The Murmurs Beneath Halcroft
I never should have returned to Halcroft.
It had been nearly twenty years since I last saw the desolate coastal village, a crumbling relic perched on the edge of the North Atlantic, perpetually smothered in fog and rot. I had fled it as a child, clutching my aunt's hand, too young to comprehend the circumstances that led to my father's disappearance, or the whispers that haunted the town for decades afterward.
But when the old house passed to me after Aunt Miriam's death, duty or perhaps something else compelled my return.
The Halcroft's air was the same damp, cold, briny, like something exhaled from a long dead lung. The villagers had not changed much either. Pale, thin lipped folk who avoided my gaze and muttered to one another in a dialect I barely remembered. I could feel their eyes on me as I climbed the hill to the manor, which stood still, somehow untouched by time. Its black shutters gaping like the eye sockets of a skull.
The dreams began the first night.
I saw a cavern beneath the earth wet and vast, filled with towering columns carved with impossible geometry. Pulsing things moved just beyond the firelight, and some voice without a mouth whispered from the darkness in a tongue I could not comprehend, yet seem all too familiar.
The second night, I found seawater pooled on the floorboards beneath my bed.
By the third, the basement door, which had always been sealed with rusted chains, stood wide open.
I told myself it was grief, that the house was playing tricks on me. But in my bones, I felt it. Something was beneath Halcroft. Something that had always been there.
Driven by equal parts terror and compulsion, I descended the basement stairs. They groaned under my weight, and the lantern trembled in my grip. I found, to my horror, not the cracked stone cellar I remembered but a tunnel. Smooth and damp, bored into the earth with precision no tool could replicate.
The further I went, the colder the air became. My breath clouded, and a low vibration throbbed in my ears not heard but felt as though the very stone hummed with anticipation. Then I saw the glyphs. Carved into the walls in an unearthly script, they shifted as I looked at them, defying comprehension. I tried to turn back, but my feet would not follow.
Eventually, I emerged into a massive underground chamber, a cathedral of slime and salt. A black pool occupied the center, mirror smooth and perfectly still. I knew without knowing how that this was the place my father had vanished.
I heard the murmurs then, louder than before inviting, entreating. The surface of the pool rippled.
Then something rose from the depths.
It was not a creature so much as a presence vague and shifting, like a shadow seen through deep water. But in its gaze, I felt every atom of my being laid bare. Time bent. Space folded. I glimpsed stars that should not exist. Worlds that writhed. Cities not made by hands.
And I understood this was not a god, but a memory of one. A hunger that persisted beyond its own death. It had whispered to Halcroft for centuries. It had called my father. And now it called me.
I awoke on the stone floor, salt crusted and shivering. My mind is fractured, but I know one truth.
It is awake again.
And the village waits.
The Stitches Never Hold
Dr. Elias Verren had steady hands once hailed as miraculous, divine, a gift from God. But in the pale light of his private basement laboratory, those same hands shook beneath blood slick gloves, trembling over the waxen chest of the woman he loved.
Claire had been dead six days.
He hadn't buried her. No, he couldn't. Not when there was still work to be done. Not when there were possibilities science wouldn't dare entertain. Not when the veil between life and death seemed thin enough to pierce if he only tried harder.
It started as grief. Then obsession. Now, it was something else.
The hospital had noticed his absences, but Elias didn't care. He had other sources now. Bodies from the morgue went missing. He stole nerves, glands, brain matter, anything remotely vital, harvesting them like a demented gardener plucking rare, forbidden fruits. Pity the poor interns who came asking questions; they were dismissed, or in one case, never seen again.
Claire's body was pristine, preserved in a cocktail of embalming fluid and chilled saline. He had replaced her heart twice already. The first had decomposed too quickly. The second, stolen from a teenager killed in a motorcycle crash, had beat for twenty-seven seconds before failing again.
The humming machine in the corner, cobbled together from hospital equipment and black-market tech, pulsed with sickly green light. A mix of defibrillator, neurostimulator, and something far older etched with runes from a grimoire bound in skin Elias had acquired in Prague during a strange, blurred trip filled with whispers and sleepless nights.
Tonight, would be different.
