The words on the wall—I'M STILL HERE—burned in Alex Monroe's mind long after he left the basement. He replayed them over and over as he sat in his car, rain trickling down the windshield in glistening rivulets. Fresh scratches. Fresh marks in a house abandoned for thirty years.
Either someone wanted to scare him, or… someone never left.
The engine hummed beneath his hands, but Alex couldn't bring himself to drive. He stared at the ruins through the blur of rain, shadows twisting and bending in the broken windows. Every instinct screamed at him to leave, to put Ravenwood and its ghosts in his rearview mirror. But another instinct—older, sharper—
kept him rooted. The same instinct that had made him dig into cases others had buried, the same instinct that told him truth mattered, even when it cut like glass.
Finally, he shifted into gear and drove back into town.
The next morning, Alex carried the fire marshal's notes to the precinct. His office smelled faintly of stale coffee and cigarette smoke; the blinds rattled against the window frame in the chill wind. He spread the documents out across his desk, studying every line, every scrawled sketch.
The fire marshal—William Carr, long dead—had noted "accelerant trails" and "non-accidental ignition points." But the official report had scrubbed those details, leaving only "faulty wiring." Someone had covered it up.
The case wasn't just a tragedy. It was a crime.
"Still chasing shadows, Monroe?"
The voice broke his focus. Detective Marcus Hale leaned against the doorframe, his broad shoulders filling it. Hale was younger, brash, with a smirk that made enemies faster than friends. He flipped a coin in his hand, letting it clink against his knuckles.
"You hear about the Turner place," Hale said. "Whole damn town's buzzing again. Thought we buried that ghost story decades ago."
Alex didn't look up. "You believe in ghosts, Hale?"
"I believe in idiots who see what they want to see," Hale shot back. "People around here love a good haunting. Makes them forget their own messes. But you?" His smirk faltered. "You're supposed to know better."
Alex finally met his eyes. "Four bodies were recovered. Five were supposed to be there. Where's Eli Turner?"
Hale's smirk returned, sharper this time. "Maybe he burned too bad to find. Maybe he ran. Maybe he's the one scratching your spooky little messages. Either way, Monroe—you dig too deep, you'll choke on the dirt."
He left with a casual shrug, but his words lingered.
That evening, Alex walked the quieter side of Ravenwood. The streets narrowed here, houses sagged against one another like weary drunks. He was heading to the address of Margaret Larkin, the last surviving Turner relative—a cousin who had refused to leave town.
Margaret's home was a crumbling two-story, curtains yellowed, paint flaking. She answered the door slowly, her eyes pale and clouded with cataracts. Her hair hung in limp strands around her face.
"You shouldn't have come," she whispered, voice brittle as paper.
"I need to ask you about the fire," Alex said, careful, steady.
Her hands trembled as she clutched the doorframe. "No one asks about the fire. Not anymore. Not since they… since they made sure we stayed quiet."
"Who made sure?" Alex pressed.
Her eyes darted to the shadows behind him, as if she feared someone was listening. "You think the fire was just flames? No. It was a cleansing. A sacrifice. They took him. They took Eli."
Alex's pulse thudded. "Who took him?"
Her mouth opened, but no words came. Only a soft wheeze, then her hand lifted—pointing past him.
Alex turned.
At the end of the street, beneath a flickering streetlamp, stood the figure of a boy. Thin. Motionless. Watching.
The air grew colder.
When Alex turned back, Margaret had slammed the door, bolting it shut.
That night, Alex couldn't sleep. He poured himself bourbon, the amber liquid catching the lamplight, and sat in his chair with the Turner file open again. His eyes burned from exhaustion, but every time he closed them, he saw the boy. The outline. The pale face watching from the shadows.
Around 2 a.m., he gave up on rest and went back to the ruins.
The mist clung heavier than before, shrouding the skeletal house in shifting veils. His flashlight cut a narrow path through it, illuminating splintered beams, the carcass of the staircase, the gaping maw of the basement stairs.
He descended again.
The symbols on the walls seemed to writhe in the beam of light, twisting, reshaping. His breath echoed in the hollow chamber, shallow and uneven. The air smelled faintly of smoke, but also of something metallic—like blood.
And then he heard it.
A whisper.
Alex…
His name. Clear. Close.
His heart hammered as he swung the light. The beam landed on a corner where rubble had piled. And there—half-buried—something gleamed.
He crouched, brushing away ash and stone until his fingers touched metal. He pulled it free. A locket. Tarnished, its clasp rusted. He pried it open.
Inside was a photograph—blackened around the edges but intact. A boy with a gap-toothed smile. Eli Turner.
The basement temperature plummeted. His breath fogged in the beam.
Footsteps. Soft. Behind him.
He spun. The light trembled in his grasp.
The boy stood at the far end of the basement, pale and silent, eyes hollow pits of shadow. His lips moved, but no sound came.
"Eli," Alex whispered, voice cracking.
The boy raised his hand, pointing. Not at Alex—but at the symbols on the wall.
Alex turned the light toward them. The circles and lines weren't random. They formed a pattern. A ritual. And in the center, scratched deeper than the rest, was a single word:
AWAKEN.
The bulb in his flashlight flickered, then died.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
And in that suffocating black, the whisper came again—not a child's voice this time, but deeper, older, a growl beneath the skin of the world.
He never left, Detective. He never left…
When Alex stumbled out of the ruins an hour later, he was pale, his hands shaking around the locket. The mist curled tighter, almost following him. He shoved the locket into his coat pocket and walked quickly to his car, refusing to look back.
But he felt it.
Eyes. Watching him from the ashes.