Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. The Lees kept her hands fixed
at ten and two, nearly white, knuckling the wheel as
her car cut through the misculling off black route lake.
The dust made everything ambiguous. Headlights dissolved against the fog,
and the road swallowed her in a darkness that felt
denser than mere nightfall. She slowed and squinted at the
narrow drive that the directions insisted held her near dress,
then crept onto gravel. The taz crunched too loud in
the hush. As the cow eased toward the vast shape.
She glimpsed in real estate phetous for weeks. There it
was at last the manner. Three sawers perched atop a
gentle rise, colonal bone straining beneath layers of peeling paint,
windows staring out, half shut out and blackened with age.
Creepers tangled over the porch balustrades, their leaves gome brittle
with autumn. The lake beyond head and nail pressed to
chill up her arms as she killed the engine and
stepped into ethic with woodsmoke and white earth, she wasn't
sure if she expected a greeting, but the only movement
came from a hunch figure, gray hair faded Denham waiting
on them steps, Miss Rowin his voice rasped more than echoed.
He said about it suitcase beside her boxes. Care Diacer's
what they call me, but you can call me Saul.
His handshake was equally brief. Town left me to see
you're saddled. Saul pressed a ring of heavy keys into
her palm. Doors have peculiar ways here, keep them locked,
especially at night. He said nothing more about what those
ways might be. His boots thudded over Plank's. He loaded
her remaining suit case onto the porch. By the time
Elise managed to thanks, he was half way down the steps.
The menose front door groaned, swinging inward under her touch.
These braced his shoulder against it, heart curiously quick. She'd
come for the escape, and you start something at the
edge of Noah to bury what came before. It should
feel promising. Instead, every inchine side felt like someone holding
their breath when pressed at the shutters. As she explored
the foy mold blotched wallpaper and oval mirre reflect with
black a winding staircase, vanishing above her heels, clicked on
warp wood, breathing deep lees inhaled the sense of disuse, dust,
grocy rose water with the lingering cold, She busied herself
with the little ritual, setting suit cases by the banister,
a lining butt by the umbrella, stand lighting her phone
for confidence, She flicked her new keys through her fingers,
searching for something like assurance. Instead, she watched Soul's battered
pickup disappear into murk, leaving her utterly alone. Dinner was
two crisp apples from a paperback and a bottle smoothly
eaten cross like it in the living room floor. She
watched the guttering candle phone bright beside her first messages.
Her sisters made it their safe. Her friends raised string
of encouragements. The lies replied, lies, gentle as perfume. Yes,
it's beautiful. I'll be fine, and then added a photo
of her knees in the parquet, lighting the candlelight disguise
the sullen gloom around her foxes and packed folded tease
sketch pads a battered hard back novel. She undressed and
showed by the pale glow of her phone screen, avoiding
her eyes in its small, fogged up reflection. As she
zipped herself into a cold sheet, the house growned and settled,
new sounds creaking through floorboards and wainscoting. She told herself
she was only tired, long'stight from the cold, drive and
dim light. Surely the sense of a presence of watching
was only suggestion. But sometime around two in the morning,
as drizzlebet a tattoo of the window panes, something not faint,
somewhere distant, A dry tap, tap, then silence, Blize curled
into herself, promising that old pipes did things like this. Still,
she pressed the covers tighter, heart stuttering in her chests,
and lay perfectly still until the dawn. By morning, the
last of the night it operated with the mist, Blize
cracked the window of looking the lake still veiled in
a silvery band of fog that seemed reluctant to leave
the water's face. She padded down stairs, her feet bare
and chilly, and made instant coffee in a crap muk
rescued from a moving box. The house felt different in daylight,
if not exactly. A lively and old dog stretching into
activity after long sleep, desmot swirled through some beams where
they could worm past heavy velvet curtains. Bilie swept through
the lower rooms, humming to herself a defensive little tune
whilst she mentally mapped the house's strange geometry. The grand
staircase beckoned her upward. The rails were sticky, with polish
scure work chipped, but every step was sturdy. Up Stairs,
LEAs found three bedrooms, one furnished an ancient four poster
bear dressed in paisley, the other two in various states
of neglect. One poked into a turret, its floor banged
under the weight of old boxes. Half the doors were locked.
She tried each key, one caught and turned, revealing a
sewing room, chirped with sunlight and dried lavender bundles. A
palete knife set in an unfinished canvas, rested on an easel,
The image beneath a thick dust and distinct, perhaps a
rowboat on the water. The line of family firthographs ran
along the upper landing glass streaked with centers of thumbs.
She looked closer. In every picture, faces blurred or erase
by time, some marred by deliberate scratches gouged into the emulsion.
The effect was unsettling. Groups gathered for birthdays or weddings,
but no smile remained intact. One at the end of
the row had apertures where a woman's eyes should be,
as if the gaze itself had been clawed free. She
intended to laugh it off, but the air was colder here.
The lees moved on, hot, moving with her. At the
end of the corridor, she paused at a door hung
with a faded sign the nursery. The handle was cold
and sticky as she pressed down. Inside, the chamber blushed
blue with shadow, toys bounded in heaps, a shelf of
porcel and dull sagged against the wallpaper, their faces cracked,
eyes set and fixed parody of kindness. On the floor,
a wooden train was still of mid journey, bowing beneath
a colapstarch. An old rocking horse gleamed with years of fingerprints.
Its made snarl of real hair, not on a wool,
but something brittle and pale. She closed the door, quickly,
drawing and her lower lip. As she moved on back downstairs,
she circled the room's PAULA kitchen window walls, larium bristling
with dead house blunts, the kitchen clock, elaborate brastwork, and
tiny birds wood in time with her footsteps. She ran
a wet cloth over sticky condows and covered her bread
books filled only with cinnamon dusted crumbs. Her phone vibrated
with another check and text, which she dismissed, setting it aside.
Determined to make the first day her own for IROs,
she cleaned. The ordinary motion of scrubbing, dusting, and heaving
boxes grounded her. She opened wide doors for the wind,
aired out faded curtains, sang tunelessly as she cleared cobwheps.
For a while, the strangeness of last night seen an invention,
a trick of nerves and unfamiliar walls. But by afternoon,
the chill sat back in and the sunlight didn't reach
every corner. Silence scattered in the shadows, holding back barely
at the edges of each room, Bilies readed for bed.
Early tied by physical work in the house's subtle resistance
to change, she double checked every latch and bolt, circling
twice in the uncertained dusk. The wind rattled the panes
after she brushed teeth and killed every lamp. She hesitated
before sleep and knees prickling her skin. She didn't remember dreaming,
but woke uneasily before dawn, a sense of absence rather
than prisons troubling her. When she descended the stairs, she
stopped cold at the bottom. Muddy footprints curve threw the
foy not hers. Her shoes checked automatically, were lined up
in the bedroom. Yet here was a preyed small prince
as if a child had patted him from the rain,
and stood baffort at the threshold of every room, lees
not touching one with a cautious finger, cold slick, neither
dry nor terribly fresh. She followed the trail to the
back door, but the latch was sound. Only when she
looked closer did she spot a single small hamprint high
on the gas. On the inside, the pungence of earthy
water rose in her thoughts. She made herself believe local
kids must have slipped in a dare gone wrong, though
no one admitted to knowing the old house when she'd
asked in town. She cleaned the mess, scrubbing hard enough
that the skin on her knuckles tingled the kitchen cock.
