The Lake Knows Your Name

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1:05Hello, I'm Wilkins' stories all the time. Glad you are here. Let's get into it. Elise kept her hands fixed at 10 and 2, nearly white knuckling the wheel as her car cut through the misculling off Blackroot Lake. The dust made everything ambiguous had lads dissolved against the fog and the roads wallowed her in a darkness that felt denser than mere nightfall. She slowed and squinted at the narrow drive that the directions insisted held her new dress then crept onto gravel. The tyres crunched too loud in the hush as the car was eased toward the vast shapes she glimpsed in real estate for two as for weeks. There it was at last the manor. Three sores perched top of gentle rise, colonial bone straining beneath layers of peeling paint, windows staring out half shuttered and buckened with age. Creepers tangled over the porch ballast raids, their leaves gum brittle with autumn. The lake beyond, headed now, pressed a chill up her arms as she killed the engine and stepped into ethic with woodsmoke and wet earth. She wasn't sure if she expected a greeting, but the only movement came from a hunch figure gray hair faded denim waiting on the steps. Ms. Rowan? His voice rasped more than echoed. He said about it suitcase beside her boxes.

2:07Care-dickers were they call me but you can call me Saul. His handshake was equally brief. Town left me to see your saddled. Saul pressed a ring of heavy keys into her palm. Doors half peculiar ways here keep them locked, especially at night. He said nothing more about what those ways might be. His boots thudded over planks as he loaded her remaining suitcase onto the porch. By the time Elise managed to thanks, he was halfway down the steps. The manor's front door-growned swinging it would under her touch. These bracelets shoulder against it heart-curiously quick. She'd come for this escape and you start something at the edge of nowhere to bury what came before. It should feel promising. Instead, every inch inside felt like someone holding the breath. When pressed at the shutter as she explored the foyer, mould blotched wallpaper and oval mirror reflect with black, a winding staircase vanishing above. Her heels clicked on warpwood. Breathing deep, Elise inhaled the sense of disuse, dust, grossly rose water at the lingering cold. She visited herself with the little ritual setting suitcases by the banister, aligning boots by the umbrella stand, lighting her phone for confidence.

3:10She flicked her new keys through her fingers, searching for something like assurance. Instead, she watched souls batting pick-up disappear into Merck, leaving her utterly alone. Dinner was too crisp apples from a paperback and a bottle smoothed the eating cross like it in the living room floor. She watched the guttering candle, phone bright beside her. First messages her sisters made it their safe, her friend raised string of encouragement. Elise replied, lies gentle as perfume, yes, it's beautiful, I'll be fine, and then added a photo of her knees and the parquet, letting the candle light disguise the sullen gloom around her. Boxes and packed, folded tees, sketchpads, a battered hardback novel. She undressed and shouted by the pale glow of her phone's green, avoiding her eyes in its small fog-dub reflection. As she zipped herself into a cold sheet, the house groaned and settled, new sounds creaking through floorboards and windscoating. She told herself she was only tired, longs type from the cold drive and delight. Surely the sense of a presence of watching was only suggestion. But sometime around two in the morning, as Rizobita tatuwa the window pains, something knocked faint, somewhere distant a dry tap tapped in silence.

4:11Elise curled into herself, promising the old pipes did things like this. Still she pressed the covers tighter, hot stuttering in her chest, and lay perfectly still until the dawn. By morning, the last of the night operated with the mist. Elise cried the window of looking at lake, still veiled in a solvary band of fog that seemed reluctant to leave the waters face. She patted downstairs, her feet bare and chilly, and made instant coffee in a crap mug rescued from a moving box. The house felt different in daylight, if not exactly a lively no dog stretching into activity after long sleep. Dismotes twirled through some beams where they could warm past heavy velvet curtains. Elise swept through the lower rooms, humming to herself a defensive little tune while she mentally mapped the house's strange geometry. The grand staircase back in her upward. The rails were sticky with polish, its scorework chipped, but every step was sturdy. Upstairs, Elise found three bedrooms one furnished with an ancient four-poster beddress in Paisley, the other two in various states of neglect. One poked into a turret, its floor bang under the weight of old boxes. After doors were locked. She tried each key one caught and turned,

5:11revealing a sewing room chuked with sunlight and dried lavender bundles. Her palette knife set in an unfinished canvas rested on an easel, the image beneath a thick dust and distinct, perhaps a robot on the water. The line of family friff graphs ran along the upper landing, glass-street with centers of thumbs. She looked closer, in every picture, faces blurred or erased by time, some odd by deliberate scratches gouged into the emulsion. The effect was unsettling, groups gathered for birthdays or weddings, but not smile remained intact. One, at the end of the row, had apertures where a woman's eye should be, as if the gaze itself had been clawed free. She intended to laugh it off, but the air was cold to hear. The leaves moved on, hot moving with her. At the end of the corridor, she paused at a door hung with a faded sign, the nursery. The handle was cold and sticky as she pressed down. Inside, the chamber blushed blue with shadow, toys bound in in heaps. A shelf of porcelain doll sagged against the wallpaper, their faces cracked, eyes set in fixed parody of kindness. On the floor, a wooden train was still of mid-journey, bowing beneath a collapsed arch. An old rocking-horse gleamed with ears of fingerprints,

6:12its main is snarl of real hair not dawn or wool, but something brittle and pale. She closed the door quickly, drawing in her lower lip as she moved on. Back downstairs, she circled the roomed pallet kitchen, window-walled salarian bristling with dead houseplants. The kitchen-clock, elaborate brasswork and tiny burrows, wood in time with her footsteps. She ran a wet cloth of a sticky condo's, and covered a bread-books filled only with cinnamon-dusted crumbs. Her phone vibrated with another check in text which she dismissed, setting it aside, determined to make the first day her own. For hours, she cleaned. The ordinary motion of scrubbing, dusting, and heaving boxes grounded her. She opened wide doors for the wind, aired out faded curtains, sang tunelessly as she cleared cobwebs. For a while, the strangeness of last night seemed an invention a trick of noves and unfamiliar walls. But by afternoon, the chill sat back in, and the sunlight didn't reach every corner. Silence gathered in the shadows, holding back barely at the edges of each room. Belize redded for bed early, tired by physical work and the houses subtle resistance to change. She double-checked every latch and bought circling twice in the

7:13uncertain dusk. The wind rattled the pains. After she brushed teeth and killed every lamp, she hesitated before sleep and eased prickling her skin. She didn't remember dreaming, but woke unneasily before dawn, a sense of absence rather than presence trolling her. When she descended the stairs, she stopped cold at the bottom. Maddie Frittprinckov threw the foyer. Not hers, her shoes checked automatically, will lined up in the bedroom. Yet here was a parade of small prints, as if a child had padded in from the rain and stood beffered at the threshold of every room. Belize not touching one with a cautious finger. Cold slick, neither dry nor terribly fresh. She followed the trail to the back door, but the latch was sound. Only when she looked closer, did she spot a single small hamprint high on the gas on the inside. The pungence of earthy water rose in her thoughts. She made herself believe Lovikids must have slipped in, a dead gun wrong, though no one admitted to knowing the old house when she'd asked in town. She cleaned the mess, scrubbing hard enough that the skin on her knuckles tingled. The kitchen cock she noticed over her toast had lost four hours. Midnight forgotten, the hen stuck at eight. She tapped the face no change.

