The voice did not simply enter her ears; it slithered into her mind, a rusted needle threading through the folds of her brain. It was devoid of tone, of gender, of anything remotely human. It was the sound of dust settling on a coffin lid.
"I've always loved hide and seek."
Lane's body locked into a state of pure animal terror. Every muscle was a taut wire, her breath trapped in her chest, a scream frozen solid in her throat. The darkness in the small, concrete room was no longer an absence of light but a physical entity, a cold, heavy blanket smothering her. She could not see the doorway, but she could feel the presence there, a distortion in the fabric of the air, a vortex of absolute cold and ancient malice.
Shuffle. Drag.
A sound from the hallway. It was moving. Not away. Past the door.
The footsteps—if they could be called that—receded slowly, the dragging sound grating against the dusty floorboards. Shuffle-drag. Shuffle-drag. It was moving down the hall, away from her room.
It was starting the game.
A hysterical thought bubbled up in her mind: Maybe if I don't move. Maybe if I stay perfectly quiet, it will just go away. But the child in the photograph, the one with her face contorted in terror, knew better. This thing had found her once before. It would find her again.
The rules were being written in the dark. Rule number one: Do not stay in the open.
Her paralysis broke. She lunged away from the wall, her hands sweeping frantically in front of her in the utter blackness. Her fingers brushed against the rough wood of the school desk. She dropped to her knees, scrambling, her hands patting the gritty floor. Where was it? Where was it?
Her fingertips found the edge of the faded Polaroid. She snatched it up, shoving it deep into her jacket pocket. It was a piece of this nightmare, a clue. She couldn't leave it.
The shuffling had stopped. The house was holding its breath again, listening.
She had to get out of this room. It was a trap. A brightly lit cell designed to hold her until the hunter returned. She crawled on her hands and knees, one arm outstretched, until her fingers met the cold, unfinished wood of the door. She felt for the knob, turning it with infinite, painstaking slowness, terrified of making even the faintest click.
The door swung open silently onto the deeper black of the hallway. The air that washed over her was freezing, carrying that same sterile, coppery smell. She rose to her feet, her back pressed against the doorframe. Her phone was useless, its light extinguished. She was blind.
But not helpless. Not yet.
Her mind, sharpened by adrenaline, clawed for a memory. The hallway. She had walked down it. She tried to map it in her mind's eye. The walls had been close. If she reached out, she should be able to touch them.
She stretched her left hand out into the darkness. Her fingertips met damp, peeling wallpaper. Good. She began to move, sliding her feet carefully to avoid tripping, her left hand trailing along the wall, a desperate lifeline in a sea of nothing.
Shuffle. Drag.
The sound was closer than she expected. It wasn't ahead of her. It was… everywhere. The acoustics in this place were impossible, the sound bouncing off non-existent surfaces, coming from all directions at once. It could be right around the next corner. It could be right behind her.
She kept moving, each step a monumental effort of will. Her hand on the wall suddenly dipped. An opening. A doorway. She paused, her heart thundering. The door was closed. She fumbled for the knob, turned it. Locked.
Move. Keep moving.
The wall under her hand changed texture abruptly. From damp paper to smooth, cold glass. A window? She felt frantically, her palms flat against the surface. It was boarded up from the inside, the wood solid and unyielding. No escape that way.
A soft sound made her freeze.
It was a new sound. Not a shuffle. Not a drag.
It was a hum.
A low, tuneless, droning hum that vibrated through the floorboards, up through the soles of her shoes. It was a nursery rhyme. A distorted, broken fragment of one she almost recognized. It was coming from just ahead. And it was getting louder.
The thing was humming.
Terror threatened to buckle her knees. It was enjoying this. The game was a beloved ritual.
Her trailing hand suddenly met empty air. The wall had ended. A corner. She had reached a junction. The humming was to her right, down the new branch of the hallway. It was close. Too close.
To the left, the hallway felt… different. The air was slightly warmer, carrying a faint, new smell. Not the hospital-clean, not the copper. It was the smell of old paper. Of books.
Without allowing herself to think, she turned left, abandoning the guidance of the wall and moving as quickly as she dared into the unknown blackness. The humming faded slightly behind her, a dreadful, receding tide.
She took five steps, ten, and her shin slammed into something hard and solid. Pain lanced up her leg, and she bit down on her tongue to keep from crying out, the coppery taste of her own blood filling her mouth. She reached down. It was a low table, its surface cluttered with small, unidentifiable objects. She was in a room.
Groping blindly, her hands found a doorway—no door, just an archway. She stumbled through it, and the smell of books grew stronger. A library? A study?
Her outstretched hands found a wall of shelves, the spines of books feeling like a ribcage under her fingers. She moved along them, desperate for cover, for a place to wedge herself. The humming had stopped. The silence was back, and it was worse.
Her foot caught on something on the floor and she pitched forward, landing hard on a rough, woven carpet. The impact knocked the air from her lungs. She lay there for a second, gasping silently, waiting for the sound of the shuffle-drag to come rushing toward her.
It didn't.
As she pushed herself up, her hand landed on something long, thin, and metallic. A handle. She closed her fingers around it. It was cool and solid. A tool? A weapon?
A faint, grey light began to bleed into the room.
Lane blinked, her eyes starved for any stimulation. It wasn't her phone. It wasn't electric light. It was the pale, sickly light of dawn seeping through a single, small, grime-encrusted window high up on the far wall. It wasn't boarded up.
The light was weak, but after the absolute black, it was like the sun. She could see shapes.
She was in a study. Bookshelves lined the walls, crammed with leather-bound volumes swollen with damp. A large, mahogany desk sat in the center, piled high with papers and strange, geological-looking specimens. And in the corner, tucked away, was an old, high-backed armchair, its upholstery moth-eaten and leaking stuffing.
Clutched in her hand was a fireplace poker, its end twisted into a decorative spiral. It was heavy. It was real.
The light was a reprieve. A chance to think. To plan.
She scrambled toward the desk, her eyes scanning the papers. The handwriting was spidery, frantic, covering page after page with dense script and frantic diagrams. One drawing caught her eye: a spiral, identical to the one on the bone key fob.
A floorboard creaked in the hallway outside the study.
Lane's head snapped up. She ducked down behind the large desk, pulling her knees to her chest, making herself small. The poker was held tight in her white-knuckled grip.
Shuffle. Drag.
It was in the hallway. Right outside the archway.
She held her breath, pressing herself against the solid wood of the desk. The grey light made the shadows in the room long and deep. She watched the archway, waiting for the shape to fill it.
The sound stopped.
She could see a shadow stretching across the floor from the hallway, long and thin, distorting as it moved over the piles of books and debris. It was just outside.
A long, silent minute passed. Then another.
Had it moved on? Had it not seen her come in here?
Then, a whisper. It wasn't spoken aloud. It was inside her head, a venomous thought that was not her own.
I know you're in there.
The shadow on the floor began to change. It elongated, stretching, its edges becoming indistinct. It peeled itself up from the floorboards, rising into a column of darkness that took on a vague, man-shaped form. It had no face, no features, only a terrifying emptiness that focused on her hiding place.
The Whispering Dark was no longer in the hall.
It was in the room with her.