Chapter 5

The whispers slithered from the walls again, closer now, naming her secrets she never spoke aloud. They didn't just vibrate in the air; they hummed against the marrow of Eleanor’s teeth. Greasy. That was the only word for them. They felt like a coat of oil over her skin, slick and impossible to wash away.

*The fire, El… remember the way the curtains curled like blackened skin?*

She pressed her palms against her temples, her fingernails digging into the thin flesh. "Stop," she whispered to the empty hallway. The floorboards of the Victorian house groaned in response, a long, low trek of wood-on-wood that sounded like a heavy body being dragged through the attic. "It’s the house. It’s just the settling. It’s the pipes. It’s the dry rot."

But the dry rot didn’t know about the lighter in the velvet-lined jewelry box. The pipes didn’t know about the way she had stood on the lawn, watching the smoke rise, feeling nothing but a cold, crystalline relief until the screaming started.

Eleanor stood in the center of the foyer, the shadows cast by the stained-glass transom window stretching like elongated fingers across the floor. The air in the house had grown thick, a soup of dust motes and the smell of old, wet wool. Exhaustion was a physical weight, a leaden cape draped over her shoulders. She hadn't slept for more than an hour at a time since she’d arrived at Blackwood. Every time she closed her eyes, the whispers became a roar, a sea of voices chanting the things she had spent ten years trying to forget.

She needed to find the source. If she could just find the hole in the wall, the drafty vent, the logical, physical explanation for the sound, she could stop the unraveling.

*Under the floor, El… it’s damp under the floor…*

"Shut up," she snapped, her voice cracking. 

She began with the parlor. Her flashlight beam, a shaky, jaundiced circle of light, cut through the gloom. The furniture was shrouded in white sheets, rising like stagnant ghosts from the corners. She moved toward the fireplace, running her hand along the mantel. The dust was thick, velvet to the touch, but beneath it, the marble was ice-cold. 

She leaned her ear against the chimney breast.

Silence. 

Then—a rhythmic thud. *Thump. Thump. Thump.*

It wasn't a heart. It was too slow, too heavy. It sounded like a fist wrapped in cloth striking the other side of the brickwork.

"Who’s there?" she called out. The thumping stopped. 

*You knows who, little match-girl. You brought the spark. You brought the invitation.*

Eleanor pulled her hand back as if the marble had turned into burning coal. The voices weren't coming from the air anymore; they were coming from inside the walls themselves, vibrating through the lath and plaster. She turned, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. 

She had to go up. The attic had been locked when the estate agent gave her the keys—"lost," he’d said, with a shrug that didn't reach his eyes. But the whispers were loudest when she stood beneath the ceiling rose in the upstairs landing. 

Her legs felt like they belonged to someone else as she climbed the stairs. One. Two. The third step creaked—a sharp, splintering sound that echoed through the hollow house. She gripped the banister, the wood grainy and rough under her skin. The darkness at the top of the stairs seemed more than a lack of light; it was a physical barrier, a curtain of ink that she had to push through.

When she reached the landing, the air temperature plummeted. Her breath manifested as a ghostly plume of white. The attic door was a slab of dark oak, its grain twisted into shapes that resembled agonized faces. 

She reached for the handle. It didn't turn. Of course, it didn't turn. 

But then, the whispers changed. They stopped being a cacophony and became a single, unified hiss.

*Open. Open. Open.*

The lock clicked. Not because she had turned a key, but because something on the other side had slid the bolt. 

The door swung inward with a slow, agonizing groan. 

The attic was a cavern of forgotten things. Trunks, broken chairs, stacks of yellowed newspapers that smelled of vinegar and rot. But in the center of the room, positioned directly under a singular, cracked skylight, stood a vanity mirror. Its silvering was tattered, eaten away by age, creating black voids within the glass.

Beside the mirror lay an object that shouldn't have been there. 

Eleanor stepped forward, her boots crunching on broken glass she didn't remember seeing. It was a letter. The paper was scorched at the edges, the center stained with a dark, brownish-red hue that had long since dried into the fibers. 

She picked it up. The paper felt like dried skin.

*“To the one who watches the fire,”* the handwriting began. It was her own. 

