The great house rose like a slumbering giant against the forlorn sky of slate, and the wind rattled and shook at buried ancient trees. Eleanor Hayes was waiting on the gravel path, breath misting in the cold. The suffocating weight of the manor’s ambiance lay on her chest. She knew why she had come back. Sarah’s disappearance was a knot in her mind, constricting every passing hour. And inside those worn walls secrets spoke — a language only half understood, half afraid.

Marcus Flynn, who stood restlessly beside her, was sceptical in a way that had become both weapon and burden. “You do realize you’re not going to find anything in there? It’s just an old house, Hayes.”

Eleanor looked straight into his eyes and they were as unruffled, a bit on the steely side. “It’s never just an old house, Marcus. Not this one.”

Lily Chambers stood behind them, gripping the edge of her coat with tightly clenched fists, eyes darting from the towering portico to its dark reflection. The girl had always bragged about her fascination with the supernatural, but now even she seemed to be losing her nerve. The slightest tremble in her breath was audible to Eleanor.

He materialized from the night itself and was standing in the doorway before her, with that curious expression around his mouth. His presence unnerved her--a man who was too at ease in the dark of the woods about the house. His look, inscrutable and profound, rested for an instant upon Eleanor ere he moved his head with a motion towards the door. “If you’re going to figure this place out, well then, you’d better listen when the silence talks.

The group moved inside. The door creaked shut with a heavy groan behind them, and everything went silent except for the quiet dripping of water from down the corridors.

Eleanor’s feet echo on the floorboard, worn smooth by countless footsteps over years. Rooms opened before them like frozen time, every inch saturated with memory and terror. Sarah’s spirit, or whatever was left of it, deeper inside the house somewhere.”

With a wave of the hand, Dr. Samuel Whitaker pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose, keen eyes landing on what everyone else could only feel—the way shadows gathered under chandeliers like pools of darkness, the chill you could dismiss as just cold despite layers and even shiver though it was so far from frigid outside. He wasn’t here just for the horror stories. His work required that he see how such isolation impacted the mind, how fear had a bodily form. “This place fucks with the mind,” he mumbled to himself as much as anything.

Agnes Blackwood’s voice insinuated itself into people’s minds like a warning from beyond your grave. They know the old woman they met, hunched over the fire in their village pub, who made no sense when she spoke and smelled of something old and frightening. “The curse is not asleep anymore, none of you,” she had said (with her eyes showing some kind of terror). “It waits in the silence, calling names it has no right to know.”

Now, her words echoed inside Eleanor’s head. The house was listening. It murmured between breaths.

The group then split to explore as the night grew late. Eleanor felt herself pull in the direction of the east wing, that seemed thick with oppressive silence. Her nostrils were filled with a scent of damp wood and something older, like decay pushed back for ages. Outside a door she halted, the name ‘Sarah’ pulsing dully in her soul—a fine thread dragging on and on.

“Eleanor,” said something so faint that it was nearly lost in the silent air.

She froze. The noise was unmistakable — her name, uttered from the void.

Her hallway stretched empty behind her. No one stirred.

“Did you hear that?” Lily sounded half scared, half intrigued as she moved in closer, the beam of her flashlight wavering.

“It’s nothing,” Marcus called back, his voice dismissive but fingers tightening around the torch.

Eleanor's heart thudded in her chest, each lub-dub echoing through the chilling silence. The house groaned and sighed around her, echoes of names, memories calling out in the musty cool air.

Then, the light fluttered out.

It was as if darkness itself had smothered them, thick and choking.

The voice came, it returned, in the black silence — it was so much clearer now than before — and more insistent.

“Eleanor…”

The group tensed up, taking in rapid, shallow breaths. Dr. Whitaker’s placid veneer shattered, his voice barely steady. “We need to stay calm. It’s probably just auditory hallucinations due to stress and fear.”

But Eleanor knew better. Some thing in her knew that voice--not human figment, but something older, more monstrous.

Some vague shadow passed across the far wall, vague and formless. The evil that was the Shadow had started to move.

“Why are you here?” Eleanor demanded, aloud, throwing down the challenge to the darkness.

I shivered slightly, though it was not such a cold night, but the wind froze me as if sighing with sorrow itself It replied again in that voice as of whispers under the world's forgotten names.

“Because you called…”

Already her skin was a mass of goose pimples with fear and with feverish anxiety.

Behind the silence, a soft noise began—muted footprints; heavy and measured thuds from within the heart of the manor. Eleanor’s mind buzzed as puzzle pieces clattered together: Sarah vanished, Agnes’ briefs, ghostly whispered names from Evie Sinclair lingering in that place suspended between worlds.

“Evie,” she breathed, intuition sharpening. “Is it you?”

The silence stretched, and then a shape shuffled into the grotto—pallid, translucent; its eyes were empty pits with a mute com­pelling appeal. A soul not living nor dead, lingering due to the curse of a history with the manor.

Lily made a little gasp and put out her hand to touch the vision.

“Don’t,” Eleanor warned. “She’s not here for us. She’s a message—and a warning.”

There was this tidal wave of unbearable sorrow emanating from Evie. Now her voice was a wailing chorus of whispering moans, sad names whispered through the dark.

“You have to get out before it gets you too.

Just then, the door behind them closed with a resounding thud. Panic surged.

“Father Reid!” Marcus shouted, voice cracking.

The priest came forth, his face ashen but determined and he gripped a battered crucifix fiercely. “The Shadow eats fear for breakfast. We’ve got to deal with it or we’re going to get consumed.”

Their eyes were locked, their mutual determination uniting them. Whatever secrets the manor held inside, whatever darkness had claimed Sarah—it was here now, living within the silence between breaths, it whispered thinking to her from the beyond.

Desperately, Eleanor moved her hand toward the black swirling vacancy before her, step by step while the voices crescendoed in a tempest of whispers. Her name no longer sounded like a summons, but like a stab. To make it out alive, she would have to face the shadows — and the ghosts of her own past.

The louder grew the echoes in the silence.

And in the darkness, as her name was called, it was just starting.