The trapdoor yawned open on rusted hinges, exhaling a long-forgotten breath of stale air and mold. Anna coughed and pulled her hoodie up over her mouth, the flashlight trembling slightly in her hand.
Beneath her, a narrow wooden stairway descended into complete blackness. No light reached that far. The air felt damp and thick, like the bottom of a dried-out well. She hesitated, listening.
Nothing.
But she could feel it. A pressure, subtle and strange, building in her chest—not fear exactly, but recognition. Like a memory you can't name, tugging at the corners of your mind.
She stepped down.
The stairs groaned in protest, each footfall sinking into the hush like a stone into still water. The walls down here were stone, damp and close. At the bottom, the passage opened into a small room with a packed-earth floor. Roots dangled from the low ceiling like dead fingers.
Then her flashlight passed over something.
In the center of the room was a circle of chalk, cracked and faded but still visible. Inside the circle: a chair. And on that chair, a small, hand-carved wooden box.
The whispers returned.
Soft. Gentle. Like lullabies from another life.
Anna's hand moved of its own accord, reaching toward the box. The moment her fingers brushed it, the air in the room shifted. The temperature dropped so fast her breath fogged. Somewhere in the dark, something knocked—once—on the stone.
The box was sealed with wax, bearing the same rune she had seen etched on the trapdoor.
She pulled it close, heart pounding. It was surprisingly light. Her fingers hovered over the wax seal—and then froze.
A sudden noise behind her: a scraping sound. Like something dragging across the floor.
She spun around.
Nothing.
Then the whisper came again, this time from above—from the house she'd left open and waiting.
But the voice didn't sound like hers.
It didn't sound like anyone alive.
TheBox. Anna stared at the wax seal, fingers trembling just above it. The rune—roughly carved, jagged like it had been scratched in with a blade—seemed to throb faintly in the beam of her flashlight. She could almost hear it humming, low and slow, like a sound too deep to be heard with ears.
Her thumb pressed into the wax.
It cracked.
The whispering stopped.
For a breathless moment, the entire house seemed to hold still. Even the creaking timbers above her fell silent, as if listening.
She opened the lid.
Inside was a folded piece of paper—yellowed with age, brittle at the edges. Beneath it, wrapped in dark red cloth, something small and heavy. She removed the paper first, carefully unfolding it.
It wasn't a letter.
It was a drawing.
A detailed sketch of the house—but not how it looked now. This version was alive. The windows had faces in them. The roof curled at the corners like horns. And beneath it, drawn in thick charcoal, was a vast network of tunnels coiled like veins under the earth, leading to a shape that wasn't quite human.
In the center of the drawing: a name, scrawled in uneven handwriting.
Dorma.
Anna blinked.
Her head throbbed suddenly, sharp and pulsing. The air shifted again—this time heavier, like it had become aware. She reached for the wrapped object. The cloth smelled faintly of iron and smoke.
Inside was a small, hand-carved idol. A figure with no face, just a smooth oval head and long, spindly arms that folded in on themselves like a cage. It was cold to the touch, almost wet.
As her fingers curled around it, something moved in the drawing. She looked down—eyes wide.
The shape in the tunnels… had shifted.
Its head now turned toward the surface.
Toward her.
Above her, the floorboards groaned. Not from age this time. From weight.
Footsteps.
Slow. Deliberate.
Coming closer.
Dorma. The name lingered in Anna's mind like smoke—refusing to drift away.
She whispered it once aloud, not meaning to.
And the house breathed.
Not a gust of wind. Not a creak.
A breath.
Like exhalation from something slumbering deep beneath the foundations.
She turned the drawing over, hoping for answers. And found more questions.
On the back: a list of dates. Dozens, maybe hundreds, scrawled in faded ink. Most were over a century old. But some were disturbingly recent—one of them just three months ago.
Next to each date: a single word.
"Fed."
She sat back hard against the stone wall, cold sweat blooming across her skin.
Who—or What—is Dorma?
Dorma wasn't a person. Not anymore. Possibly never.
The name predates the house. Predates the town.
Fragments of old journals Anna would later find in Miriam's study revealed more: Elias Morwen hadn't built the house to live in. He built it as a lid. A seal.
According to one journal:
"Dorma does not wake. Dorma waits. Dorma listens through wood and water. It does not hunger. It is fed. The house feeds it."
What Elias meant by "fed" was unclear—until Anna remembered the trapdoor, and the strange pit beneath the basement. A dry well. Claw marks. And now a box with a carved idol, wrapped in blood-colored cloth.
Dorma had rules.
It couldn't rise. But it could reach.
Through cracks.
Through dreams.
Through wood that remembers blood.
And it had done so before.
Elias's wife. The Holloways. The recent dates. All were offerings. Some willing. Some not.
The floorboards, Anna now realized, weren't just creaking.
They were responding .
Anna reading one of Elias's original journal entries.
Found in a false panel behind the hearth, stitched into oilskin and sealed with tallow.
Anna's hands shook as she unfolded the brittle parchment. The ink had browned with age, but the handwriting was sharp and frantic—words crammed together as if written in desperation.
She read aloud, softly, as the wind howled outside. Here it's start:-
October 3rd, 1872
It listens.
I hear it even now. Beneath the floor, beneath the stone, beneath the skin of the house. It whispers in a tongue I cannot translate but understand all the same. Not with my mind. With my marrow.
Cordelia is gone. Taken, I fear—not devoured, not dead. It does not consume in the way men know hunger. Dorma is not a beast. It is a will. A dreaming pressure pressing upward from the deep earth.
It reaches best through wood—old wood. Wood that holds memory, fear, the trace oils of hands and footsteps and blood. That is why I sealed the floor with elder timber. That is why I carved the sigils.
But the house lives now. It grows teeth.
Anna stopped, heart hammering. The wind had died again.
The silence around her was so complete, she could hear her own pulse.
She kept reading.
I built the house not as a home but as a tether. A cage. Not to keep it out, but to keep it in. I fed it once—to learn its shape. That was a mistake. It remembers me now. It dreams of me.
It knows my name.
If this is found—burn the box. Break the seal. Salt the floor. Leave the house and do not return before the third whisper.
If you hear the third—
It is too late.
The last line trailed off, ink smeared as if the quill had been ripped from his hand.
And above her, muffled through the ceiling like breath behind plaster, came a sound.
Whisper one.