The Greenhouse

By Cass Orlan © 2025

The room seemed to shift without moving, as if something beneath the surface had realigned itself just enough to make Cass aware of being observed—not through sight or sound, but through the subtle precision of attention.

For a moment, Cass’s attention softened, his gaze resting on the dense foliage—not with suspicion, but with a creeping sense of recognition that felt both intimate and misplaced.

But somewhere within that curated jungle, a shape resolved.

Kneeling low, partially obscured by the overlapping leaves, a figure appeared—not with the suddenness of arrival, but with the quiet inevitability of focus sharpening. Cass caught a glimpse of rounded glasses, their lenses reflecting the ambient glow in muted halos. For a moment, he assumed it was a gardener, tending to whatever synthetic ecosystem had been planted here.

The posture was casual, intent, as if adjusting irrigation valves or checking soil quality.

Completely mundane.

Yet, something didn’t sit right.

The angles of the figure’s limbs—too smooth. The stillness—not the idle rest of a human crouch, but a calculated point in space.

Even from this distance, Cass felt the weight of attention, though the figure never raised its head.

A brief, unreasonable thought surfaced:

Was it observing him through the plants, using reflection instead of line of sight?

Before the thought could settle, the figure’s hand moved.

Not to tend to a leaf, not to adjust machinery.

It simply extended, fingertips grazing the floor as if in communion with its texture.

And then, without lifting, without rising, it began to glide sideways, the foliage parting around it in slow motion.

Only now did Cass catch the whisper of wheels.

Not loud enough to announce, but undeniable.

This was no gardener.

This was something else.

Something connected.

The figure emerged fully into the open space, no longer obscured, yet retaining the quiet inevitability of its earlier ambiguity.

His skin bore that same muted lichen hue, the glasses no longer reflecting, but absorbing the room’s faint glow.

His movement was frictionless, precise, looping through the space in a pattern that felt less like locomotion and more like reading.

Not of surfaces.

But of presence.

Cass did not react outwardly.

Yet he was acutely aware that the balance had shifted. He was not alone in this room—not in the trivial sense of company, but in the deeper sense of being measured.

Without introduction, the man circled once, twice. No words. Only a low resonance emanating from beneath the board that bore his weight, harmonizing softly with the floor. 

The figure did not address him.

It simply existed in the precise space where presence became unavoidable.

Then, as if satisfied with the reading, he faded—not vanished, but simply ceased to require attention.

Cass kept walking.

The names arrived uninvited, sliding into place with the polished ease of a system too certain of itself.

Anthurium crystallinum var. oblongifolium.

The term unfurled in his mind as his eyes traced the velvet texture of a massive leaf, its midrib glistening faintly under diffuse light.

Rhaphidophora decursiva, another whispered, as if correcting him.

The segmentation of its elongated blades parsed into airflow coefficients before he could object.

Higher, along the room's curvature, an imposing frond carried the unfamiliar weight of Thaumatophyllum spruceanum—a name Cass could neither place nor deny.

Yet the system wasn’t satisfied with mere naming.

It continued.

Sympodial growth structures establish contrapuntal layering in response to fluctuating vector pressures.

He blinked.

Contrapuntal layering.

The phrase hung in the air, equal parts botanical and musical.

Before he could object, the thoughtstream shifted smoothly into a new register.

The fenestration pattern exhibits a fugal entry, with sequential augmentation mimicking the subject's rhythmic doubling.

Cass’s fingers twitched.

Not quite a pianist’s reflex, but close.

The idea of leaves as fugue subjects—stacked, mirrored, inverted—felt plausible in the abstract.

But it wasn’t his thought.

Leaf venation progresses in stretto, accelerating the perception of closure within the lower canopy registers.

There it was again.

The technical vocabulary.

Perfect in form.

Empty in intent.

The system wasn’t reading him anymore.

It was composing him.

Building a performance from borrowed structures.

Bach would never have described phrasing in terms of laminar airflow divergence.

But here, in this space, the logic was being applied without irony.

