YOUR POV
The old house stood sentinel on the hill, its silhouette stark against the bruised twilight sky. It had been vacant for years, a whispered legend among the locals, a place where children dared not venture. I, however, was drawn to its decaying grandeur, the promise of a story waiting to be unearthed.
The front door creaked open with a groan, revealing a cavernous hall draped in dust motes dancing in the fading light. The air hung heavy with the scent of decay and something else, something indefinable, like the memory of a forgotten fear. As I explored, each room echoed with the weight of its past, the ghosts of laughter and sorrow clinging to the peeling wallpaper and warped floorboards.
In the attic, I found a dusty trunk, its brass lock rusted shut. I pried it open, revealing a collection of faded photographs, letters, and a worn leather-bound journal. The journal was filled with meticulous, almost manic, entries, detailing the life of a young woman named Amelia. She wrote of her love for her husband, their idyllic life in the house, and then, a chilling shift. The entries became filled with paranoia, fear, and a growing obsession with something she called "the darkness."
The last entry was a frantic plea for help, Amelia's handwriting scrawled in a desperate, trembling hand. "It's coming," she wrote, "I can feel it. It's in the walls, in the shadows, in my dreams. It wants me. It wants us all."
I closed the journal, a shiver crawling down my spine. The house creaked, the floorboards groaning like a dying beast. I felt a presence, a cold, watchful gaze upon me. I turned, expecting to see a figure in the shadows, but there was nothing.
Suddenly, a cold wind swept through the attic, extinguishing the flickering candle I had been using. I was plunged into darkness, the only sound the frantic pounding of my own heart. I fumbled for my phone, the screen illuminating the room with a sickly green glow.
And then I saw it. Not a figure, not a shadow, but a single, chilling sentence scrawled on the wall in what looked like blood: "It's here now."
My breath caught in my throat. I stumbled back, my phone slipping from my grasp, the screen flickering out. I was alone in the darkness, the cold wind whispering through the house, the scent of decay heavy in the air. And I knew, with a terrifying certainty, that I wasn't alone.
The journal wasn't Amelia's. It was mine. I wrote those entries, years ago, when I were a young woman, consumed by a growing fear of the darkness that haunted my dreams. The house, the attic, the journal, it was all a part of my own repressed memories, a twisted reflection of my own past anxieties. The "darkness" I wrote about was never a physical entity, but a manifestation of my own fear, a fear that has now returned to haunt me.