What Sleeps Within The Walls

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Hello, I'm Wilkins.

Stories all the time.

The loud you are here.

Let's get into it.

The fog had a hunger of its own that evening.

It culled around the battered sign for the lockspurine, swallowing the black paint

and swallowing the last hope forage at the sunset.

My breast looks solid in the cold, and each dip up the mossy flaxthons crunch louder

than felt possible.

The kind of sound that, if you aren't careful, swells up in your mind and convinces you

or not alone even when you know you are.

I managed to key from the vanilla envelope.

Its paper gritty and damp from the journey stuffed in my back.

The old eye and key looked like a prop from a play about which is heavy or neat, rust

tickling my palm.

The lock didn't want to turn, groaning once twice before jerking open with a metallic

snap that seemed to echo much further than it ought.

The door pushed in and the thick, mineral scent of old stone, dust, and something faintly

sweet swept over me.

My first view inside was clutter and half light from the insecure grey outside, a wall

shardowed and indistinct.

I stepped forward, swallowing any hesitation, and dumped my duffel just to the left of

the door.

The main hole was nearly silent, some tick of hidden pipes, the faint static whine of

ancient wiring above the tiled ceiling.

A heap of mail spilled over a narrow table beside the stairs.

On volips, their coroner's curl, stock windows showing governments down some messy handwritten

addresses in my aunt's sloping style.

I barely glanced at them, walking further in.

My eyes caught on a photograph propped against a lamp, Margaret, younger them when I'd

last seen her.

Arm curl tied around a figure I didn't recognise, the two of them half caught in laughter at

the porch I just stepped through.

Beside it, a scoff hung like a flag left behind red wool and mistakenly hers displayed

as they'll blow in there by rough wind, not folded or forgotten at all.

I held the scarf up, rammed them over its chewed up tassels.

Still smelled, impossibly, like the lemon sage soaps you favored.

Placing it on the new post, I forced myself to get a grip.

This was just a house.

I told myself, and I reminded myself I'd promised Margaret one day I would return here.

I would her that much.

As I started upstairs, my footsteps seemed to rouse a soft, uneven rustling somewhere

below.

I paused, straining to listen, but all that surfaced was the house's shallow, breathing

the layer of hush that sits just a bus islands.

By the time I set my bags in Margaret's my room, the fog kept surrendered to full night.

One lamp and another flicked weekly to life.

I peered out through the modelled window glass, seeing nothing but my own face staring back.

For a few moments, I tried to believe the inn was only exactly what had appeared, four

warm walls, well of furniture, the small triumph of having a roof over my head that wasn't

a friend's disused fruit on a rented room with toothed in walls.

But a minute later, as I wandered back downstairs to hunt for the kettle, another scrape touched

my hearing the faintest, most transcend scratching, maybe below the four boards, maybe beside my

feet.

I pressed my palm to the scuff paneling, but felt nothing except cold.

The kitchen offered little comfort, only more still in the sempty cupboards, remnants

of tin soup, and the stark flood of a silent refrigerator.

After poking around, I gave up, shootaway fatigue, and decided food could wait till morning.

I found myself wandering, passing through all territory without meaning to, the musty

lounge, the breakfast knuck with its window bench, finally circling back to the central

entryway.

There in the dim, I caught my faint ghostly reflection hovering over Margaret's gaff

and the photograph again.

As I started the image, my mind wandered to the reason I'd come here, not just out of

obligation or inheritance, but out of a hope of foolish, childlike one, perhaps that

here, I might start something resembling a future.

I'd left behind a city that didn't want me anymore, and a relationship with too many

cracks to fix, no matter how stubbornly I tried to patch it.

Sometimes a place can grow so sharp around you that it's safe to flee before it cuts

you to nothing.

I resolved to get supplies, and me too move a still cold, this little mountain village

home, if only to tie myself to the well beyond the inn.

I needed faces and voices, boundaries marked by mundane routines, and recognisably human

eyes.

The next morning, the fog had receded just far enough to reveal the disheveled trees bordering

the gravel drive.

I picked my way down the path, boosts lipory with dew, and found the village by roads barely

wide enough for two cars.

The general store-way to near the crossroads of Chit, flickering, sign-reading Monday and

daughters, its window thick with aging advertisements for bread and kindling.

Inside, a practical warmth greeted me in Ionstove, fence male of yeast and perifin and shells

crowded with jars for our goods, buckets, and ancient magazines.

Two women stood behind the counter.

The older one, hair I in gray and coiled in a tidy knot, sized me up as I entered.

A companion, probably around my age, offered a brisk knot.

Good morning, I managed, setting my list down.

I've just arrived at the locks baron.

They exchanged a look quick, but not unfriendly.

Margaret's niece, or you, the older woman asked, not quite smiling.

No accent through the words out, middle vowels buried under centers of mountain speech.

And that's right, Lee Addison.

The younger woman rang my items through tea bags, bread, candles, and a battered coil

of rope without comment, but glance my way she searched for change.

When will the in-re-open?

That caught me off-balance, though I try not to show it.

Not sure, I'm not decided yet.

It's been close since Margaret, since my aunt passed, hasn't it?

The older woman nodded, lips thinning.

Shame about Margaret, good woman, some houses are best left to rest though.

She added, almost to herself.

She shuffled my groceries into a waxed paper bag.

Some say the locks was got its own mood, Margaret had troubled the last winter or two of.

Her voice trailed off.

The girl frowned, but said nothing.

They hesitated, exchanging another glance this time uncertain, as if they crossed some

invisible line.

The older woman finally looked up, face cautiously kind.

If you need anything, dear, just say, names honestly, don't mind if fructs seem brisk

outside or is never stay long, not since.

She stopped again.

This silence suggested an unfinished sentence I wasn't welcome to finish for her.

I paid and left with the mixture of gratitude and unease, trotting back through the slick

morning to the inn.

There was nothing overtly menacing, not yet, but the conversations felt rehearse, they

are of a village keeping certain doors closed.

Back inside, with provisions tucked away, I walked a halls again, my boots scuffing over

scuffer on her rugs and cracked tiles.

The main lounge, even with sunlight, felt too cold, though the chinny stood tall and brought

above the mantle.

I tested the damper, rear rings kindling, and after three frustrating attempts, finally

coaxed a weak flame from old logs.

As I paced, I tried to recall where everything had been in my childhood, at Margot's lampier,

a collection of alphigurines there, the battered green armchair where she'd read my fortune

from a deck of cuts.

The air was colder now than I ever remembered, like something had shifted indelibly since

my last visit.

Upstairs, I checked the bedrooms, most were barrigued as sparse bears and dust-motes, the

faint shadow of long gone guests and the thoroughbic quilts.

My own old room had a shelf lined with children's books, their covers modeled by agent neglect.

And halfway up the staircase, right where I used to leave it lay my stuffed bear one button

eye, even newly severed from the head.

I'd left it here when I was twelve, and Margot had promised to keep it safe from me,

ascooped it up, surprised at how the fabric seen cool and strangely damp.

The hall would be on grew colder as I moved, I see plumes trailing my breath.

I tested every radiator, finding them all cold and inert.

In Margot's room, the fireplace offered my only hope.

As I arranged to firewood, I noticed the singular key, ringed in black tarnish, hung on a

nail beside her dresser.

It fit the lock trunk at the foot of her bed, hinges squealing as I lifted the lid.

Beneath stacks of knitting, I discovered what looked like old journals, their covers marked

with heavy, inky strokes, crooked constellations, taut circles, whores etched and hurried script

the veilous thinness at night guard the threshold.

