The air inside the healer’s house was thick with smoke and rot. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling in tangled bundles, their scents sharp and bitter. The walls were covered with symbols drawn in rust-colored paint or blood.Caroline lay Rita on the narrow bed as Mara, the old healer, shuffled closer. Her steps were slow but deliberate, her pale eyes fixed on the trembling child.“She saw something,” Mara murmured, touching Rita’s forehead with fingers as cold as stone. “Something that remembers.”“What do you mean?” Caroline asked, clutching Patrick’s hand.Mara didn’t answer. She began to hum—a low, guttural sound that made the floorboards vibrate. She dipped her thumb into a small clay bowl filled with thick black liquid and smeared it across Rita’s eyelids.Rita’s breathing steadied. Her trembling stopped.Caroline exhaled shakily, tears welling up. “Is she okay?”“For now,” Mara said, voice distant. “But the child has been seen by the town’s shadow. It will not forget her easily.”Caro

The day dragged on in a strange, heavy silence. The house seemed to breathe, as if every plank and nail remembered the footsteps of those who had once lived and perhaps died inside it. Caroline moved quietly from room to room, trying to shake the feeling that something unseen was following her. Every time she passed a mirror, she caught the faintest movement her reflection lagging just a second too slow, her face somehow not quite her own. Rita lay on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, staring blankly at the window. Patrick sat on the floor playing with a small wooden car Gerald had found in the attic, rolling it back and forth without a word. Caroline tried to focus on the ordinary the children, the creak of the floorboards, the steady ticking of an old clock but the house refused to feel ordinary. It whispered. It breathed. It remembered. From somewhere deep within the walls came a faint sound, like the dragging of fabric over stone. Then a whisper soft, almost kind, calling her name.

The night after the feast was colder than any before. A heavy mist crawled through the cracks of the windows, filling the house with a damp chill that settled deep into Caroline’s bones. The torches outside had burned low, their smoke curling into the shape of black ribbons that swayed in the wind. The silence in Bogahill was not peace it was expectation. Something waited. Caroline sat by the window, her hands trembling as she clutched the locket Gerald had given her years ago. It used to bring her comfort a reminder of their early days together, the laughter, the dreams but now it felt like a weight, something foreign pressed against her heart. Her mind kept returning to the way he’d looked at her at the feast. Not with love. Not even with guilt. But with certainty, as if she was already gone. Unable to bear the stillness, she lit a lamp and began to walk through the house. The light cast long shadows that twisted across the walls like veins. Somewhere above her, the boards groaned a

The silence after Rita’s words was unbearable. The air in the attic hung thick, like the house itself was listening. Caroline could feel the weight of it pressing on her chest, waiting for something she could not see. She gathered the children close, trying to still her trembling hands, but the quiet stretched on until it felt like a scream trapped behind her teeth. Then came a sound a low, hollow creak from beneath the floorboards. Slow, deliberate, like footsteps moving under the house. Patrick whimpered and clutched her sleeve. “Mommy, someone’s under us.”Caroline forced herself to listen. The noise was faint but unmistakable, the soft rhythm of movement below the floor. Then, as if answering her thoughts, a gust of cold air blew through the room, and the round attic window shattered inward. The candle flickered wildly, and for the briefest moment, she saw it the faint outline of a circle drawn on the wooden boards near the window, lines carved deep and filled with something dark

Caroline woke with a start, the red glow of the blood moon still burning in her vision, though now muted to a dull, sickly hue. The air around her was heavy and cold, thick with the metallic tang of iron and something darker she could not name. She blinked, trying to take in her surroundings. The cellar had changed. The walls were no longer stone but a living, pulsing flesh, lined with veins that throbbed like a heartbeat. The symbols from the red circle glowed faintly on the floor, not burned or drawn, but carved into the flesh itself, as if the house had absorbed the ritual. Her hands went to her stomach instinctively. There was no movement now, only silence. Panic clawed at her chest. “No… no, no,” she whispered, backing away from the center of the room. The air around her vibrated with a low, resonant hum, a sound that seemed to come from beneath the ground itself. And then she heard it a faint, wet gurgle, a tiny, deliberate sound that made her blood turn to ice. Caroline’s eyes