The house on Marrow Lane did not feel like a place where people lived.
It stood back from the road, its paint the color of old bone, its windows narrow and watchful. Elias noticed those things immediately. He noticed everything now. The way the front gate creaked in protest. The way the porch boards sagged under his weight. The way sound seemed to vanish once it crossed the threshold.
His aunt Miriam lived there alone.
She greeted him with a stiff hug that smelled faintly of mothballs and lavender, her arms thin but firm, as though affection were a responsibility rather than an impulse.
"You'll be safe here," she said, more to herself than to him.
Safe was not a word Elias trusted anymore.
Inside, the house was immaculate. Too immaculate. Every surface polished, every object placed with deliberate precision. There were no photographs on the walls. No evidence of joy, or chaos, or life interrupting routine.
Miriam showed him to his room without much ceremony.
"It was your cousin's," she said, smoothing the bedspread. "He moved out years ago."
Elias did not ask why there were no pictures of the cousin either.
The first night passed without incident. No footsteps. No shadows at the window. Elias lay awake anyway, listening to the quiet. It pressed against his ears, thick and unnatural. He missed the sounds of Alder Row—the pipes knocking, the distant traffic, his mother humming while she cooked.
Here, silence ruled.
Days settled into a routine. Miriam left early for work and returned late. She cooked simple meals and spoke only when necessary. Elias went to school, where teachers smiled too much and classmates stared just long enough to make him uncomfortable.
He learned quickly that grief made people uneasy.
At night, he explored the house.
Not out of curiosity, but instinct.
The rooms felt older than they should have been, as though they remembered things Miriam had forgotten—or chosen not to remember. In the hallway near the stairs, Elias found a door that was always locked.
"What's in there?" he asked one evening.
Miriam did not look up from her plate. "Storage."
That was all.
One week after his arrival, Elias laughed for the first time since his mother's death.
It surprised him as much as it did Miriam.
A boy at school had tripped during recess, tumbling into a bush in such an exaggerated way that laughter burst out of Elias before he could stop it. The sound felt foreign in his throat. Wrong. He covered his mouth, suddenly ashamed.
That night, something changed.
He woke to a sound he had never heard in the house before.
Footsteps.
They were slow and deliberate, moving from room to room below. Elias sat up, his heart pounding. Miriam never walked at night. She slept like the dead, still and silent.
The footsteps stopped beneath his door.
Elias held his breath.
Nothing happened.
Minutes passed. Then the steps retreated, fading back into the depths of the house.
The next morning, Miriam's eyes were rimmed with red.
"You sleepwalk?" Elias asked carefully.
She stiffened. "No."
But her hands trembled as she poured his tea.
From that night on, Elias stopped laughing.
He began to understand something important: a house without laughter was not empty.
It was full of things people refused to name.
And whatever lived in the silence of Marrow Lane had begun to notice him.