I brushed dust from a cluster of pages.

The journals were dense with scrolled notes, observations about boundary places, what

must have been weather records, and sketches of odd symbols are twisted, branched white

shape, mirrored in my ants' kaffled raft again and again.

The day faded, bringing early darkness.

I moved about trying to warm the other rooms, but nothing seemed to take.

At one point, I crossed into the kitchen to fetch, and I finally defined the pantry door

wide open when I was certain I'd left it shut.

I closed it, bracing a heavy chair against the latch.

Someone's joke, I told myself except who.

There was only me here.

That night's leaps circled, but didn't settle.

I fought off the strange shills with every quilt I could scrounge from the cob of linen

closet, but the feeling only thickened, cold radiating from the walls, itching at my

skin.

I lay awake, convincing myself there was no pattern to the sounds just in old house suggesting,

some animal beneath the floorboards, a wind funnel between ridge and roof beam.

But the scratching did not follow the mindless rhythm of an animal.

It started and stopped dancing behind the lath and stone.

I would close my eyes and then, in a moment in the thin edge of sleep, the soft tap, tap,

tap would return, as if testing the walls for weak points.

I counted the beats, convinced myself nothing would happen if I just stayed very, very

still.

Morning brought with it a low haze as if the sun, like the villagers, was unwilling to

cross the threshold entirely.

I forced myself into a patterns reeping, dusting, mending leaks anything to ground myself

in tasks with beginnings and ends.

My first mission was to tend to the main fireplace.

I shuttled cinders into a steel bucket, but when I returned to the lounge, the fire would

outfetched vanish as though spirited away in a brief moment as stepped up.

In its place, a bundle of damp sprouting twig sat on the hearth.

The sense of emptiness intensified, not just a lack of people, but a lack of presence,

as if the rooms were bleeding away whatever warmth they held for Margaret.

That afternoon, the bell at the front door startled me out of a day's an older man with

a basket of apples.

He left his in the steps, offered a hurried greeting, and worked off of that accepting

a single word of thanks.

A while later, I saw him through the front window, trudging down the driver this collar

up in his dog press clothes, his glance never once returning toward the house.

I made the best of the food he'd left.

When I took the remains of the core outside to the compost heap, muddy prints caught my

eye in the fent light.

Not the knee-ducks left by deer or raccoon, these were heavy, wide, clearly made by boots.

I knelt, pressing a hand beside them for size.

They faced toward the back entrance, leading to the cellar's latch doors.

I swallowed, scouting for neighbours or passing hikers, but the woods were empty and utterly

still.

Animal tracks, I told myself, but the patterned in fit.

The cellar door was drawn tight with a rusty padlock, same as always.

Still, I checked every window twice before nightfall.

As dusk fell, the house drew back inside itself, shadows lengthening corners thickening

with gloom.

The scratching returned, now joined by a faint thumping, almost an audible beneath the

memory of wind and rain knocking at the glass bains.

I paced to the dining room, comforted for a moment by the stutter of my own reflection

in the ancient sideboard mirror.

Then I noticed beneath the faded floral curtain, the wall was mowed, a rough gouge running

up from the floor about three inches long, dark beneath the wall-paper.

The edges flicked out jagged as though Claude was scraped.

I tore back the curtain for a closer look.

Nothing about the damage set settling our mass, not with the paper hanging in strips and

fresh plaster dust flicking the baseboard like pelsner.

I pressed my fingertips into the groove and jerked back at the cold colder than the rest

of the room, an icy cord that throbbed with my racing pulse.

The darkness came thick and early again.

I bowled at the doors tightly and tried, as best I could to sleep.

My dreams were splintered, vivid a candle that stuck his spiral in down, objects flickering

in and out of focus at the edges.

At the bend of the stairs, the tall figure, massed, chanting in a tonneye instinctively

mistrusted.

The voice sharpened into Margaret's, saying words, I almost understood, but not quite,

the syllables and spooling like ropes around my chest.

I woke sweat down, the sheet to wound around me.

In that instant, the scratching reversed mirrored my heartbeat, softer, but a mistakeable,

coming from behind the baseboard.

Had it always been there?

Or was it only once I'd quieted every other noise that it found away in?

When sunlight finally won against the gray, I walked the village again, now searching

for information.

I nodded at folks near the market, most met my eyes, but only briefly.

Some offered the insulated politeness of people who long ago resolved not to know their

neighbors too deeply.

I stopped at the little post office, handing over a few of Margaret's letters to forward.

As I waited two men by the sorting room banded in low whispers, their voices turning flat

as I entered.

I half-corder phrase, the ritual, and then the silence as they noticed me, matching

expressions of awkwardness and worry.

I paid and left, my errand and finished.

Walking back, I followed a winding path around the village edge.

An accidental detour brought me to an neglected hillock.

Brambles concealed an ultrionous slab of mossy rock, like a needin' and half submerged.

I knelt curiosity over coming nerves, and pushed brush aside to uncover a shallow carving,

maybe six inches across the same symbol from Margaret's journal The White Branch joined

at the base, with two crescent circling either side.

Something tight and lead and clenched my gut.

I harrowed home clutching the finding like a secret in my fists and cleaned furiously

for a night of scrubbing at the floor that never seemed to lose its grit.

The village is a luftness stuck with me, the warning from assess honestly at the store

I code with the new edge.

Some houses are best left to rest.

What did she meant by that?

Was it simply grief or something older?

That night I glanced over my notes and listened, realized, uneasily, that things weren't

lining up.

Surely I'd written that I'd locked the front door before going out yet the bolt was

open when I stepped in.

My mental check is wobbled in memory.

I stood in a parlor anxious and scribbled a quick note for tomorrow.

In the morning, the scroll looked faintly different the slant off-center.

I shook myself and turned to Margaret's journals again.

Under the uncertain yellow of a bedside lamp, her handwriting seemed to tremble and flare

as if written in haste or fear.

More passages dotted between weather records and receipts the tapping grows every night.

I feared the old promise would be broken soon.

If anyone finds this, there in one brittle entry was my own name.

Lee, if you ever come back, do not trust the mirrors of dusk.

Do not open the west door.

Above all, do not light the black candle.

It is not what it seems.

The words crawled under my skin.

That night I left every mirror covered with bedsheets, my heart pounding each time I passed

a sliver of glass.

The scratching sewed from the walls so loud at one point I pressed my palm over my ears,

desperate for quiet.

Early morning bled into a real half-dream.

I was halfway down the stairs, journals pressed to my chest when I spotted, in a mirrored

hole with sconce a person shaped blur at the far end.

Block against a deeper black, in distinct and shifting.

My throat clamped tight, but when I turned nothing.

The air hummed, almost sang, with a charged silence left behind.

I started searching, frantic for explanations that made sense.

In the attic amid the piles of mouth-eating curtains and trunks of account books, I found

Ottman's Margaret Mosse of Hidden, waxed candles tucked into holes behind beams, a chip

knife that looks ceremonial, it's point broken, but it's blazed stained darker at the

dip and a handful of strange.

Nubby clay figurines, each painted with loops and lines like the symbols in the journals.

A piece of fabric Margaret's, a mistakeable was not of round, one candle with a tag.

Do not let the flame go out before dawn, as I rotated the objects in my hand.

A memory rose, a bit and so out of place, I nearly laughed to bonfire once.

Margaret's arms around my shoulders, seeing his dusk sweat the yard.