She noticed over her toast had lost four IROs midnight,
forgotten the hand stuck. At eight, she tapped the face.
No change outside. The lake chopped with a steady wind,
and the fog belowed to move by the sun's weakess ent.
That afternoon, she drove into Hallowfield, the nearest village, all
crooked lanes and slate roof slick with damp. The Lees
bought groceries and hardware, a new flasklight, dead bolts, lawn screws.
She prowled a small shop for tea and exchanged pleasantries
with a clerk, but the conversation drifted into silent Whenever
she mentioned a manner at the pub, the barton did
nodded tightly at her order. When she explained she'd move
into the lake house, his mouth tightened. You say you've
inherited blackbirt, he asked, polishing a glass. That's right, I
suppose it's called that a lie's offered, her voice trailing
last owner left sudden way I heard one day, no
trace place has always been touchy. He set the glass down,
then gave her a sidelong glance. Keep your doors locked
if you know what's good, she laughed, uneasily, reminded of
Saul's words, you mean recent Breaking's not what I mean.
The man leaned in just enough that she caught the
heavy groceries and of beer on his breath. You hear
odd things out by the water. Best not open up.
Don't listen, no matter what you think you here at night.
He straightened. Another customer called for a pint. The exchange
was over as quickly as it began. Lees considered pressing,
but the other pigeons gave her nothing except the polite
remove given to the unfamiliar. A barmaid tapped her shoulder
and said, almost too quietly, they say someone always comes looking.
Don't be that some one. Lees went home by an
unfamiliar route, saving the groceries for morning. Her mind turned
with fragments, goosebumps racing in their wake. The night, she
set every bolt on every door, tested the front and
backyard latches. The house was quiet as she moved from
room to rumor, storing, she told herself agency over rooms
that pressed too close. Upstairs, she turned down the bed
and flicked through the battered paper back until her eyelids
grew heavy. Sleep was shallow, restless, scraping whispawing. She swore,
half conscious that something drifted in and out of her dreams,
a thread of childish laughter or a song sung out
of key. A click snapped her. A week before dawn.
She reached beneath the mattress for her phone three seventeen
a m and swung her legs to the floor. The
bedroom door was ajar, though she couldn't remember opening it.
The air was colder than before. She forced herself down
two flights and into the kitchen. Life flickered under the
pantry door vanished when she opened it. When she checked
the living room, curtains were drawn open and not in
their length, as if some one had peered out, Twisting
the fabric tight, she double checked the locks and touched.
Retreating to her room, she tried to reason it all out.
All buildings moved and shifted. The breeze could are knock curtains,
but she reset the furnishings before sleep, tucking the flashlight
within reach. Morning came gray and sullen. The lake was
invisible behind a wall of mist, but she thought she
saw movement for gaps in the trees, dark shapes flitting
from one knolt or another. Trying to bring sense back.
A filled her next day with poor decks. She swept
the rooms she hadn't yet entered. Found a sunken drawing
room with dustint bookshelves and a piano tuned half step flat.
She fixed the faucet in the downstairs bathroom, the rhythmic
drip now stilled all day. The house felt mutely complied
to no one settling knock. No way would foot prince
until she returned from holding old newspapers out to the bin.
The bedroom window was unlocked. She stopped corrosories craddled awkwardly
to her chest. She checked every window as a matter
of ritual, had even forced the latch extra type before leaving.
She checked again, no sign of the force opening, so clean,
just unlocked. Night pressed sooner than she prepared for saucer eyed,
Elise made soup in the kitchen, the Twin Bites. She
read passages from a tattered guide to look a legend
she'd found in the study stores of lights flirting over
the water. Forces found in morning, miss and secret spurred
under the man a lawn before the first stone was laid.
She set it aside, dreams clouding her senses. That night,
when she woke. The curtain was now tied the other way,
a perfect bow at its hem. Suspicion mixed with dread,
she wondered about soal could he come and go noticed?
Or was there something else at work? And uninvited presents
testing her vigilance. The next afternoon, as she swept under
the window seat in the study, she uncovered a series
of small pebbles lined precisely along a crack beneath the
base boat. None matched the gravel in her drive. When
she ran fingers over the shelf above, she felt the
faintest pulse of vibration barely there, like a humming wire
below her skin. It faded as quickly as it began.
She found herself talking aloud to the walls, beseeching the
silence for acknowledgment, but the house only answered with its
own brand of flickering, creaking gurglin. Quite something moved in
the mirrors, or seemed to, at least caught at the
periphery of her vision. Not herself, but another, shoulder hunched
where none should be, eyes black and glimmering through grime.
When she spun round, only her reflection stared back, wide
eyed and pale. Sleep grewuel as if another morning. Kitchen
clock now lost nearly six hours overnight. The lake's surface
shivered in the gray. Not a bird in the water.
When snapped at the loose shinkles in the porch. In
the back of her mind, days slowed together, each identical
done to the dicks of the ground for the clock.
The aches and her wrists from over vigorous grubbing. She
tried another visit to Hallowfield. This time the gross of
a hollow eyed woman with silvered hair met her gaze
without the amateur's wariness. You are the new lady, a blackbirute, eh,
she asked, passing over brown bread and cabbage. That's me.
Elise agreed it peaceful. The woman tolted her head, considering
there was a professor years ago lived there with his wife.
Interested in lakes and local stores, he asked about the
light over the water. Harold was his name. She tapped
the counter, her voice dropping for roat journals, claimed there
were things in the manner shadows. We found his car
idol at the train station. He never came back. No
one has not for long, Elise felt her skin prickle.
Has anyone ever found what happened to him, just doras
crawling into people's heads. The woman set the change in
Elise's hand. If I were you, I'd leave it alone.
Bad memories breed more shadows, and a households on to them.
On the drive home, the road track behind her as
the trees crowded in for she thought she saw some
one standing at the edge of the woods, a smaller
shape poised just out of sight. By the time she sopped,
nothing was there. That night, she resolved enough wondering, she
checked the house top to bottom. First the attic, it
yielded little, only suitcases, crack trunks, moth wing shawls. Still,
she searched, lifting every box, peering into corners. At the
last she found her own calend up in beneath a
pile of books, pages marked with red circles on dates
she couldn't recall. One of them was to day. She
paused house bristling along her form outrey again the ken
of peaches, half a loaf of breadigone. She tore her cabinets,
noting other small things missing a teaspoon, four matches, her
favorite green munk. All the while the lakes wind batted
against fogged glass and somewhere below the pipes whispered in
their own metallic language. That night, lying awake, Lees heard
her name, not spoken aloud, but unmistakable, drifting in with
the windows. If caught on laughter alize. She sat boldepright, heart,
hammering against rupes. The lake hidden behind the wall of night,
pressed against the house's foundation as if it were a
living thing, all gllecked at the lowest windows. Every nerve
told her to listen closer, that the voice was almost
almost familiar. But Saul, the shopkeeper, even the bartender, don't listen,
no matter what you hear. She crawled to the window aside,
shadow pulled beneath the black trunk trees, she saw she
could have sworn a figure standing at the lake's edge, tall,
distorted by mist. She blinked, and it was gone. She
didn't sleep again until dawn bled pale through the nursery window.
