A Storytelling Sunday Mystery
She hadn’t expected much from the house—only dust and tangled ivy, the usual scent of old wood and inherited silence. It sat on a bluff above the sea, her aunt’s final residence and, now, hers.
The lawyer had used the word “inn,” but nothing about it felt commercial. Just a long, quiet house with too many rooms and no records of guests.
She spent her first two days opening doors. Room by room, she swept and aired and catalogued. Each space was neat. Clean. Curated with a careful hand and dried flowers placed with precision. Nothing personal, but everything intentional.
Except for Room 7.
The door was locked.
Not stuck—locked. A fact that wouldn’t have felt odd if it weren’t for the perfect order of the rest of the house. The absence of keys in drawers. The missing seventh hook on the hallway rack. The way the air near the door felt a touch colder, as though the house were holding its breath.
She searched half-heartedly at first, then with growing urgency. Until, on the third evening, she found it.
Tucked behind a pressed violet in the pages of a book titled The Quiet Hours of the Body was a narrow brass key.
It fit the lock.
Room 7 opened easily. Dust floated through the beam of her flashlight. The air was different here—warmer, but heavy. There was only one item in the room: a large wall hanging.
It was black, with a vivid floral arrangement blooming around a central skull. The flowers were detailed and intentional—poppies, cosmos, bloodroot, and white wild daisies with delicate gold centers. It was... beautiful. And unnerving.
She left the door open that night... Just a crack.
That was when the dreams began.
Each morning she awoke with the sense of having spoken aloud. The words stayed just out of reach. And always—without fail—the flowers in the tapestry had changed.
Sometimes subtly: a blossom unfurled, a leaf curled. Other times entirely: a new bloom where one had not been. A red petal stained like blood, one day. Gone the next.
She stopped turning on the light when she passed Room 7. But she never locked the door again.
By the end of the first week, she noticed something else.
The house had grown quieter.
Not empty—just quieter. As though it were watching. As though Room 7 had opened something that had been patient and still for a long time.
One night, after too much tea and too little sleep, she sat in front of the tapestry. Just looking.
She said nothing. She touched nothing. But the longer she stared, the more she felt certain the skull wasn’t just a motif. It was an arrangement. A memory made physical.
That night, her dream was clear.
She saw her aunt, standing in front of the tapestry, a flower in her hand. “They only bloom when remembered,” she said, before placing the stem among the others. Then she turned—and vanished.
When she woke, her pillow smelled faintly of dried lavender and sage.
She returned to Room 7 and stood beneath the tapestry. One flower—a pale yellow daisy—was fresh. Real. And at the base of the fabric, tucked gently beneath the folds, was a small note in her aunt’s handwriting:
“Some arrangements are made to be seen once.
If you remember them, let them bloom again.”
She didn’t tell anyone about Room 7.
The rest of the house remained orderly. Guests came, occasionally. She served breakfast, changed linens, restocked the tea cabinet. She never placed anyone in that room.
But every so often, a flower appears that she doesn’t recognize.
And she leaves it there, undisturbed.
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