"We need to follow these rules exactly," Ren said, folding the blood-stained paper and tucking it into his coat. His voice carried the weight of someone who had seen too much already. "No deviation. No heroics. Just survival."
Sarah nodded, her blue eyes reflecting the sick green glow that came from somewhere in the walls. "The Hall of Knights first. Walk quickly, don't stop."
They approached the corridor lined with black stone statues. Each knight stood at attention in carved alcoves, their armor detailed down to individual chain links. The silence pressed against their eardrums like water. Only their footsteps on the obsidian floor made any sound, and even those seemed muffled, as if the mansion was swallowing the noise.
Ren counted under his breath as they walked. "One, two..." His voice caught. "Third from the left."
The helmet wasn't there.
Where polished metal should have covered the statue's head, there was instead a face. Ren's face. But wrong in every way that mattered. The skin hung in gray, wet strips like old wallpaper. The eyes had clouded white with death, but they still moved, still tracked. The mouth worked constantly, as if trying to speak words that wouldn't come.
"Jesus Christ," Sarah breathed.
The thing that wore Ren's features turned its head as they passed. It moved with the grinding sound of stone against stone, but underneath that, they could hear something else. Wet sounds. Like meat being chewed.
Ren had stopped walking. He stared at his own rotting face, unable to look away from the sight of himself as a corpse. The statue's mouth opened wider, revealing teeth stained black with something that definitely wasn't decay. It began to smile, and when it did, maggots fell from between its lips.
"Don't acknowledge him," Sarah whispered, but her voice shook like leaves in a storm.
The statue's hand began to lift from its sword hilt. Stone fingers scraped against the metal grip, and sparks flew where they touched.
"Ren!" Sarah grabbed his arm and yanked him forward just as the statue took its first step out of the alcove.
They ran.
Behind them came the sound of stone grinding against stone, growing louder with each heartbeat. But worse than that were the footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, and gaining ground. The other statues were moving now too. Ren could hear them stepping down from their pedestals, their armor clanking as they turned to give chase.
"Faster," Sarah gasped.
At the end of the corridor stood the final knight, larger than the rest, his sword already raised high above his head. The blade caught the sick light and seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat. As they approached, they could see that the sword wasn't made of metal at all. It was bone. Human bone, fused together into a weapon that dripped something dark onto the floor.
"Bow," Ren said, dropping to one knee so hard it cracked against the stone. Sarah followed, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
The sword lowered slowly. The bone blade passed inches from their heads, close enough that they could smell the rot coming off it. Behind them, the grinding sound stopped. The footsteps ceased.
Ren risked a glance back. Every single statue in the corridor had turned to face them. Their stone eyes reflected the green light like mirrors, and every carved mouth was smiling. But they had stopped moving.
"That was the easy part," Sarah said, and her voice cracked on the last word.
The main hallway stretched before them like the throat of some massive beast. Portraits lined the walls in ornate frames, each one showing a different person. Nobles in fine clothes, servants with downcast eyes, children with ribbons in their hair. But something was wrong with every face. The eyes followed them as they walked, and worse, the mouths moved behind the painted lips.
As they walked deeper into the hallway, whispers began.
"Turn around."
The voice was soft, almost musical. It came from a portrait of a young woman in a blue dress.
"Look at me."
This one came from a painting of an old man with kind eyes.
"I have something to tell you."
A child's voice, sweet and innocent.
The voices came from the paintings, each one begging for attention. Sarah pressed her hands over her ears, but the whispers seemed to burrow right through her palms and into her brain.
"Keep walking," Ren muttered through gritted teeth. "Don't answer. Don't even think about answering."
"Please, just one word."
"I'm so lonely."
"Look at what they did to me."
The whispers grew more desperate. Some began to sound like voices they knew. Sarah heard her dead mother calling her name. Ren heard his college roommate, the one who had died in a car crash five years ago, asking for help.
But they kept walking, eyes fixed straight ahead, even as tears began to roll down Sarah's cheeks.
Then Sarah saw it.
One frame was empty. The painting that should have been there, a pale woman with hollow eyes and pearls around her neck, stood in the hallway beside her portrait. She was beautiful in the way that poisonous flowers are beautiful. Her skin was white as fresh snow, and her dress flowed around her like water. But her eyes were holes. Not just empty, but holes that went all the way through her head to somewhere else.
"Don't turn around," Ren warned, having spotted her too. "She's following us."
They could hear soft footsteps behind them. Bare feet on stone, keeping perfect pace with their walking. The sound was somehow worse than heavy boots would have been. It was intimate, patient, like a cat following a mouse it knew couldn't escape.
"Trade places with me."
The voice was like silk being dragged across broken glass.
"You can rest in my frame. Forever and always. I can live in your skin. Just for a little while."
The footsteps grew closer. Sarah could feel cold breath on the back of her neck, even though they were walking forward and the woman was behind them.
"Just turn around. Just once. Let me see your pretty face."
The breath was right at Sarah's ear now. She could smell something sweet and rotten, like flowers left too long in a vase.
"I could wear it so much better than you do."
They reached a junction where the hallway split into different wings of the mansion. The footsteps stopped. When they finally worked up the courage to look back, the pale woman was gone. Her portrait frame was empty again, but now they could see wet footprints leading from the hallway back to the wall.
