Adrian doesn't explain the figure in the glass. He doesn't need to. His silence weighs heavier than any denial could. With a nod sharper than courtesy, he turns me down another corridor, this one narrowing, lower ceiling, the air cooler as though the house saves its warmth for itself.
We stop at a plain oak door. Adrian unlocks it with a key he produces from nowhere and pushes it inward.
"Your chamber," he says. "You'll find it sufficient."
The understatement gnaws at me.
The room is long but narrow, high-ceilinged, the plaster mottled with age. A narrow bed pressed to the wall, heavy quilt folded tight. Wardrobe hulking in one corner, its mirror dulled like it refuses reflection. A desk scarred with generations of knives or pens. One window, tall and iron-latched, overlooks the sea. The glass is clouded, but through the blur I glimpse waves heaving black and white in the storm.
"I trust you can manage," Adrian says. His voice folds the words into dismissal. Before I can reply, he closes the door behind me. The lock clicks like punctuation.
Silence swells.
I drop my pack on the bed, shoulder aching from its weight. The house creaks faintly, timbers shifting like bones settling. Then the sea asserts itself—constant boom of surf against cliff, each impact shaking faint dust loose from the rafters.
As I sit, the system stirs:
Status Ping: Environmental baseline exceeded.Passive Unlocked: Environmental Acuity I — heightened awareness of minor shifts in sound, light, and motion within occupied space.
The hum threads into my hearing, into my skin. The surf is no longer background—it's a rhythm, steady, predictable. The wind rattling the latch is irregular, distinct. And beneath both, something subtler: the wooden wardrobe expanding and contracting with damp. The floorboard by the door carrying a whisper of weight not my own.
I glance sharply at the crack under the door. Nothing visible. But the pressure remains—like the house itself breathes slow, patient breaths around me.
My fingers brush the scarred desk. Cold. Damp in the grain.
The wind lashes the window again, and I swear the latch trembles once in warning.
The first step comes soft, as if the floor itself sighs.
I lift my head, listening. The surf counts steady below the cliff, the wind rattles glass in irregular bursts. Those belong. But this sound—footfall—is new. Lighter than Adrian's deliberate stride, too measured to be random creaks.
Another step. Closer. Then a pause, long enough for silence to settle before the next.
My Environmental Acuity threads the noises apart: the surf's thunder is heavy, low. This step is thin, high, pressed into the wood like a finger into wax. Whoever walks the corridor outside is barefoot or careful.
I move to the door, careful not to breathe too loudly. The crack beneath it glows faintly with lamplight. Shadows ripple once across it—something passing.
The latch trembles. Not the wind this time.
I snap the lock open, pull the door wide.
The corridor yawns empty.
Stone under faded carpet, candles guttering in brackets. The air carries only the stale tang of wax and a ghost of chalk. No one stands there. No one could have vanished so quickly. Yet the hush left behind is wrong: silence stretched too thin, like a drumskin waiting to tear.
I step out, eyes flicking down both ends of the passage. Nothing but portraits hanging too close, their frames catching flickers of flame. Their painted eyes seem to shine wet, as if they've just blinked.
Behind me, my door remains ajar. I should close it. But the passive hum urges stillness, as though the house itself leans forward, waiting to see if I'll follow the steps or retreat.
I hold my ground.
Then the nearest candle gutters violently sideways. No draft stirs my clothes, no window stands open. Yet the flame bows low, nearly extinguished, before straightening.
A whisper of cold air brushes my cheek.
Not a draft. A presence.
I retreat, close the door, bolt it. The silence folds back over me, thick, heavy, deliberate.
The wardrobe creaks in answer.
Sleep refuses to come. The bed is narrow, the quilt heavy, but it's not discomfort that keeps me awake. It's the silence. Silence thick enough to crush thought, punctured only by the boom of surf.
I get up, boots muffled against the carpet. The hall stretches, candles flaring weakly as I pass. The air leads me, as though my steps follow a current deeper into the house.
The library waits at the end. Double doors, one ajar, opening into a cavern of shelves.
The smell hits first: dust, leather, a faint musk of parchment too old to have been disturbed lately. I close the door behind me, let the hush settle. Shadows crouch between rows of spines, high ladders leaned like forgotten tools of war.
I trail a hand across a table stacked with registers. The paper feels cold, brittle. My thumb brushes the margin of one, and something sharpens in me—
Status Ping: Object retention anomaly.Passive Unlocked: Touch Archive I — tactile recall of recent contact, pressure, and material alterations.