8:17Outside, the lake chopped with a steady wind, and the fog billowed a move by the sun's weakest end. That afternoon, she drove into Hallefield the nearest village, all crooked lanes and slate roof slick with damp. Belize bought groceries in hardware, a new flashlight, dead bolts, lawn screws. She prowled a small shop for tea in exchange pleasantries with a clerk, but the conversation drifted into silence whenever she mentioned a manor. At the pub, the bartender nodded tightly at her order. When she explained she'd moved into the lake house, his mouth tightened. You say you've inherited blackroot, he asked, polishing a glass. That's right, I suppose it's called that, Elise offered her voice trailing. Last owner left sudden, way I heard, one day no trace, places always been touchy. He set the glass down, then gave her a sideline glance. Keep your doors locked if you know what's good. She laughed an easily reminded of Sal's words. You mean, recent break-ins? Not what I mean. The man leaned in just enough that she caught the heavy groceries and of beer on his breath. You hear all things out by the water, best not open up,

9:18don't listen no matter what you think you hear at night. He's straightened. Another customer called for a pint, the exchange was over as quickly as it began. Elise considered pressing, but the other pigeons gave her nothing except the polite remove given to the unfamiliar. A bar made tapped her shoulder and said, almost too quietly, they say someone always comes looking, don't be that someone. Elise went home by an unfamiliar route, saving the groceries for morning. Her mind turned with fragments, goosebumps racing in the wake. Then night, she set every bolt on every door, tested the front and backyard latches. The house was quiet as she moved from room to room restoring, she told herself, agency over rooms that pressed too close. Upstairs, she turned down the bed and flick through the bottom paper back until her eyelids grew heavy. Sleep was shallow, restless, scraping, was spoiling. She swore, half-conscious, that something drifted in and out of her dreams a thread of childish laughter or a song sung out of key. A click snapped her awake before dawn. She reached beneath the mattress for her phone 317 AM and swung her legs to the floor. The bedroom door was a jar, though she couldn't

10:20remember opening it. The air was cold to them before. She forced herself down two flights into the kitchen. Life flickered under the pantry door, vanished when she opened it. When she checked the living room, curtains were drawn open and not in their length as if someone had peered out, twisting the fabric tight. She double-checked the locks and touched. Retreating to her room, she tried to reason it all out, all buildings moved and shifted. A breeze could or not curtains, but she reset the furnishings before sleep, tucking the flashlight within reach. Morning came grey in solid. The lake was invisible behind a wall of mist, but she thought she saw movement for gaps in the tree's dark shapes flitting from one knoll to another. Trying to bring sense back, at least filled her next day with poor decks. She swept rooms she hadn't yet entered, found a sunken-froying room with dusted bookshelves and a piano tuned half-step flat. She fixed the faucet in the dance-stairs bathroom, the rhythmic drip now stilled. All day, the house felt mutely compliant to no unsettling knock, no way it would footprints until she returned from hauling old newspapers out to the bin. The bedroom window was unlocked. She stopped, groceries cradled awkwardly to her gist.

11:24She checked every window as a matter of ritual had even forced the latch extra type before leaving. She checked again no sign of a force opening so clean, just unlocked. Night press sooner than she prepared for. Salsa ride, Elise made soup in the kitchen. Between bites, she read passages from a tatted guide to look a legend she'd found in the study, stowers of lights flaring over the water, forces found in morning mists, and seek its bird under the man-along before the first stone was laid. She set it aside, dreams clouding her senses that night. When she woke, the curtain was now tied the other way, a perfect bow at its hem. Suspicion mixed with dread. She wondered about all could he come and go unnoticed. Or was there something else at work, an uninvited presence testing her vigilance? The next afternoon, as she swept under the window seat in the study, she uncovered a series of small pebbles lined precisely along a crack beneath the baseboard. None matched the gravel in her drive. When she ran fingers over the shelf above, she felt the faintest pulse of vibration, barely there, like a hummingwire below her skin. If faded as quickly as it began. She found herself talking aloud to the walls for

12:25sieging the silence for acknowledgement, but the house only answered with its own brand of flickering, creaking, gurgling quiet. Something moved in the mirrors, or seemed to, at least caught, at the periphery of her vision, not herself but another shoulder hunched where none should be, eyes black and glimmering through-grine. When she spun around, only her reflection stared back, why died in pale. Sleep grew elusive. Another morning, a kitchen-clock now lost nearly six hours overnight. The lake surfaced shivered in the grey, not a bird on the water. When snapped, at the loose shinkles on the porch. In the back of her mind, days slow to give each identical down to the ticks of the ground for the clock and the aches and her wrists from overfigure a scrubbing. She tried another visit to Hallofheal. This time, the gross of a hollow-eyed woman with silver tear-meadow gaze without the amateurs' weariness. Here are the new lady, a black root, a, she asked passing overbrown bread and cabbage. That's me, Elise Greed. It's peaceful. The woman told at her head, considering. There was a professor, years ago, lived there with his wife, interested in lakes and local stores. He asked about the light over the water, Harold was his name.

13:27She tapped the counter, her voice dropping. Root journals claimed there were things in the manner, shadows. We found his car idol at the train station. He never came back. No one has, not for long. Elise felt her skin prickle. Has anyone ever found what happened to him? Just stores crawling into people's heads. The woman said the change in Elise's hand. If I were you, I'd leave it alone. Bad memories breed more shadows, and the house holds onto them. On the drive home, the road shrank behind her as the trees croded in. Before she thought she saw someone standing at the edge of the woods a smaller shape, poised just out of sight. By the time she sobbed, nothing was there. That night she resolved, enough wondering. She checked the house top to bottom. First, the attic. It yielded little, only suitcases, crat trunks, mothwing shoals. Still, she searched, lifting every box, peering into corners. At the last, she found her uncaloned up in beneath the pile of books, pages marked with red circles on dates she couldn't recall. One of them was today. She paused, housed bristling along her form. Atry again. It kind of peaches half a loaf of bread to gone. She tore through cabinets,

14:32noting other small things missing, a teaspoon, four matches her favorite green muck. All the while, the lakes win battered against fogged glass, and somewhere below, the pipes whispered in their own metallic language. That night, lying awake, leased her to her name. None spoke in a loud, but unmaskable, drifting in with the windows if caught on laughter. A leased. She sat bolder-prite, heart-hammering against rips. The lake, hidden behind the wall of night, pressed against the house's foundation as if it were a living thing. Fog licked at the lowest windows. Every nerve told her to listen closer, that the voice was almost, almost familiar. But Saul, the shockkeeper, even the bartender, don't listen, no matter what you hear. She crawled to the window. Aside, Shadow pulled beneath the black trunk trees. She saw she could have sworn a figure, standing at the lake's edge. Tall. Distorted by mist. She blinked, and it was gone. She didn't sleep again until dawn, blood pale through the nursery window. Days blurred. Food vanished from her cupboards. His sketch pencils left where she'd arranged them to reappear, blunted, graphite snapped.