Days blurred food vanished from her cupboards. His sketch pencils
left where she'd arranged them, reappeared, blunted, graphite snapped datamasked
on her stolen calendar, so marked with strange curling letters
she could not read. Whispered love to drifted through the
upper floors. Always just as she passed the closed door,
sleep deprivation gnawed at her. She snapped at nothing, yelled
at the shadows. When the wind mowned too loud, her
face hollowed up with tiredness, as dark as moss. Pulls.
By instinct or hope. Elise ran sack closet Francis, a
boarded up warder yielded nothing but moths. At last, a
sewing room closet. Hidden beneath the boxes of tangled thread
and a moth eaten colt, she found a battled wooden crate,
islock already rusted open. Inside, curled like a fossil, was
a thick water sane journal. She carried it to the
light and pied it open. Hard angular skirt filled the
opening page, labeled eighth Kelson, June nineteen eighty nine. She
paged through Pole's quickening. The entries began forsake a complaint
about weathered about salary, but soon inscription sired. Shadows seen
creeping along the floors of voice calling at night, lafted
behind the clock, There's something in the lake, Chelson wrote.
At night it stirs calls me with my mother's voice.
Pages catalog, more disappearing, time vanished, food objects rearranged, Then
more frantic entries, handwriting, sprawling sideways. It knows what you regret.
Don't trust the mirrors, they aren empty. Here the last
interest bled and can scratch lines blurring down the page.
The heart is beneath that waits for me. Night a longer.
Now I must go. Lees traced her finger over the
impression left by the pen denie. She flipped the back cover,
tucked in. All with age was a faint drawing the
cellar steps, a circle scratched at one side, the lantern
in the cellar. She had never gone that far, Spooked
by cold, now though, she had to see. As she
stepped beyond the kitchen, the clock stop pendulums stilled mid
to wing. Her flasklight's beam shuttered over stone steps, descending
into earth. The air grew colder with each footfall. The
smell of mud and metal choked her foot. A distant
roll of thunder shipped the water pipes. She paused, listening
far below, soundless and deep, She thought she heard water
lapping at hidden walls. Night fell with sudden violence. The
Lees watched through the kitchen windows. When pressed, the pines
to unnatural angles. Rain sky are in the porch. The
lake itself, out beyond her line of sight, pulse with
blue white flashes, lightning, but the color seemed drawn otherworldly,
thick as by a luminescence. A single glimmer flicked at
the shore, not lightning, but a steady pulse, as if
the lake itself drew breath. She pulled on boots, wrapped
herself in a raincoat, and stepped out into the dampoor.
It felt like a compulsion, some deep urging she couldn't name.
The grass was slow underfooto She edged down the slope,
flashlight jerking with her heartbeat. The wind keen across the water,
sending ripples capering up the bank. As Lese neared the
shore of the pulsing light, bright and shining, three thick
fog dancing on the black water. Beside an old jetty,
A lone figure stood, a moving illuminated by the glow.
It was impossibly still, taller than any one she had
ever known. It contors blowed by the unsteady air. She
choked on a gasp and raised her light, but the
figure didn't move. The light flared a blue, then green,
then a sickly why. The figure turned toward her, face
lost in the shimmer, and the least staggered backward, slick
boots sliding in the mud. She thundered up the slope,
hearts grumbling in her chest. The man of windows watched her,
every one a blank, unblinking eye. She slammed the door
shut behind her and through every lock, barricading herself inside.
Breathing ragged, she calnged to the railing the storm, screaming
at the glass. Her skin burst with energy that was
adrenaline or fear, but something older, darker, a certainty that
whatever she had seen on the water could follow her
if it so chose. She remembered Kelson's last line, echoing
through her mind. The heart is beneath A fresh draft
slithered under the kitchen door, curling around her ankles like
a living thing. Above, something walked the upstairs hall. No child,
no burglar, but heavier, deeper. The house's very bones responded.
She knew now she was not alone, never had been.
She could not trust her own sense. The entity, the
presence was awake, stronger with each passing night. Outside, the
rain relented fogs like the earth rising higher than before inside.
Aleise pressed her palms together, knuckles bone white, and realized
with a deep shudder that this was only the beginning.
And as the wind shifted, it carried her name, drawn out,
gentle and utterly inescapable back from the lake, Blize couldn't move.
She stood at the base of the stacies for a
long time, Paul's trying to slow every muscle, ready to
bolt again if that thing, whatever she'd seen by the
lake appeared at the door or window. The old house
did not go silent, not any more. She could pick
out the new music of its immersed soft tapping up
above and intimittent rattles sweeping down the corridors, the very
bones of black croop manner shifting in answer to the storm.
Lightning flashed outside. The glass shimmered, and for split secondly
saw the whole Foy illuminated in coal blue rainwater streaked
down the panes in heavy wriggling trails. She caught her
own shadow doubled and redoubled in the mirror before the stairs.
Her skin seemed thinner of in, showing ghost blue. A
second flush revealed behind her reflection a gray shape at
her shoulder and necho a shadow bloom gone. When she
spun around. She needed to move, letting the urge for
action override every bit of reason. She flicked through her
found keys, racing up stairs, passing the nursery she swore,
she felt a draft, a trickle of air that smelled
faintly of what stone in the lake, sire Mott. She
pressed her hand to the wall, shuddering at the chill
from down the corridor. A soft creak snapped her attention.
The sewing room door, which she shut herself, now gaped
open by hand's breadth. Lies approached on tiptoe feet, sinking
into the carpet with each nervous step. Her flashlight barely
cut a tunnel across the seam in the door. Something
metallical into done the sewing table. For a second, she
convinced herself it was just a loose pin, a trick
of the light, nothing more. But as she drew closer,
she could see it was her own house key, the
spare she left on her keyring, the ones she hadn't
touched since arriving. She stared, skin prickling with cold realization.
Had someone come inside while she was at the lake edge.
She backed out of the room, shutting the door carefully,
heart beating in her foot. When she descended, she left
half the dance stairs lights on, reckoning. Electricity bills were
a lesser evil. Grabbing her phone, she tried to pull
up perception of one bar, barely functional, but as she
died Soul's number. The line clicked, then filled with quiet static.
She closed her eyes, fighting impulsive anger and fear, the
urge to make noise, slam, dogs, shout, prove her own
presence to whatever else inhabited this house, battle with the
instinct to go silent, vanish into a hole in the
wall like a rabbit. Instead, she retreated to the kitchen,
poured herself cold water from the tap, and huddled by
the window. She forced herself to watch the lake through
the glass, searching for another sign of movement. The pulsive
blue had gutted out. For now, the shore sea empty.
The only shape in the darkness was her own. Caught
between rain streak panes and the yellow wash of the
kitchen lamp. She barely registered the passage of minutes, then IROs.
The house went tight on the skin of an ease,
finally relaxed as wind died toward dawn, When she did sleep,
head cradled unfolded arms atop the kitchen counter. Her dreams
were shallow and quick cut, shadowed with scrambling things and
walls that closed in as she ran. It was nearly
mid day when she woke to the persistent knock at
the door. Wood echoed with slow deliberation, heavy, not the skittish,
uncertain wrapping she remembered from that first strange night. The
lees is hot dove in her chest, but she made
herself cross the foy, Peering through the warps in the glass.
