The car slowed as if the road itself did not want to disturb the house. Belle watched the mansion through the fogged pane, every inch of its age laid bare: stone that had weathered a hundred storms, ivy claws gripping the walls, and windows like tired eyes. Even from the street it looked like a thing with history folded into its bones.
"This will be our home," her father said, voice trying for cheer but missing it by a few beats. He carried a box into the yawning porch, and in the slow, domestic motions Belle saw an awkward attempt to make something ordinary out of the extraordinary.
Her mother smiled and tried to make the house seem smaller, kinder. "The ceilings are high, the rooms are generous—think of all the space." She brushed a hand along Belle's arm as if to anchor them both.
Belle felt neither anchored nor comforted. The mansion smelled of dust and years, of orange peel and old newspapers, of a closed-up life. Portraits with eyes like specks of coal lined the hallway; a grandfather clock chewed time in deliberate, heavy ticks. They carried boxes through rooms that were only half-breathed in light. A narrow staircase rose to the second floor, disappearing into shadow.
"It's best if we keep to the first floor for a while," her mother said later, unpacking cups in the kitchen. "Some things haven't been opened in years."
Belle's curiosity flared. "What things?"
Her father's jaw tightened. He looked toward the stairwell with a careful, practiced avoidance. "Some rooms are better left alone," he said. "We'll live downstairs. We'll make new memories."
That night the house settled in around them, not like a welcome but like a claim. Belle lay awake longer than she expected, listening to the house breathe—boards whispering, wind fingering the eaves. The attic window, a lonely eye above, caught the moon in a way that made it look like a small, distant lantern. She could not stop watching it.
When the clock in the hall tolled midnight, the silence in Belle's room was broken not by wind but by a sound so small she might have imagined it: a breath, but from a place above her bedroom ceiling. It was a soft calling, like the rustle of someone moving with care across a floor that had not been crossed for decades.
"Belle…"
Her name on the air made her sit straighter. It was not a voice she recognized, and yet it held something like an invitation. Her heart thudded—not with fear so much as an odd, electric curiosity.
She rose, mindful and foolish at once, slipped into her shawl and padded barefoot along the colder corridor. Each step raised the dust as if the house wanted to know who dared disturb it. The stairs up to the attic seemed longer than they had looked in daylight. Shadows gathered here like old promises.
The attic door was the last one on the landing—a heavy wooden thing with carvings eaten by time. Her fingers found the knob: iron, cold, with a tarnished ring. There was a lock across it, rusted but complete, and a red thread of sunlight from the moon that striped the edge of the wood.
Belle pressed her palm to the door. The house fell into an almost expectant hush. She pressed her ear against the grain. Beneath the tick of the clock and the soft creak of the house she felt a heartbeat—slow, steady—and knew, with the certainty of someone who has felt the small courage of a new and dangerous thing, that she was not alone.
The attic, unseen for years, breathed against her like someone waiting with a secret. She drew back, the name still on her tongue, and with the single childish instinct that guides the brave and the foolish alike, she vowed she would return.