15:35Determost on her stolen calendar, some marked with strange, curling letters she could not read. Whispered laughter drifted through the upper floors, always just as she passed the closed door. Sleep deprivation nodded at her. She snapped at nothing, yelled at the shadows when the wind moaned too loud. Her face hollowed out with tiredness, eyes dark as moss pulls. By instinct or hope, Elise ran to close its frances. Aborted up water beaded nothing but moths. At last, in a sewing room closet hidden beneath boxes of tangled thread and a moth eaten coat she found a battled wooden crate, the slark already rusted open. Inside, curled like a fossil was a thick, water-sane journal. She carried it to the light and potted open. Hired, angular script filled the opening page labeled 8, Kelsen, June 1989. She paged through Pol's quickening. The entries began forsake complaint about whether it about salary. But soon, description sired. Shadows sink creeping along the floors of voice calling at night, laughed at behind the clock. There's something in the lake, Chelsen wrote. At night, it sturs, calls me with my mother's voice.

16:35Pages cataloged more disappearing time, vanished, food, objects rearranged. Then, more frantic entries, handwriting sprawling sideways, it knows what you regret, don't trust the mirrors they are and empty here. The last interest bled and can scratch, lines blurring down the page. The heart is beneath, that waits for me, night to longer now, I must go. Elise traced her finger over the impression left by the pen. Beanie, she flipped the back cover tucked in, brittle with age, was a faint drawing, the cellar steps a circle scratched at one side. The lantern in the cellar. She'd never go on that far spooked by cold. Now, though, she had to see. As she stepped beyond the kitchen the clock stopped, pendulum stilled mid-swing her flat lights beam-shuddered over stone steps descending into earth. The air grew colder with each footfall. The smell of mud and metal troked her fruit. A distant roll of thunder shook the water pipes. She paused listening. Far below, soundless and deep, she thought she heard water lapping at hidden walls. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough

17:36seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. No, there could be social decimals. Now I fell with sudden violence. The leaves watched through the kitchen windows when press the pines to unnatural angles, rain skyer in the porch. The lake itself, out beyond her line of sight,

18:40pulse with blue white flashes. Lightning, but the colors seemed wrong, otherworldly, thick as bioluminescence. A single glimmer flicked at the shore, not lightning, but a steady pulse as if the lake itself drew breath. She pulled on boots, wrapped herself in a raincoat, and stepped out into the downpour. It felt like a compulsion some deep urging she couldn't name. The grass was slick under photos she edged down the sloped flashlight jerking with her heartbeat. The wind keen across the water, sending ripples capering up the bank. As the leaves neared the shore, the pulsing light brightened shining through thick fog, dancing on the black water. Beside an old jetty, a lone figure stood a moving, illuminated by the glow. It was impossibly still taller than anyone she'd ever known, it contrasts blue by the unsteady air. She choked on a gasp and raised her light, but the figure didn't move. The light flared blue, then green, then a sickly white. The figure turned toward her, face lost in the shimmer, and the leaves staggered backward, slick boots sliding in the mud. She thundered up the slope, hearts grumbling in her chest. The manna windows watched her every one of blank, unblinking eye.

19:40She slammed the door shut behind her and threw every lock, barricading herself inside. Breathing ragged, she clung to the railing, the storm screaming at the glass. Her skin buzzed with energy that wasn't adrenaline or fear, but something older, darker, a certainty that whatever she'd seen on the water could follow her if it so chose. She remembered Gelsen's last line echoing through her mind. The heart is beneath. A fresh draft slithered under the kitchen door, curling around her ankles like a living thing. Above, something walked the upstairs, whole no child, no burglar, but heavier, deeper. The house's very bones responded. She knew now she was not alone, never had been. She could not trust her own sense the entity the presence was awake. Stronger with each passing night. Outside, the rain relented. Vox licked the earth, rising higher than before. Inside, Elise pressed her palms together, knuckles bone white, and realized with a deep chudder that this was only the beginning. And as the wind shifted, it carried her name drawn out, gentle, and not only inescapable back from the lake. Elise couldn't move. She stood at the base of the staircase for a long time,

20:42Pulse trying to slow, every muscle ready to bolt again if that thing would ever she'd seen but the lake appeared at the door or window. The old house did not go silent, not any more, she could pick out the new music of its immersed. Soft tapping up above, an intermittent rattle sweeping down the corridors, the very bones of black group mounted shifting in answer to the storm. Lightning flashed outside, the glass shimmed, and for a split second Elise saw the whole foy illuminated in cold blue. Rainwater streaked down the pains in heavy, wriggling trails. She caught her own shadow doubled and redoubled in the mirror before the staves. Her skin seemed thinner of inshowing ghost blue. A second flash revealed, behind her reflection, a grey shape at her shoulder in echo, a shadow blew him gone when she spun around. She needed to move. Ladding the urge for action over a wide every bit of reason, she flicked through her found keys, racing upstairs. Passing the nursery, she swore she felt a draft a trickle of air that smelled faintly of what stone in the lake's eye or mat. She pressed her hand to the wall, shuddering at the chill. From down the corridor, a soft creek snapped her attention, the sewing room door, which she shut herself, now gaped open by a hands-breath. Elise approached on tiptoe,

21:46feet sinking into the cockpit with each nervous step. Her flash light barely caught a tunnel across the seam in the door. Something metallic glinted on the sewing table. For a second, she convinced herself it was just a loose pinnacle of the light, nothing more. But as she drew closer, she could see it was her own house key to spare she left on her queering, the one she hadn't touched since arriving. She stared, skin prickling with cove realization. Had someone come inside while she was at the lake edge. She backed out of the room, shutting the door carefully, heart beating in her throat. When she descended, she left half the dance to his lights on, reckoning electricity bills were a lesser evil. Forabbing her phone, she tried to pull up reception in one bar, barely functional, but as she diled soul's number, the line clicked, then filled with quite static. She closed her eyes, fighting a pulse of anger and fear. The urge to make noise slandalls showed proof her own presence to whatever else inhabited this house battled with instinct to go silent, vanishing to a hole in the wall like a rapid. Instead, she retreated to the kitchen, poured herself cold water from the tap, and huddled by the window. She forced herself to watch the lake through the glass searching for another sign of movement. The pulse of blue had

22:48gutted out, for now the shore scene empty. The only shape in the darkness was her own, caught between rain-street pains and the yellow wash of the kitchen lamp. She barely registered the passage of minutes then-ears. The house, windtight on the skin of an ease, finally relaxed as wind died toward dawn. When she did sleep, head cradled on folded arms and topped the kitchen counter, her dreams were shallow and quick cut shadowed with scrambling things and walls that closed in as she ran. It was nearly midday when she walked to the persistent knock at the door. Wood echoed with slow deliberation, heavy not the skittish, uncertain wrapping she remembered from that first strange night. The leaves is hot dove in her chest, but she made herself cross the foyer, peering through the warps in the glass. Soul shape, hunched and thick set, loomed on a porch and so wet. Before she could force her relief, a flash of caution flickered up she left the key inside, and after last night nothing felt certain. She unlocked the door with trembling hands, keeping her body brace behind it as she cracked it open. Soul peered in, brows overshadowing his eyes, the flannel at his collar sodden from the walker drive. She'd have checked sooner, he muttered, as though already chastising himself.

