Brittle leaves scratched across Blackwood Manor’s frigid, cracked stone paths as the wind whipped through venerable oaks that surrounded it. Eleanor Hayes faced the great oak door, her breath misting in the cold of the evening. The dark stains on the bowed wood appeared almost sentient, whispering secrets she was longing to know. Since Sarah vanished the manor had been calling her like a siren’s song—resistant, mysterious and tinged with doom.

And here, in this maze of dilapidated walls and faded wallpaper, symbols and signs started to dissolve the veil that had shrouded the horror stitched into the weft of estate’s dark past — a language that was as old as recollection itself, a cipher, and an omen.

Eleanor had spent the last three days or so interrogating Thomas Grayson, the mysterious caretaker of the manor who spoke in nothing but riddles and half-truths. His knowledge seemed old, as if handed down from the soil. Later that day, as the sun hung low beneath the horizon and shadows crept through narrow angles, Thomas summoned Eleanor to the library—an imposing room filled with musty books and curiosities from seagoing cults.

“There are marks,” Thomas whispered, “hidden in plain view. Barely more than scratches to the untrained eye, but each serves a purpose.”

He ran a finger over a worn symbol etched round the edge of the ancient mahogany desk—a twisted spring interwoven with broken lines, a device Eleanor recognised from Agnes Blackwood’s maniacal rantings.

"Old Agnes of the village was the first to put Eleanor on her guard. “The manor speaks in signs, child,” Agnes had said, her voice faint but steady. “The shape is abiding the curse and who sees, survives.

Agnes’s warnings had not made sense at the moment. And now, standing face to face with the enigmatic carving, it was impossible not to do so.

The symbols were everywhere.

Then in faded scratchy claw-like marks on the frayed walls of Sarah’s room, Eleanor observed intricate designs. And Lily Chambers, inevitably drawn to the darker edges of the manor house, discovered a mysterious chalk drawing on the floorboards of the attic: an elaborate pentagram that was somehow broken in places, disrupted as if someone had attempted to crack its hold.

Dr Samuel Whitaker, who was called in to assess what the oppressive atmosphere of the manor might be doing to the mind, found the longevity of their appearance intriguing. “To be clear, they’re not just decoration,” he rationalized, shuffling through some notes. “These marks touch something subconsciously Fear of venomous animals is a fear deep in man’s subconscious.” They play with perception, turning us paranoid, maybe even making us hallucinate.”

And still he could not quite shake off the deep-set uneasiness that seemed to lace every line, every contour gouged or scribbled by a trembling hand… or something far worse.

Marcus Flynn laughed at the idea of a supernatural purpose.

“There are rational explanations,” he complained one evening as they sat in a circle around the manor’s ancient dining table. “Weathering, ” old architecture,” prankish teenagers with chalk — nothing inherently mystical there.”

But Marcus’s skepticism wavered when the researchers found the most chilling set of symbols. Behind a door hidden in the library was an epiphany, carved into frames of vellum and inscribed with arcana in a spiral bound to draw the eye inward, making it dizzy.

Beneath was written in a scrawl of indifferent ink a name.

“Evie Sinclair,” whispered Eleanor. The name sounded through the stillness like a bell ringing in the distance.

Evie — the hunted spirit, newly dedicated to the in-between Intricate whisperer of lost names Lost one calling from a void interfaced And beautiful there She just wants someone like you She prays you mean what she reads.

Then the barest rustle of a voice sounded as if from out of the very walls.

“Eleanor…”

Father Callum Reid had produced a cross from his pocket, holding it as he walked towards the wall. His anguished history of faith and doubt only made the manifestations more wrenching. His quaking fingers traced the glyphs and his lips mouthed silent prayers, a hope against the encroaching darkness.

“This is not just an ordinary haunting,” he mumbled. ‘These are wards, spells used to control or bind forces beyond our ken. Blackwood Manor has a curse on it even the living can see.”