My child's mind full of shadows made safe by her presence.

My comfort fell far away now.

The last journal entry, did in March 19 the night of Margaret death-thread simply, I fear

I failed to the boundary as week then, later, squeeze between frantic permarks, if you find

this, do not light the black candle.

The sharp snap of fire was splitting below reminded me I'd left the large hearth burning.

In a rush, heart pounding, I hurried down.

The flames had shrunk to smolder, orangey light flickering over the tails.

Among the ash logs in the grate, a candle had melted thick air, luck edged, with wax puddled

and spread in a way that looked almost intentional.

The air of the hoth-tisted, rankin' minutely sulfurous of bitter sand that didn't belong.

I gathered the pieces, extinguished the last ember with water.

My fingers prickled, anxious, as a wrap the remains in an old towel and toss them outside

to the compost.

Only as I shut the door did I realise how late it was though near a few minutes to midnight.

My watch is second-hand staggered and stopped, as if uncertain it wanted to move forward

at all.

Seep was elusive, the vision of the brambled shrine and Margaret's warnings following

me into every feverish doors.

The fog grew thick again outside until it pressed against the glass with the weight of

water, muffling every noise from the village beyond.

It was as if the house lay at the bottom of a slow, rolling sea.

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A sharp, frantic knocking and my front door startled me new dawn.

I jerked upright, pausing for any sound, but the loud I hadn't dreamed that I'd go in my chest.

Through the walked glass, Mrs. Anesta's face snapped into view pale, her hair was cute,

eyes wide and wild in a harsh porch bulb that seemed to be swallowing by the fog even a few feet away.

She pressed her palm flat to the door.

You have to leave, she hissed between ragged breaths.

Now, Lee, there are wickets awake, you don't understand, you're not safe, not here.

I stared through him by the volume and a tear in her voice.

What what to wake?

But Mrs. Anesta only shook her head, looking past me to the depths of the inn.

Don't stay, do you hear me?

No one stays now, not even the dead, please, for your own sake.

Then, almost as suddenly as she arrived, she rushed off, boots splashing through puddles

that weren't there the day before.

The fog sucked her away until she was little more than a streak of motion in the grey.

They hind me, the walls reverberated and not just was scratching, but pounding now, deep

in its assistant, a rhythm like something massive beating at the boundary between worlds.

In the whole mirror, word was crawled, reverse and streaked with moisture, not enough.

Not yet.

I spun gasping, hard to trap bird in my chest.

Each direction I faced seem to shift and blow I was dipped forward, only to find myself

one room further than I meant to be, always warping and lengthening impossibly.

Drawing toward the noise, I gathered the ritual items almost without thinking, clutching

the broken dagger, journal, and half-barren candle to my chest as I moved, compelled toward

the source.

The pounding led me down the kitchen-stepped, flashlight trembling in my hand, bass boxes

of cangoods and the cold earth-floored cellar with a stonewall's pooled moisture year-round.

The sun grew swirling and with it a spreading chill that sunk into my bones.

At the far end of the cellar, behind shelves of rusted tools and jars stood a bricked

off alcove.

It had always struck me as odd a wall within a wall, bricks mismatched and more tenured

than the buildings' other bones.

The pounding now shook just from the ceiling.

And on the brick surface, cracks pited to the nut first, then too wide, bleeding blackness,

not just shatter.

Something pressing out, hunger distorting the stone, trying to find the weakness.

The air was thick, almost vibrating, filled with forces, was spring not foreign, but familiar,

snatches of Margaret's voice in my own, strung together with words I'd never said.

I stumbled backward, flashlight beam-wavering.

The boundaries here, I realized, had always been fragile.

Margaret had tried to keep her heavily with the knees walls contained.

Maybe the burning candle had been the last link in the chain and I, by failing to understand,

hadn't done what little protection remained.

Around me, in every crack and shire, the fog pressed deepest whirling now not just outside,

but inside, sneaking along the baseboards.

And in its depths, a caught, for the first time, the gleam of eyes.

I could not move.

Not forward, not back.

The pounding rose.

Just shifted on, ancient beams above.

The black cracks widened, something pushing through with a desperate, hollow strength.

When I, the dupe, the interloper, the girl who wanted it so foolishly to begin again,

stood at the threshold as the chains began to break.

I was alone.

At least, I was the last thing standing between the thing behind the wall and the rest of

the waking world.

The house, half mad with cold and grief, bent beneath the weight of something ancient,

and hungry, and I sensed, deep in my marrow, that the true knight had only just begun.

My feet slid backward on air than floor, the beam of my flash-fight chasing after its own

trembling shadow, as the pounding from behind the bricks turned almost wet, as if something

was clawing at the stones with more than nails claws.

I didn't want to imagine.

The voice ringing in my head now had splinters of Margaret's cadence, fragments of half-sung

lullabies, but looped through it was my own voice low and strange, for adding sentences

I'd never spoken.

Fog trickled along the scenes where floor met wall, swirling in line with tendrils as

if drawn by a slow breath from deeper in the earth.

I watched helpless as Crixwarden.

A thin line of inky moisture seeped from the bricks slick and viscous.

My hand clutching the broken dagger felt numb.

Somewhere above, a door slammed.

I flinched, the sound shaking me loose enough to take a single step backward but the fog

behind me called dense now, and when I spun the stairs seemed impossible to be far, the

way I collapsed into a blur of shadowed distance.

The cellar wall shuddered.

There was a sharp physiostatic in my ears then a voice, then a near, lily, don't answer.

The voice definitely Margaret's ragged with warning drifted not from behind the wall, but

bafflingly from inside my own chest.

I pressed my back to the damn stones, sharp to breathiting through my coat.

Very urge-cream first-gaped, instayed, my mind clawed for anything I could do.

Recalling the journals inked warnings of the veil as thin as the night, a circle must

not be broken as scrambled to fish the piece of chalk I had taken from the upstairs basket

out of my pocket.

My breath heaped, ghosting white, as circled in place, knees buckling, and with shaking

fingers began to scroll one of the wise-shaped figures onto the ground before the brick

dock of.

My first line wobbled, chalk splintering beneath my grip.

From the black gap, a whisper threaded into something almost like a word a syllable press

against flesh.

My teeth ached as my hands worked faster, leaping the crescent's closing the circle again

and again.

The pounding faltered as my last chalk line closed, and for heartbeat at a silence dropped

like a stone.

The next instant, something struck out from inside the brick wall of hog, definite blow.

Knuckles or something that wanted to mimic knuckles.

Mortar just shivered onto my face, the gap in the brick's gate black and slick.

The voice warped slipping between Margaret and my own voice again, but lower now and strained,

you can't close it alone at the candle, the boundary.

I joked my head, scanning the dock for the piece of black and candle I tossed in my pocket

in my panic.

Reflexively, I placed it just outside my new chalk circle, then, despite a rising sense

of wrongness, thick my lighter.

The flame caught slow and sullen blue, and the air at once seemed to flatten, suddenly

thick and solid as stone.

In that locked instant, the wasp was pulled away from words to become a high, keen impression,

vibrating just behind my eyes.

The fog sat backward, coiling into the cracks, as though sucked by a tide.

The pounding pauls.

For a moment, nothing moved except the candle's tiny, oily flame.

Cold swept my bones, chopper now, almost surgical in its shell.

The memory of Margaret's arms ran my shoulders summertime, the air thick with the scent of

cut grass, her singing washed over me so forcibly as stagger, falling to my knees.