23:50Storm was bad last night, you all right? Alise hesitated. Should she tell him? Part of her wandered nothing more than to blow it ever shadow, every impossible shape but something held her quiet, suspicion or shame. She settled for, there was someone by the lake, I think, a person or she stopped letting panic speak for itself in her type voice. He stedded her for a moment longer than nodded. People come around sometimes, just passing through, most don't stay. There was a subtle shift in his posture, occluding off. Anything gone missing, doors forced. Just some food, little things. She didn't say what truly shook her that spare key, a calendar, the sense of being hunted by her own reflection. Soul grunted, nudging back his cap. Don't leave the curtains open at night, best to fruom stay in shadow after sunset, that's how they can see in. His eyes flickered upward toward the attic. Something stirs this time of year. When she flinch, he spoke more softly, almost an apology, I'll check the grounds. Make a round after the storm. Folks round here, while some say weather wakes things up. He stepped off the porch, boots thudding through

24:53mud. Belize watched him vanish between the trees marked black by last night's tempest, comforted at least by his living presence. When soul was gone, she run the house nervously. She counted doors a game, almost then checked the windows. In every pain she found water trails, this batter of mud, but no footprints inside. She moved quickly, energy feeding on itself, needing to prove the house ordinary again. In the solarium, she noticed a patch of condensation in the glass, a smudge double as if a face had pressed there from outside. The height too tall for a child. Vile rose in her throat, she scrubbed a clean with sleeve of her sweater, refusing to look too closely at the shape the fog had left. Outside, the light was then grey as dishwater. Vogue climbed to the lake, shifting in silence worlds. The world shrank to the boundary of house and shore theater for one, the audience was looking as the thing she'd glimpsed the night before. She distracted herself with real work, fixing a loose banister, patching a few cracks in the plaster, anything to keep her hands busy. Periodically, she checked her phone, the signal, as before, was a quivering promise, wavering between nothing and a single fleeting bar. By late afternoon,

25:55soul returned, mud caking his boots. Some light caught the bits of gravel in his hair. He wiped his face with a bandana and shook his head. Didn't find sign of anyone out there, ma'am. If this keeps on, maybe best to get a dog, or go to town and wait out the worst of it. Do you think the last owner did he see things was he? The question faltered. Was he afraid? Soul's face pinched, Joe clenching as he looked to the ceiling as though the right answer lived in the beams above them. Professor Kelsen, he said after a pause. He was curious, that's all, too curious, maybe. He hesitated as if the words themselves cost him. Lakes always been strange, don't let it stillness fool you, and those who come here sometimes they bring things with them, the house holds on like the lake, hard to leave when you want to. Soul gave a half as if dismissing his own superstition. He left as abruptly as he'd come, promising to stop by again within the week. Please lock the doors after him, sliding each bolt with more care than before. The iris before a nightful drag. She kept to the kitchen and parlour, bathed in lamp light, thumming the cracked journal she'd found,

26:57testing each account in Professor Kelsen's entrance against her own. Sleep when it came. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. You ain't heard about Moto Casino. Moto has real Vegas slides. Any gang you can find on the floor in Vegas, you can play it on Moto. I like my slides hot. Moto's free to play like food stamps in line at the grocery store, at a funeral, in traffic. Keep rise on the road. Hop on Moto Casino. Moto Casino got jackpot to the bigger than my belly. Moto, America's hottest free to play social casino. Download the Moto Casino app today. Moto Casinos is a social casino board we're prohibited. No purchase necessary. Visit Moto.US for more details.

28:02It was a jittery undertaking. She left all the doors to her bedroom open, wanting to see whatever approached. That night at the eye of between midnight and first light, the house changed again. The leaves half awake, heard a scraping, and then her name is soft as breath, drawn through the nursery floor. The pitch was not her mother's, not quite her own yet as summoned every egg of child to spend tiptoeing past closed doors on sleepless nights. She got up, wrapping a cardigan around thin shoulders, and padded to the landing. Dansters, the glow of the solarium, beckoned to pale line at the door's edge. Had she left a light on? She hovered in the hole. The nursery door, which she latched earlier, was open, rocking slowly behind her as if pushed by a child's uncertain hand. From within, the wooden horse creaked back and forth. The dolls on the shelf, watched in the faint spill of hallway light, seemed to lean forward, eye shining pinpoints in their cracked faces. Trying not to blink, alleys edge forward. The horse jerk once more, then shivered to a stop. As she stepped inside, the room's temperature plummeted a chelsoe profound, she saw each exhale fog in a gloom. Then, from the floor beneath the far wall,

29:04she heard something rather than a scraping as if dull shoes dragged along wood. She swung her flashlight over the carpet, nothing, only dust and a long shadow of the old rocking horse. But in the dull gleam of the train's paintwork, she saw a shape reflected a two-tall smeared at the edges, bent in proportions a child could never possess. She fled, nearly tripping on her own robe as she bolted into the hall and back to her bedroom, slamming the door, pressing her back against it for long, trembling minutes. Tears came at last a furious, animal-response bitter relief of being alone, regret for not leaving months ago. The house fell quiet. Yet alleys could sense, for the rest of that endless night, something paced in the upper floor, moving between the nursery and the attic as if searching for misplaced treasure. She pressed her hands over her ears, blocking out the sound, and only when the birds announced all in did she let herself collapse, dizzy with sleepiness. When she finally surfaced late the next day, her throat rower and heart thudding unevenly, she opened every window she dared to pace in the perimeter with shaking steps. The air was cleaner, but the shadows would not be banished. Her reflection familiar then subtly wrong-shoved at her from each mirror. By noon, she resolved on a plan.

30:09The journals hinted to the cellar. In order, promising something beyond dread, something tangible. She gathered a lantern, a wind-up flashlight, gloves, and a crowbar swipe from Sol's gardening shed. If there was an answer to be found, it was down there in the bone-cold dark. She crossed to the basement stairs rain started again, steady and relentless. The first stepped grown like warning. She pressed on, swinging her lantern ahead, adding light across Stonewall's rich with roots. Cobwebs crawled in the corners, dust netting the banisters. At the bottom, damn seep through her boots, the earth was colder than any room above. But brees seemed to breathe through the cellar pushing, pulling. Belize scanned for anything she'd missed before, a hatch, as the professor wrote, of Summonatural Hollow. Shining her lantern along the back wall, she spotted a faint line as seems surrounded by rough-classed Stone, half lost to Meldy. She tried the crowbar, jamming at between Stone's heart racing as the metal shrieked against mortar. Bit by bit, she levered to section outward, earth crumbled onto her shoes. A panel gave way at last, revealing a cavity shrouded in rank-air. Inside, a set of narrow stone-stepped spiral downward slick with Lycan,

31:13vanishing into darkness entouched by her light. Cole almost drove as fear pulsed in her throat. She set her jaw encroached inside, lantern held high. The walls closed in, rough with hand-dub furrows. Roots dangle overhead like grasping fingers. At the base of the spiral, the space widened to a chamber a mud-kicked also dominating its center, carved cymbals swirling in patterns indecipherable, old as the stone itself. Personal to try to slither the niche, a crack pair of classes strung with dirty twine, a charm bracelet, tooth-ump-nail-size pebbles painted with a child's clumsy scenes. Belize felt the air-move, the kinkul, as if Summon scene persons exhaled against her cheek. She forced her so forward, heart-hammering. On the altar, a patch of late mud was still wet, fresh against stone. Smaller objects are rusted ring, a filigree perch sang calf-barried in the muck. Her breath clouded the only sound the drip of condensation down the wall. Then, from behind, a gentle slosh, water, moving where water ought to not be. She whirled, lantern-beam-wodling. Something brushed her calf a cold wet pressure, like the touch of her hand.

