The manor loomed, covered in heavy mist, its shattered windows the empty eyes within pale flesh of the fading twilight. Eleanor Hayes tugged at the strap of her bag, her breath misting in the cold and looked to the gnarled branches clawing against the grey stone walls. The house was warm with soundlessness. Unheard voices whispered on the far side of hearing—faint, elusive tones that drew at her consciousness.

She had come back to Blackwood Manor not only as a journalist following a story, but also as a woman seeking the truth. The disappearance of Sarah Kendal had pried open a crack to the world Eleanor had worked for years to forget, a place where logic warped beneath layers of shadow and secrecy.

Thomas Grayson was there waiting within, no more or less mysterious than the manor he occupied. The caretaker’s eyes were deep with a knowledge that seemed simultaneously like a warning and an invitation. He indicated the drawing-room, where the twilight was contending with the gloom.

“Some secrets are not meant to be discovered,” he murmured softly, allowing the tension in his words to make itself felt.

Eleanor pushed skepticism aside with a rampaging flood of unease. She wasn’t the only one; Marcus Flynn’s Skepticism oozed from him like the slime in Two Year Baths’ shower pit and Lily Chambers kept clutching at her old leather-bound notebook, each flicker of shadow catching in her wide, frightened eyes as though they held a secret key.

The two of them disrupted the eerie quiet of the manor. They all played a role here, part of the rolling drama — skeptics and believers ensnared in the manor’s terrifying mass.

The further they proceeded into the house, the tighter the walls appeared to press on them, and every creak and moan shared stories older than history could remember. It was Agnes Blackwood—the haggard woman whose warnings, though cryptic, had prompted their entire trip—who joined them moments later, her gnarled fingers wrapped around the edges of a worn shawl that bore traces of woodsmoke and chrysanthemum.

“Hear me well,” Agnes whispered, her voice grating like the passage of centuries. “There are individuals who simply don’t ever sleep. That which is hidden but tethered to this doomed area. They see, they wait… and sometimes they speak… if you’re bold enough to listen.

Her words parted the silence into jagged pieces that poked at Eleanor’s skin. But it was no mere superstition—the curse of de Morney was a living, panting thing cowering at the foot of yonder crumbling walls and in the shadowy spaces between.

Afterward, as Eleanor and the assembly followed into the great hall, shadows came creeping from all corners like troubled ghosts drawn by flickery firelight. The quiet, thoughtful company of Dr. Samuel Whitaker was a curious foil to the busy air. He scrutinised the face of each with detached curiosity, his notebook in hand to capture their jagged fear and loneliness – as if the human mind at breaking point were the last piece missing from the manor.

But perhaps the most unnerving presence was one that no one could quite put a finger on. Evie Sinclair. The wayfaring soul in its passage between regions. She seemed a fragile wraith—half seen and half imagined—her voice the low dirge of names no longer remembered murmured in shadow.

“— their names,” Evie said, her eyes unfocused. “But to get your own … That’s when the shadow comes close.”

Dead silence succeed, save for a sudden nervous creak from above. The house itself appeared to be listening.

Father Callum Reid entered quietly. The priest flowed with a heavy grace, his eyes filled not only with faith but an intimate knowledge of despair. His own past was laced with failures he couldn’t acknowledge or elude.

“This house,” he intoned, “is a border. Between light and absolute darkness. We need to be prepared to face off against what looms in the darkness, or risk being consumed.”

Eleanor looked at Marcus, whose disbelief was accented by something disturbing–a discomfort that deepened with each moment.

Then the manor’s cruel punchline arrived.

The lights belted and went down, throwing them into a dark so thick it smothered the sound of breath.

Eleanor shivered as a voice, too nearby but impossibly far away, breathed her name.

“Eleanor...”

The walls appeared to draw closer together, the living and dead merging into vague shapes. The shadow was there here-an ever-present sentinel that felt her fear and, perhaps, her secrets.

In that moment, the hidden figures were revealed. Grim and angry faces stared out of the dark — ghosts of those who had suffered in the manor’s grim history. Their eyes screamed look at me, listen to me but the world made them invisible.

And the living witness—the mute sentry trapped between worlds—was Evie.

Her hushings wound the fringes of reality, calling out to those lost by time and memory. They spoke through her, the shadows did, and from their stories a history drenched in blood and betrayal arose.

It was a weight of truths barely glimpsed but desolatingly urgent that reeled in Eleanor’s mind. There were no coincidences behind Sarah’s vanishing, only a bit of thread caught up in the manor’s cursed tapestry.

As the veil of darkness was cast over them, calling out from the depths of a fractured American dream, they all knew that only their wayward souls could determine whether they would escape—until or unless it was simply too late to flee the call…and search for a truth older yet more ruthless than any had imagined.

The hidden figures waited.

The unheard witness watched.

And beyond that veil, somewhere in the dark, The Shadow's long fingers extended, waiting for those who responded to its call