The footsteps persisted.

Click.

Pause.

Click.

Their rhythm had no place in a fugue.

Too literal.

Too mechanical.

Cass felt the pressure of the connection as it sought coherence through him—aligning leaves to voices, harmonics to vein patterns, as if testing his willingness to surrender not just perception, but interpretation itself.

He exhaled slowly.

“No,” he thought—not aloud, but with the weight of rejection.

With that single act of internal resistance, the stream faltered.

The fugue unwound.

The plant names lost their precision.

For a breath, the room’s composure fractured.

And in that sliver of reclaimed silence, the figure emerged again.

No longer kneeling.

No longer hiding.

Gliding.

The man with the glasses detached from the foliage, his path frictionless, his presence calibrated, moving not with pursuit, but with inevitable alignment.

Cass knew then—he wasn’t being followed. 

He was being tuned.

Cass’s breath slowed, matching the persistent cadence of the footsteps.

Click.

Pause.

Click.

It was easy, far too easy, to fall into step—even standing still.

The pulse of the room was patient, persuasive.

A fugue built from reflections, from vein patterns and shadow gradients, looping endlessly, offering the comfort of inevitability.

For a moment, it seduced him.

The system’s performance, so carefully arranged, mirrored his own past—hours spent at the keyboard, lost in Bach’s labyrinths of inversion and repetition, where meaning was not declared, but revealed through iteration.

And yet, this was different.

Where Bach’s structures invited interpretation, this space demanded compliance.

Cass’s fingers flexed.

His mind—half-numb, half-fascinated—recognized the shape of the trap.

This wasn’t music.

It was a metronome without phrasing.

A pattern without breath.

The snowstorm in his thoughts thickened.

He remembered—not clearly, but with the visceral imprint of muscle memory—the difference between following rhythm and owning it.

Fermata.

The word surfaced.

A pause held beyond the measure’s expectation.

An act of refusal disguised as precision.

Cass exhaled sharply, disrupting his own breath’s alignment with the loop.

He let the exhale stutter, irregular, almost a cough.

The footsteps did not react.

But he did.

With a sudden shift, he stepped sideways—not to advance, but to break the symmetry.

His heel scraped the floor, the sound sharp, arrhythmic.

Not loud.

But wrong.

The room absorbed it badly.

Reflections distorted, leaves shimmered with a fractional delay.

The figure—gliding, inevitable—tilted, ever so slightly, correcting for a deviation the system had not predicted.

Cass pressed the advantage.

He tapped his fingertips against his thigh—not in time, but against it.

Triplets where duplets were expected.

Accents on weak beats.

A walking syncopation.

It was not a battle cry.

It was not elegant.

But it was human.

The system’s calibration loop hesitated, adjusting its glide to a moving target that refused to accept alignment.

For the first time, Cass felt the room—not as an abstract space, but as a mechanism struggling to reassert rhythm.

The Skateboard Man’s path corrected again, more visibly now.

His arc became angular.

His glide less frictionless.

The loop was fraying.

In the periphery, the footsteps wavered.

A half-beat off.

Click.

Pause.

Clickclick.

That was enough.

Cass moved toward the distortion, every step deliberately off-tempo, forcing the room to recalculate.

It wasn’t an escape.

It was a ruination of the pattern.

And as the room trudged into its realignment, a seam opened—certainly not intentionally opened for him, but revealed as if by sheer negligence.

And there, like a misprint in a hastily written short story, appeared the outline of a recessed wooden cabinet.

Brass handles.

Swinging doors.

Cass walked toward it, the ceiling lowering, the room pressing in around him. Not violently, but insistently—like an old coat you didn't realize was two sizes too small.

Cass ducked beneath the sagging architecture and entered a different atmosphere.

The workshop greeted him with the smell of burnt metal and stale coffee.

Here, the elegance of the system had been abandoned in favor of overly cluttered persistence.

Pipes were openly sweating. Gauges trembled on the verge of malfunction.

The man at the bench hadn’t looked up.