Saul shape hunched and thick set loomed on the porch
in silhouette. Before she could force her relief, a flash
of caution flickered up. She left the key inside, and
after last night nothing felt certain. She unlocked the door
with trembling hands, keeping her body breeze behind it. As
she cracked it open. Saul peered in brows, overshadowing his
eyes the flannel at his collar. Soudumn from the walk
or drive. Should have checked sooner, he muttered, as though
already chastising himself. Storm was bad last night. You are right,
Elise hesitated. Should she tell him part of her wanted
nothing more than to blurt every shadow, every impossible shape.
But something held her quiet, suspision or shame. She settled
for there was someone by the lake, I think a
person or She stopped, letting panic speak for itself in
her type voice. He steadied her for a moment longer,
then nodded. People come round, sometimes just passing through. Most
don't stay. There was a subtle shift in his posture,
a closing off anything gone, missing, doors forced, just some food,
little things. She didn't say what truly shook her about,
spare key, a calendar, the sense of being hunted by
her own reflection. Saul grunted, nudging back his cap. Don't
leave the courtains open at night. Best to froom, stay
in shadow after sunset. That's how they can see. In
his eyes flickered upward toward the attic. Something stirs this
time of year. When she flinched, he spoke more softly,
almost an apology. I'll check the grounds, make a round
after the storm. Folks round here. While some say weather
wakes things up. He stepped off the porch, brutes thudding
through mud. Blise watched him vanish between the trees marked
black by last night's tempests. Comforted at least by his
living presence. When soul was gone on she runed the
house nervously. She counted doors a game almost then checked
the windows. In every pane. She found water trails, the
spatter of mud, but no footprints inside. She moved quickly,
energy feeding on itself, needing to prove the house ordinary again.
In the solarium, she noticed a patch of condensation in
the glass, a smudge to a vale, as if a
face had pressed there from outside. The height too tall
for a child. While rose in her throat, she scrubbed
a clean with sleeve of her sweater, refusing to look
too closely out the shape the fog had left outside.
The light was then grayzed dishwater. Fog clung to the lake,
shifting in silence whirls. The well trank to the boundary
of house and shore. Theater for one the audience was
looking as the thing she'd glimpsed the night before. She
distracted herself with real work, fixing a loose banister, patching
a few cracks in the plaster, anything to keep her
hands busy. Periodically, she checked her phone. The signal, as before,
was a quivering promise, wavering between nothing in a single
fleeting bar. By late afternoon, Saul returned, mud caking his boots.
Some light caught the bits of gravel in his hair.
He wiped his face with a bandanna and shook his head.
Didn't find sign of anyone out there, ma'am. If this
keeps on, may be best to get a dog or
go to town and wait out the worst of it.
Do you think the last owner did he see things?
Was he? The question faltered? Was he afraid? Saul's face
pinch Joe clenching as he looked to the ceiling, as
though the right answer lived in the beams above them.
Professor Kelson, he said, after a pause, he was curious.
That's all too curious, maybe, he hesitated, as if the
words themselves cost him. Lake's always been strange. Don't let
its stillness fool you. And those who come here sometimes
they bring things with them. The households on like the lake,
hard to leave when you want to. Saul gave a hulf,
as if dismissing his own superstition. He left as abruptly
as he'd come, promising to stop by again within the week.
Lease locked the doors after him, sliding each bolt with
more care than before the ire is before nightfull drag.
She kept to the kitchen and parlor, bathed in lamplight,
thumbing the crap journal she'd found test in each account
in Professor Kelson's entest against her own. Sleep when it
came was a jittery undertaking. She left all the doors
to her bedroom open, wanting to see whatever approached that night.
At the hour between midnight and first light, the house
changed again. The lee's half awake, heard a scraping, and
then her name is so off his breath drawn through
the nursery floor. The pitch was not her mother's, not
quite her own. Yet to summon every ache of childhoodspent
tiptoing puss closed doors on sleepless nights. She got up,
wrapping a cardigan around thin shoulders, and padded to the
landing dance stairs. The glow of the solarium beckoned a
pale line at the door's edge. Had she left a
light on. She hovered in the hall. The nursery door,
which she latched earlier, was open, rocking slowly behind her,
as if pushed by child's unswerred in hand from within,
the wooden horse creaked back and forth. The dolls on
the shelf, watched in the faint spill of hallway light,
seemed to lean forward, ice shining pinpoints in their cracked faces.
Trying not to blink. Alee's edge forward. The horse jerked
once more, then shivered to a stop. As she stepped inside,
the room's temperature plummeted, a chill so profound she saw
chick's hailed falk in the gloom. Then from the floor
beneath the far wall, she heard something writhing, a scraping,
as if dull shoes dragged a lawnward. She swung her
flask light over the carpet, nothing only dust and the
long shadow of the old rocking horse. But in a
dull gleam of the train's painterck, she saw shape reflected
a two tall smeared at the edges, bent in proportions
a child could never possess. She fled, nearly tripping on
her own robe as she bolted into the hall and
back to her bedroom, slamming the door, pressing her back
against it for long, trembling minutes, tears came at last,
a furious animal response, bitter relief at being alone, regret
for not leaving months ago, the house fell quiet, yet
Elise could sense, for the rest of that endless night,
something pacing the upper floor, moving between the nursery and
the attic. As a searching from misplace treasure. She pressed
her hands over her ears, blocking out the sand, and
only when the birds announced dawn did she let herself collapse,
dizzy with sleeplessness when she finally surface slate the next day,
her throat rough and heart thudding unevenly, she opened every
window she dared it, pacing the perimeter with shaking steps.
The air was cleaner, but the shadows would not be banished.
Her reflection, familiar, then subtly wrong, stroved at her from
each mirror. By noon, she resolved on a plan. The
journals hinted the cellar in nodder, promising something beyond dread,
something tangible. She gathered a lantern, a wind up flashlight, gloves,
and a crob was wiped from Saul's gardening shed. If
there was an answer to be found, it was down
there in the bone cold dark. She crossed to the
basement stairs. Reins started again, steady and relentless. The first
steps groaned like warning. She pressed on, swinging her lantern ahead,
heading light across stone, walls, ridge with roots, cobwebs crawled
in the corners, dust netting the banisters at the bottom.
Dimp seeped through her boots. The earth was colder than
any room above, but breeze seemed to breathe through the cellar.
Pushing pulling, the lee scanned for anything she'd missed before
a hatch, as the professor wrote of some unnatural hollow.
Shining her lantern. Along the back wall, she spotted a
faint line a seemed surrounded by rough placid stone, half
lost to mildy. She tried the crowbar, jamming it between
stone's heart, Racing as the metal tree against mortar. Bit
by bit, she levered the section outward. Earth crumbled on
to her shoes. A panel gave way at last, revealing
a cavity shrouded in rancair inside a set of narrow
stone steps spiral downward, slick with lichen, vanishing into darkness,
and touched by her light. Cold, almost joyous fear pulsed
in her throat. She set her jaw and crushed inside
longer and held high. The walls closed in rough with
hand out furrows. Roots dangled overhead like grasping fingers. At
the base of the spiral, the space wadd into a
chamber of mud caked also dominating its center, carved symbol
swirling in patents indecipherable, old as the stone itself personal
to try to sletter the niche a cracked pair of
glasses strung with dirty twine, a chom bracelet too thumb
nail sized pebbles painted with the child's clumsy scenes. Blise
felt the air move, thick and cool, as if someone
seeing persons exhaled against her cheek. She forced herself forward,
heart hammery on the altar. The patch of late mud
was still wet, fresh against stone. Smaller objects are rusted rain.