Agnes had mentioned as much, repeating tales that were so old they barely even qualified as oral traditions—of long-dead manor owners attempting to bind unspeakably evil things through esoterically charged symbolism. But the dark being he had dubbed The Shadow had corrupted those constraints, transforming what should have been shield into a prison and scourge.

In a cramped, little room that had once been Sarah's, Eleanor discovered a journal--its leather binding frayed and pages browned with age. Sarah’s pen captured a mind in the grip of terror and fascination, mapping the discovery of symbols and signs that she came to believe were related to a voice that only she could hear.

But one page had caught his attention--a poorly rendered sketch of a circle filled with curious writing and in the center, a lone closed eye. Beneath it, a chilling phrase:

*The eyes summon us, the names hold us. Pay close attention or be left in the dark.” *

The very room quaked in Eleanor’s eyes which saw it thickening out and trembling, as if there was breath in the walls – treacherous breath.

Night after night, Lily once again found herself back in the secret passages of Blackwood Manor sketchpad in hand. Her childhood curiosity was a light in the gathering dark. She touched the symbols with unsteady fingertips, at times murmuring the names she heard in fever dreams.

Eleanor looked at Lily, and she felt the thick ropes of history and the numinous knot together inside her. Every single symbol had been a puzzle piece in a sadistic game that connected the dead Sarah to trapped spirits and to The Shadow’s thirst.

Even Whitaker himself admitted that the fright of which we speak, in this case was transformed into something meta-physical— where the symbols acted as conduits warping reality and channeling howling darkness.

One afternoon, in crisp air and beneath the dull gleam of a scurrying sky, Eleanor went up to Agnes Blackwood once more. The parchment-like skin of the old woman seemed no less heavy, when one saw the uncanny clearness of her eyes.

“The signs,” Agnes croaked, “point to the limits. They protect. They imprison. But above all—they call.”

“Call what?” Eleanor pressed, her voice low.

“It’s the names that are forgotten,” Agnes replied, looking down at the ground. The souls lost. The Shadow waiting. When your name is called in the darkness, a whisper it is not. It’s an invitation. And a sentence.”

That night, under the sagging rafters of the manor, Father Callum conducted a silent ceremony among the carvings in the wooden columns. In Latin his voice climbed as he tried to break the invisible chains that bound the house, holding its workers in their place.

But as the prayer went on, the walls seemed to beat. There was a dim glow of symbols—similar to embers flickered by cold fire, then nothing.

The silence was shattered by the sound of a whisper “Eleanor…”

Her name, chosen from the silence, a ghostly echo that offered salvation—or obliteration.

Over the next days, Eleanor patched together pieces from all sources—the cryptic carvings Thomas had discovered, the warnings Agnes spoke of, the dreams Dr. Whitaker described—and the broken notes from Sarah’s journal.

The symbols were a language — a curse written not in pentagrams and crosses but geometries and syllables — that mapped a space between, where the living encountered the dead. The manor existed between those boundaries and it fed The Shadow, eating the people who saw it signs.

Eleanor traced the spiral of glyphs that wound through which she was certain would take her farther into the bowels of the house, and knew a cruel paradox: only by admitting to these symbols and following where it prompted would she ever hope to unravel this misery.

But to listen was to court disappearing into the darkness forever.

Sitting with her back against a shattered wall the symbols wound around her like a snake. Thomas was close, offering no reassurance, just a solemn nod.

“You’ve got to be thinking about why you’re here,” he said. “The signs have chosen you — not to observe, but to warn.”

Lily flitted, bristling sketched clutched to her chest, and Marcus stood resolutely sceptical despite the color draining from his complexion.

Far off, the wind blew a chorus of whispers—names fluttering in the dark.

There was one voice above all.

Her name.

Eleanor shut her eyes and just listened.

The night answered.

And the signs began to move.

The graffiti at Blackwood Manor wasn't just the representation of symbols and words - it was much more than that. It was fear itself. It was the blueprint to damnation. And, apparently, it was also a young girls map to salvation. Every etched rune, murmured by name, was one more footfall on the frigid road to the sickening realization that when your own name echoed through shadowed corridors in this house, no one could leave..