June Challenge - "The man she buried is back and knocking."

She buried and he is back knocking on her door.

The man she had buried was back and knocking. Paula looked through the door visor and blinked. How could this be? She had raised their son and sent him off to university, lived through birthdays and Christmases, weddings and illness, all on her own. Life had moved on without him, and now here he was. Mark’s voice cut through the numbness that was already rising. ‘Open up, love, it’s me. I’m soaked and it’s bloody cold out here.’

Her hand hovered over the lock. This man looked like Mark and sounded like him, even stood like him, but there was something in his posture, in the way his shoulders hunched as if time had never passed, that did not feel quite right. But before she could decide what to do, he bent down, lifted the garden gnome, and retrieved the spare key she had forgotten was still there. The door rattled open under his hand. Paula took two steps back and placed one hand over her heart, which thudded like a slow drum.

Friends go out to a bar to have a few drinks. Man tries to buy them a drink none of them reciprocate he gets mad.

In a world where young witches summon animal familiars to guide their magic, one girl breaks the sacred rules. While her peers receive pigs and hens, she conjures something forbidden: a man.

Patrick O'Connor, a wealthy Irishman, goes missing in August 1849 and what unfolded is a tragic tale of love, lust, greed and murder in Victorian London.

The man she buried is back and knocking.

When she turned the twisted crimson key in the keyhole of the green rusted doorknob beneath the stained chalk window of the magnificent door, she heard a distinct click.

Ella froze. The knock was soft—almost polite. But it rattled through her bones like thunder.

It had been three years. Three long, lonely years since she’d stood beside an open grave, rain soaking through her veil, watching the coffin of her husband—ex-husband, really—sink into the mud. Paul had died in a car crash. No witnesses, only twisted steel and fire. She’d cried, of course. But not for love. For relief.

Lila, a veterinarian haunted by her sister Emily’s brutal murder in 1995, arrives in Vegas for her best friend’s bachelorette party. When a hospital scare delays her friends, Lila spends the first night alone until she spots a man in a bar she believes is Emily’s killer, the notorious “Spike Killer.” Driven by rage, she lures him to her Airbnb, drugs him, and buries him alive in the Nevada desert. But the next day, as her friends arrive, the man she buried returns, dragging her into his truck for a confrontation. He claims he’s not the killer but the twin of the real culprit, long dead. As they head back to Vegas, Lila reveals details about her friends, unaware of the bloodstained spiked rod hidden beneath her seat; or that her captor’s twin story is a lie, and he’s been the killer all along, now targeting her and her friends.