A filigree perch sank, half buried in the muck, her
breath clouded. The only sound the drip of condensation down
the wall, then from behind, a gentle slush, water moving
where water ought not be. She whirled land and beam, mobbling.
Something brushed her calf, a cold, wet pressure like the
touch of her hand. She choked back a sob as
her land and jittered and nearly went out. In its
flickering radius, she saw, for a heart beat a long
chadow rising at the edge of the steps. It was
formless at first, the looming presence that thickened and drew,
the bitter metactane of lake water choking the air. She
stumbled backward, nearly dropping the lantern. Whispers filled the little chamber.
Word she could not understand, but the cadence the grief
rang itchingly familiar. She heard again her mother's voice pleading apologies,
and her own, the echo of young regret woven through
the cacophony. The house moaned above, and the roots trembled
with each word. Elise spawn and clawed her away up
the steps, the lantern clattering against the wall, knees and
palms bruising as she crawled behind her. The whispering swelled,
rising to a chorus, then snapped off with a natural silence.
She sound the pan all behind her, oppressing her full
weight against the cold stone, eyes wild in the lantern's
ratic glow upstairs above, the crushing quiet rain battered the world.
The house was not only haunted by the dead or
whatever dwelled in the lake, but by the gathering repetition
of sorrow, of things left and finished in words never spoken.
She felt seen, charged and horribly expected, as if her
arrival was merely the ticking of a clock toward a
preordained ere. The lantern's light windowed as she limped back
up into the kitchen, leaving shadows behind for now. Blise
pressed herself against the warmth of the stove, daring not
to listen to the soft, beckoning hush that rose from below,
The muffled sound too much like her own name. Lee
spent that morning in a waking fever, Wrapped tightly in
a wal blanket, she dragged from the guest bed, hugging
herself on the kitchen floor. The house was quiet, not
comfortingly so, but hanging in a kind of hush that
pressed her ears, making her doubt even her own breeding. Outside,
the wind had backed off for now, leaving a row
stillness where the churning rain had battered against glass all night.
Not even the usual bird call stirred, as if every
creature that might have once flitted through the lake sidewards
had retreated as far as possible from the dead hud
USh that no grit bluckered. She wasn't sure how long
she sat there. She blinked, and the light had shifted,
panting the kitchen yellow then gray, long stripes crossed grimy tiles.
The memory of the cello was stuck in her jaw,
a soreness, as though she'd been biting down all night
to stop herself screaming. Her hands, she realized were shaking
cold despite the blanket, the feeling of that wet hand
still lingering at her uncle, liking a welcome brand. The
compulsion to move warmed in her bones, so she forced
herself upright. She filled the cattle, letting the sound of
water mask even the quiet when it boiled. She poured
it over a half stale tea bag and griped the
mug tight enough she'd have broken the china in another life.
Her other hand, more ba accident than resolve, retrieved Professor
Kelson's journal from the table, fingers smoothing over its battered spine.
She reopened the final entry, searching lines she'd already read
for something she'd missed, but no revelation leaped out. The
heart is beneath pages before it were west frantic scrolls,
fragments that suck the heat right from her. It calls,
using my own voice, wants me to follow. Never go alone,
Never answered the voice, Never let soro take root She
pressed herums hard on that last word, take root. The
roots down in the cellar, she had felt them moving,
entwined in stone and mud. Had they grown towards or
left intended? Always? The house only of her meant to
pull in the lonely, the broken people like her, who
came carrying the kind of wounds that ach louder. With
every creak and sigh of a place like this, the
tea burned her tongue, left her tissing nothing. Whatever was here,
it didn't seem interested in leaving. Now that she disturbed
the altar. Maybe she should have packed up, left the
house for all to watch, driven anywhere with running water
and walls that didn't pres him from all sides. But
something inside her refused the idea. If she ran away,
the thing beneath black root wouldn't stop following. If she
left it and challenged, it would keep drawing the next
person in. Some of the solitary, self fooled by cheap,
reole estate and their own need to escape us fear.
She thought of Saul's warning, the gross's pinched face, a
stories that clustered around the edges of town like mist.
Someone always comes looking. Don't beat at some one, But
now she was was She drawn straight to the heart
of the house, to the altar. In the cellar, her
funds OLOKX screen flared, the signal flicker, then vanished. For
a moment. She couldn't be sure. The ghosts and the
dumb mirrors had made her imagine plenty. For a moment,
she thought she saw a face she didn't recognize in
the reflection of her battery icon just at her shoulder.
Mouth twisted as if whispering, She shut the screen off fast,
hands suddenly sweaty. Decision pressed up heavy as a hand
on her shoulder. There would be no help from outside.
In the journal's margins, in more careful script than the rest,
Kelson had written, don't let it find you alone with
your regrets. If it does, it will use them to
open doors. Don't listen, no matter how kind it sounds. Outside.
The fog that had only hugged the water was now
building slow swall, snaking high out the shore, pushing toward
the garden wall. Bleise watched it through the scum window,
knuckles bown wide in the sill. She could feel it,
not just see it. The chill and the stone, the
damp in the hollow for colobums. If she squinted, she
thought she saw movement, something dark, lean, lind, shifting just
inside the mist, waiting for the house to let it in.
A rattle snapped her forcus. Upstairs, a door slamed, not settling,
but sharp with force. She flinched, watching dust drift down
from the parlor's crack ceiling. For a long moment, she waited,
hoping for sunlight, for anything ordinary, but nothing changed. The
silence that returned was jagged, the raw end of a scream.
She forced herself to move, checking latches and locks. Her
feet traced the lap she had already worn into the
board's kitchen, hallway, parlor staircase back around. When she tried
to front door, she found it stuck, not locked, not jammed,
but as if something on the other side was leaning
its weight into it. She rattled it harder, and a soft,
answering shudder came from the glass, but it didn't give.
Not wanting to break more things, not yet, she turned away,
heart thumping. She left a lamp burning on every level,
every room with an exit, and retreated to the kitchen
with a window faced what used to be the parlor
garden and beyond it the lake. The fog was thicker still,
it had pressed up almost to the porch, now dulling
the world to a few silent yards. It made her
think absurdly of cotton packing. A wind aw way cat
the world out, but also kept infection in. As she watched,
certain she was awake and not dreaming, the shapes began
to form out of the FOG's undulations. At first it
was only one, tall and stooping, indistinct, then in the
next long minute, more smaller, childish lynsed too long or
bent to the wrong places, flickering in and out of
body in the gaps between fogbanks. They didn't move like
animals or people, just stood expecting. Facing the windows. She
couldn't see faces, only the slack suggestion of ice orkus
caught in the gray. They're not real, she told herself,
but the words refused to root. Her breath came and
choked SIPs. As a taller shape, the one from the lake,
she was sure, took too slow, impossible steps toward the
porch and stopped folk gathering at its knees. She closed
a curtain, pressing her forehead to the cold tile of
the wall. Her mind stuttered and skipped, refusing to process
what she'd seen. A knock sounded in the kitchen door.
She scrambled away, knocking over a chair. The knock came again,
slow and patient, the exact rhythms all used when he visited.
