The study was silent again, but the air still thrummed with the echo of the violated smile. Lane's arms trembled, the weight of the fireplace poker suddenly immense. She stared at the spot under the bookshelf where the shadow had vanished, half-expecting it to come pouring back out like black smoke.
It didn't.
Her breath fogged in the air. The cold the thing had brought with it lingered, a psychic chill that had seeped into the very bones of the house. She was shivering, a full-body tremor that had little to do with the temperature. The thing had worn her face. It had taken a memory of her purest childhood terror and dressed itself in it. The violation was absolute, a poison in her veins.
She looked down at the journal clutched in her other hand. Her great-uncle Elias's journal. I will document its nature. He had tried. And he had died, starved in a locked room, his three-course meal untouched.
The hook in her ribs, the compulsion that had drawn her here, was no longer a pull. It was a command. Understand. Or die.
She needed light. Real light. The grey dawn from the high window was insufficient, a sickly glow that only deepened the shadows. Her phone was still dead, a useless brick of glass and metal. She began patting down the desk drawers, her movements frantic, jerky. The first was locked. The second screeched open, empty but for a few dried-up insect corpses. The third drawer contained a jumble of desiccated rubber bands, a rusted letter opener, and a single, fat candle nestled in a chipped clay holder. Next to it was a box of matches.
Her hands shook so badly she broke the first two matches before one finally flared to life, the sulfurous smell a shocking tang of the ordinary world. She touched the flame to the candle's wick. It caught, sputtered, then burned with a steady, golden flame. The light pushed back the gloom in a small, defiant circle around the desk. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Pushing aside the strange rocks and frozen papers, she cleared a space and set the candle down. She pulled the small, brown journal closer, its plain cover drinking in the candlelight.
October 12th. I have taken the key. Father is gone. The silence is my inheritance now. I will document its nature. I will find its weakness. It must have one. Even gods have rules.
She turned the page. The handwriting grew progressively more unhinged, the letters sprawling and desperate.
October 14th. It speaks to me in Mother's voice. It asks me to open the door to the cellar. I will not. I remember what happened to the dog.
October 17th. The geometry is wrong. I walked down the hall to the kitchen for water. I counted 13 doors. On the return, there were 14. The new door is pale pine. It smells of fresh sawdust and violets. Violets were planted on Father's grave. I will not open it.
October 22nd. It is learning. Its imitations are becoming more refined. It no longer just uses the voices of the dead. Today it showed me a perfect recreation of my first love, Elara, from the summer I was sixteen. It stood in the garden, in the sunlight that does not reach this place, and beckoned to me. The light felt warm on its skin. The detail was… exquisite. It is pulling from deeper memories now. The happy ones. This is a new strategy. A cruel one.
Lane's throat tightened. She thought of the thing wearing her child-face. It was doing the same to her. It was learning her, studying her library of fears and joys.
October 29th. I have made a terrible mistake. I tried to trap it. I used silver wire (from Mother's old service) and mirror shards (from the bathroom it shattered last week). I laid the pattern in the attic, a design I found in one of the older texts. It was a pathetic gesture. It simply stepped through the wires. The mirrors did not reflect it. They showed only an empty room. It was amused. It left me a gift on my pillow: a single, dead violet.
November 3rd. It cannot create. It can only imitate. It builds its body from memory and fear. This is the First Rule. It is a parasite. A mimic. It has no form of its own. It requires ours. Without a witness, without a mind to reflect, does it cease to be? I must test this theory. But to do so requires a state of no-mind. A state I cannot achieve while it whispers my father's last words on an endless loop.
November 7th. The food is gone. I had a stash of tins in the root cellar. They are all empty. Not eaten. The contents are simply… absent. As if they never were. It is tightening the walls. It is making its move. I feel it wants to try on a new skin. A permanent one.
November 9th. Water from the taps runs black and tastes of soil. I am so thirsty.
November 10th. I found a can of peaches I'd hidden in a hole in the library wall. It was behind a loose brick. I devoured them, the syrup a divine ambrosia. I hid the can. It must not know. It must not know I can still find sustenance. This is my secret.
The entries stopped. The following pages were blank. Lane's heart ached for this man, her relative, who had fought the same battle she was fighting now. He had died here, alone and starved, his mind picked clean by the thing in the dark.
But he had left a clue. A secret.
I found a can of peaches… behind a loose brick.
Lane looked up from the journal, her eyes scanning the study's walls. They were paneled in dark wood, from floor to ceiling. Thousands of bricks. Thousands of hiding places.
It was a needle in a haystack. But it was the only thing she had. Sustenance. A secret it didn't know she knew.
She grabbed the candle and rose from the chair. She started on the wall opposite the desk, running her fingers along the seams between the panels, pressing, searching for any give. The wood was old, warped in places. She moved methodically, the candle casting her own monstrous, looming shadow on the wall beside her.
The silence was different now. It was a watching silence. She could feel the house's attention focused on her, curious about this new activity. She tried to project a sense of desperation, of a frantic search for an exit, hoping to mask her true intent.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She froze. The sound was faint, coming from somewhere above. It was the sound of a branch against a windowpane. But there were no trees that close to the house. She listened, her ear tilted toward the ceiling.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It was more deliberate than a branch. It was a rhythm. Three quick, two slow. A signal.
She ignored it, returning to her search, pressing on a particularly warped panel near the floor. It didn't move.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Tap.
The rhythm changed. It was faster now. Impatient.
A cold draft snaked down from the ceiling, making the candle flame gutter and dance. The smell of violets, cloying and sweet, filled the study. It was the smell from the journal entry. The smell of the new door. The smell of its cruelest imitations.
It knew she was looking for something. It was trying to distract her.
Lane pressed on, her fingers growing sore. She moved to the next panel, and the next. Nothing.
TAP! TAP! TAP!
The sound was no longer above her. It was inside the room. It was coming from the desk drawer. The locked one.
She stared at it. The rhythm was insistent, angry. Let me out.
It was a trick. It had to be.
But what if it wasn't? What if it was her uncle? What if some part of him was trapped in there, trying to communicate? The journal had said the house changed geometry. What if time changed here, too?
Her hand moved toward the drawer against her better judgment. The rational part of her brain screamed in protest, but the human part, the part that craved connection, needed to know.
Her fingers closed around the small, cold brass knob of the locked drawer.
The tapping stopped.
The drawer was not locked.
It slid open silently.
Inside, there was no ghost of her uncle. There was only one thing.
A single, dead violet, its petals black and crumpled, lay on the bare wood. A gift. A reminder.
And beside it, a new Polaroid photograph, the film still glossy and fresh.
Her blood ran cold. She reached in and picked it up.
The photo was taken from behind. It showed her, from the back, kneeling right where she was now, her head bent over the journal, the candlelight illuminating her hair. It had been taken moments ago.
She was not alone in the picture.
The tall, wavering column of darkness was standing directly behind her, its form leaning over her shoulder, its featureless head tilted as if reading the journal along with her. One of its shadowy hands was extended, its long fingers inches from her neck.
Written in thin, frantic letters along the white border at the bottom of the photo were the words:
I KNOW YOUR SECRET.