…my knuckles white around the cold metal casing. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird as I stepped out into the second-floor hallway. I stared up at the narrow, unlit staircase that twisted toward the third floor.
Thump. Scrape. Thump.
The sound was rhythmic, heavy, and deliberate. It sounded less like someone moving an antique armoire and more like something massive dragging its own weight across the floorboards.
“Hello?” I called out, my voice betraying a pathetic tremble.
The dragging instantly stopped. A suffocating silence fell over the house, heavy and thick. The temperature in the stairwell seemed to plummet ten degrees, and the faint, coppery scent of old pennies and dried earth drifted down from the darkness above.
Against every instinct screaming at me to run out the front door, I placed my foot on the first step. The old wood groaned in protest. I crept upward, the beam of my flashlight slicing through the thick, dusty air. When I reached the top landing, my blood turned to ice.
The contractor was right. The third floor wasn’t just dusty antiques.
The walls of the corridor were completely destroyed, the vintage floral wallpaper shredded by deep, parallel gouges that looked horrifyingly like claw marks. But it was the door at the end of the hall—the master attic suite—that made my breath catch. The heavy oak door had been reinforced from the outside with heavy iron deadbolts, but the wood surrounding the locks was splintered and bowed outward. Something had been trying to get out.
And right now, the deadbolts were completely unlatched.
I took a trembling step forward, shining my flashlight through the crack in the open door. The beam illuminated a massive pile of broken furniture—chairs, dressers, and shattered mirrors—all pushed together to form a crude, circular nest in the center of the room.
Then, the shadows in the corner of the room shifted.
A figure slowly rose from the floor. It was impossibly tall, its limbs elongated and wrapped in a patchwork of my grandmother’s old, moth-eaten quilts. As it turned toward the light, I clamped a hand over my mouth to stifle a scream. Its face was gaunt, its skin a translucent, sickly gray, but its eyes… its eyes were a vivid, piercing blue. The exact same shade of blue as my grandmother’s.
“Margaret?” it croaked, its voice sounding like dry leaves grinding together. It tilted its head, its joints popping sickeningly in the quiet room. “Margaret didn’t bring the meat.”
“M-Margaret is dead,” I whispered, paralyzed by terror. “I’m her granddaughter.”
The creature went utterly still. A long, horrifying moment passed before its thin lips stretched into a grotesque, impossibly wide smile, revealing rows of jagged, yellowed teeth.
“Oh, wonderful,” it purred, stepping over the barricade of broken furniture with terrifying grace. “A new caretaker. Margaret’s portions were getting so terribly small in her old age. And I am so very hungry.”
The floorboards groaned as it lunged forward, and I finally found my legs, turning and throwing myself blindly down the dark staircase into the pitch-black house below.
