The crushing darkness of the night had thrown its dull shroud over Blackwood Manor, casting the decaying walls and speaking halls into an intangible emptiness; a presence almost. Eleanor Hayes was frozen in the decaying drawing room, her lantern barely flickering as she shone it around and long, trembling shadows danced on peeling wallpaper and broken portraits. She shivered, but wouldn’t back down. Not yet — not when the maze of secrets connected to her childhood friend’s disappearance called to her beyond.

Her breath caught as the silence shattered: a voice, dim but so distinct, whispered her name.

“Eleanor…”

It came from the depths of the manor, a haunting call designed to slip through both sandstone and sanity. Eleanor's fists squeezed for an instant, all of her senses telling her to run. But she was bound here — constrained by that name, those memories, a history that scratched at her from below every groaning floorboard.

“Did you hear it?” But the voice of Marcus Flynn intruded on her reverie. Frowning, disbelief etched deeper into his face as he looked around the room where that sound could have possibly come from.

“I sure did,” Eleanor said, her voice even but shaking beneath the burden of what it could mean. Marcus always demanded logic, but here logic frayed at the edges. “It’s her. Sarah.”

Lily Chambers took a deep breath nearby, her cognitive interest in the scene warring with fear. “Sarah’s name… here? “But how can you say that, she disappeared days ago.

Eleanor’s eyes shifted to the small hallway that led to the west wing. In that direction beat the pulse of the manor, a sense of tension and something dark and ancient. Out there, though, she sensed something else—a presence that neither Marcus’s cynicism nor Lily’s wide-eyed optimism truly understood.

Thomas Grayson stepped out of the shadows by the door, his eyes haunted with a past Eleanor was not sure she wanted to face. “The manor does not forget,” he slurred gravely, his voice low as if the walls had ears. “When it’s calling, old names come up like ghosts.”

Eleanor's thoughts flew back to what Agnes Blackwood had told her: the old woman's voice had shaken around this estate with its prophecies of doom. Agnes had mentioned a curse that kept souls tied to an endless cycle of misery—voices urging the living to find their way with those lost to darkness.

Dr. Samuel Whitaker, who had come earlier to study the psychological impact of their ordeal, watched the group from a distance. "Fear has a strange way of giving sound," he murmered, "but what if the rush isn't entirely conjured in our own heads?"

His words shimmered and lingered in the air, before they dissolved into the arrival of Father Callum Reid.Callum was scarcely visible his clerical collar was almost devoured by shadows. His eyes were haunting, the burden of shattered faith and personal demons bearing down on him as he stepped closer to Eleanor. “There are forces that we cannot comprehend,” he said, his voice steady but tinged with unease. “And sometimes when the abyss calls your name, it’s not a beckoning but rather a warning.

And the room grew cold, and the flickering lanternlight threatened to gutter in the sudden chill. Eleanor’s heart hit against her ribs. “Evie Sinclair,” she whispered, thinking of the tales told of the lost soul that walked between realms, whose broken words now became something to unlock secrets within the mansion. Evie’s voice, it was said, slithered through darkness like a thread — drawing the living toward the dead.

All at once the darkness deepened, engulfed in it headlong the struggling light. A deadly stillness, full of horror, surrounded all. Then out of the heavy darkness voices twinkled, in tones that were separate from their source, and an ectoplasmic chorus proclaimed.

“Eleanor… Sarah… Return… Join us…”

Marcus took a few steps back, his disbelief turning into bewildered fear. “This is… impossible. There must be some reason!”

Eleanor stepped forward, heart pounding. “There’s no rhyme or reason to this one, Marcus. Not anymore. This is a manor full of voices—some anguished, others evil.

The Shadow, that which has no form but is everywhere all the time—beckoned in the unwatched places, a black writhing thing that spoke of futures and of tomorrows growing distant, of mortal precursors made visible. It whispered at the fringes of their minds, a stealthy hunter inviting prey near with the sound of familiar voices.

“There’s nowhere safe here.” Thomas spoke in a murmur, but turning away only makes it stronger. Rather than answer the call of the abyss, we must look it in the face.

Eleanor gritted her teeth as a resolve of steel thundered through the fear. It was no longer just about Sarah. And it was about untangling the interlaced strands of past and present, truth and illusion, defying the malignant forces that would drag them all into a boundless night.

The chorus of dissonant voices grew louder, and a chill of realization drenched her at the abyss -- it wanted more than to whisper. It wanted confirmation. It wanted a reply.

Eleanor inhaled deeply, unyielding.

“Who are you?” she demanded into the darkness.

The silence that met him was a harbinger of atrocities to be perpetrated.