The scratching woke her.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
Elara's eyes snapped open in the unfamiliar dark. The bed was narrow, the sheets smelling of someone else's life. Rain tapped softly on the roof and for a second,she was confused and didn't know where she was. Then it came back—Blackwater, The house, Gran.
Scratch… scrape…
It was a metallic, deliberate sound at the window.
Her heart kicked against her ribs. She lay frozen, listening to the slow, grating drag of something sharp down the glass pane. She turned her head, just an inch.
A shadow—a person's shape,moved across the black square window which was streaked with rain. It stopped moving and was now facing her.
Cold terror locked her in place. She couldn't scream, couldn't move and the figure leaned closer which made her see the outline of a long coat, an old-fashioned cut. Then, in the darkness where its face should be, two points of light kindled—Pale,silver color which glowed with their own cold fire.
Eyes.
They fixed on hers with no anger, no curiosity. Just a deep, patient recognition, as if it had been waiting a long time to finish looking at her.
The sound of the rain faded away. There was only the window, the shadow, and the twin pinpricks of light holding her in place.
The figure straightened and took one step back, then another, melting into the deeper black of the night until only the silver lights remained, hanging in the air like forgotten stars. Then they winked out.
Sound rushed back—the rain, the frantic thud of her own pulse. She scrambled up, fumbling for the lamp. Harsh light flooded the small room, exposing the floral wallpaper, the dusty dresser.
The window was empty with just water trailing down the glass.
A dream. A stress dream. It had to be a dream.
Her hands trembled pushing off the blankets and walked to the window, placing her palm flat against the cold pane. Her own pale, wide-eyed reflection stared back. Outside, there was only the shifting curtain of rain and the shapeless dark of the overgrown garden.
But on the glass, right at eye level, the rainwater was channeling in odd, straight lines. She leaned in. Her breath fogged the surface.
There, etched into the condensation on the outside, was a mark. Three straight lines, already softening at the edges from the downpour.
It formed a simple, open eye.
A choked sound escaped her. She stumbled back to the bed and sat down hard, pulling her knees to her chest. She stared at the marked window until the grey light of morning finally seeped into the room, turning the terror into a shaky, fragile exhaustion.
---
The grey light of morning seeped into the room, turning the night's terror into a shaky exhaustion. Elara finally uncurled herself from the bed.
The rain had softened into fine,clinging mist. From her window, the house's backyard was a tangle of wet weeds and leaning trees. It looked different in the dull daylight—not less ominous, just weary.
Inside, the air was still and smelled of beeswax, dried lavender, and dust. A sudden and sweet memory of her grandmother's hands, spotted with age, arranging flowers in a blue vase surfaced which made the ache loss fresh and surprising.
She got up and dressed quickly, the silence of the house feeling more like a presence than an absence.
She needed to see it in the light, to ground the strange night in ordinary things.And then she found the light switch—a chandelier in the hallway buzzed and flickered on.
The first room was a parlor frozen in time. A single wingback chair faced a cold fireplace. A knitted blanket was draped neatly over its arm. Books lined the walls, serious volumes on local geology and town records. No photographs,n personal trinkets;it was just that her grandmother, Agatha, had lived in her mind, not in her house and this profound loneliness of the place pressed down on Elara.
She bypassed the staircase and pushed open the door to the study instead.
The smell of lavender was stronger here, almost cloying. And then she saw the wall.
A massive, hand-drawn map covered it—Blackwater and the suffocating woods around it. The paper was covered in pins, connected by a web of red and black thread linking the mill, the cemetery, the town square which was all work of obsession.
She stepped closer to the map sliding her fingers across the map, following the notes in the margins as though searching for a secret only she could see. The notes in the margins were in her grandmother's precise script, but the handwriting was tight, frantic.
Site of '23 disappearance. No footprints found.
Luminous phenomena in Drake's Hollow. Static on all bands.
And in the very center of town, circled in a violent, blotting red that had seeped through the paper: The Watching Ones. Always here.
"What were you trying to see, Gran?" she whispered.
"Mostly things people here have agreed not to talk about."
The voice came from behind her. Elara whirled, a gasp catching in her throat. A tall man with a solid, immovable presence,wearing a deputy sheriff's uniform that seemed too crisp for the dusty house filled the doorway.
"You scared me," she managed, her hand flying to her chest.
"Didn't mean to." He didn't smile. His eyes moved from her to the map and back, a quick, assessing sweep. " I'm Deputy Marcus Chen and you must be Agatha's granddaughter."
"Elara Vance. I just… got in last night."
He nodded, his gaze lingering on the red circle on the map. "Here to handle the estate?"
"That's the plan. There's a lot to sort through."
"I'd make it a fast plan." He took one step into the room. His boots were quiet on the hardwood. "This isn't a town that warms up to newcomers. It's set in its ways."
"My grandmother lived here her whole life for Eighty-six years."
"She was from here," he said, as if that explained everything. He moved to the desk, his eyes dropping to an open journal. Elara saw the phrase 'footsteps in the rain' before he reached out and closed the cover with a soft, final sound.
"Your grandmother knew stories about this place. The kind that don't make it into the library archives."
"She was a historian," Elara said, feeling a need to defend the woman, the work.
"She was poking a hornet's nest with a short stick," he replied, his voice low and even.
He turned to look at her directly. "My advice? Take anything you want to keep,hire a liquidator,sell this place to someone with a strong stomach for damp and decay and then go back to wherever you've built your life."
His bluntness sparked a defiant heat in her chest. "Seriously? I just met you and for the record,this is my house and my inheritance." She waved a hand at the walls. "Maybe she was onto something everyone else is too afraid to see."
A muscle in his jaw tightened. He studied her face, and she could see him measuring her stubbornness. "What do you think she was 'onto,' Miss Vance?"
"I don't know yet but I'm certainly going to find out."
He let out a short, quiet breath, almost a sigh of resignation. "Then you're going to have a lot of long, quiet nights. So I advice you to lock your doors,not just at night but all the time. Don't go walking in the woods, especially near dusk. And pay attention to the animals."
"The animals?"
"Dogs. Birds. If they all go silent at once, or if every dog in the neighborhood starts howling at nothing, pay attention. It's not a coincidence." He held her gaze, making sure the words sank in.
"This isn't a ghost story for tourists. This is a town with a bad memory. Your grandmother spent her life trying to be its conscience and it cost her."
"What did it cost her?" Elara asked, her voice quieter now.
"Normalcy. Company. Peace." He adjusted the brim of his hat, a gesture of conclusion.
"Welcome to Blackwater. My number's online. You can call if you have a problem you can put into words. If you can't… try to let it go."
He left without another word. The front door clicked shut, and the house seemed to settle around her, the silence now thick with his warning.
Elara stood in the study, the red circle on the map burning in her peripheral vision. He's just trying to scare you off, she thought. But the fear felt specific. It matched the cold terror from the night before.
She thought of the silver eyes at the window. The mark on the glass.
Then,from the deep, shadowed hallway,a man's voice reached her. It was calm, clear and held a strange,weary kindness.
"Elara," it said, "You shouldn't have come back."