"I fixed the misalignment," he muttered. "Her soul will find the body. It has to. The frequency is right now."
He adjusted the skullcap over Claire's head, connecting needles to her spine, her brainstem, her temples. A final wire slid into her tongue, where he believed the soul might still speak.
Then he flipped the switch.
The machine whined, then roared, a hurricane of stolen science and whispered sorcery. Claire's eyes snapped open, milky, unfocused.
Elias leaned in, elated. "Claire! It's me. It's"
Her mouth opened. Not to speak. To scream.
It wasn't her voice.
The thing inside her convulsed. Her spine cracked against the steel table. Black veins bloomed across her skin. The room stank of rot and ozone. The lights flickered. The machine sparked, overloading.
And the voice that spoke was not human.
"You should have let her rest, Elias."
He stumbled back, slipping on a pool of brackish fluid. Claire sat up, limbs twitching, head lolling slightly. She grinned. It wasn't her smile.
"You called me," the voice rasped from her throat. "You stitched a door in her flesh. And now you cannot unsew it."
He screamed in awe and horror, as the thing in her body stood up.
He had brought something back.
And it remembered him.
The stitches never held.
The Book of Never
In the furthest corner of Grimsby Library, where the fluorescent lights flickered and the air tasted faintly of dust and old paper, there sat a book no one ever cataloged. As Owen explored the library as he often did, he found the book by accident. The book sat flush against the back of the shelf so centered it almost seemed staged. No title on the spine. No sticker. Its cover was faded, with a strange, soft sheen that caught no dust. The binding didn't look worn, but there was something used about it, like a glove or a door handle, something that had been touched too many times by too many hands. Owen looked over his shoulder. The library was silent. He reached for the book.
He wasn't the curious type but became enamored with this book. He could not put it down.It was heavier than he expected. Dense, but not thick. Like it held something of weight inside. The material felt smooth and cold, not quite leather, not quite fabric. There were no markings on the front, no author's name, no embossed letters, not even a symbol. But when he opened the front cover, a faint scent rose from the pages.
It smelled like forgotten things old perfume, wilted flowers, wet stone. It didn't make sense, but it wasn't unpleasant.
The first page was blank. So was the second.
He almost closed it, but something made him turn one more.
"You weren't supposed to find this."
Owen froze. The text was centered, written in a narrow font almost like it had been typed, but too precise. The ink shimmered faintly, like it had just dried.
He glanced at the margin. No page number.
He turned the page again.
"But now that you've begun, it's too late."
His breath caught.
A breeze brushed his neck.
There were no windows open.
He flipped again.
This time the page was not printed, it was drawn. A sketch, faintly rendered in fine graphite, of a boy in a library aisle, holding an open book. The boy was looking down, his brow furrowed, his features soft but strangely familiar.
Owen looked down at his own arms. The pose was identical.
He turned the page with shaking fingers.
Now the boy in the sketch was glancing up eyes wide, as though sensing something behind him. And behind the boy, barely visible in the shadows between the stacks, was a shape. No details. Just an outline. Not quite human.
The page was cold.
He flipped to the next faster now.
"You can stop reading whenever you like. But it will not stop reading you."
Owen's mouth went dry.
Something creaked in the aisle—he turned quickly, but there was no one there. The air had changed. Thickened. The smell of the book was stronger now—like ash and lavender, like the memory of a fire long extinguished.
He wanted to shut it. He really did.
But his hand turned the page instead.
And the book turned back.
The text reappeared, still forming, as if being written in real time:
"The Boy in the Aisle."
The words were not ink anymore. They shimmered in gold, hovering just slightly above the surface of the paper, writhing as though alive. Then, without warning, they began to drip falling from the page like candlewax, thick and slow.
The book grew heavy in his hands. The air around him rippled. The spine curled backward, and the pages began to flutter on their own. He let go, but the book didn't fall.
It opened wider.
The light above him flickered once, twice, and then failed completely.
He stepped backward.
But the floor wasn't there.
He didn't fall, exactly.
There was no drop. No sudden terror of gravity. Just a long, breathless slide into quiet.
And when he opened his eyes,but the library was no more.