The key felt heavier than it should have as I turned it in the lock of 47 Maple Street. The brass was tarnished, worn smooth by decades of use, and it scraped against the mechanism with a sound like fingernails on metal. The door swung open with a prolonged creak that seemed to echo through the empty rooms beyond.

I hadn’t seen Grandmother Evelyn in fifteen years. Not since the funeral where she’d stood at the back, watching my mother’s casket being lowered into the ground with those pale, unblinking eyes. She’d tried to approach me afterward, but I’d turned away. I was eighteen and angry at the world, and she represented everything I wanted to leave behind.

Now, at thirty-three, I found myself inheriting her modest two-story house in a town I’d sworn never to return to. The lawyer’s letter had been specific: live in the house for exactly one year, and it would be mine along with her considerable savings account. Fail to complete the year, and everything would go to charity.

The house smelled of lavender and old paper, with an underlying mustiness that spoke of windows kept closed for too long. Dust motes danced in the afternoon light filtering through yellowed lace curtains. The furniture was covered in white sheets that gave the rooms a ghostly appearance, like a museum of a life recently ended.

I found the journals on the third day.

They filled an entire room on the second floor—what might have once been a sewing room or small bedroom. Hundreds of leather-bound volumes lined floor-to-ceiling shelves, each one labeled with dates spanning back forty years. The earliest entries began the year I was born.

My hands trembled as I pulled the first journal from the shelf. The leather was soft with age, and it fell open naturally to a page near the beginning. The handwriting was Evelyn’s—I recognized it from birthday cards she’d sent when I was young, before the estrangement.

March 15th, 1991

Dear Thomas,

Today you took your first steps. Your mother called me, crying with joy, to tell me how you’d let go of the coffee table and walked three whole steps to reach for your father’s outstretched hands. She said you looked so proud of yourself, clapping your little hands together. I wish I could have been there to see it, but I understand why I wasn’t invited. The gift requires distance, even from those we love most.

I flipped through more pages, finding entry after entry describing moments from my childhood with impossible accuracy. My first day of school, complete with a description of the blue shirt I’d worn and how I’d cried when my mother left. The time I’d broken my arm falling from the oak tree in our backyard—she’d written about it the day before it happened.

My hands shook as I reached for another journal, this one from my teenage years. The entries grew more detailed, more intimate. She knew about my first kiss, about the night I’d snuck out to go to a party, about the college rejection letter that had made me cry in my room for hours. Things no one else knew. Things I’d never told anyone.

But it was the future entries that made my blood turn to ice.

November 3rd, 2025

Dear Thomas,

Today you’ll find these journals. You’ll read this very entry and feel your heart racing as you realize what they contain. You’ll want to dismiss it as coincidence, but deep down you’ll know better. The gift has been in our family for generations, though it skipped your mother entirely. I’ve been watching your life unfold like a movie I’ve seen a thousand times, recording every moment for you to find when the time was right.

I dropped the journal as if it had burned me. The date at the top was today’s date. I looked around the room wildly, half-expecting to see Evelyn standing in the corner, watching me with those pale eyes. But there was only silence and the musty scent of old paper.

With trembling fingers, I picked up the journal and continued reading.

You’ll try to leave tonight. You’ll pack your bags and drive to the city limits, but you’ll turn around before you reach the highway. The pull of knowing will be too strong. You’ll want to read more, to see what comes next. The curse of prophecy is that it creates its own inevitability.

I slammed the journal shut and stumbled backward, knocking over a small table. This was impossible. Evelyn had been a quiet woman, a seamstress who’d lived alone and kept to herself. She couldn’t have known these things. She couldn’t have predicted my reactions with such precision.

But even as I tried to rationalize it away, I found myself reaching for more journals. The compulsion was overwhelming, like an itch that demanded to be scratched. I pulled volume after volume from the shelves, scanning entries that detailed my college years, my failed relationships, my career struggles. Every triumph and disappointment laid bare in Evelyn’s careful handwriting.

The recent entries were the worst. She’d known about my divorce before I’d even met my ex-wife. She’d described our wedding day with perfect accuracy three years before it happened, and she’d recorded our final fight word for word six months before we’d even had it.

As the sun began to set, I found myself reaching for the most recent journal, the one with dates extending into the future. My future. The leather felt warm under my fingers, as if it had been recently handled.

Jan 15th, 2026

Dear Thomas,

By now you’ve read enough to understand what you’re dealing with. The gift—or curse, depending on your perspective—has been passed down through the women in our family for seven generations. We see the threads of fate, the inevitable paths that lives will take. I’ve watched your entire existence unfold like a tapestry being woven, beautiful and terrible in its completeness.

You’re wondering why I left you the house, why I wanted you to find these journals. The answer is simple: someone needs to know. Someone needs to understand that free will is an illusion, that every choice we think we’re making has already been made. I’ve carried this burden alone for seventy years, and I’m tired.

I flipped ahead, scanning entries that detailed conversations I would have, places I would go, people I would meet. The specificity was terrifying. She knew I would order Thai food next Tuesday and burn my tongue on the soup. She knew I would get a call from my old college roommate on November 3rd at 2:47 PM. She knew I would find a stray cat in the alley behind the house and decide to keep it, naming it Shadow.

But it was the final entries that made my hands shake so violently I could barely hold the journal.

November 15th, 2026

Dear Thomas,

Today marks exactly one year since you inherited the house. You’ve fulfilled the terms of my will, and the house is legally yours. But you won’t be alive to enjoy it. Today is the day you die.