Another memory, not from my own mind, a young Margaret, digging with trembling hands in wet

earth, bearing something in a wooden box just outside the same brick echo her lips moving

in frantic prayer.

As quickly as it came, the image went, leaving a hollow ache, grief cut with terror.

I forced my stiff legs to move, my fingers pried the chalk's doubly loose, and I drew

another figure at this one awkward and huge, just as I'd seen in her most frantic sketches.

That's when the temperature plummeted, breath frosting before my lips in the thick, dark

air.

From deep within the wall, I faint, rhythmic thud began as if something vast and patient

pressed his bulk into an endless pattern.

The voice, now no voice at all, slithered up my spine, hungry always hungry, let us

out, let us in and out.

My hands spousened around the daggers' hailt.

Nail scraped the mortar somewhere and seen.

As sifted subtly across a circle I'd made.

Not yet, I croaked, echoing the words from the mirror.

You're not getting out.

My own voice sounded paper thin and foolish I was talking to the very thing every piece

of this house's history was designed to contain.

A blinding white crackling raced from my left shoulder to my jaw static, memory cold.

The flame got of sideways, and in that flicker the sheep in the blackest behind a brick's

press forward with renewed force two points of reflected fire to an embers, wet with need.

His form swelled, filling the widening hole with bottom lachato.

The champ rows were less straining, writhing.

The circle held.

The whispering built further now layers, voices not just of myself and Margaret but voices I

felt must be every woman in our bloodline stretching back, each bearing a sheep on my face,

each ringing hollow with exhaustion and fury.

Then the pounding stopped.

Sudden quiet, so absolute my own heartbeat sounded like a drum.

For a beat the world itself seemed to pause.

A soft trickle of mortar sloughed to the floor, and in that space I heard a different sound

stares above creaking and those summons wait.

I froze every hair along my arms standing prickly and raw.

Another living person, a villager, anestly come back from me, or was it the house shifting

in sympathy with the fog?

Pleee?

It was a whisper fragile and not quite right.

I wanted to believe it was anestly, but something in a tone echoed the voice from the mirror

flat slightly blurred every vowel guttered at the edge.

Who's there?

My voice was barely able to choke, the cold filled my lungs like water.

Foot's that's patented above, moving along the hole toward the kitchen.

A shape flickered at the base of the stairs, a silhouette just beyond the reach of my

candle in distinct and listing.

The circles heat press against my skin, pushing me to stay within its perimeter.

The silhouette stopped outside the open cellar door, a soft shuffling sound, then a cold

wind tumbled in.

The fog swirled again, drifting between the upper steps.

I drew the voice with it, almost playful now, come away at me, leave that thing.

I gripped the dagger tighter until my knuckles ached.

Show yourself, a snarled, furious teeth rattling together in my cold numb mouth.

There was a beat of silence.

When the figure moved at last, I saw for just an instant a face glimmering with the suggestion

of Margaret's features, but strange, slick with an unnatural sheen.

The eyes, though, were wrong deep-pits stillness within stillness, reflecting the dull below

of the candle.

Wish what she started, the not quite Margaret pleaded, foreswirling above the cellar's

icy hash.

Before it's too late.

A vibration ripple through the concrete below me, a low resonance like a groan from deep

underground.

The thing behind a wall pressed again, restless, and small flakes of stone tumbled free.

I don't know how, what did she do?

I asked desperate for it cracking along it seems.

Sacrifice the specter answered too quick.

In the next breath, the draft changed sweet and rotting almost as if the house itself

exhaled.

I saw, out of the corner of my vision, more symbols, lines scratched into the stone

look by hands or claws or both.

I've completed circles hastily close, all radiating out from this very room.

Don't trust it, another voice interceded, this one definitely Margaret, faint but fiercer,

somewhere inside my own ears.

It once a body, a mind.

A adrenaline searched through me, I reached for the journals, flipping frantic pages with

clandie, freezing fingers, searching for anything in incantation, a sequence, a final

passage she might have scribbled in her last ear.

On the back page of the oldest journal, nearly torn by the press of the pen, I found

a single line in Margaret's sharpest roll, a hunger cannot create only feed.

The ward must endure, not break the chain.

The candle at midnight marks the boundary until dawn.

I read it again, slowly allowed, as if the words themselves could build a wall.

From behind the bricks, something howled, not an anger but an aching, animal yearning,

as if the very sound would coax me across my own chalk line.

The not quite Margaret pressed at the edge of the candlelight, faceless, and then suddenly

dissolving, swept up and away in a gust as the wind rays heavier through the cellar,

sending a flame streaming sideways.

My legs carried me instinctively, joking to renew half-faded lines of shock, voice mumbling

every line of Margaret's notes I could recall, over and over, a shield build of the only things

I still trusted.

The pounding sank to low, steady thuds.

In a fog-thick silence, I realised my watch had stopped against the arc, as if this place

had cut itself loose from time.

The only light was the sick, receding glow of the candle, now nearly spanned, and the

scrabbling gleam from deeper in the split bricks.

I didn't know how long I sat like that guarding the circle, Margaret's journal's gripped

height, twert freezing in my clothes before something inside the wall shifted with a final

rending sigh.

The hunger, for now, faded behind layers of stone and night.

When finally a staggered upright bones ash and thoughts splintered, the fog at my

ankle seemed to thin by inches.

The pain in my right ankle flared as I limped up the stairs, desperate for air, for morning,

for a way to pull myself together with the dawn.

At the top step, the silence was brittle, no pounding, no whispering, just the distance

clatter of the wenties in the porch sign once again.

I braced myself against the old refrigerator, letting my breath slow.

Had I repaired the boundary, or merely delayed what was coming.

There were things in this house older than Margaret's notes things older, perhaps, than

any warning the villagers could muster.

I scanned the kitchen, counted up to skew, doors hanging slightly wider than before,

a muddy prince mudge faintly in the linoleum.

At the edge of my vision, the fog thickened, pulling at the back window, and then I swear

to retreated as if it sensed I was watching.

At the faint hand of bent wax and bitter herbs filled the air.

I caught my own reflection in the dusty pain, hairwild, as far too wide.

I pushed a chair under the handle of the back door and collapsed into the nearest seat,

hugging Margaret's journals to my chest.

Alone in a waning dark, I forced myself to log in my notebook everything I'd seen

in the pattern of the cracks, what Margaret's voice had tried to teach me, the words from

the old pack.

My handwriting was jagged, half unreadable.

Above, somewhere in it eaves the now familiar scratching continued, softer, almost subdued.

I waited for the first confidence bark of daylight to break over the mountains.

I did not move.

The air felt less frigid for the first time in days, but I knew better than to imagine

the house was only resting.

I gathered what courage I had left and checked every door, every window, every hidden

seam where cold might slip through.

The scars on the walk on marks, symbols, charred wax would not vanish, no matter how many

times I wiped at them.

I wanted so badly to run, to find a neighbour, to make an other plea for help.

But I'd seen, now the thing that lived within the birktalkov.

I knew, with the cold certainty of the marrow, that running would not save me, Margaret had

tried to run, and in the end, all she could do was buy a handful of nights for the village

for me.

Later, as the new day asserted itself against the mist and hunger behind the wall, an

image crystallised, Margaret sitting in this very kitchen, quote, tip-in-hand, face-thrown

with purpose and love.

She'd never really wanted me to have this legacy, yet she'd left me every piece I'd need

if only I understood how to use them.

The true question rose and circled, cold and unanswerable.

What exactly sleeps within these walls?

And when and not a foot awake again?