32:16She choked back as solvers her lantern jittered and nearly went out. In its flickering radius she saw, for a heartbeat, a long shadow rising at the edge of the steps. It was formless, at first the lumen presence that thickened and grew, the bitter, metallic town of Lakewater choking the air. She stumbled backward, nearly dropping the lantern. Whisperes filled the little chamber where she could not understand, but the cadence, the grief, rang edgingly familiar. She heard again her mother's voice, pleading apologies, and her own, the echo of young regret, woven through the cacophony. The house moaned above, and the roots trembled with each word. Belize spawned and clawed her way up the steps, the lantern cluttering against the wall, knees and palms bruising as she crawled. Behind her, the whispering swelled, rising to a chorus, then snouted off with a natural silence. She sounded the panel behind her, pressing her full weight against the cold stone, eyes wild in the lantern's erratic glow. Obserres, above the crushing quiet, rain battered the world. The house was not only haunted by the dead or whatever dwell in the lake, but by the gather and repetition of sorrow of things left and finished and words never spoken. She felt seen, judge, and horribly expected, as if her arrival was merely

33:20the ticking of a clock toward a preordained iron. The lantern's light dwindled as she limped back up into the kitchen, leaving shadows behind for now. Belize pressed herself against a warmth of the stove, daring not to listen to the soft, beckoning hush that rose from below, the muffled sound too much like her own name. Belize spent that morning in a wicking fever, wrapped tightly in a wool blanket she dragged from the guest bed, hugging herself on the kitchen floor. The house was quiet not comforting as so, but hanging in the kind of hush that pressed her ears, making her doubt even her own breathing. Outside, the wind had backed off for now, leaving a rust illness where the churning rain had battered against glass all night. Not even the usual bird coals stirred, as if every creature that might have once flitted through the licksidewards had retreated as far as possible from the dead hush that no grit bluckered. She wasn't sure how long she sat there, she blinked in the light-adchifted, panting the kitchen yellow then gray, long stripes across grimy tiles. The memory of the cello was stuck in her jaw, a soreness as though she'd been biting down all night to stop herself screaming. Her hands, she realized, were shaking, cold despite the blanket, the feeling of that wet hand still lingering at her ankle like in a welcome brand.

34:22The compulsion to move warmed in her bones so she forced herself upright. She filled the kettle, letting the sound of water mask even the quiet. When it boiled, she poured it over a half-stale tea bag and gripped the mug tight enough she'd have broken the china in another life. Her other hand, more baxid and than resolved, retrieved Professor Kelsen's journal from the table, fingered smoothing over its battered spine, she reopened the final injury, searching lines she'd already read for something she'd missed. But no revelation left out. The heart was beneath. Pages before it were Westfrandex girls, fragments that sucked the heat right from her, it coals using my own voice, wants me to follow, never go alone, never answer the voice, never let Sora take root. She pressed her thumbs hard on that last word. Take root. The roots down in the cellar, she had felt them moving, entwined in stone in mud. Had they grown towards Sora left and tended? Always the house only ever meant to pull in the lonely, the broken, people like her who came carrying the kind of wounds that ache louder with every creek inside of a place like this. The tea burned her tongue, left her tasting nothing. Whatever was here, it didn't seem interested in leaving now that she disturbed the altar. Maybe she should have packed up,

35:26left the house for salt to watch, driven anywhere with running water and walls that didn't press in from all sides. But something inside her refused the idea. If she ran away, the thing beneath blackroot wouldn't stop following. If she left it unchallenged, it would keep drawing the next person in some of the solitary soulful by a cheap real estate in their own need to escape her swear. She thought of souls warning, the grossest pinched face, a store is that clustered around the ages of town like mist. Someone always comes looking. They'll beat at someone. But now she was, wasn't she? Drone straight to the heart of the house. To the altar in the cellar, her phone's lock screen flared, the signal flickered, then vanished. For a moment, she couldn't be sure the ghosts and the dumb mirrors had made her imagine plenty for a moment. She thought she saw face she didn't recognize in the reflection of her battery icon, just at her shoulder. Mouth twisted as if whispering. She shut the screen off fast, hands suddenly sweaty. Decision pressed up heavy as a hand on her shoulder. There would be no help from outside. In the journal's margins, in more careful script than the rest, Kelsen had written, don't let it find you alone with your regrets. If it does, it will use them to open doors.

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37:34Outside, the fog that had only hugged the water was now building, slow-swall sneaking high out the shore, pushing toward the garden wall. Please watch it through the scumbed window, knuckles bone wide in the cell. She could feel it, not just see it, the chill in the stone, the dampened hollow of her collarbones. If she squinted, she thought she saw movement something dark, lean-land, shift in just inside the mist, waiting for the house to let it in. A rattle snapped her focus upstairs, a door slammed, not settling but sharp of force. She flinched and backed away, watching dust drift down from the parlour's crack ceiling. For a long moment she waited, hoping for sunlight for anything ordinary. But nothing changed. The silence that returned was jagged, the raw end of a scream. She forced herself to move checking latches and locks. Her feet traced the lap she had already worn into the board's kitchen, hallway parlour, staircase, back around. When she tried to front door, she found it stuck not locked, not jammed, but as if something on the other side was leaning its weight into it. She rattled at harder and a soft answering shudder came from the glass, but it didn't give. Not wanting to break more things, not yet, she turned away heart-thumping.

38:36She left a lamp burning on every level, every room with an exit, and retreated to the kitchen where the window faced what used to be the parlour garden, and beyond it, the lake. The fog was thicker still. It had pressed up almost to the porch now, dulling the world to a few silent yards. It made her think absurdly of cotton packing a wind the way it kept the world out, but also kept infection in. As she watched, certain she was awake and not dreaming the shapes began to form out of the fog's undulations. At first it was only one tall and stooping in distinct. Then in the next long minute, more smaller, childish, lint too long or bent at the wrong places, flickering in and out of body in gaps between fog banks. They didn't move like animals or people, just stood, expecting, facing the windows. She couldn't see faces, only the slack suggestion of Isalka's caught in the grey. They're not real, she told herself, but the word refused to root. Her breath came and showed sips as a taller shape the one from the lake she was sure took too slow and possible steps toward the porch and stopped, fog gathering at its knees. She closed a curtain, pressing her forehead to the cold tile of the wall. Her mind stuttered and skipped,

