The next morning, Lily wandered the house, feeling the weight of the previous night's events. She couldn't shake the sensation of being watched, nor could she ignore the memory of the whispered voice that had called her by name. Determined to find some answers, she made her way into her grandmother's study once again, hoping that something in the room would give her a clue.
Shifting through the stacks of dusty books and papers, she became aware of the old carpet beneath which one of the floorboards came loose. Her curiosity is now aroused as she removes the plank and finds that within is a small leather journal with worn pages weathered over time. Pages crumbly, with the faded ink, the grandmother's handwriting was readily identified.
All was mysterious with regards to an evasive shadow, lurking even in her old days when it seemed it did visit her grandmother. She has nightmares and visions where one thing lurked somewhere beside her line of view. As Lily goes along through the pages, the dread feeling is mounting higher due to each word from these lines that made apparent some sort of an old rite obsession with which the grandmother was.
What's more, among her interesting but cryptic writings are one entry that read :
"I dread that it is watching me tonight again. The Shadow comes closer with each passing night, whispering secrets into my blood. I could feel it in the air and hear it in walls. It knows. Knows I am trying to put an end to it all.
Lily closed the journal, her heart racing. A curse? A shadow that her grandmother believed would return? Could that explain the strange feeling of being watched, the symbols on the walls, the voice that had called her name? She wanted to dismiss it as superstition, but she couldn't shake the feeling that her grandmother had left this journal as a warning.
That night, lying in bed, shadows seemed to thicken and darken, pressing in on her from all sides. She held the journal against her chest as if it was all that was keeping her in the world. As she closed her eyes, however, the whispering started up again, soft and insidious, curling around her mind like a tendril of smoke.
"Lily… the blood… it calls…"