My legs refused to steady.

Every muscle seemed to buzz with the memory of what a pressed and clawed from behind the

ruin bricks below.

There was grit in my mouth, in my hair, it took me effort to breathe anything but that

cellar stench earth, wet stone, bitter wax, and the iron tang of fear.

Light at the window had begun to bleed blue, dawn tickling past the fog, promising a day

that my behaviour-like days were supposed to do.

The morning passed in blurred fragments.

I washed the soap from my hands over and over, though the chill wouldn't leave us again.

Upstairs, the air held that bruise flavor of old storm's charge, restless.

I pressed my ear to the walls and heard nothing but the faintest ash, just the shifting

of the old insettling.

I told myself I could sleep, that everything was contained if only for a little while.

But sleep was thinner than a dream.

I drifted in and out of shallow, colourless rest, sometimes I'd snap awake, convinced

I fell to hand hovering close to my face, the tickle of breath on my cheek, sometimes

I jerk up right at the softest twitch of the floorboards, expecting fresh pounding at

the basement wall.

In the chiming of the old clock told me it was midday, lonely as crossed against my

bones so fully it left me hollow.

Food felt impossible, but necessity pushed me onto unsteady feet.

The kitchen waited, quiet and raw, earthick with spent smoke.

I chewed bread and apple so slowly and yearly wet with relief when nothing tried to drag

me under the table or pull me through a rift in the wall.

Still, every window offered up visions of shifting, missed curling, retreating, but never

so far as I wished.

It was only after I found my voice again after a full liar slumped by the hearth, Margaret's

journals fan in a semicircle around my knees that I realised I needed someone else.

Humanize human warmth.

Not just a voice whispering from memory or the wivery hush of fog filled holes.

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I think I'll wait inside.

Dressed in yesterday's jeans and Margaret's old shawl, I stepped into the day.

The cold outside was cleaned by comparison, bracing enough to bring colour to my cheeks

as I headed for the main road, like soar and weak with fear I hadn't shaken off.

The village seemed abandoned at first.

Dores bolted, windows clustered with old curtains or thick glass.

Dead leaves bowled along the gutter.

I knocked at the shop and got no reply, walked past the post office, the padlock handing

with finality from the chain.

My fritz depths were swallowed by the mist and above the hush's burrows hid her left completely.

Finally, at the will behind the market, a spotted mccess and essay hunched over three shopping

baskets struggling to coax a handguard over the threshold.

She looked up as if she'd been expecting me for days.

She shouldn't be here, she said in a rascal catch by fatigue, yet her eyes soften the

words.

I didn't know where else, I croaked, wanting to spill everything, wanting her to reassure

me that what I'd seen and felt could fit in the world everyone else inhabited.

She gestured with her chin, drawing me into a thin strip of sunshine behind the shop.

The cobbles there were dry.

We leaned against the some warm stone just long enough for her to light a stub of cigarette,

the smoke tumbling away too quickly in the returning breeze.

You saw it, she said deliberately, not a question.

Nothing in my posture gave me away, or maybe it was the smudge chalk on my cuffs, the

soap rinsed only halfway from my nails.

I nodded.

She let her breath out slow as fix in the shop window.

You weren't told she murmured.

No one tells outsiders we want wanted to believe the pack could just hold, run on its own.

She pressed her hand to her chest, thumb hooked in the edge of her scarf.

You're Aunt Purcell, she tried a different way, it cost her.

I bit my lower lip until pain grounded me.

What is what's down there?

My word's fumbled, every syllable is with disbelief and new terror.

What is it that feeds there?

Older than the village she replied.

Older than any of us, always hungry, always testing.

We built over it, thinking stones and prosky tame hunger, but it's not stopped, only

quite as so long as the bargain holds.

Her fingers were the fernj of her scarf.

A ward stays, keeps a circle, candle at midnight, every night, the one left behind Margaret

she was the strongest we'd had.

My voice cracked.

Why didn't anyone tell me?

Why didn't she?

A sadness creased her face, so profound I almost jerked away.

What use would it have done?

She hoped, I think.

You could be spared she'd seen too much.

Lost too much.

Anis was gay sharpened.

She tried, child, they always do, wasn't fair it had to be one of us.

From here, always someone with a seat in the soil, and when she, when she died, things got

thinner, the hunger started pressing worse.

The street had quieted absolutely around us.

I lowered my eyes, struggling for composure.

I can't, I don't know what I meant to do, I confessed.

I honestly flicked her cigarette, lips twisting.

Say alive first, keep the circle closed, the flame lit, don't break the chain, for all

our sakes ended.

She reached out, hand rough and bone lights, squeezing my wrists.

If you get the chance to leave, take it, don't look back.

Something behind us clad her to shut her bowing shot, or just the wind end she bolted

upright.

Go home, she whispered, and don't open your door after sunset, I'll bring what help

I can.

With that she bundled up her baskets and disappeared, head low, forced lost to the

hush.

A hollow resignation followed me as I made my way back up the hill.

Every corner tested too far, every step a little heavier than the last.

I passed the shrine again at symbols staring bluntly from beneath draggled vines.

I touched the stone, fleetingly, with two fingers and let what little hope I had trickled

into the rock.

A silent bar again, if there could be such a thing.

By the time I reached the end, the light was curting gold at the edges, the air and

knife shop.

I shut every window, braised every door, checked and rechecked the cellar padlock.

The house felt twice its size, each room bigger and empty them before.

The scratching was back that evening before the sun had finished abandoning the house.

At first, light, like mice restless behind the woodwork but soon enough, it slid into

low, guttural whispering, as if someone no, several someone stood breathing just behind

a faded wallpaper.

I pressed my hand there, no not expecting warmth but something much darker.

Even the notion of running felt utterly impossible.

Trying to ground myself, I spread Margaret's journals out on the dining room table, lining

up entries and sketches like a puzzle.

The rule seemed simple, but every time I traced the ink, a new line suggested itself,

symbols must connect.

Circle must never break.

A flame must burn each midnight till dawn.

Once darkness stirs, the hunger will test through dream and waking alike.

I tore through the kitchen drawers, scavenging every candle I could find.

Some were fat and shapeless, others twisted and yellow with age.

At the stroke of midnight, as the cloth bell from above the stairs, a drew chalk and

loops marking the circle on the cello tiles and backed it up with a ring of Margaret's

salt, her old canister heavy in my palm.

The candle never black quacks again, not if I could help it stood at the circle's edge.

The match flow blowed in the swollen silence.

The first iron, I sat, knees hunched to my chest, reciting half-renumbered lullabies and

childhood prayers.

Nothing happened except the tick of my heart.

The near two in the morning, the fog pressed and so thick at the window wells I could barely

see the hand before my face.

The whispering began and knew, this time scurling, inviting, so did I see fingers chasing

at my arms, behind my ears.

Each word was a coaxing, unfinished promise, shawl and fragments tumbling and rejoining

at the edge of sense, let us inlet us out Margaret Lee Lee the candle.

I slammed my eyes shut.

The hand my eyelids, visions formed, figures in the hallway, masks look with candlelight

spinning slowly in a stately circle.

Margaret beckoning me, her hand strumbling, her math uttering warnings at once clear

enshrouded.

When the candle gutted and stretched tall, shadows swept the walled all fingers and grasping

hands and never seated just before sun split the sky open.

I stumbled to my feet, more sleep served monster than girl, and buried my face in a couch

cushions as the first bird dared its absurd son outside.

Again, a day of false comfort.