39:39refusing to process what she'd seen. A knock sounded in the kitchen door. She scrambled away, knocking over a chair. The knock came again, slow and patient, the exact rhythm saw used when he visited. For half a second, hoped that gets claws and her chest eats said he'd try to come by within a week, right? That the rational part of her, the one that had survived things much cooler than fog and cold, insisted that nobody could cross the grounds now, with the mystic as milk and their shapes still hovering out there. A voice called, low and soft, muffled by wood and fog. Elise sounded like Saul, but also didn't. She pressed a hand over her mouth, heart pounding her ribs. The professor's notes robbed in her mind don't listen, no matter how kind, no matter how familiar. They'll open the door. Knowing, with an animal clarity, that the voice wanted her to answer, to greet her worse let it in, she forced herself to sit, back to the door, hands clamped hard on her knees. The voice tried again, a different note in its timbre, and she recognized her own name this time, the syllables gentle pleading, it's called, please, Elise, I'm scared, let me in please. Her mother's voice grained for grain. She jammed her fingers into her ears,

40:42willing herself not to shake, not to weep. Eventually, after what might have been minutes or whole ires, the knocking faded, and the voice trailed off, echo spinning through the house as if done along empty hole. Then the smell came, thick and immediate pond water, wrought the stink of things raged up from black mud. Please, gagging, ran to the sink and wretched up the last of her tea. Once she straightened, she saw the footprints, not muddy at his time, but wet black, as if someone not quite human its log through peat and lay contract up onto her kitchen tiles. They circled the island, then led down the hall toward the cellar, each step gleaming. A decision grew around her heart, wherever the heart of this thing was, it was stirring now. It wanted to coax her out, keep her shifting on the threshold of her own dread until there was nothing human left to protect. She didn't know what drove her, reckless or resigned, but the thought burned clear. She couldn't hide, couldn't shut herself off and hope the storm passed. She had to face it. Still shuddering, she washed her mouth, braced herself, then stuck through the swinging door and started down the cellar steps. The air congealed cold of the deeper she move, passed the everyday chaos of mice and app to the threshold where she broken through to the

41:45secret shaft the day prior. As she descended, the voices began again this time, they didn't belong to anyone she recognized. Fragments of speech stopped syllables help. Let me go. Are you sorry for it yet? And sometimes, embedded in the whistling wind, her own name again, drawn out until it was more moan than word. The winding stairs led her deeper than she'd expected. Halfway down, her lantern guttered as if the air had gotten too thick for flame. She twisted the wind up flat light, letting the weak beam jump along the walls, handog's gars, roots as thick as a wrist, ruins that flickered in and out as if scrolled in a living, shifting ink. At her feet, the mud was slick, studded with bone chips and debris. She made herself push forward through the chamber's bottom neck. The altar was waiting, still crammed with wet, rotting earth. Only now, as she drew closer, the carves' whirling seemed to pulse, faintly breathing, like the surface of the lake had done. As sound rose beyond the threshold, not quite foot steps, but something dragging a limb, a chain, a heap of something so sought in it nearly disolved as it moved. Please be done on the inside of her cheek, hard, until copper bloomed and her vision sharpened. Why me, she whispered?

42:50It was de plea, just a request, as tired as anger after all these nights alone. What do you want from me? She didn't expect an answer. But the thing that merged from the far side of the altar was almost human outline, enough that the brain insisted on trying to map a face onto the slick, luminous patch where her head belonged. Its eyes were blue, as drowned light, mouth too wide, body hung with rags of old clothes, bark, things from the water. Mud ran off it in runnels, pulling behind its steps. It paused when she spoke, head listing. The whispers grew sharper, overlapping, till her thoughts could barely surface above them. It took another step, and amidst the babble she heard lonely. Angry. Come closer. Give us your heart, and we rest. One of its hands stretched toward her, too many joined it, the nails black. The leaves staggered back, gasping. She pressed her palm to the broken altar, stone felled again, that sick tremor, a living-frid pulsing up her arm. The roots, alive and nodded, ride just beneath, longing for something else to feed upon. This bear built thick and drowning, and for a moment she felt herself slipping, willing in some dim place to lay down and give

43:51up, let the house have her soar or her regrets to feed the thing beneath. But then, from some or not just inside her own mind, a memory vivid as sunlight on a riverbank, laughed with ray and her sister, the taste of cider, the warmth of someone else's armor ran to during the hardest night something tugged her back. She remembered who she was before she tried to uprun herself, before this house's shadows grew inside her until that was all she carried. No, she choked. Louder, no. The thing reared back, visaged, twitching between sprites of childhood figures, and people she'd loved on left and wound. It's mouth grew impossibly wide. At least spun, or calling Kelson's words, don't let it use the mirrors, don't let it borrow your soar. She tore the flashlight from her pocket, shone the light straight into its eyes, or what passed for them. In the flash, the shape flicker fragments appear, dissolving from child to lover, to parent to friend, too fast to pin them down. The voices faltered, then tore out in the screech. You don't get to take any more, she spat. She left for the steps. The thing held, a storm of loss and longing collapsing into an enemy up. Roots lashed at her ankles, cold and sticky. She kicked free, battered up the spiral

44:54climb, hot thundering. Above her, the door had closed, but she prided the same, shoving with every last trembling muscle. The sounds below followed her, a crescendo of whales. Stay, stay, we are so lonely, stay with us. The volumes backed like a thousand hands clutching at her thoughts. But as she finally burst through the panel, back into the main cellar, the racket cut off. She snapped the trap close behind her, shoving boxes, broken chairs, anything a hand onto the hull until it felt sufficiently weighted, sweat icing her temples. She staggered upstairs, slamming the door at the top, embrace against it, listening to the deep, unnatural silence. For a moment, all she heard was her rust-sping breath, the birdless wind, the faint hum of the failing fridge. But then a pulse. Not inside her, but through the house itself, a living recoil. She ran to the nursery, grabbed the antique mirror there, and, using the crowbar smashed it to spinning shards. In Apollo, the tall guilt mirror her horn to double-shattered on the second blow. Each time a mirror broke, the airy's pressure lifted in the smallest fraction as if a stone rolled off her gut. She kept moving, on principle, on raw fury. Another in the sewing room gone splinters everywhere.

45:58One in the hallway closet. She held a candle stick into the bathroom glass and watched her reflection dissolve to fragments. As she destroyed each reflection, those voices dimmed, no laughter, no lapping syllables at the periphery. Only the shutter of wind outside, only her own, veers gasp inside. When she was done, she glapsed in Apollo chair among dust and silver debris, hands ringing, knees slicked with cold sweat. She thought she might be sick, or saw, or simply fall sideways, and let herself sleep no matter what. But as her breath finally slow, she felt a change gathering through the house as if, for the first time since she'd set foot here, it had let go as chill cold in the air. She peeked through a tear in the curtain. Outside, the fog had thinned, she could see the tops of the cypress trees by the lake, the water reflected a pale, honest guy for the first time in days. As sudden exhaustion heavy, then all the cold before threatened to drag her under. She suppose she could sleep on the sofa. Her body thrummed with something like adrenaline and business at once. But one more thing needed to be checked. Shaldo's tight, crowburned hand, she inched back down to the kitchen and gently tried

46:58the front door. This time it went open. No resistance from outside, no atmospheric pressure helling drags of night against the frame. The porch was deserted, the gravel pathclier. She stepped out, the crow were jangling, framed in her grip. At her feet, the porch was still slick we'd do, but there were no new footprints. No handprints left were a child, or Shaldo might have pressed running against a withered boards. For the first time, leaves heard a sound that made her tremble not with fear, but with acknowledgement, a crow caught out over the water, rough and insistent. Then another joined in. She could not bear to cross the garden to the lake's edge, not yet. Her legs wobbled at the very idea of passing the spot where the figure stood inside the pulsing fog. Moro casino, American social casino. Welcome to Moto Casino, where the excitement never ends, with thousands of the hottest free-to-play social casino games, fastest payouts and the best promotions in the industry. No tricks or gimmicks owned and operated in the USA. Moto Casino is a free-to-play social casino, no purchase necessary 21 plus to play void with prohibited. Sign up today for a generous welcome bonus.