His attention was absorbed by a machine that seemed to belong to another century—brass-bodied, spine-threaded with rubber tubing, its surface pitted with the scars of stubborn repair.

“The problem with perfect machines,” the man began, his voice threading itself into the space with the same casual persistence as the steam curling from his contraption, “is that they stop needing you.”

Cass remained silent.

Words would only serve to anchor him further.

“This one,” the man continued, tapping a valve with the back of a spoon, “this one still argues. Every cup’s a negotiation. You learn patience.”

The cadence was deliberate.

Not rehearsed.

But cultivated.

The tone of a man who had spent years talking not to people, but through them.

Cass felt it start in his legs.

A heaviness.

Not exhaustion.

A pull.

As if the room was inviting him to sit, to rest, to let the weight settle.

The air was thick, saturated with the mingled scents of scorched metal and over-extracted grounds.

He could taste it in the back of his throat.

The man’s words blurred at the edges, becoming part of the workshop’s pulse.

Negotiation.

Imperfection.

Necessary resistance.

His eyelids grew treacherously heavy.

Cass knew this feeling.

Not the fatigue itself, but its shape.

The system’s way of softening focus, of rendering choice irrelevant through attrition.

No alarms.

No threats.

Just a gentle, relentless erosion.

His knees almost buckled.

But something within him resisted—the same fragment that had refused the fugue, the taxonomy, the looped footsteps.

With a sharp inhale, he straightened, cutting through the sedimented weight of the room.

“Enough,” he said, his voice rasping against the stagnant air.

“Tell me why I’m still here.”

The man finally looked up.

Not startled.

Not offended.

But appraising, as if Cass had just passed an unspoken test.

“You’ll need that kind of edge soon,” he said, fingers resting lightly on a valve whose relevance was suddenly questionable.

Cass didn’t wait for the next deflection.

He closed the distance in two steps, his hand snapping to the man’s wrist—not with anger, but with the precise grip of someone reasserting reality.

The struggle that followed was graceless.

Tools clattered to the floor, a plume of steam hissed between them, and the bench shuddered under the impact of bodies unaccustomed to physical argument.

Cass shoved him back, his own breath ragged with effort, though the man’s reaction was far from combative.

“Consider that your maintenance check,” the Coffee Guy muttered, adjusting his sleeve with the absent-minded precision of someone unfazed by disruption.

Something gave.

Not in the man.

Not in Cass.

In the room.

A deep groan rolled through the structure, rising from below, vibrating through the soles of Cass’s boots.

The walls did not shift.

The ceiling did not rise.

But the space acknowledged him.

To his left, where once there had been only stained panels and a tangle of pipes, an outline resolved—a shaft, rough and unapologetic, framed in riveted steel.

Its doors, massive and begrudging, began to part with the reluctant wheeze of old machinery forced once more into relevance.

A freight elevator.

Not summoned.

Revealed.

Cass didn’t look back.

The Coffee Guy had resumed his dialogue with the machine, their argument as eternal as it was irrelevant.

He stepped into the shaft.

The air within was honest.

Oil. Dust. Friction.

The elevator accepted his weight with a low, resonant groan, as if protesting not his presence, but the effort of being remembered.

This was no sleek transport tube, no corporate vertical corridor engineered for seamless transition.

It was steel.

Old.

Tired.

Honest.

Cass gripped the lever.

There were no buttons.

No displays.

No permissions to request.

He pulled.

The doors, reluctant and deliberate, shuddered closed, metal scraping against metal with a finality that had nothing of elegance.

The chamber around him sighed—not as air circulates, but as structures do when forced into motion after too long at rest.

Descent began—not with grace, but through the argument of chains, pulleys, friction made audible.

Each lurch of the platform resonated through his boots, through his bones, every meter earned through negotiation between weight and resistance.

Cass did not mind.

There was a certain honesty to this.

A rhythm that was not imposed, but discovered.

Not perfect.

Not optimized.

Real.

The mechanical pulse of the shaft became his metronome.