"Parlor or east corridor?" Sarah asked, checking the rules paper with shaking hands.
"Parlor," Ren decided. "Better to deal with the laughing man than an impatient dead child."
The parlor was a grand room with high ceilings and furniture that probably cost more than most people made in a year. A massive fireplace dominated one wall, but it held no fire. Only cold ashes and the smell of things that had burned long ago. Sitting in a leather chair before the empty hearth was a man in a dusty suit. His back was to them, but his shoulders shook with laughter.
It wasn't happy laughter. It was the kind of laughter that came from a broken mind, dry and rasping like dead leaves in a graveyard.
As they entered, his laughter grew louder. More manic. His whole body convulsed with the force of it, and they could see his head bobbing up and down with each chuckle.
"Heh... heh heh... oh, that's... that's so funny... heh heh..."
Ren swallowed his fear and forced himself to laugh along. The sound that came out of his mouth was weak and pathetic, but it was the best he could do. "Yes, I see it too," he said, the words tasting like copper pennies.
The man's laughter stopped instantly. The silence that followed was worse than the laughter had been.
Slowly, the man's head began to turn around. It turned too far, rotating a full hundred and eighty degrees until his face was upside down, grinning at them from over the back of the chair.
His face was nothing but skull. Yellow bone with strands of gray hair clinging to it like spider webs. Empty eye sockets somehow still managed to convey amusement, and his jaw hung open in a grin that showed far too many teeth.
"Ah, a fellow appreciator of humor," the skull said, its jaw clicking with each word. "Tell me, what did you find so amusing about their screams?"
Ren's mouth went dry as sand. His mind raced, trying to think of an answer that wouldn't get them killed. "The... the way they echoed," he managed. "Very... musical."
The skull's grin widened impossibly. More teeth appeared, row after row of them, like a shark's mouth. "Yes! Yes, exactly! The soprano notes when the skin came off... the baritone when the bones broke... simply divine!"
Sarah felt bile rise in her throat but forced herself to nod and smile. Her face felt like plastic.
"You have excellent taste," the skull continued. "Perhaps you'd like to contribute to the next performance? The acoustics are quite good in the basement."
"Maybe later," Ren said carefully. "We're still... settling in."
The skull laughed again, that horrible dry rustling sound. "Of course, of course! Enjoy your stay. And remember, always laugh at the good parts. The residents do so enjoy an appreciative audience."
They backed out of the parlor slowly, never taking their eyes off the thing in the chair. Only when they were safely in the hallway did they allow themselves to breathe again.
"What the hell was that?" Sarah whispered.
"I don't know, and I don't want to know," Ren replied. "Dinner or stairs?"
"Let's avoid the woman in black lace for now. The servant boy might be easier to handle."
At the base of the grand staircase stood a small figure. A boy of perhaps ten years old, dressed in tattered servant's clothes that might have once been white. He held a silver tray laden with food that seemed to shift and move when they weren't looking directly at it.
As they approached, the boy looked up with large, dark eyes that held depths of sorrow no child should know. His face was pale and thin, like he hadn't eaten in months.
"Please," he whispered, and tears began to flow down his cheeks. "Please take something. I've been holding this tray for so long. My arms hurt. Please."
The tears came faster, and the boy began to sob quietly. The sound was heartbreaking. Pure grief and pain from someone too young to understand why he was suffering.
Sarah took a step forward. Every instinct she had was screaming at her to help this child. "Maybe just a small—"
"No," Ren said firmly, grabbing her arm. "The rules were specific. Even if he cries. Especially if he cries."
The boy's sobs grew louder, more desperate. "Please! It hurts so much! Just take one thing! Just one!"
But as his tears increased, something horrible became clear. The liquid running down his face wasn't clear. It was dark and thick, like motor oil. When it hit the floor, it sizzled and smoked. Where his tears fell, the stone began to bubble and melt.
"Why won't you help me?" the boy wailed, and his voice began to change. It deepened, becoming something that never belonged in a child's throat. "I've been so good! I've been waiting so patiently!"
His fingers began to stretch and grow. They elongated into claws that gripped the silver tray so tightly the metal began to bend. The food on the tray writhed more obviously now. Pieces of meat that pulsed with their own heartbeats. Fruits that blinked with human eyes. Pastries that whispered in tiny voices, begging for help.
"Take something!" the thing that looked like a boy demanded, its voice now a growl that came from deep in its chest. "TAKE SOMETHING!"
They ran up the stairs three at a time. Behind them, the creature's screams of rage shook the walls. They could hear the silver tray crash to the floor and the sound of things scuttling across stone. The living food was escaping to hunt in the mansion's shadows.
"Bedroom," Ren panted as they reached the second floor. "We need to get through the night."
They found a room with a four-poster bed, a wooden dresser, and a mirror beside the bed that reflected things that weren't there. Ren immediately placed his equipment on the dresser while Sarah grabbed a heavy curtain from the window and threw it over the mirror.
"Now we just have to survive until dawn," Sarah said, sitting carefully on the edge of the bed.
But even as she spoke, they could hear sounds beginning throughout the mansion. Footsteps in the walls, like someone walking between the floors. Whispers in languages that sounded older than human civilization. And somewhere, growing closer, the sound of something large and hungry dragging itself across the floor.
The real horror was just beginning.