The hunger, whatever it was, needed darkness, needed dream.

I went about the motions, brushing my teeth, coiling Margaret's gaf-tight, chopping

apples that knew it tasted sweet.

Each movement was hollow.

The rooms began to twist at the edge as always covering further than their limits, reflections

flickering in glass were non-beloved.

In the mirror of the mantle that afternoon, I saw not only myself but the glimmer of another

present Margaret's familiar shape eyes wild with warning, lips mouthing something I could

not hear.

I covered the glass with a towel and retreated, wishing desperately for a friendly neighbor

or a well not governed by invisible, voracious things.

Just before sunset, another knock.

I jumped to the old fierce swampy my gut.

I considered not answering, but couldn't shake the idea it might be honestly come back

with Enzo's war, at least, company.

Instead, on the other side of the doorstep two villagers amount I'd only seen distantly,

his eyes locked on my nose, and a woman with braided hair-tuck firmly under her cap.

They looked almost sheepish or guilty, the stiffness of the posture speaking louder than

any words.

Ms. Addison, the woman, say with a brittle politeness.

We understand you're staying on at Larsper.

Her companion shot her aside long glare.

He held a bundle swaddled in brown paper, which she shifted to place in my arms.

Bread.

Cheese.

The traditional peace offerings of people who hoped to keep disaster at bay.

We know the nighto lawn, Margaret shippoles, voice trembling.

She was good to the village.

A beat.

You should keep the light burning after sunset, not just for power outages it's safer.

I nodded, hoping I'd mass my panic.

Thank you.

Neither said more.

They left as quickly as they come, heads ducked low, she was scuffing the path.

I stood with my hands full, half-lawing to beg for them to stay to help, to explain,

simply not leave me as the darkness thickened once more.

Down in the kitchen the shadows were already stretching thin.

I bolted every door, checked the circle in the cellar, refreshed the salt, set out three

candles one as Margaret had described to his backup.

The fear, by now, felt less like panic and more like an ache, familiar and constant.

When midnight told, I sat inside the circle and watched the flame fight every twitch of wind.

This night the hunger pressed harder, whisper scraping like calls in my mind, a pressure

behind my eyes threatening to burst into visions and memory.

The candle nearly died twice before writing itself.

At last, near dawn, the pounding began again softer than before, a rhythm set to the pulse

of my heart.

I could almost convince myself it sounded like Margaret knocking from the other side.

I tried, at first, to last the day upright with nothing to show from my sleepless efforts

but a mounting pile of strange, useless trivia sculled over every other surface, how long

the candle burned, with the pounding originated at the shape of the fog at dawn.

The words made centers I wrote them, then swam and twisted off the page whenever I tried

to read them back.

When I found myself drawn to Margaret's journals again, I shuffled through her earliest

entries, piecing together the fever of her preparations.

She spoke of a first sacrifice to seek her the village still tried to bury.

Each year the pack required someone to ensure the boundary held, someone chosen or left

behind.

Margaret's handwriting, previously neat, turned ragged near the end, I can't keep it

back alone.

The hunger mounts.

The villagers look away till it wants to be seen.

Every generation, one left with them, to hold or die trying.

I shuddered, bone-deep, realizing what she risked, what she chose my own family, our

blood twisted through every brick and per.

I'll come back up pretty cool.

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I think I'll wait inside.

As just crawled in, I found myself pulled to the old chess and attic one place I had not

searched since the first hour day.

I wrenched up in the lid half expecting only dust and fan instead a small, lidded wooden

box.

It was carved with those same wide branching symbols edges worn by Hans' desperate

o'living.

Inside, a whisper of white hair wrapped in linen and tied round with what looked to be

a child's friendship bracelet.

Three old coins, to arc with age, a slim bone needle, a lock of long, read a share that

could only have come from Margaret herself.

My handshook.

A memory crash, Margaret sitting cross-legged before a roaring fire telling me stories of

the lockspur in its secret heart of traditions that had to be kept, even when no one understood

why.

She'd hid in the tokens, not as mementos, but as anchors' familial, ceremonial land,

I suspected, as a desperate package of the circle of a weakened.

They melted, dreadfolding itself, into the folds of my skin.

The house vibrated with tension as though waiting for the worst to arrive.

As darkness thickened, I laid out the tokens around the candle's base, bringing them with

a fresh sifting of salt and, for the first time, whispered my own prayer nothing from any

book, just the roleplay of someone who had lost everything and could not bear to lose

us crap more.

Midnight once more, dread now both familiar and enormous.

As the candle burned, the false Margaret appeared in the corner her shape at odds with

her shadow, features rippling liquid undefined.

Her words were sharp, urgent.

Circles not enough give it memory, give it grief.

Her head caulked, a natural, as if listening to music beneath the floor.

It knows you, it wants you.

I spatted a nile, gripping the dagger so tightly my fingernails split at the beds.

Don't have me, or anyone.

There's my all bloomed sickening.

No sacrifice, no boundary, we all go.

Fog poured from every hallway.

Outside, the village lay shouted, still and unresponsive.

Red glow pulsed low and deep from behind a cellar door, an animal heartbeat.

The hunger began to press, no longer just reverses, but sent and shapeless weakness so wrongly

clothed at the lining of my throat, promises strung and ugly, glittering words.

Let us out, let us in, remember, remember.

I fell back, staggering, mind disease the walls pressed in.

Through my terror, I saw it the circle thinning, line erased in a gap with salt and chalk

it once overlapped.

The candles flame jumped spat, then shrunk into hard, blue corkscrew.

In that moment, the cello stares to sold longer than there should be, sharper with each

descending tread.

I tried to retreat, but invisible hooks spun me toward the basement.

Below, the pounding rose not just a clawing, but a shuddering fruity entire structure of

the inn.

The break to alcove bulged, spat out mortar and dust.

My memory twisted with every step, Margaret leading me by lantern light, my mother, younger

than I remembered, blocking a cellar door with her body, distant relatives, a deep recession

with hollow eyes urging me forward, all sharing a piece of my name.

Foglick the cellars, each well more solid than the luster congregation of hunger shadows.

The circle had breached.

The burning candle guttered out.

My heart seized.

Then, from behind the fracture wall, a voice not hungers, not mine, but Margaret's steady

and defiant, the chain isn't broken if you choose to bear.

I screamed, angry and afraid, both child and grown woman, I won't, I can't, let me

go let us go, all of us, but the pressure grew pulsing.

The vision of sacrifice sharpened, Margaret kneeling on this very floor, drawing her

own blood into the dust, chanting not to defeat the hunger, but to keep it pleased, at

bay, and away from the world above.

In a frenzied tumble, a snash who tokens the hair at the coins, the needle, the bristles

laying them once more, not in a perfect circle, but in the only pattern my mind could make sense

of a spiral, inward meant to draw something home.

That well from my split fingernail, I pressed it to the linen.

The flame flickered back to miserable life as I whispered, let me be the ward, not the

feast.

The pounding hasstated.

Fog's world close, faces blinking in and out, Margaret's, my own at different ages,

dozens of unfamiliar eyes, lipped mouthing the word hold.

I repeated the plea again and again, until it was hardly words but animal need, hold,

let me hold it.

What followed was not an answer, but an exhalation of sucking silence, a pause of the

houses if listening for judgment.

The brook shivered.

The crack stopped spreading.

The voices dropped to low muttering, less needy, more tired.

The candle spotted becapped its glow, small and land.

The coal persisted, now gentler, heavy but not deadly.