48:05Download the Moto Casino app today. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Comfort in the visible emptiness of the house. No wet prints, no restless knocking, not even the sense of someone else breathing inside the walls. She wandered through, testing every lock, every window all untouched.

49:05By afternoon, a brisk tap on the glass startled her. She froze, then looked up to see souls a mistaken frame, hunched in the step. He held up his hands, palms open, his expression concerned. I thought I'd check in, he calls, his voice muffled, but real. Fog finally lifted, roads are cleared downstream, postmen came before noon. He let her open the door, she noticed the politeness of this, the faint bow of respect and difference. There was no pressing, no eager stepping inside as if soul sense the danger had receded, but the wind was still fresh. You all right, he asked her, search in her face. She tried to laugh at her to her own voice craver. I will be, I think. It's good, soul say quietly, looking past her into the echoing space. That's good, sometimes that's all anyone can hope for here. He hesitated, then nodded toward the horizon where the fog was already burning away. They say once you see the thing in the lake, it doesn't follow, if you don't let it, looks like he did what you needed. It's not gone, elise replied, surprised by her own certainty. It's just not here, not for now. Soul's gaze lingered on hers.

50:05Things stick, sometimes, if you'll carry a piece with you, but it don't mean it has to decide who you are. He shrugged, backing away. If you want to talk, when need the house locked up, just come find me, don't try to fix up all the old bits at once. After he left, the world tilted back towards something resilient. Elise spent the rest of the day packing idle belongings, methodical but not frantic. She left Kelsen's journal next to one of the shattered mirrors took a photo on her phone for a record. The grocery she'd lost were found in the cellar, mostly spoiled, but it made her smile that the house gave them back as a phon apology. That night, she tucked herself into the least haunted bedroom, crowding every square inch with pillows in the quill she'd found in the sewing room. The wind shifted through the eaves, but nothing called her name. The shadows for once stayed put. When she drifted off to sleep, it was with the knowledge that she might finally rest. Not in peace, not easy, but in defiance of the thing that wandered her suffering as food. Weeks slept past. She sold the house after a lawyer in town helped settle this date and paid soul toys to close it up and let it rot. She found in apartment in the city above a neon-lit restaurant where noise never quite stopped in the hot water

51:08never ran cold. At night, sometimes, when the plumbing gurgled or when Ms. Klong to the city's towers, leaves lay on her narrow bed and listened for voices. Most nights nothing came. On others, in the hush before dawn, she swore she hurried a far off echo of her name, on a memory of a child giggling just outside her window, soft as the sleep of fog over quite water. But here, the walls held firm. And only once, when she flicked off the bathroom light and looked quick at the mirror, did she see a shadowy echo behind her shoulder tall blue lid, mouth stretching wide. But it receded when she turned, banished by nothing more than her own step-fast refusal to look too long to let herself answer back. She started walking river trails by day, letting sun-fix the animal dark inside her. Mid-new friend, real ones, and told only what she needed to but blackroot lake that she'd inherited a house she could not keep, and that she'd left before winter's first snow. She did not say how the soar of clown, nor how close she'd come to giving in. A month after the move she found a clipping posted on the local website the dechanging hands again, blackroot transferred to a young couple eager for their own start at the water's edge.

52:09Police stared at the photo, fog pooling in early morning, the house shadow, stayed set for a new beginning or repetition. She closed the laptop, drew the curtains, and listened as dust thickened in the pipes. The city's fog rolled in, quiet and gentle, but she did not open the window, and she did not listen. Instead, she settled onto the rug with a book and a thermos of tea, and let life go on, the story of blackroot lake receding behind her never vanquish, but no longer invited in. A thump jolted her out of river, something in a neighbor's flat, perfectly ordinary. She smiled at herself in the glass, noticing for the first time in months that her own eyes met her gaze without distortion, without anything lurking in the edges. The fog thickened just outside the window, silent and watchful. It leased through another breath, steady and true, and left full of rest of the shadows. Lease left the light's burning as the city turned blue and gold outside her window, the colour of evening settling everywhere except in her head. She tried to read the words on the page in her lap, but found herself staring straight through them, her knees still pacing the edge of her fuss like a dog at a closed door. She could hear her upstairs neighbor's television, a loft track looping over muffled dialogue and a hum of

53:10traffic passing under her window. Ordinary sounds. She clawed to them. Each note was a ward against the lingering, hollow hush that had belonged to blackroot manor and its parasite of shadows. At half past eight, craving ordinary company, she texted Ray, the only person in the world she dare tell a fraction of the truth. Want to come over? I'll order dumplings. Ray's reply was instant and her ever in GIF in a line. Yes, please. I need tea in high ceilings. Belize said about the minutiae of hosting, straightening the sofa, boiling the kettle, tucking straight, books under cushions and checking twice that all the windows were locked. Her own caution almost amused her now, but as she went to adjust the curtain her finger tips lingered on the edge, waiting for some trick of reflection, a whisper of a natural fog to write itself against the pain. Nothing. Only a piscol of moon behind the glass, and below the city's jittering lights. She pressed her forehead to the cool window for one shop and hail, then pulled back and forced herself to focus on the prison to the scent of jasmine tea, the scuffer for slippers, a feintine of night air. Ray buzzed up at nine, arms full of super-market

54:10pastries and her usual nosey energy. Her hood always smells like burnt sugar, she said, barreling in and dropping her back. Belize laughed at the sound, real and immediate, as if clearing a blockage she hadn't known was there. City special, it's the factory down the block. Ray shot her as light glance. Better than Oda haunted to England. The flinch must have shown, because Ray's face oftened. Sorry, I know Cilla wrote offic. Belize shook her head as they sat, worthless comfort in the clatter of mugs and the warmth press between knees, seemed ghosting over the table. I've had enough ghosts to fill a ledger, Elise said at last, just barely managing a smile. I keep expecting to hear things at night, or see something move when I'm not looking, it's nothing really, not anymore. She twisted her lips, considering. I just sometimes I dream about the fog. Ray angled her head the way she did when listening required more than hearing. Is it the same every time? No, sometimes I'm back at the lake, sometimes in some version of this place doors in the wrong spots, windows looking out on the woods, but the feelings always the same, like something's pressing me to listen like if I turn around, it'll be waiting.