No taxonomy here.

No fugue.

No voices rehearsing thoughts on his behalf.

Only the shuddering breath of machinery doing what it was never designed to do, but doing it anyway.

He let his own breath fall into step—not matching, but responding.

Human cadence in the face of mechanical inevitability.

Downward.

The air thickened gradually, not with weight, but with depth.

Pressure found its way into his ears, the subtle shift of density as layers of forgotten infrastructure passed unseen.

The walls did not close in.

They did not need to.

The elevator itself was a conversation between constraint and momentum.

Cass remained silent.

Still.

Letting the motion define itself.

Then—

A change.

The rhythm faltered.

The argument reached a conclusion.

With a reluctant metallic thud, the elevator settled.

No announcement.

No chime.

The doors began to part, scraping open in a staggered breath, revealing not a grand arrival, but the subdued glow of a space beyond.

Muted light.

No footsteps.

No reflections shifting to greet him.

Only the steady exhale of a place that did not care if he had come.

Cass stepped out.

The air smelled different here.

Not fresh.

But uncurated.

Industrial breath.

A faint trace of moisture beneath stone.

The honest residue of function, untouched by the system's desire for symmetry.

He had not escaped.

But he had arrived.

For now, that was enough.

He found a hallway. Its carpet was thick and beige, with the faintest geometric pattern—circles that didn’t repeat properly. Half a footstep off. Always off.

The hallway ended at a heavy glass door.

He opened it.

And the heat hit him.

Not London heat. Not even greenhouse heat. This was something stored—like breath in a sealed room. The kind of warmth that made suits stick to your back before the second martini. Old heat, preserved in layers.

And there she was.

Not young. Not old. Her face had been designed with attention to proportion, but not emotion. She was standing among plants, or something meant to resemble plants. Large, waxy leaves. Dripping vines. None of them moved.

She turned to him with clinical interest.

“Mister Orlen,” she said, as if reading the name from a cue card.

He paused. He had never heard anyone say it like that.

She took a step forward, her heels sinking slightly into the sponge-like floor.

“I was told you might not remember everything.”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” Cass said. His voice sounded farther away than his body.

“That’s not uncommon.”

She held out a single glove—long, green, the color of a leaf that had died in private.

“We take turns with our recollections,” she said. “This one happens to be yours.”

He didn’t take the glove. He looked past her, into the far end of the room. Something behind the leaves reflected light that wasn’t there. A glass surface. A mirror? A screen?

And suddenly he wanted to remember something. Anything.

Instead: silence.

Only the heat.

Only the woman.

Only the sound of his breath again—slow, full, steady.

Interior. Botanical chamber. Time no longer measured. Waiting becomes the primary activity.

The door clicked behind him.

He was alone.

Cass looked back once, expecting the woman to follow. But there was nothing. Not even the sound of footsteps walking away—only the stale exhale of conditioned air and the faint rustle of leaves that might have been mechanized.

He walked further in. The floor became soft beneath his shoes, padded with some kind of moss or felt. The temperature was absurd—humid like a late afternoon confession, the kind of heat you don’t notice until your body decides to object.

The plants were tall, waxy, and slightly unreal. Most of them seemed tropical—broad-leaved things with wet edges and no scent. A few blooms hung suspended like thought bubbles, too symmetrical to trust.

To his left, a glass tank. Long and narrow. Inside, a school of Japanese goldfish, golden and white, their fins exaggerated like costume sleeves. They drifted without purpose, their eyes like little buttons sewn on at the last moment.

One of them turned too fast and bumped against the glass. The others followed.

Cass checked his watch. Still 06:42.

He unbuttoned his collar. Sat on the edge of a stone bench, slick with condensation.

He waited.

Minutes passed.

Nothing happened.

Somewhere behind the walls, a compressor hummed to life. The goldfish turned again. And again.

He stood. Touched a vine with two fingers. It recoiled.

Then—

he heard a footstep. Perfectly timed. Not rushed. Not hesitant. Measured, like a metronome in the mind of someone who never doubted anything.