The fog retreated, inch by inch, curling along windows and under doors until, by the time

the first pink streak split the sky, the seller's only company was me and his silk, sweat

and salt stinging every open nick, had sagging under the confession that I would not now,

believing.

I climbed to the kitchen, muscles shuddering, barely registering my own weight.

On the side, stillness bird calls emerging one by one as if embarrassed to sing after

such a night.

The village had not burned.

The increaked and groaned beheld.

Later that morning, as I sat with Margaret's journals in the last crust of bread, Mrs.

Annisly knocked, slow and soft.

She anted the words for what sat between us, her eyes, wet and haunted, told enough.

She brought me a sturdy candle and a coil of fresh white cord.

He the ward now, she said, a chingly gentle.

He won't be able to go, enough for a time, maybe not ever.

In my bones, I believed her.

The world beyond the indoor seemed impossibly far.

I'd already tried to wander away, past cold back, her eyes and folded into the fog.

My steps always soaking home.

No buscane, no curse stopped.

Even phone calls faded to static, as though my voice existed elsewhere.

Annisly lingered a moment, I searched my face for cracks.

Bring the bell if it's bad, the rest well, will remember, will bring food when we can.

Her hand on my shoulder was warmer than any candle.

She left, and I resumed my new routine, cleaning, sorting through neither hope nor despair,

sitting the circle, waiting for night.

The weeks blurred.

Each evening, as fog slid at the hillside, I made ready laying out the candles, ringing

the warts with salt, anchoring the tokens.

At midnight, the flame flayed, the voices swelled, the scratching returned.

Sometimes the pounding threatened another breach.

Each night, I pressed back, what every ounce of will left me.

After a time, the hunger learned the shape of me.

The temptations grew slow, versus promising escape, secrets whispered in my mother's

lute, future visions where the patch was broken and the village prospered, so long as

I gave up my post.

I resisted, because to do less was to deliver a world to a thing that would never be

sated, only emboldened.

Sometimes it told myself I was strong.

Sometimes I only wiped.

The villager was visited rarely.

They always left gifts at the stoop baskets, jaws, once even a fat tardy cat that made

itself at home purring in the warm patch where my shadow fell.

The cess Annisly brought books, puzzles, rusting tins of tea.

He stayed only so long as the wind remained mild and the light gold never after dusk.

Days grew sire and slow, then, with the turn of summer, almost bright.

I kept my vigil.

The hunger did not sleep, but it grew less greedy as satisfied, perhaps, by the presence

of someone willing.

While simply biting its time, patient as old mountains.

One day, I tried the road again, walking downhill for fresh clear day.

For hours, I wandered, always hopeful, but every path bent gently back to the crumbling

sign at the engaged.

I laughed then, short and sharp, and named myself what I had become the Addison, locks

for his new stanker, blood, and bunshaped to an old, urgent need.

At night, I sometimes dreamed of the cellar not as it is, but as Margaret first found

it, clean stone, fat candles, as warm as any holding place could be.

She sits by my side, pale but content her fingers warm in mine, whispering, we keep it

so.

We hold, for them, for us, all the women before her flicker ran, and out of sight,

nodding solemnly, hands clasped.

And then the dreams wrought at the edges, splitting into shadow, hunger wetting through

cracks, voices sliding up to a break, we want no more wards, only open doors.

I wake, sweating, hollow light, but each time I go to the cellar, and light the candle

once more.

Each time, the pounding wanes.

Months pass.

They cat grows fat and sleepy.

I tend Margaret's garden, and the old trinous side-town scrubbing moss from the wise-shaped

carving, placing a coin and a twist of yarn, with the roots break stone.

I see faces in the fog sometimes, but none draw close, none demand.

One night, near the edge of sleep, I hear voices in the walls clear and beckoning, sounding

not hungry now, but mournful.

You are us, they murmur.

You are now to line.

Resigned, I take out Margaret's last batted ledger, and begin my own warnings.

I write simply, in my own settling hand, if you come here, be wary.

Mine the symbols keep the flame.

Do not trust the hunger, no matter whose face it wears.

Below me, as the night stretches taught, scratching begins a new insistent, clever, bolder.

I place my hands over the fresh chalk lines, steady my thought against the coming irons.

The window pains tremble at the weight of gathering fog.

I cannot see the village, nor the path out, nor any promise beyond the bounds of this

cursed tethered in.

But as I left my candle to the glass, and what shadows call at the walls, I tell myself,

as Margaret must have, one more night.

One more circle closed.

One more dawn kept safe.

In that lonely vigil, I keep my place unsure if I hold the hunger at bay, or only give

it new ways to dream, but knowing that what must go on until someone wiser or stronger

leaves me at last.

The scratching resolves, pauses, and resumes always there, always hungry, waiting for the day,

perhaps, when it learns what comes next.

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The scratching rose in pitch, the rhythm shifting.

Not random, not animal anymore.

It sounded like fingers spelling out a message snared in some ancient cyclical cord.

Even the cat bristleed at the baseboard, honches covering, ears flat.

I watched as peoples go wide, reflecting what little light I coaxed from the kerosene

lamp.

It went still, then dotted in the low, crud scuttle toward the Paula, verbrushing the

leg of a chair Margaret used to claim as her own.

My hand tightened compulsively and the notebook I'd left open on the kitchen table, a list

meant to reassure, not only evidence of how few tasks remained to distract me.

Beyond the model of gas, the night was thick with fog, the windows reflecting overlapping

versions of my face layered and uncertain.

I could not sleep.

I tried to read a chapter, made tea I left cooling beside the sink, watched the candles

flame strain against every stray breath.

The house performed its liturgy of eerie quiet, then a creek, then a drawn-out exhalation

from the pipes deep beneath the stairs.

And after a while, those ever-boulders cratches stitched upward, sending tides of shivers

through the floorboards.

When that last exhaustion forced me into a fragile drows, my dreams provided no solace.

I walked circles to her home that rearranged itself behind if he closed door holes that

bent into vaults, bedrooms that opened into damp forests, cellars, and frilling in impossible

calls.

Each step took me back to the beginning, the breakdown cove, now crumbling, now restored,

always bleeding a blackness that pulls to your own like a mouth.

I walked shivering, my pillow gritty with saw from tears of sweat.

The cat had pressed up against my knees trembling.

The candle, nearly spent, got her low.

I touched my temples and found them raw as if I'd been pressing my skull against rough

flaster all night.

From somewhere else to room I hadn't entered, or perhaps the stairwell I heard the hush

of words.

Not the slurred, luring voices of hunger, but a single, deliberate phrase, it's almost

timely.

I jerked up hot lurching, Margaret.

The name burst out before I could wade the risk.

Then, in a hallway, another insistent round of scratching, this one travelling, arcing

across the windscoating, drawing nearer to the cellar door.

I steeled myself and rose, slip a softer over the walked wood, hands bowled in the pockets

of my dressing gown.

The lamp I clung and so itinered to me, my own shadow the only thing moving in the

brittle hush.

I reached the mouth of the stairs.

Below, the ear-alumed black, heavier than it should be.

I drew a breath and stepped down, the cat has stating at the top before letting out a

church owl and vanishing behind a bookcase.

I carried, I thought, with a flicker of envy.

The cellar's cold chewed at my cheeks, trapping the memory at the sort of cold it feels personal.

Each day sounded hollow, though I'd have swarmed the last time I'd checked a planks

with a consternity.

Done I went, feet careful, the circle of lamplight shrinking as I descended.

The bricked alcove was visible even before I reached the bottom.

