PART 1
Claire believed the bedroom door was locked.
So when he heard a key turning from the other side, his heart almost stopped.
She quickly folded the old letter and hid it below her waist just as Jason walked in without knocking.
She smiled as if nothing had happened.
"I saw the light under your door," he said.
Claire forced herself to stay calm. "I was unpacking."
Jason's eyes scanned the room, slow and cautious, as if he already knew she had found something. Then he warned her not to trust anything Ethan did or said.
“It’s fragile,” Jason said. “A blink, a sound, a tic… people mistake those things for being conscious.”
Claire remembered Ethan's faint whisper.
Don't trust Jason.
So he lied.
“He only said my name.”
Jason watched her for a long second and then smiled.
“How sweet.”
After he left, Claire took out the letter again and read it under the lamp.
Ethan had written it before the accident.
He warned that Jason, Dr. Vale, and even the house itself could not be trusted. He wrote about secret passages behind the walls and a silver recorder hidden in the music room. If he was still alive, he begged whoever found the letter to get him out of there.
Then Claire noticed the portrait that hung in her room.
The painted woman's eyes shone strangely.
When Claire touched one, it moved.
Behind the wall, a secret passageway opened up.
The cold, dusty air emanating from the darkness.
Claire then realized that Blackwood House had been watching her from the moment she arrived.
The next morning, she went to Ethan's room and told him she had found the letter.
He opened his eyes.
Weak, exhausted, but conscious.
When Claire showed him the medications, Ethan reacted violently to one of the bottles: Dr. Vale's "neurotonic solution".
Claire understood the truth.
Medicine wasn't curing him.
He had him trapped.
When Dr. Vale and Jason entered, Claire pretended to inject the medication into Ethan's IV, but secretly squeezed the tube to close it.
Jason leaned over Ethan and murmured, "Rest, cousin. You were always better in silence."
Ethan didn't move.
But his eyes were burning.
That afternoon, Claire searched the music room and found the silver recorder hidden inside the piano.
Before she could leave, Mrs. Lang, the housekeeper, stopped her.
Instead of betraying Claire, Mrs. Lang admonished her.
"Jason never left," she whispered. "He wanted you to look for him."
Then slow applause was heard from the hallway.
Jason entered the room.
“Give me the tape recorder, Claire.”
Claire ran.
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