Her vision blurred. The room began to tilt. The smell of smoke—acrid, choking, and terrifyingly real—filled her nostrils. She wasn't in the attic anymore. She was ten years old, standing in the hallway of the old house on Miller Street. The heat was a wall, pressing against her face. She held the lighter. It was heavy in her small hand, the silver cool against her palm while the world turned red.

*“I didn’t mean for it to go that far,”* she heard her younger self whisper. 

No. That wasn't right. She had told the police it was a faulty wire. She had told her mother she’d been playing in the yard. She had lied until the lie became her only truth.

The whispers in the attic became a chorus of laughter.

*“You wanted the quiet, Eleanor. You wanted the screaming to stop, so you replaced it with the roar of the flames. But we don't go out. We just… smolder.”*

The shadows in the corners of the attic began to move. They didn't drift; they twitched. They pulled themselves from the eaves like spiders, lengthening and thickening. They coalesced into shapes that were almost human, but stretched too thin, their limbs jointed in ways that defied anatomy.

One of the shadows stepped into the weak moonlight from the skylight. It had no face, only a vertical slit where a mouth should be, and from that slit came the draft that chilled the room. 

Eleanor backed away, her hands fumbling for the doorframe, but the door was gone. There was only the wall, the endless, weeping lath and plaster.

"I’m dreaming," she gasped, her breath coming in ragged, shallow bursts. "It’s the exhaustion. I’m—I’m hallucinating."

"Hallucinations don't leave bruises, El," a voice whispered close to her ear. It wasn't in her head. It was a physical vibration. 

A hand, cold as a tombstone and smelling of damp earth, brushed against the back of her neck. The touch was tactile—real. She felt the individual ridges of the fingerprints. She felt the sharp, jagged edge of a fingernail scrape against her skin. 

She screamed and swung her flashlight. The beam cut through the shadow-figure, passing through it like smoke, but the entity didn't dissipate. It lunged. 

Eleanor fell back against the vanity. The glass of the mirror rattled in its frame. She scrambled toward the edge of the room, searching for the stairs, for the exit, for anything other than this suffocating dark. But the attic had expanded. The walls were miles away now, lost in a forest of junk and shifting silhouettes. 

Every trunk she passed seemed to contain a memory she’d buried. A charred doll. A half-melted gold watch. A photograph of a woman with her eyes scorched out.

"Let me out!" she shrieked. 

The whispers rose to a fever pitch, a cacophony of names, dates, and the specific, rhythmic sound of a crackling fire. It was the sound of her life burning down, playing on a loop.

*You invited us in, Eleanor. You made the space. You cleared the house so we could have a home.*

She reached the center of the room again—no matter which way she ran, she ended up back at the mirror. The shadow-figures were closing in, a circle of darkness that squeezed the light from the room. 

The tallest one leaned over her. It didn't have eyes, but she felt its gaze. It smelled of her father's cologne and the metallic tang of blood. It reached out a long, tapering finger and touched her lips.

"Ssssh," it hissed. "The secrets are safe with us. We are the secrets."

Eleanor felt the cold sinking into her bones, a paralysis that started at her toes and worked its way up. She looked into the mirror, desperate to see her own face, to find some tether to the woman she believed she was. 

But her reflection wasn't moving with her. 

Her reflection stood perfectly still in the blackened glass. It looked older, its skin grey and translucent. Its eyes were not her eyes; they were twin pools of flickering orange light, like the embers of a dying house.

The reflection smiled. It was a slow, terrifying peeling back of lips. 

Eleanor stumbled back, her heel catching on a loose board. Her hand flew out to steady herself, striking the surface of the mirror. 

The glass didn't just crack; it exploded outward in a spray of silver shards that sliced through the air like shrapnel. Eleanor covered her face, feeling the sting of a dozen small cuts across her forearms. 

In the sudden, ringing silence that followed the crash, the whispers ceased. The shadows retreated into the eaves, becoming nothing more than ordinary darkness again. 

Eleanor stayed on her knees, gasping for air, the taste of copper in her mouth. She slowly lowered her arms. The frame of the mirror was empty, save for a few jagged teeth of glass clinging to the edges. 

She looked at the floor where the shards lay. In every single piece of broken glass, a different version of her own mouth was moving. There were hundreds of them, tiny and distorted, all speaking in perfect, chilling unison.

"You invited us in," they breathed.