Its outline had changed more building now than more to pale with a fluorescence.

The air thick with the scent of stone, earth, and something newly rotten.

The spiral of chalk had drawn only a few nights ago lay mostly intact, but filming

moles corrupting along its edge.

As soon as I stepped onto the last stair, the scratching started, then stopped.

The silence was so profound that it wondered if the world above still existed.

I crouched beside the circle, breathing shallowly.

You aren't getting out, I was predelestifying, morally, not tonight.

The voice that answered slid just beneath hearing, and yet every word was clear, let

me in, Lee, let me out, choose.

I closed my eyes clutching the spiral of tokens at my throat.

No.

The house responded, not with rage, but with a juttering, exhausted sigh.

The brick swelled, a thin crack lancing up the center.

Mr. something like it leaked through coiling.

And within the fog, faces pressed children, women, men each holding my gaze for a terrible

incident before dissolving into the mass.

You cannot keep me forever, sleep with us, the faucet sang, no longer strictly mugged

nor precisely my own, but of course, an inheritance forced on generations of wardens

and daughters and frightened villages too paralyzed by history to intervene.

I swallowed and traced the chalk lines in new, hand-shaking.

Soul-quivered on the stone, though they are remained perfectly still.

Against my wishes, my merry-stodd shop as I smugglers face the night she'd sent me away

as a child, her voice rough, her hand-shaking as she'd nodded the red scarf at my throat

go, Lee.

Don't come back.

Not until you must.

I bent low and pressed my forehead to the stern, letting my tears run into the cracks.

Take me if you wish, but leave them alone.

The reply was unclear, a sudden building of pressure that made my nose bleed and metallic

trickle across my lip.

I let the blood fall, coloring the chalk line red.

When the drops touched, the air twisted, the chorus dissolving into a single brittle voice,

word, warden, angstay.

I remained crutch, half defeated, until the first inkling of sunrise reached the high

window at light, soft and wild, filtering through dust so old it might have been born

alongside the hunger itself.

Only then did the oppression lift enough for me to breathe easy.

I staggered upstairs, half blind teeth chattering and shirt soaked in sweat.

The rest of the day was like passing through invisible water every movement weighed down,

every attempt at normalcy shrunken to gestures of habit, not hope.

I went through the routines, breakfast, lost in taste, herbs gathered in the garden, the

cat stalking at my heels once more.

Mrs. Annisley did not come that day, nor the one after.

The villagers, when glimpse through fog or between slats and the shutters, stepped out

of sight, their offerings thinning.

Even the shrine at the edge of the woodhunch lower, as if overwhelmed by the responsibility

of standing guard one more night.

Late one afternoon, as the light lost its grip, a new sound fredded the unshushed chime,

metallic, faint but insistent.

At first, I thought of the bill from the post office clock, but as I listened, I realized

it told not from outside, but from the upper floor.

I almost ignored it, one more artifact of a mine ground down to the stub, but it would

not cease.

Upstairs, the hallway was longer than it should have been.

Shadows peeled away from the baseboards.

Adora, at the end, I didn't quite remember opened onto a narrow rumour nursery, or something

like one, with a single wooden cradle, its size pinned it with faded vented flowers.

The bell rested to top the cradle's headboard of Margaret's old skull bell, the one she'd

used to wait me on when tomorrow morning's for hot chocolate and stores.

I blinked, stagged closer, and saw the bell was reingently though no hand touched it.

As my fingers reached, a chill deepened, and then a vision took me Margaret kneeling at

the cradle, drawing chalk symbols on the floor as a baby a shadow, remembering slept, eyes

wide and unblinking, silent as a stone.

Her face, pinched and tired, bent over scrolls of wide branches and double crescents.

I jolted back.

They hind me, the air hardened to more presence than emptiness, more threat than comfort.

The hungry thing beneath the end was not patient, it had waited and now pressed against every

seam, every memory, every ounce of will I had tormented over the lonely months.

The scratching, loud and out, traced up the stairs, ticked to collect the dull edge of

a knife dragged along bone.

I reeled, clutched the bell, nearly fell as I raised downstairs.

Below, the kitchen windows boiled with fog.

The cellar door rattled in its frame.

The candle supply was low only to remained, stock and stubby, the wax knicked a bit teeth

in the hope that nothing would come from me before I burned through the last night.

I went to the table, sat the bell beside the candle, and began the circle again, salt

chalk, tokens placed in their careful spiral.

I drew in breath, held Margaret's journal, and whispered her words, my own voice joining

hers.

Circle I'm broken, candle ally, anchor in blood and memory let this line hole.

No answer.

Not a first.

In a wall's moot contracted inward and outward in a rhythm that pressed on my lungs.

The cat shrieked bolted for the pantry as wide with terror.

Out of the corner of my vision, forms flickered in Margaret.

My own child, a chateau, strangers wearing the look of family, each one rooting me here,

a chain I could not break.

The cellar door burst and would on a gust of wind so cold it burned exposed flesh.

The brick alcove shuddered, more debancing loose, cracks yawning as they head in the first,

worse night the hunger pressed forward and patient jubilant.

The voices overlapped in a babble, all versions of myself and every woman who had come before.

But now the shape behind the wall grew deliberate less brew, more cunning.

It cruned.

Let me out, be free, the world does you nothing bleep, you keep this place for what?

I shut my eyes, hands clamped over my ears, news pressed into the spiral.

Full of, I said, not sure if I meant Margaret, the village, myself, or all those nameless voices

in the fog.

To keep the circle, so no one else has to break.

A rip tore through me, pain beyond the body memory, history, desire jumbling into a final,

brittle command.

Stay or open, stay or open, stay or open, I sobbed pain rippling from scalp to feet.

Stay I begged, I'll stay just let the village be, something shifted.

The cracks in the wall wept black, then ebbed.

The forces settled to a steady thrum.

The fog outside hesitated at the window, then slowly, sweetly unfurled, streaming away

over the hills.

I thought I heard Margaret's voice again gentle, exhausted, but relieved, thank you.

The candle brightened, slim blue to steady gold.

The bell still clutched in my shaking hand, rhyme once the most ordinary, humbly sound

in all these years.

I slept that morning cold beside the table, cat cold on my chest, a first sunlight since

who knew when spilling candid yellow over the mottletiles.

After that, things changed suddenly, but for good.

The scratching slowed.

Villages began to leave gifts at the stoop again bred, bundles of chars, jaws of summer

preserves.

The sessanessly returned, this time with a basket of duck eggs and a tentative smile,

and sat with me while tea-steamed the dust from our ferrets.

She said little, but her hand on mine told me the rest.

You can ask for help, she said softly will come now, you've done enough alone.

The hunger in the walls receded, not vanished, becaused, pacified by understanding not just

the ritual, not just the candle, but choice.

Each night I built the circle, lit the flame, set my prayer, and found the way to childlight

her, not absent, never that, but possible to bear.

The house yielded to me and you.

Margaret's room swelled with peas, and the mirrors reflected only my own face drawn, sober,

but recognisably mine.

The fog, when it came slid past as if respecting the boundary set by hopeful, tired hands.

I did not leave, but I was not alone.

When I gardened, the laughter of children drifted up from the village below.

When I walked the edge of the trees, I felt watched, yes, but not with malice-only witness,

memory, warning.

Every so often, near midnight the scratching would sharpen just long enough to remind me

the hunger learned and waits.

But so do weed awards the key percent of night, the boundaries hold.

For now, that is enough.

And that is the end.

Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.

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