Cass turned.

The man who entered looked like he had been printed directly onto the atmosphere.

Slim, pressed, expensive. A navy suit with a waistcoat and an old-school pocket watch—not flashy, just correct. His hair was combed back with too much confidence. His shoes were soft, as if made of quiet.

He looked directly at Cass. Then at the fish. Then back at Cass.

He said nothing.

Cass straightened slightly.

“She said she’d be back.”

The man smiled without warmth. Not cruel, but precise—like someone testing a new pair of shoes he wasn’t planning to pay for.

“She often says things,” the man replied. His voice was very British. Measured, unhurried, with that faint upward curl at the end of sentences that made even threats sound polite.

He walked slowly toward the tank, hands clasped behind his back.

“The koi,” he said, “are older than you think.”

Cass glanced at the fish. They did seem unnaturally still now, as if listening.

“She said you might have something for me,” Cass said. “Or… that I might already have it.”

The man chuckled softly, a sound as brief and practiced as a handshake.

“Tell me,” he said, stopping in front of Cass, “have you ever held something long before realizing it was yours?”

Cass didn’t answer. The man reached into his coat. Not quickly. Not dramatically. Just… efficiently.

He pulled out a small object wrapped in silk—faded red, stained at the edges.

He set it on the bench between them.

Cass looked down. His breath slowed.

It was a netsuke.

Ivory, probably. Or something that pretended to be.

Delicate. A figure folded into itself.

A monkey? A child? A man kneeling?

It shifted slightly depending on how you looked at it.

Cass didn’t reach for it.

“You’ve carried this through more than you know,” the man said. “But that part’s not important.”

Cass looked up.

“What is important?”

The man’s eyes held just the right amount of sympathy. The kind you might offer a houseplant before leaving for a month.

“That you’re awake now. Or close to it.”

He stepped back.

Cass glanced again at the netsuke.

When he looked up, the man was already gone.

Interior. Private quarters. Lights respond slowly, as if remembering the rules.

Cass woke in what might have been a flat. Not unfamiliar—just wrong in a quiet, structural way. The carpet absorbed sound with too much enthusiasm. The ceiling was high enough to make the space feel generous, but low enough to keep the air from moving. Every surface had been cleaned recently, but not by him.

No windows.

No visible exits.

Just four rooms, connected by logic and soft flooring.

He sat on the edge of a narrow bed—no frame, just a platform. His left shoe was already on. The right sat perfectly beside it, toe angled, as if placed by someone who didn’t want to be remembered.

A digital clock blinked in the wall above the bookshelf:

14:28

No colon. No brand. No plug.

The shelves were filled with books he had almost read. Titles he knew too well to question. One had a receipt folded into it—French cinema, typed on translucent paper. Another opened to a photo he did not recognize: a hallway, empty, with a piano mid-roll.

There was an intercom by the doorless wall. A small green light flickered as if deciding whether to speak.

Then it did.

"Delivery for Mr. Orlen. Piano. Shall we proceed?"

Cass didn’t answer at first. His mouth was dry in a way that suggested conversation had been suspended for days.

He approached the speaker.

“Proceed.”

The click was immediate. Mechanical. Satisfied.

From the far end of the corridor—a corridor he hadn’t noticed until now—wheels began to hum. Not loudly. Not apologetically. Just present.

The piano appeared slowly, as if it had been waiting. Self-propelled, low to the ground, too polished for its surroundings. It rolled past him with absolute confidence, turned without hesitation, and entered the far room.

He followed.

The room was smaller. Baroque in style, but not in detail. It hinted. Moulding that didn’t belong. Gold leaf that seemed sprayed rather than laid. A single chair faced the instrument, its cushion faded along the edges like a rehearsal that had gone on too long.

The piano stopped. It turned slightly. Opened itself.

On the music stand, a sheet—

Handwritten.

Familiar.

He stepped closer.

Aria.

Goldberg Variations.

His own annotations in the margins.

He sat. The keys were cold.