It will happen at 11:43 PM. You’ll be reading this very entry when you hear the sound—a scratching at the walls, like something trying to get in. You’ll think it’s mice at first, or maybe the old house settling. But the sound will grow louder, more insistent. You’ll follow it to the basement, where you’ll discover the truth about our family’s gift.

The sight will stop your heart. Literally. The coroner will rule it a cardiac event brought on by extreme shock. They’ll never understand what you saw down there, what’s been waiting in the dark all these years. The thing that gives us our visions, that shows us the future in exchange for a price that’s always paid in the end.

I’m sorry, Thomas. I truly am. But the gift requires a successor, and you’re the only one left who can carry it forward. When you die, the visions will transfer to your unborn daughter—yes, you’ll have a daughter, though you’ll never live to meet her. She’ll inherit the house when she turns eighteen, just as you did. The cycle will continue.

Don’t try to fight it. Don’t try to leave. The future is fixed, and resistance only makes the journey more painful. I learned that long ago.

With love and regret,

Grandmother Evelyn

I dropped the journal and ran from the room, my heart hammering against my ribs. This was insane. Evelyn had been a disturbed old woman, nothing more. There was no family gift, no curse, no predetermined fate. I would pack my things and leave tonight, just as she’d predicted I would try to do.

But even as I threw clothes into my suitcase, I could feel the pull of the journals upstairs. The need to know more, to read every entry, to trace the path of my life from beginning to its predicted end. I made it as far as the front door before turning back.

The days that followed blurred together in a haze of obsessive reading. I called in sick to work, then stopped answering my phone entirely. The journals consumed me, each entry a drug I couldn’t resist. I watched my life unfold in Evelyn’s handwriting, saw every choice I would make, every word I would speak. The Thai food arrived on Tuesday, just as predicted. I burned my tongue on the soup.

My college roommate called on November 3rd at exactly 2:47 PM.

I found the cat on December 8th and named it Shadow without even thinking about it.

Each fulfilled prediction felt like another nail in my coffin, proof that Evelyn’s visions were real and that my fate was sealed. I stopped eating regularly, stopped sleeping. The house became my prison, the journals my only companions. I read about arguments I would have with myself, about the gradual deterioration of my mental state, about the growing certainty that I was trapped in a story someone else had already written.

November 15th arrived with unseasonable warmth. Spring flowers were blooming in Evelyn’s neglected garden, and sunlight streamed through the windows I’d kept closed all winter. I spent the day reading the final entries over and over, memorizing every word of my predicted death.

As evening fell, I sat in the journal room with the last volume open in my lap. The clock on the mantel ticked toward 11:43 PM with mechanical precision. I thought about running, about breaking the cycle Evelyn had described. But where could I go? If the visions were real, if fate was truly fixed, then geography was irrelevant.

At 11:42 PM, I heard it.

A scratching sound from within the walls, soft at first but growing louder. It sounded like fingernails dragging across wood, or perhaps something with claws trying to dig its way out. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, echoing through the house’s old bones.

I stood on unsteady legs, the journal falling to the floor. This was it—the moment Evelyn had foreseen. I could still choose differently, couldn’t I? I could stay in this room, refuse to follow the sound to whatever waited in the basement.

But my feet were already moving, carrying me toward the stairs as if controlled by invisible strings. The scratching grew louder as I descended, more frantic. It was coming from below now, definitely from the basement. From behind the wall where Evelyn had stored her canning supplies.

The basement door stood open, though I was certain I’d never unlocked it. Cool air drifted up from the darkness below, carrying a smell I couldn’t identify—something organic and old, like flowers left too long in stagnant water.

I descended the creaking wooden steps, my phone’s flashlight cutting through the gloom. The scratching was deafening now, a symphony of desperate clawing that seemed to come from inside my own skull. At the bottom of the stairs, I turned toward the sound.

The wall where Evelyn’s preserves had once stood was gone, revealing a cavity that stretched back into impossible darkness. But it wasn’t empty. Something moved in the shadows—something vast and pale and wrong. As my light fell upon it, I understood with perfect, terrible clarity what I was seeing.

It was Evelyn. But not as she’d been in life.

Her body had grown, stretched and twisted into something that filled the hidden space behind the wall. Her limbs had elongated into pale, root-like appendages that disappeared into the darkness, and her face—God, her face had multiplied. Dozens of identical visages stared at me from the writhing mass, all wearing the same expression of infinite, patient sadness.

Her mouths moved in unison, speaking in a voice like rustling leaves: “The gift requires a vessel, Thomas. It requires someone to see, to record, to remember. I’ve been waiting so long to pass it on.”

I felt my heart stutter in my chest, the rhythm faltering as understanding crashed over me. This thing, this abomination, was the source of the visions. It had been living beneath the house for decades, feeding on time itself, showing Evelyn glimpses of the future in exchange for her eventual transformation.

“Your daughter will understand,” the Evelyn-thing whispered as my vision began to blur. “When she’s old enough, she’ll come here just as you did. She’ll read the journals I’ll help her write, and she’ll take her place as the next keeper of tomorrow.”

My heart gave one final, desperate beat and then stopped. As I collapsed to the basement floor, I felt something cold and vast entering my mind, filling the spaces between my thoughts with visions of a future I would never see. I saw my unborn daughter, eighteen years old and standing in this same basement, staring at what I was about to become.

The cycle would continue. It always had. It always would.

In my final moment of consciousness, I understood that Evelyn’s journals hadn’t been predictions at all. They’d been instructions, a script that reality itself was compelled to follow. And now it was my turn to write the next chapter, to guide my daughter toward her inevitable inheritance.

The gift requires a successor.

The gift always gets what it needs.