It began with whispers.
Not voices at least not in the way Iris had come to understand them.
These were murmurs born from flame, soft, shifting, unintelligible sounds curling from the wick of the latest match she had burned that evening.
She had kept it going longer than the others, half in defiance, half in desperation, trying to coax another memory to life.
But what came wasn't her mother's past, it was something else.
And now, the woods around the cabin refused to be still.
Iris stood by the window, unmoving, eyes locked on the tree lineas the darkness beyond the glass had thickened like blood clotted in old veins, too dense for moonlight to penetrate.
Branches twitched without wind and there was a pulse to the shadows, an ebb and pull.
As though the forest breathed. As though it watched.
Inside, the air had turned heavier, humid and sour like breath held too long.
The match tin sat on the kitchen counter, the lid closed tight, yet she could feel the weight of it in the room, as if it radiated heat even sealed.
The match from earlier lay burned out in the sink, blackened tip curling like a claw. Its memory hadn't belonged to her mother. It had been someone else.
Someone is screaming, then the running sounds.
A flash of pine trees and a red scarf caught on a branch, then a sound, a low, wet clicking, like teeth grinding underwater.
Iris had recoiled from it drenched in sweat, heart hammering.
And now she couldn't stop hearing the sound.
Click. Click. Click.
She turned from the window, trying not to look at the match tin, her hands trembling slightly, not from cold.
The cabin lights flickered again, "it's the old wiring", she told herself.
Just the wiring, but even as the bulb sputtered, she caught movement in the corner of her vision.
A shadow darted past the open bedroom door.
Iris froze, and waited yet nothing, no footsteps nor creak of the old floorboards. Just that same dead hush stretching between clicks.
She moved slowly toward the bedroom, gripping a fire poker she had dragged from the hearth earlier, knuckles white against iron.
The floor groaned under her bare feet as she reached the doorway, paused, then swung in with the weapon raised.
Empty.
The bedroom looked unchanged, the old quilted bed, the books lining the shelves.
The small photograph of her mother as a young woman beside a faceless man with his head blurred, as though water-stained.
Iris backed out of the room.
And that's when she saw the footprints.
Damp and bare leading from the match tin to the back door.
She hadn't opened the door, she hadn't stepped in anything wet.
But the prints were there dripping slightly on the old wooden floor, then drying to nothing halfway across the kitchen.
A sour chill gripped her spine.
She grabbed the match tin and clutched it to her chest, resolving in her mind that she would throw it into the woods, bury it, burn it ironically but she didn't.
Instead, she locked the back door and then she took the tin into the bathroom, locking that door, too, before curling onto the floor beneath the small window.
Something was wrong with the matches. Or maybe something was inside them.
The scratching began an hour later.
It started faintly like fingernails on glass. Then it grew louder.
Scrape. Scrape. Pause. Scrape.
It came from the hallway with something dragging along the wall.
But the moment Iris held her breath, it stopped.
"Please go away," she whispered, not sure who or what she was speaking to.
She lit another match.
The flame bloomed and the light shook then it showed her a room she had never seen before.
A black-and-white tiled floor with a metal chair.
Blood soaked into the grout and a woman tied to the chair, head slumped.
Behind her, in the mirror, a figure tall and wrong blurred like static, limbs too long, face hidden in moving flame.
Iris gasped and dropped the match and it fizzled out.
When she looked up, the bathroom mirror had fogged over, and words had formed in the condensation:
MATCHES REMEMBER. BUT THEY ALSO WATCH.
She blinked, the letters faded as fast as they appeared then the room was silent again.
Iris scrambled to her feet, she wasn't imagining this, she couldn't be.
Something had infected this house or had always lived here.
Her mother hadn't simply left her memories, she had left her haunted by a curse or worse even a door.
To what, Iris still didn't know.
A loud knock on the front door made her yelp.
She bolted from the bathroom, leaving the tin behind, and crept to the front then three more knocks much harder this time.
She peered through the peephole and there was nothing, just the dark porch.
Then she noticed the red scarf hanging from the doorframe.
Exactly like the one from the match vision.
Her stomach dropped, she opened the door a crack, hand gripping the poker behind her back.
The porch was empty, but the scarf fluttered despite the still air, it smelled of ash and pine.
And beneath it, nailed to the wood, was a match left unused, but already blackened at the tip.
Something wanted her to keep lighting them.
Something was waiting for her to remember or to see.
Iris backed into the house, locked the door again, and slumped to the floor the whispering had returned.
Not from the woods.
Not from the house.
But from the tin in the bathroom.
And one word began to repeat. Over and over.
"Burn."