The house at the edge of town was known by many names: The Widow's Keep, the Death Knell, the Hungry Hearth. No one could quite agree on what it should be called, but everyone agreed on one thing—it was cursed. For decades, people whispered about the flickering candlelight that could be seen moving through its windows, long after its last inhabitant died. No one lived there, and yet, the house was never truly empty.
When Elena moved into the crumbling Victorian monstrosity, people in the town gave her a week. A month at most. She'd heard the rumors, of course. The stories of the missing boy, the madwoman who jumped from the attic window, the family that had simply vanished, leaving their meals to rot on the table. All tales, Elena thought. A small town's imagination running wild.
She was a rational woman. Thirty-two, divorced, with a psychology degree and a streak of stubborn independence. Her marriage had drained her, and her practice in the city had turned her into a shell of herself. Moving to the country and starting over seemed like the perfect solution. The house was cheap. That was all that mattered.
It began the first night.
Elena had barely unpacked when she heard it: faint whispers, rising and falling like the ocean, coming from the attic. She froze in place, clutching the handle of a box cutter. The sound was indistinct—words she couldn't quite make out, but they carried an undeniable urgency, as if the speakers were trying to warn her. Or lure her.
She told herself it was the wind. Old houses groan, after all. She pushed it to the back of her mind and went to bed. But the whispers didn't stop. Every night, they grew louder, more insistent. They began to take shape, forming fragments of sentences:
"Do you see it?"
"It's watching you."
"It needs you."
She began to dream of shadows that moved on their own, of cold hands pressing against her throat. She would wake gasping for air, her bedsheets damp with sweat. During the day, she told herself she was imagining things. But by night, her confidence unraveled.