For half a second. Hope dug its claws in her
chest head said he'd tried to come by within a week. Right,
that the rational part of her, the one that had
survived things much crueler than fog and cold, insisted that
nobody could cross the ground now with the mis thick
as milk in the shape still hovering out there, a
voice called, low and soft, muffled by wood and fog.
Elise it sounded like soul, but also didn't. She pressed
a hand over her mouth, heart pounding her rips. The
professor's notes robbed in her mind. Don't listen, no matter
how kind, no matter how familiar. Don't open the door.
Knowing with an animal clarity that the voice wanted her
to answer to greet it or worse, let it in,
she forced herself to sit back to the door, hands
clamped hard on her knees. The voice tried again, a
different note in its timber and she recognized her own
nameless time, the syllables gentle pleading is cold. Please, Lise,
I'm scared, Let me in, Please. Her mother's voice grained
for grain. She jammed her fingers into her ears, willing
herself not to shake, not to weep. Eventually, after what
might have been minutes or whole hours, the knocking faded
and the voice trailed off, echoes spinning through the house
as if done along empty hole. Then the smell came
thick and immediate. Pond water wrought, the stink of things
raised up from black mud. Lee's gagging ran to the
sink and wretched up the last of her. When she straightened,
she saw the footprints not muddied as time, but wet black,
as if someone not quite human. Its log through pete
and lay contract up onto her kitchen tiles. They suckled
the island, then let down the hall toward the cellar,
each step gleaming. A decision grew round her heart. Wherever
the heart of this thing was, it was stirring now.
It wanted to coax her out, keep her shifting on
the threshold of her own dread, until there was nothing
human left to protect. She didn't know what drove her
reckless or resigned, but the thought burned clear. She couldn't hide,
couldn't shut herself off and hope the storm past. She
had to face it. Still shuddering, she washed her mouth,
braced herself, then stalked through the swinging door and started
down the cellar steps, the air and jeal cold of
the deeper she move passed the everyday chaos of mice
and damp to the threshold, where she broken through to
the secret chaff the day prior. As she descended, the
voices began again. This time they didn't belong to anyone.
She recognized fragments of speech soved syllables, help, let me go?
Are you sorry for it yet? And sometimes embedded in
the whistling wind, her own name again drawn out until
it was more moan than word. The winding stairs led
her deeper than she'd expected. Half Way down, a lantern guttered,
as if the air had gotten too thick for flame.
She twisted the wind up flasklight, letting the whet beam
jump along the walls. Hand dug scars roots as thick
as her wrist, Runes that flickered in an abs if
scrolled in a livene shifting ink at her feet. The
mud was slick, studded with bone chips and debris. She
made herself push forward through the chamber's bottleneck. The altar
was waiting, still cromed with wet roning earth. Only now
as she drew closer, the carve's whirling seemed to pulse, faintly, breathing,
like the surface of the lake at dawn. As sound
rose beyond the threshold, Not quite footsteps, but something dragging,
a limb, a chain, a heap of something so soft
in it nearly dissolved as it moved. Lee's bit done
on the inside of her cheek hard until copper bloomed
and her vision sharpened. Why me, she whispered, It was
to plea just a request, as tired as anger, after
all these nights alone, What do you want from me?
She didn't expect an answer, but the thing that emerged
from the far side of the altar was almost human,
eute enough that the brain insisted on trying to map
a face onto the slick, luminous patch where her head belonged.
Its eyes were blue as drown light mouthed too wide,
body hung with rags of old clothes, bark things from
the water. Mud ran off at in renolds, pulling behind
its steps. It paused when she spoke head listening. The
whispers grew sharper, overlapping, till her thoughts could barely surface
above them. It took another step, and amidst the babble,
she heard lonely, angry, come closer, give us your heart
and we rest. One of its hands stretched toward her.
Too many joined the nails black. The lee staggered back, gasping.
She pressed her palm to the broken altar stone, felt
again at sick trema, a livingford pulsing up her arm,
the roots alive and nodded, ride just beneath, longing for
something else to feed upon. The spare built thick and drowning,
and for a moment she felt herself slipping, willing in
some dimp place to lay down and give up, let
the house have her sorrow, her regrets, to feed the
thing beneath. But then, from somewhere not just inside her
own mind, a memory vivid, a sunlight on a riverbank,
laughter with Ray and her sister, the taste of sigeh,
the warmth of someone else's arm around her during the
hardest night, something tugged her back. She remembered who she
was before, she tried to outfrun herself, before This house's
shadows grew inside her, until that was all she carried. No,
she choked, louder No. The thing reared back, visage twitching
between sprites of childhood, figures and people she'd loved and
left and mourned. Its mouth grew impossibly wide, the least
spun or, calling Kelson's words, don't let it use the mirrors,
don't let it borrow your soreer. She tore the flasklight
from her pocket, shone the light straight into its eyes,
or what passed for them. In a flash, the ship
locker fragments appeared, dissolving from child to love, to parent
to friend, too fast to pinned them down. The voices faltered,
then tore out in a screech. You don't get to
take any more, she spat. She leapt for the steps.
The thing held a storm of loss and lowning, collapsing
into an animal yelp. Brutes lashed at her ankles, cold
and sticky. She kicked free, battered up the spiral, climb,
hot thundering above her. The door had closed, but she
pried at the seam, shoving with every last trembling muscle.
The sounds below followed her a crescendo of whales, stay, Stay,
we are so lonely, Stay with us. The volumes biked
like a thousand hands clutching at her thoughts. But as
she finally burst through the panel back into the main cellar,
the racket cut off. She snapped the trap close behind her,
shoving boxes, broken chairs, anything a hand on to the
hull until it felt sufficiently waited, sweat icing her temples,
she staggered upstairs, slamming the door at the top, embraced
against it, listening to the deep, unnatural silence. For a moment,
all she heard was her rasping breath, the birdless wind,
the faint hum of the failing fridge. But then a pulse,
not inside her, but through the house itself, a living recoil.
She ran to the nursery, grabbed the antique mirror there,
and using the crowbars, smashed it to spinning shots in
a pollor the tall gilt mirror her horn to double shattered,
and the second blow each time a mirror broke the
air ease pressure lift in the smallest fraction, as if
a stone rolled off her gut. She kept moving on, principal,
on raw fury. Another in the sewing room gone splinters everywhere.
One in the hallway closet. She held a count stick
into the bathroom glass and watched her reflection dissolve to fragments.
As she destroyed each reflection, those voices dimmed, no laughter,
no lapping syllables at the periphery, only to shudder of
wind outside, only her own fierce gasp inside. When she
was done, she collapsed in a parlored chair among dust
and silver debris, hands ringing, knees slick with cold sweat.
She thought she might be sick, or saw or simply
full sideways and let herself sleep no matter what. But
as her breath finally slow, she felt a change gathering
through the house, as if for the first time since
she set foot here, it had let go its choke
hold in the air. She peeked through a tier, and
the curtain outside the fog had thinned. She could see
the tops of the cypress trees by the lake, the
water reflecting a pale, honest sky for the first time,
and days a sudden exhaustion, heavy than all the cold
before threatened to drag her under. She supposed she could
sleep on the sofa. Her body thrumbed with something like
adrenaline and dizziness at once. But one more thing needed
to be checked. Shoulders tight, crowburn hand shinched back down
to the kitchen and gently tried the front door. This
time it swung open. No were resistance from outside, no
atmospheric pressure hurling dregs of night against the frame. The
porch was deserted, the gravel path clear. She stepped out.
