand pressed against the wood until, with a soft sigh, the house was gone.

Her hand hung in empty air.

Mara gasped. Around her stretched only grass and silence. No walls, no roof, no dust. She scribbled frantic notes, though her hands shook. She waited, watching the stars rise, shivering in the chill. Hours passed.

And then she heard it—footsteps behind her.

She turned. No one.

The recorder clicked and hissed. Through the static, a voice whispered, low and tired: “Why do you keep coming back?”

Mara froze. “Who’s there?”

The voice did not answer, but the ground beneath her feet felt strange, soft, like pages of a book. She knelt and brushed the soil, only to find paper-thin fragments scattered like leaves, covered in faded writing. She tried to read them, but the ink bled into shadows.

At dawn, the house returned with a snap, standing exactly where it always had, her hand still outstretched against its door. Except her notebook was gone. So was her recorder. Only her memory remained, and even that felt frayed.

She staggered back, whispering, “It took them.”

The villagers f

ound her pale and trembling, muttering about words buried in the ground. They did not ask questions. They only shook their heads, knowing the house had claimed another story.

That night, Mara dreamed of being inside. Rooms stretched endlessly. Doors opened into other versions of herself, all writing the same notes. And one of them turned to her and said, “We are the house.”

When she woke, her hands were stained with ink that wasn’t hers.

The house on the hill still waits each morning. Vanishing each night. Collecting memories, collecting people, collecting stories that no one dares to tell aloud.

And though Mara returned to the city, she never published her findings. Not because she didn’t want to, but because every word she wrote about the house vanished from the page the next morning.