The House That Drew You

It started with the vanishing of Felix Moran-acclaimed painter, recluse, and surrealist whose final canvas was a house no one could place. It had twisted windows and a roof that dipped like a sigh. He titled it “The Home I Can’t Forget.” Then he vanished, the brush still wet.

One year later, the dreams began.

Carmen, a retired nurse, woke up clutching charcoal sketches despite her lifelong tremor. Malik, a tattoo artist, found a house etched in ink across his forearm-he’d never sleep walked before. Lila, a barista, pulled a painting from beneath her pillow, signed with her name in unfamiliar handwriting. And Jonah, a war journalist with one eye, saw the house clear as day… in both.

They met in a digital forum for dream anomalies. Their stories matched. The house’s angle, the overgrown ivy, the strange crosshatched sky above it. As if drawn in a fever dream.

When they finally gathered to find it-an empty stretch in rural Vermont-it wasn’t on any map. Yet the road bent, and there it stood. Just as they’d seen it. As if it had waited.

As if it had been chosen.

Inside, the scent of linseed and dust hung like breath. The house was alive with stillness. Paintings lined the walls-each of them in frames too ornate for comfort.

Jonah stood before one of himself, screaming in a field of fire.

Lila showed her opening a door, her shadow grinning behind her.

Malik had his hands red with paint-no, blood-smearing symbols on a mirror.

Carmen’s portrait was the worst. She sat in a chair, mouth stitched shut by threads of ink, eyes blank and waiting.

Beneath each frame, verses curled in a hand not quite human:

“The brush remembers every face,

And locks you in its canvas place.

Painted once, you’ll never flee-

Art is truth, and truth is me.”

They turned to run. The door shut itself.

They screamed. The house whispered back.

“Finish the painting. Or become it.”

Malik, desperate and trembling, doused the floor in turpentine and struck a match. The fire didn’t eat-it painted. The flames danced in hues of orange and despair, shaping a fifth frame on the far wall. Slowly, deliberately, it filled with color: four people, burning-but staring outward, as if they saw the viewer.

Outside, the house remained untouched.

Inside, the whispers began to chant their names.

Jonah. Lila. Malik. Carmen.

One by one, they vanished into their portraits, screaming silently through oil and canvas. Their mouths moved-but only the walls could hear them.

The house still stands in Vermont. No address. No road leads to it.

But sometimes, when the moon is low and silence deeper than dark, a painter dreams of a house he cannot name. And when he wakes…

His brush is wet.

And the canvas waits.