55:13Recipt her tea, searching her friend's expression. But you don't turn around. And not in time, Elise answered, voice barely more than a thread. But then I wake up. The conversation drifted to mundane things, a project Ray was struggling with at work, the recent cold snap where the cats really could see ghosts. Elise found herself relaxing in increments, tining breaths to raise cheerful digressions. For a while, she almost managed to shed the sense of something trailing her. After Ray left, Elise lingered in a living room, letting the television play quietly to stave off sleep. Midnight teched over. She debated a night gap, fingered her phone and stared at the calendar on the wall of bright, clean square, no strange marks or vanish days. Wind rattled the glass. She sat perfectly still, ears pricked for a note of the old, things the anomalous harsh, the press of pond would have sent, a voice calling her name. Nothing. The city breathed around her, wide and alive. She slept eventually tangled among pillows, conscious of her unracing heart in the moments before dreams claimed her. She dreamed not of fog or water, but a voice is blurred and interesting, but not kind and coaxing anymore.

56:15Ungray. In the small liars, a tap came at the window, so soft it might have been the clothes of a neighbour or a flicker of wind. She lay frozen, adrenaline surging. The street lamp outside painted a faint pattern on the curtains, and for a moment, a shadow wave to something impossibly tall, stooping, it's outline fluxing in and out with each blink. She closed her eyes, counted as she'd learned to do, listening to the breath in her lungs, the tick of pipes, the distant thunder of the subway. When she looked again, only the narrow trucks of rain marked the glass. Morning came, gray and drizzling. She brewed coffee and dared to walk outside, turning her colour up against the wet. She watched Miss Gather in the gutter, pulling in tiny, swirling edges around her feet. Her reflection in a puddle was her own, no looking imitation with stretching lips. Yet inside, some soft place remained weary. It felt as if the manner had left a pressure behind, a way of finger pressed into skin leaves a pale, shallow pit before the blood returns. But the world here was relentless in its ordinariness, horns blaring, children skipping back on their way to school, a neighbour hauling recycling to the curb. Elise bought groceries, pausing in the produce aisle when she saw a crate of apples green and

57:17polish, nothing like the ones she'd eaten hunched on blackroot sickle and floor. She picked two, feeling their cool solidity, their human scale. Back home, she cleaned and played a podcast, reseting the apartment to casual disorder. The day passed, texts, work emails, a moment's frustration when her laptop froze nothing supernatural just cheap hardware. Evening arrived without incident. But that night, as she washed her face in the bathroom and peered into the mirror, she felt the old tickle at her shoulder. The glass, street with steam, offered her only half a face ant, behind, a blow that might have been a cut left swing on a pego the way her own hair fell at an angle. She stayed perfectly still, neither funging nor inviting until the steam cleared. The next night she dreamed of a lake, but this time, instead of being drawn to its edge, she watched from high above a bird's view, the fog sweeping low at the shape of the shoreline drinking with distance. In the dream, the house was shrinking, too, with every breath she took until it was only a great thumperant against sendless water. She awoke with a scratch of warmth beneath her breastbone a memory, not a fear, but a refusal. A few days later, Elise felt the tension at its doctor since leaving blackroot recede, replaced by a weary gratitude.

58:21The ache in her jaw faded, her hand stayed steady, even in the quiet moments before sleep. The apartment was no longer a ruin to defend, but a shelter that belonged to her unburdened by ancestral rot or unsatisfied hunger. She met Ray for lunch, drank cider, and laughed at a joke that did not trail off into dread. When she returned, the world was turning sharply towards praying, bulging clouds promising another storm but nothing more. Her phone rang late to numbers she didn't recognise, area code from upstate. She almost didn't answer it then did. A crackling delay, then a young voice, awkward and uncertain. Hiya, is this Elise Rowan? Yes, speaking. This is Jamie Co. Hiya, I'm sorry to bother you, but I think he used to own a property up in Hallowfield, blackroot manner. Elise put a hand over her chest, forcing herself calm. I did, yes, I sold it last year, are you? There was a hesitant laugh strain, perhaps forced. Yeah, my partner, and I just finished moving in. Sorry, we're still going through old paperwork and I found your number in a file. You left some old journals in a box. Elise's mouth went dry, memories crowding to the surface. That's right, I'm in to pass those along. Did they help

59:26her to history? Jamie hesitated. A bit, yeah, I just this is going to sound weird, but do you remember ever, hearing things there? Elise didn't reply immediately. She pictured the new coupled happy and eager, maybe fighting over paint colours by now, already wondering about each creek in the dark. I did, she said, carefully. It's an old house, the wind plays tricks, best advice I can give, don't let the place make you forget who you are, and keep the mirrors covered at night. Jamie laughed awkwardly again, flustered. Yeah, okay, I'm one more thing, there's a weird hatch in the cellar, should we? I'm sill it up. Chill slick to Elise's palms. Keep it closed, she said a voice a little bit even. And if you hear anyone calling you a name from outside, don't answer, don't open the door, no matter what voice you hear. A long pause followed. All right, thanks, I guess, let us know if you remember anything else. I will, Elise promised, because anything else would have sounded cruel. After the call, she walked through her apartment, covering mirrors with whatever towels and sheets she could find. It was an old ritual, once she hadn't needed since leaving that place,

1:00:28but necessity lingered in her bones. Then night, her dreams were heavy, weighted by the voices of strangers Jamie and their partner, perhaps, or others who've come before. She watched, Palace, as the fog crept up the newly painted portrait blackroot, brushing the stones, winding through the garden, slipping always toward the open doors, then cover glass. Morning brought sunlight, only sunlight, and Elise worked dry-eyed, not torn from sleep by course of longing. She dared the mirror, found her face alone. In the weeks that followed, she noticed a difference in her city walks. When the clouds pressed low, endless tongue between the buildings, her heart sped, a familiar dreadnipping at her footsteps. But nothing ever followed. She passed shop windows, their reflections criss, and on days when rain swept the world away in gray, she kept to the crowded places, pressed into warmth and conversation, clinging to the noise of belonging. Sometimes, she thought about Jamie and the partner, one did a fiddler and she had whether the house would hunger for new wounds or settle into silence. She thought of the pattern repeating over time, how each inhabit and brought their own pain, their own longing, and how, somewhere deep below, the thing beneath poles and waited. Once she wrote an email to Jamie,

1:01:30intending to warn them more explicitly. But the message sat in her drafts for days, then weeks. She never sent it. Instead, she offered a silent hope that they, or someone after them, would prove stronger, refuse to answer, break the mirrors when the time came. Belize returned to her life. Friends, city errands, lawn-eyers at the desk, laughter ringing out of a city sirens. She felt the ache of the manifold replaced by cautious peace. Yet, on certain nights, when the city's fog pressed thick against her window and the hiss of tyres, unwet street minutes surf on the shore, Elise would pause, holding her breath, unlisten. There would be nothing, usually nothing but the world's ordinary whisper. But every now and then, just as sleep overtook her, she would hear a single, yearning, voice-call her name from very far away from beneath the roots of things. And Elise would turn away, breathing in the safe dark, and let it go unanswered. And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.

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