The Truth About the Fire
Those who could not escape the flames
The final page of the diary explained the night when everything had ended.
Long before Alice, another family had been trapped inside the house by fire.
The town records described the year when the terrible had begun.
On a cold winter night, the doors had been locked from the outside.
The family inside had been left with no way to escape the flames.
"This is the room where they were trapped," Emma said, pointing upward.
The locked was the place where the fire had first been started.
Everyone who had lived there that night had been lost to the smoke.
The house had been rebuilt afterwards by people who knew nothing of it.
But the fear of that night had never truly been washed away.
Alice had discovered the same records in the winter when she disappeared.
"They had been calling for help," her last entry said, "and no one came."
The reason why the house felt so cold was slowly becoming clear.
Those who had died had been waiting for someone to hear their voices.
Emma understood at last the day when the whispering had first begun.
"The people were trapped, and then they were forgotten," Tom said softly.
The names on the town list were the ones that had been carved in the wall.
In the locked room, the chair had been placed where a mother had sat.
The cold that filled the house was the that had never been released.
"We must open that room, for the sake of those who were lost," Emma said.
The moment when they touched the door, the whole house seemed to sigh.
A wave of warm air, which had not been felt for years, rushed past them.
The voices that had been crying for so long grew suddenly quiet.
But the peace they had hoped for did not last more than a moment.
For the fire, they realised, had never been the whole of the story.
The house had trapped those families for a reason no one had yet named.