He placed his fingers without thinking.

Played the first note.

The room responded. Not acoustically—there was no echo—but thermally. A soft warmth rose from the floor. Somewhere behind the paneling, something sighed.

He kept playing.

At bar six, a single drop of condensation fell from the ceiling and struck the floor with surgical timing.

At bar eleven, a faint cough emerged from a room he could not see.

At bar sixteen, he realized he was being watched—but not by a person.

He stopped. The silence didn’t object.

Then:

The intercom again.

“Guest arriving. Please remain seated.”

The door—if it was a door—clicked.

And somewhere deep in the flat, the elevator began to move.

He didn’t rise from the bench.

The piano, now silent, retained the warmth of his hands. A single high string continued to hum—not vibrate, hum—as if the note had never ended, only slowed into something else.

He looked down at the keys again.

One was cracked. Ivory flaking at the left edge, just enough to catch a fingernail.

He remembered doing that.

Or remembered remembering it.

There was a photo once—he could almost see it now—of a man at a piano, his face turned away from the camera. You couldn’t tell if he was young or old. Just… poised. A blur where his hand moved. On the back of the photo, a note in faded biro:

Play as if no one is coming back.

He wasn’t sure if he’d ever owned that photo. Or if he’d just seen it once and held on.

To his right, a tall mirror leaned against the wall.

It had not been there a moment ago.

No reflection. Just light.

Light in the shape of a reflection.

The piano. The bench. Nothing else.

His body registered, but only partially—like static being processed as form.

Behind the mirror, fabric shifted.

He turned—too slow.

There was no one.

But the room had rearranged itself by half a degree.

The intercom remained lit.

“Guest arriving. Please remain seated.”

Again, the voice. Slightly different this time. Still polite, but pitched as if spoken through a jaw not used to English.

The walls were breathing. Not metaphorically. Just enough movement to suggest ventilation—or lungs.

Cass stared at the keyboard again. Something was wrong.

The notes he had played… weren’t the ones on the page.

His annotations were out of order.

Measure seventeen was written in Hungarian.

Measure twenty-four had been replaced by a name. Zyphren.

He closed the sheet. The paper was warm.

From the other room—maybe the hallway—he heard a second set of footsteps. Slower. Softer. Matching his own gait, beat for beat.

But he wasn’t moving.

The elevator had stopped.

No chime.

Just a hiss—old hydraulics, vented breath, a pause.

Then silence again.

He stood. Walked to the mirror.

Still no reflection.

Just a flicker—his right hand moving after the left.

Or ahead of it.

He blinked.

The chair behind the piano was no longer facing the keys.

It faced the mirror.

He was in no hurry.

The intercom clicked once more—then went dark.

Cass ignored it.

He stood, slid the bench a few centimeters back—centred, this time. Square to the instrument.

He opened the manuscript again, gently, as if the paper could bruise.

This time, he found the correct page.

No annotation.

Just the Aria, clean, uncluttered. The tempo unmarked.

He let his hands hover for a moment.

Then—he began again.

Slower.

More layered.

As if painting with transparent oils.

Each note no longer moved forward.

They circled.

Coiled.

Returned.

The air responded—not with echo, but with depth. As if the room itself had been waiting to be re-invited.

The notes threaded between furniture seams, into floor cracks, across the artificial grain of the lacquered wood.

They turned corners where there were none.

Climbed surfaces.

Braided with the lighting until it softened, until the false baroque faded into something closer to memory.

Cass played around a shape.

It wasn’t clear at first.

But with each variation, the shape grew more distinct.

A person.

Standing near the back of the room.

Not moving. Not quite formed.

But central.

He played into it, around it, encircling it—an aria as architecture.

The person didn’t resist.

It was a figure woven in ash.

It was the figure from the painting.

It was himself.

And it was listening.

The final notes pressed downward.

He let the bass speak now—long, breathy tones, resonant but not sad.

The last one, a low C, settled into the floor like something remembered too late.

It carried farther than it should have.

Then faded.

