The crushing stillness of Blackwood Manor had enveloped them like a smothering blanket. Eleanor Hayes paused in the darkened hall, her breathing shallow, her nerves taut. The odour of damp wood and old paper lingered in the cool room, tinged with an intangible tension that set his skin pricking. The first voice, the one that had pulled her here to begin with, seemed hardly to have faded when a new sound, colder and more imperative yet, slithered through the shadows. A second voice answered from the darkness outside of the dancing candlelight.

She wasn’t alone.

Lily Chambers, standing behind her, held the edges of her jacket tight, eyes wide with fear and excitement. On the other side of the hall, Marcus Flynn’s skepticism had begun to wear thin, and instead he wore a mask of trepidation as he peered into the darkness with narrowed eyes. Thomas Grayson seemed ill-suited to the peeling paint and faded wallpaper; quiet manor keeper a little older, now dragging as though his own secrets were too much for him.

Eleanor's ears pricked for the origin of this new whisper--a voice not wind, nor fancy. It was chillier than Evie Sinclair’s ethereal lamenting and more pressing than the enigmatic warnings made years ago by Agnes Blackwood.

“Did you hear that?” Lily said softly, her voice almost inaudible.

“I heard it,” said Eleanor, forcing herself to swallow down the ball that was materializing in her throat.

The corridor grew darker as though the manor inhaled and swallowed even the dim light. It was when Eleanor's name was called. Not quietly, with a questioning tone, but with the most mocking definition.

“Eleanor…”

The voice was unfamiliar, but eerily intimate. It wasn’t Thomas, or Lily, or Marcus inside (Finally!) -or any of the others who fell into the manor’s clutches. Nor was it the soft, mournful murmur of Evie Sinclair--the tormented son who still haunted this place for all time, uttering the names no one remembered now. This voice was laced with danger, hints of something sinister lurking within.

And Eleanor’s own heart thudded against her ribs. Her thoughts turned to Sarah Kendal, her childhood friend who she lost in these walls. Was this the voice that had beckoned Sarah? Had the malevolent force, The Shadow, been waiting for her all along?

“Don’t listen,” Thomas interrupted sharply, moving up close. His voice was thick, dry as a warning. “It’s not safe.”

But Eleanor couldn’t turn away. The second voice was a whisper in the manor’s fabric, pulling her one way or another, making her want to know its secrets.

Father Callum Reid entered from the room beyond, his robes whispering on the floor. And he was haunted himself, by doubt and fear, a man at war with his own demons even as he set out to reign over the night that surrounded Blackwood Manor. “The voices are louder tonight,” he glance side-long in the corners of The Shadow, as though it was something tangible. “We are standing on hallowed ground and something — someone is watching us.

Dr. Samuel Whitaker, clipboard in hand, was calm but soundly awake. To him the voices, the dancing lights, the dense black shadow were so many things to be studied—he had borne enough of psychological nightmare through fear and loneliness. But even his clinical detachment had been shaken when her name emerged from the darkness.

“It’s not just with hallucination,” Eleanor objected in a shaky voice. “There’s intent behind those calls. Someone—or something—is reaching out.”

Marcus chuckled softly, but he didn’t entirely disregard what she said. “Even if it is true, that doesn’t make it supernatural. There’s always a rational explanation.”

“Not here,” Lily said quietly. “This place... it listens.”

The corridor appeared to tighten, its shadows gathering around their feet like ink thrown over an abandoned page. Then a blast of cold wind and the whisper delivered again; so close, it was like breath against Eleanor’s ear.

“Eleanor…”

She whirled, eyes wide, but no shape faced her. The hall was deserted except for the six of them, each of whom seemed frozen in some particular and private insight, disbelief, panic.

You’re all bound up with that curse is what Agnes Blackwood said. The names are key, and the voices… traps.

“Names,” Eleanor repeated aloud. “It’s about the names.”

Evie Sinclair's wavering ghost had warned them, her pale face outlined in sadness and yearning. Names were the cord, the way station between this world and that beyond. To utter a name was to summon a history, a memory, a fate.

“Sarah wasn’t the first to be named,” Father Callum said, making the sign of the cross. “And it won’t be the last.”

The coterie moved forward, fingers skimming broken wall, voices soft to keep the unnerving calls from the darkness from reverberating. The manor breathed around them, alive and encapsulating their fear, reflecting it tenfold.

And then again there came a sound from the depths of the house — a very slight, unmistakable footstep, soft and slow. All heads turned.

“Did you hear that?” Now mingling with his disbelief was some definite alarm, for Marcus inquired.

Thomas’s jaw tightened. “The Shadow walks for whom it wills.”

And afterwards a second voice called, doubled this time with another—gentle, entreating — desperate — their whispers colliding through the past and the present:

“Eleanor… Sarah… help me…”

Eleanor’s grip on reality wobbled. In the conspiracy of hidden truths to which Thomas belonged, with all its raw patches, and in the cracks Disclosure made in the sediments of memories held by the manor itself, she felt herself helplessly shredded into tatters.

“We’ve got to keep going,” she said, determination rekindling. “It’s like—whatever the fuck this is — curser or voices or The Shadow – we’ll confront it. For Sarah. For all of them.”

And as they continued on into the dark, Eleanor could not shake the feeling that the second voice had been more than a caution—it was an invitation, for some kind of reckoning no one could ignore.

When her name came up the second time, the shadows began to move and Blackwood Manor’s terrifying secret threatened to tear it apart