The crobe were jangling, faint in her grip. At her feet.
The porch was still slick wid dew, but there were
no new foot prints, no hand prints left were a
child or shadow might have pressed longing against the withered boards.
For the first time, Lees heard a sound that made
her tremble, not with fear, but with acknowledgment. A crow
caught out over the water rough an insistent then another
joined in. She could not bear to cross the garden
to the lake's ouge, not yet. Her legs wobbled at
the very idea of passing the spot where the figure
stood inside the pulsing fog. So she stood at the
porch rail and sucked in a lungful of jail, ordinary air, reel,
laced with the memory of rain in the returning warmth
of autumn. The rest of the morning drifted. At some
points she lost time waking on the floor in the parlor,
sunlight painted to carpet. She drank a glass of water,
and then another, and let herself take comfort in the
visible emptess of the house. No wet prints, no restless knocking,
not even the sense of some one else breathing inside
the walls. She wandered through, testing every lock, every window,
all untouched. By afternoon, a brisk tap on the glass
startled her. She froze, then looked up to see Soul's
a mistakable frame. Hunched in the step. He held up
his hands, palms open, his expression concerned. I thought, I
check in, he called, his voice muffled but real. Fod
finally lifted. Rhodes are clear. Downstream. Postman came before noon.
He let her open the door. She noticed the politeness
of this, the faint bow of respect and dedifference. There
was no pressing, no eager stepping inside, as if Soul
sensed the danger had receded, but the wind was still fresh.
You all right, he asked her, searching her face. She
tried to laugh and heard her own voice craver, I
will be. I think it's good, soulsa quietly, looking past
her into the echoing space. That's good. Sometimes that's all
anyone can hope for here, he hesitated, then nodded toward
the horizon, where the fog was already burning away. They say,
once ye see the thing in the lake, it doesn't
follow if you don't let it looks like he did
what ye needed. It's not gone, Elisee replied, surprised by
her own sodainty. It's just not here, not for new.
Soul's gaze lingered on hers. Things stick Sometimes you'll carry
a piece with you. But I don't mean it has
to decide who you are, he shrugged, backing away. If
you want to talk, we need the house locked up.
Just come find me. Don't try to fix up all
the old bits at once. After he left, the world
tilted back towards something resilient. Lalise bent the rest of
the day, packing idle belongings, methodical but not frantic. She
left Kelson's journal next to one of the shattered mirrors,
took a photo on her phone for a record. The
groceries she'd lost were found in the cellar. Moses boiled,
but it made her smile that the house gave them
back as if an apology. That night, she tucked herself
into the least haunted bedroom, crowding every square in tripolows
in the quill she'd found in the sewing room. The
wind shifted through the eaves, but nothing called her name.
The shadows for once stayed put. When she drifted off
to sleep, it was with the knowledge that she might
finally rest not in peace, not easy, but in devidance
of the thing that wanted her suffering. As food weeks
slept past, she sold the house after a lawyer in
town helped set the estate and paid Soul twice to
close it up and let it rot. She found an
apartment in the city of a neon lit restaurant, where
noise never quite stopped and the hot water never ran cold.
At night, sometimes when the plumbing gurgled, or when misclunged
to the city's towers, Lees lay on her narrow bed
and listened for voices. Most nights, nothing came on. Others
in the hush before dawn, she swore she heard a
far off echo of her name, or a memory of
a child giggling just outside her window, soft as the
slip of fog over quiet water. But here the walls
held firm, And only once, when she flicked off the
bathroom light and looked quick at the mirror, did she
see a shadowy echo behind her shoulder, tall, blue lit
mouth stretching wide. But it receded when she turned, banished
by nothing more than her own stepfast refusal to look
too long to let herself answer back, she started walking
river trails by day, letting sun fix the animal darkened
side her mid new friends, real ones, and told only
what she needed about Blackbroot Lake, that she had inherited
a house she could not keep, and that she had
left before winter's firstener. She did not say how the
sorrow clown, nor how close she come to giving in.
After the move, she found a clipping posted on the
local webside, the dechanging hands again, black crew transferred to
a young couple eager for their own start. At the
water's edge. The lee stared at the photo, fog pulling
in early morning, the house shadow stayed, set for a
new beginning or repetition. She closed the laptop, drew the curtains,
and listened as dust thickened in the pipes. The city's
fog rolled in, quiet and gentle, But she did not
open the window, and she did not listen. Instead, she
settled onto the rug with a book and a thermos
of tea and let life go on. The story of
black Root Lake re seeding behind her, never vanquished, but
no longer invited in a thumb jolted her out of revery.
Something in a neighbor's flat, perfectly ordinary. She smiled at
herself in the glass, noticing for the first time in
months that her own eyes met her gaze, without distortion,
without anything lurking in the edges. The fog thickened just
outside the window, silent and watchful. The Lees drew another breath,
steady and true, and left fold the rest of the shadows.
Lees left the lights burning as the city turned blue
and gold outside her window, the color of evening settling
everywhere except in her head. She tried to read the
words on the page in her lap of found herself
staring straight through them, her knees still pacing the edge
of her thustle like a dog. At a closed door.
She could hear her upstairs neighbor's television alft track looping
over muffled dialog, and the hum of traffic passing under
her window. Ordinary sounds. She clung to them. Each note
was award against the lingering, hollow hush that had belonged
to Bluckart manner and its parasite of shadows. At half
past eight, craving ordinary company, she texted Ray, the only
person in the well. She dared tell a fraction of
the truth. Want to come over, I'll order dumplings. Raey's
reply was instant and reverent, gif and a line, yes, please,
I need tea. In high ceilings, Blise set about the
minuchie of hosting, straightening the sofa, boiling the kettle, tucking
straight books under cushions, and checking twice that all the
windows were locked. Her own caution almost amused her now,
But as she went to ad just the curtain, her
finger tips lingered on the edge, waiting for some trick
of reflection, a wisp of a natural fog to write
itself against the pane. Nothing, only a piskol of moon
behind the glass and below the city's jittering lights. She
pressed her forehead to the cool window one sharpen hail,
then pulled back and forced herself to focus on the prison,
to the scent of jasmine tea, the scuff of her slippers,
a faint tongue of night air. Ray Ba's up at nine,
arms full of supermarket pastries and her usual noisy energy.
Earhood always smells like burnt sugar, she said, barreling in
and dropping her back. Balise laughed at the sound, real
and immediate, as if clearing a blockage she hadn't known.
Was there city Special, it's the factory down the block.
Ray shot her a sly glance, better than ode haunted
twempland the flinch must have shown, because Ray's face softened. Sorry,
I know, silly wrought topic. Blee shook her head as
they sat wordless, comfort in the clatter of mugs and
the warmth pressed between knees seam ghosting over the table.
I've had enough ghosts to fill a ledger, Elie said,
at last, just barely managing a smile. I keep expecting
to hear things at night, or see something move when
I'm not looking. It's nothing, really, not any more. She
twisted her lips considering. I just sometimes I dream about
the fog. Ray angled her head the way she did
when listening required more than hearing. Is it the same
every time? No, Sometimes I'm back at the lake, sometimes
in some version of this place, doors in the wrong spots,
windows looking out in the woods. But the feeling's always
the same, like something's pressing me to listen, Like if
I turn around, it'll be waiting. Ray sipped her tea,
searching her friend's expression. But you don't turn around, and
not in time, Elise answered, voice barely more than a thread.