Heat ghosts my palm, not mine. Someone else touched this volume. Recently. Not just touched—pressed. Fingers digging harder at certain lines, as though emphasis could change what was written.
I open it. Ledgers. Ashgrave family accounts, neat columns. But a page near the end trembles against my fingertips with fresher ink. Dry, yes, but too dark, too glossy. Entries made within days, perhaps hours.
The house wants me to believe these books are dormant. They aren't.
I set the ledger down, try another. Same impression: years of disuse, then sudden renewal. Some invisible hand has been combing through these archives, adding, revising.
My breath sounds too loud in the vastness. The ladders loom above, their rungs shadow-striped. For a moment I think I hear another page turn, deep in the stacks, though I haven't moved.
I lift my hand from the paper. The warmth fades, leaving only the chill of stone pressing in.
Somewhere beyond the far shelves, something shifts.
Not the sea. Not the house settling.
Weight. Human. Waiting.
The air in the library grows tighter, as if the shelves themselves are leaning closer to listen. I hold my breath, straining.
Then it comes—faint, muffled, through the wall to my left. Voices.
One is Adrian's. That clipped cadence couldn't belong to anyone else. Even softened by distance, every word lands with that coin-weight precision.
The other… female. Low, deliberate, like water slipping under a door.
I edge closer to the paneling, press my palm flat. My new passive hums alive—Touch Archive doesn't just speak through objects; it lets vibrations carry clearer.
"…she doesn't know." Adrian's voice. Calm, but sharper than he means it to be.
"…contract binding," the woman answers. The words fracture, pieces lost in the wood, but contract cuts through clean.
"She is… necessary."
A pause. My ribs tighten, the silence loaded. Then Adrian again, lower: "…until the West Wing releases."
My Threat Appraisal II vibrates at the edges, mapping the lie he doesn't tell. He believes what he says. But there's something under it—a withheld name, a buried clause.
The woman's voice lifts, a hiss of resistance. "…danger… already…"
The rest is swallowed by the wall.
I press harder, fingers splayed, the wood damp under my skin. For a heartbeat, I think I hear a third sound—lighter, breath-like, as though someone leans closer on my side of the paneling.
I turn.
The library is empty. Ladders like skeletons. Books like ranks of soldiers. Shadows pooled thick as water.
I step back from the wall, pulse hammering. My hand is still hot where the wood vibrated against it. Contract binding. Until the West Wing releases.
Who is she?
I wait, ears straining, but the voices dissolve into silence.
The surf booms once, heavy, as if punctuating their departure.
I'm alone again. But not untouched.
The corridor feels narrower on the walk back, shadows stretching like muscle under skin. Every portrait I pass has eyes too wet, too alert, as though they overheard the whispers with me.
My room waits, door closed as I left it. I hesitate, then slip inside, locking it fast. The quilt is untouched, the desk scarred in silence, but the air feels stirred, as though someone breathed here while I was gone.
I sit on the edge of the bed, shoes still on. The surf batters the cliff outside, steady, brutal. I let its rhythm ground me. The passive hums low in my chest, mapping every creak: wardrobe sigh, desk wood expanding, latch flexing against the storm.
Then another sound threads through.
Scratch.
Not wood settling. Not storm. A precise scrape, slow, deliberate, against glass.
I rise, pulse in my throat. The window looms tall, blurred with condensation. Scratch. Pause. Scratch. Like nails testing the strength of the pane.
I step closer. The latch trembles faintly, not from wind, but from pressure. My hand hovers, not yet daring to touch.
Lightning flashes white across the sea. For a moment the room bleeds into reflection—my figure in the glass, pale and rigid.
And behind it—
Her.
The same blurred feminine outline. Shoulders narrow, head tilted, hair hanging like soaked thread. She stands just over my shoulder, close enough to brush against me.
The breath rips sharp from my lungs. I jerk around.
Nothing. The room is bare, only the wardrobe and the desk, both stubbornly ordinary.
I turn back.
The glass holds only my reflection. Wide-eyed, caught in stormlight. The shape is gone.
Until the scratch returns. Louder this time, dragging down the length of the pane, the sound of something that has time, patience, and nails.
The system pings once, low and cold:
Status Alert: External presence logged. Classification pending.
The surf roars, the latch shivers, and in the next crack of lightning—
Her face is almost clear.