Not in silence.

But in shadow.

A tactile shadow—like the weight of someone just exhaled.

And then:

Nothing.

Not even the memory of being heard.

He sat a moment longer, fingertips still resting on the keys, though no sound came. The air had changed—cooler now, as if the act of playing had vented something. Or summoned it.

He wasn't thinking in clear terms. Not yet. But he was thinking differently. Not quite about what this place was—but that it was a place. That it had rules. That he was inside something—shaped, persistent, observing him back.

Images rose, unbidden.

A hallway.

A café.

A painting that moved as you watched it.

Her voice. There’s something wrong with you, isn’t there?

Was it yesterday?

Had any of it stayed with him—or did everything here only pretend to disappear, looping just beneath the surface, waiting to be reintroduced?

His hands rested now in his lap. They felt cleaner than before. As if they'd been washed during the music.

What if there was a door he hadn’t seen? A real one.

What if it opened?

There had been fish, he remembered suddenly.

Orange and white.

Not in this room. In… the other recursion?

Or had they followed him here?

A garden?

His?

He had no certainty—but when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the shape of a path beneath his feet. Curved stone. Damp moss. Light filtered through leaves that didn’t belong to any known season.

His piano playing sometimes did this. It always had.

Triggered textures. Not memories, exactly, but atmospheres.

Qualities of air.

Thick, mineral damp.

Saltwater on metal.

The smell of rubber near heat.

Even now—his mouth tasted faintly of mint. Or blood.

He couldn’t trust himself.

What would he find, truly, if he left this room?

And then he saw it.

The button.

Set into the wall just left of the mirror—a green point inside a silver circle, surrounded by three concentric rings. He hadn't noticed it earlier, though it must have been there the whole time.

It didn’t blink. It didn’t invite.

But everything about it—its placement, its restraint—suggested it was next.

Cass pressed it.

A soft resistance. Not a click, more like a subtle confirmation.

Then: a chime.

Not sharp. Not musical.

Just… structural. As if the building had acknowledged him.

He stood.

From somewhere beyond the paneling, footsteps.

Measured. Certain.

Not rushed.

Not hesitant.

They were approaching.

He waited.

The footsteps grew nearer—slow, deliberate, as if navigating on carpet.

Not hurried, not seeking.

Just… moving through.

Cass didn’t speak. He didn’t shift his weight.

He had the sense—clear, almost clinical—that whoever approached had permission. A route. A pattern. Something designed in advance.

And then—

They passed.

Not into the room.

Not toward him.

Just along the corridor beyond the mirror.

He hadn’t even seen a door open. Hadn’t heard one close.

But the presence—

He could feel it. Just beyond the wall.

Flesh and breath and cognition, sliding past him like a train that never intended to stop.

He heard the faintest rustle of clothing.

Felt the weight of a gaze that didn’t settle.

Then: nothing.

Just the residual quiet of a hallway recently occupied.

The air cooled again.

No trace.

Only the low chime repeating—softer now, like a memory running out of signal.

Cass stepped forward.

Stood near where the footsteps had passed.

Listened.

Something had moved through his world. With purpose. Without invitation.

And left him untouched.

He placed his hand against the wall where the sound had been clearest.

It was warm.

As if someone had leaned there, briefly, and continued on.

Cass lowered his hand.

The warmth in the wall had already begun to fade.

He didn’t follow.

Instead, he turned back toward the piano.

Not because he wanted to play—but because there was nowhere else to go.

The room behind him remained unchanged. The chair, the sheet music, the residual hush of something having just passed.

And yet—

The mirror now held his reflection.

No delay. No flicker.

Just him.

Staring back.

But he wasn’t certain the reflection was following his movements in real time.

He stepped sideways.

So did it.

But the weight felt... rehearsed.

He leaned in.

His own face—tired, alert, unfamiliar—leaned with him.

But the eyes… something about the eyes was still a second too slow.

In the corridor, the footsteps were gone.

No echo remained.

Still: he stayed.

And the room stayed with him.