But then I wake up. The conversation drifted to mondane things,
a project Ray was struggling with at work, the recent
cold snap where the cats really could see ghosts. Elise
found herself relaxing in increments, timing breaths to raise cheerful digressions.
For a while, she almost managed to shed the sense
of something trailing her. After Ray left, Elise lingered in
a living room, letting the television play quietly to stave
off sleep. Midnight tacked over, she debated a nightcap, fingered
her phone, and stared at the calendar and the wall
of bright, clean square, no strange marks or vanish days.
Wind rattled the glass. She sat perfectly still, ears pricked
for a note of the old things, the anomalous, harsh,
the press of pondward are sent a voice calling her name.
Nothing the city brethed around her. Wide and alive, she slept, eventually,
tangled among pillows, conscious of her own racing heart. In
the moments before dreams claimed her. She dreamed not of
fog or water, but a voices, blurred and indistinct, but
not kind and cooxing any more, ungraer in the small eyres,
A tap came at the window, so soft it might
have been the claws of a naprid or a flicker
of wind. She lay frozen, adrenaline inserting. The street lamp
outside painted a faint pattern on the curtains, and for
a moment a shadow waved, something impossibly tall, stooping its outline,
fluxing in and out with each blink. She closed her eyes,
counted as she had learned to do, listening to the
breath in her lungs, the tick of pipes, the distant
thunder of the subway. When she looked again, only the
narrow tracks of rain marked the glass. Morning came gray
and drizzling. She brewed coffee and dared to walk outside,
turning her color up against the wet. She watched mis
gather in the gutter, pulling and tiny swelling eddes around
her feet. Her reflection in a puddle was her own,
no looking imitation with stretching lips. Yet inside some soft
place remained warry. It felt as as if the manner
had left a pressure behind the way a finger pressed
into skin. Lisa pale, shallow pit before the blood returns.
But the world here was relentless in its ordinariness. Horn's blaring,
children skipping, but on their way to school, a neighborhauling
recycling to the curb. The Lees bought groceries, pausing in
the produced aisle when she saw crate of apples, green
and polish, nothing like the ones she'd eaten. Hunched on
black roots, echoing floor, she picked two, feeling their cool, solidity,
their human scale. Back home, she cleaned and played a
podcast for setting the apartment to casual disorder. The day
passed takes Warky Mills a moment's frustration when her laptop froze.
Nothing supernatural, just cheap hardware. Evening arrived without incident But
that night, as she washed her face in the bathroom
and peered into the mirror, she felt the old tickle
at her shoulder. The glass, streaked with steam, offered her
only half a face aunt behind a blow that might
have been a cut left swing on a pego the
way her own hair fell an angle. She stayed perfectly still,
neither flinging nor inviting, until the steam cleared. The next
night she dreamed of the lake, but this time, instead
of being drawn to its edge, she watched from hig
above a bird's view, the fog sweeping low, the shape
at the shoreline shrinking with distance. In the dream, the
house was shrinking, too, with every breath she took, until
it was only a gray thumprint against endless water. She
awoke with a scratch of warmth beneath her breastbone, and
memory not of fear but of refusal. A few days later,
Lees felt the tension that had stoked her since leaving
Blackhroot receipde, replaced by wary gratitude. The ache in her
jaw faded, her hands stayed steady even in the quiet
moments before sleep. The apartment was no longer a ruin
to defend, but a shelter that belonged to her, unburdened
by ancestral rot or in Satside hung There, she met
Raphael lunch rank cider and laughed at a joke that
did not trail often to dre. When she returned, the
world was turning sharply towards spraying bulging cloud's promising another storm,
but nothing more. Her phone rang late a number she
didn't recognize area code from upstate. She almost didn't answer it,
then did a crackling delay. Then a young voice, awkward
and uncertain. Hi, Yah, is this a Lee's roan, Yes speaking,
this is Jamie co ay. Ah. I'm sorry to bother you,
but I think he used to own a property up
in Hallowfield Black croup maner. Elise put a hand over
her chest, forcing herself calm. I did, yes, I sawd
it last year. Why are you there was a hestant laugh, strain,
perhaps forced. Yeah. My partner and I just finished moving in. Sorry,
we're still going through old paperwork and I found your
number in a file. You left some old journals in
a box. Elise's mouth went dry, memories crowding to the surface.
That's right, I meant to pass those alarm Did they
help it to history? Jamie hesitated a bit. Yeah, I
just this is going to sound weird. But do you
remember ever hearing things there? Leees didn't reply immediately, She
pictured the new coupled, happy and eager, maybe fighting over
paint colors, by now already wondering about each creek in
the dark. I did, she said, carefully. It's an old house.
The wind plays tricks. Best advice I can give. Don't
let the place make you forget who you are. And
keep the mirrors covered at night. Jamie laughed awkwardly again flustered. Yeah, okay,
on one more thing. There's a weird hatch in the cellar.
Should we I'm seal it up. She'll slick to Lise's palms.
Keep it closed, she said, voice low, but even, and
if you hear any one calling your name from outside,
don't answer. Don't open the door, no matter what voice
you hear. A long pause followed, All right, thanks, I
guess let us know if you remember anything else, I will,
the Lease promised, because anything else would have sounded cruel.
After the call, she walked through her apartment, covering mirrors
with whatever towels and sheets she could find. It was
an old ritual, one she hadn't needed since leaving that place,
but necessity lingered in her bones. That night, her dreams
were heavy, waited by the voices of strangers, Jamie and
their partner perhaps, or others who've come before. She watched,
powerless as the fog crept up the newly pinted porch
of black root, brushing the stones, winding through the garden,
sleeping always toward the open doors the uncovered glass. Morning
brought sunlight, only sunlight, and the leeese worked dry eyed,
not torn from sleep by course of lawning. She dared
the mirror found her face alone. In the weeks that followed,
she noticed a difference in her city walks, when the
clouds pressed loow and mist hung between the buildings. Her
hot sped a familiar dress nipping at her footsteps, but
nothing ever followed. She passed shop windows, their reflections crisp,
and on days when rin sweat the world weigh in gray,
she kept to the crowded places, pressed into warmth and conversation,
clinging to the noise of belonging. Sometimes she thought about
Jamie and the partner, wondered if they'd learn as she had,
whether the house would hunger for new wounds or settle
into silence. She thought of the pattern repeating over time,
how each inhabit and brought their own pain, their own lowning,
and how somewhre deep below the thing, beneath poles and waited.
Once she wrote an email to Jamie, intending to warn
them more explicitly, but the message sat in her drafts
for days, then weeks. She never sent it. Instead, she
offered a silent hope that they, or some one after them,
would prove stronger. Refused to answer break the mirrors. When
the time came, the Lees returned to her life, friends,
city urns, long eros at the desk, laughter ringing out
above city sirens. She felt the ache of the man
of feite, replaced by cautious peace. Yet on certain nights,
when the city's fog pressed thick against her window and
the hiss of ties on wet street minics so from
the shore, les pause, holding her breath and listen. There
would be nothing, usually nothing but the world's ordinary whisper.
But every now and then, just as sleep overtook her,
she would hear a single yearning voice call her name
from very far away from beneath the roots of things,
and Elise would turn away, breathing in the safe dark,
and let it go unanswered. And that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.