When the room went dark, she heard her name. This all began a few days ago when the night air was heavy with a thickness that Eleanor Hayes had not expected. There was something ethereal about the mist that snaked around the old oaks, meandering in between as if a wraith itself; holding back the encroaching darkness, which began to consume Blackwood Manor. He felt a quiet, a hush more extreme than absence — an unsettling silence that swept the land as if the ground itself exhaled a secret too terrible to tell. Eleanor hugged her coat around her, the bite of autumn colored air stinging at her fingers and reinforcing the urgency that had returned her to this forsaken locale.

She looked over at Marcus Flynn, his skeptical gaze on the manor's imposing profile. His lips were a line stretched almost too thin, and the crowd heard skepticism in his refusal far more than they heard it in words. “You really believe your friend vanished ‘because’ of this place?” he said with a bemused voice.

Eleanor didn’t answer immediately. Her gaze moved past the snarled iron gate, to rest on the shadowy form of Thomas Grayson, still and silent by the porch. A man as if hewn from the very stone of the manor, stoic, gnarled and with eyes that conveyed hidden layers of unspoken knowledge. Whenever she looked him in the eye, unsettling waves simmered at the back of her neck, like she stood on a precipice of truths that she just wasn’t supposed to get.

Sarah Kendal’s laugh had rung out here, and Tyler imagined it as it must have sounded once, bright with hope, untainted by shadows. Only the lack clawed at the fringes of her consciousness now.

The loose gravel beneath my feet snapped loudly. The hunger for the inexplicable that seemed to haunt Lily Chambers, the little girlish figure at her elbow, drew near to Eleanor’s side. Her wide, unafraid eyes peered into the gloom where branches twisted and looped like bony fingers over their heads. “Do you hear that?” Lily whispered, barely audible.

Eleanor strained to listen. Nothing for a moment — only the wind’s plaintive moan through the broken windowpanes. And then, faintly, ever so lightly, came a whisper in the silence that wrapped around them like chill wind.

“Eleanor…”

Her heart gave an uneasy jolt before her common sense could object. The animals froze, every beat of her canon alight in a pulse-racing suspension. The summons was inimitable, but utterly impossible — how could the night usher itself with her name? She gulped, eyes flicking over the dark sultry curves of the house’s shadowed exterior.

“Did you—?” Marcus opened his mouth, but a clatter echoed from the house. All three glanced around, the sound bouncing off of the thick silence.

From the porch, Thomas appeared and I could read nothing on his face. “The house always has something to say when night comes,” he said as an aside. “But sometimes, it’s a warning.”

As they neared the thick oak door, Eleanor’s thoughts strayed to Agnes Blackwood. The old woman had looked them in the village square that time of day, with her gnarled hands trembling when she voiced her enigmatic warnings. “The manor remembers every secret. It summons the lost, and once it has a name for them, it will never release them again.”

Underneath the manor now, those words thrummed with horrible truth.

Once inside there was a chill in the air and everything smelled old, like dust and death with a tinge of cobwebbed memories. The heavy beam of Eleanor's torch broke the darkness, lighting native people on scabbed wallpaper and ancestors in faded portraits whose eyes would surely have flickered with silent accusation. Marcus was stood a few feet inside the entrance, arms folded, but even his disbelief began to waver under the accusatory climate.

Lily, however, ventured deeper, unfazed. There was something about the restless energy here that pulled her closer. “There is something alive in the house,” she mumbled, “something that waits.”

A soft thud sounded on the floor above — light and purposeful, as though someone was carefully walking in the dark. The electric light winked and failed. They were in utter blackness.

Eleanor’s breath caught: the perfect silence broken by nothing but her own heart beating wildly in her chest. She searched for her flashlight, but it was useless: the batteries were dead. From out of that eerie blackness, a faint presence was felt: it sounded like no more than a whisper against the cold silence; and yet its message was clear.

“Eleanor…”

The sound was small, far but insistent. It was the same fragile urgency she had just heard, but now it carried a greater depth, as though there was a desperate plea caught between life and death. Her skin prickled, the hair on her arms and neck standing up as the night appeared to lean in closer, almost breathing her energy.

“Who’s there?” Eleanor’s voice wobbled, brittle against the emptiness.

The silence seemed to go on forever before a second murmur wafted through the room.

“Evie…”

Her head thumped in the direction of the name, local legend! ghosts!, that was just a new way to stop thinking. The victim of a fatal shooting whose sorrowful plight had become woven into the house’s grim landscape was said to wander its halls, calling out to whoever might hear her.

Eleanor's friends sat stunned, like victims of individual nightmares. Marcus shook his head. “It’s just the house settling,” he insisted, his voice tight. “Stress, wind, perception playing tricks.”

But Eleanor wasn’t convinced.

Memories rushed back — bits of childhood nights spent playing with shadows with Sarah, tales shared around snapping flames and the crushing heaviness of her friend’s abrupt disappearance. She remembered Father Callum Reid’s words earlier, his reluctant confession steeped in his personal demons: “Some darkness is not meant to be faced alone. It even, sometimes, calls us — beckons us to what we fear most.”

In answer, the house appeared to murmur once more — an indistinct medley of broken voices ebbing and flowing like breakers under ground.

“Eleanor…”

“Sarah…”

“Help…”

A chill breath tickled Eleanor’s ear, causing her to stop in her tracks. Beneath the manor, where the horror had begun, somewhere outside of everything, away from everyone — it shifted through the dark with a formless hunger that could never be sated.

But, even in her terror, a wonderful clearness came to Eleanor at that moment. This wasn’t a mistake, coincidental or anything of that kind. And the manor’s livid whispers were inextricably bound to whatever had happened to Sarah, and now, to her.

Thomas came up next, his voice solid but urgent. “You heard it, then. The first whisper. It’s the house meaning it has decided to talk TO you.”

“And what if I don’t answer?” “Can’t we just not answer?” Eleanor asked, despite the fact that there wasn’t really any getting out of the call.

Agnes’s heartless words came back to her: ‘One the whisper knows your name you cannot pretend it does not. The manor will have its due.”

Lily's voice pierced through the tension, tinged with both terror and wonder. “What happens next?”

Before anyone could react, something caught in Eleanor’s vision – a figure, somehow blurred but terribly recognizable, glided momentarily through the dappled lights and darks like from within a dream. The air was now colder, as if the manor sighed with a breath of old evil flowing from it.

And in the next moment Eleanor understood what the first whisper meant, for it was: ‘Come to us in darkness and join that which is hidden from mortal eyes.’

And down in the bulwarks, Deep there The Shadow lay waiting Its voice an irresistible lure to those that hearkened.

The whisper had started when the lights first went down.

Eleanor Hayes was listening.