The Curse Awakens

The door to the hidden room shuddered violently, an unseen force battering the wood from within. The air thickened, sharp with the iron tang of fear, and Victor stumbled backward, fists raised as if against a tangible foe.

A rattling sound worked through the bones of the building—a low groan that seemed to start in the mill’s buried foundation and surge upward, shaking dust from the exposed beams, making plaster flake in slow gray sheets. Leah’s phone, still gripped in her fist, sizzled with static until it went dark, and Eli’s flashlight beam guttered, casting quick-moving shadows that almost took on human shape.

They retreated from the hidden room, gathering in the narrow corridor, backs pressed to the rut-gouged wall. Darius whispered, voice torn by awe and panic, “Did anyone feel that? Like—the whole goddamn mill was breathing.”

No one answered. Instead, a second tremor ran through the building, a deep, rhythmic thud-thud, like a heartbeat out of time. From somewhere below, a woman’s sobbing echoed, distant yet horribly close. Stephanie’s eyes glazed, her breath coming rapid and shallow.

“Don’t,” she muttered, hands clamped onto her temples. “Don’t listen to her. She’ll find you if you listen.”

Victor snarled, “Who, Stephanie? Who’s here?”

Stephanie’s attention snagged on the empty black at the end of the hall. Her lips barely moved: “The spinner in the walls. The watcher. She remembers.”

A blast of cold air swept through the passage, carrying the smell of burning hair and wet earth. Eli whipped around, his voice shaking now: “We need to get outside. Fresh air. Now.”

They fled down the rotted stairs, the steps bowing terrifyingly beneath them. Again, that cry—the same woman, closer now, the sound thick and bubbling, like lungs choked by water. At the base of the steps they froze: the main hall was different, subtly wrong—once-scattered relics rearranged into ritual shapes, ledgers stacked in glyph-like towers. Overhead, the ceiling creaked as if bearing enormous weight.

A dull thump. Something dropped from the rafters—a coiled braid of hair, crusted with mud, landing at Leah’s feet. She recoiled, bile surging in her throat. The group pressed together, instinctively ringed around Stephanie, who had begun to hum tunelessly, eyes squeezed shut.

Then the lights shifted. Not flashlights this time, but a sickly blue radiance swelling from nowhere, seeping from the pores of the wood. And out of the air, a shimmer, coalescing into a shape—a woman, tall and thin, her body a torn shadow, her head crowned by chaotic tangles of hair, eyes vast and stitched with black threads.

She drifted closer, her feet dragging yet leaving no mark. Mouth trembling, Stephanie whimpered, “She’s seen us. She knows what we did.”

The apparition’s mouth yawned wider than possible—a split seam stretching from ear to ear. Her voice scraped over their nerves. “You took. You watched. You left her here. It never ends. You will spin, and spin, and never leave.”

Eli hurled his flashlight at her. It passed straight through, striking the wall with a hollow clang. The air thickened, stinking of ancient mold. Darius’s teeth chattered; Victor inched forward, fists clenched. “Is my sister with you?”

The specter’s head snapped toward him, neck cracking sideways. Her hand—clawed, impossibly long—pointed at Stephanie. “She listens. She calls me. One will join. One pays.”

A gust of wind shattered a pane of glass above, showering them in tiny barbed prisms. Leah shielded her eyes; when she looked back, the apparition was crumbling, dissolving into a haze of biting cold. Victor lunged at the spot she’d been, a scream tearing from his raw throat, but met only empty air.

“Everyone, get to the door. Now!” Leah barked, maintaining composure with effort. They scrambled across the warped floor, dodging relics, their panic scattering logic and sense.

The foyer loomed ahead—but the doors had vanished. Where the exit should be, only unbroken wall stretched, mottled with mold and flickering blue light. Eli crashed into it, shoulder-first. The impact jarred through him, but the wall held—a solid, monstrous refusal.

Something crashed behind them: the trunk upstairs, flung from its spot, clattering down the steps as if hurled by invisible hands. Dust filled the air, making it hard to breathe.

“We can’t get out!” Darius shrieked, voice rising in childish terror.

A noise like heavy chains unfurling boomed from above—the sound of something old, waking after too-long sleep. Leah grabbed Stephanie, shaking her to focus. “Steph! What do we do?”

Stephanie’s eyes flickered with trapped moonlight. “She wants company. She wants—to finish what was started. The debt.”

And then darkness. Complete, wrenching—a presence pressing on closed eyes.

Leah tasted blood. A scream, stifled by a hand; she fought to sense who was by her side. A flurry of scraping footsteps, bodies shoved in panic. A hand—a small, cold hand—gripped Leah’s wrist, and she felt the numbness race up her arm.

Light flared again—bare, emergency red. The group was scattered, dazed. Victor was doubled over, dry-heaving near a cracked window; Darius clung to the banister, peering upward as if expecting the ceiling to collapse. Eli—furious, desperate—hammered still at the wall that should have been the entrance.

But Stephanie was gone.

Leah registered absence first as silence, then as a searing pit in her chest. “Stephanie!” she yelled, her echo careening around the ruined hall. No answer. Darius rushed for the stairs—but halfway up, a door slammed shut above, the reverberation making every board jump.

Victor thundered after him, bellowing Stephanie’s name, his own grief twisting his face. The air thickened. Every attempt at rationality—their adult cool—crumbled. Panic ate into their centers.

Eli rounded, eyes wild. “You. You knew this would happen! You brought us—her—here!” His finger jabbed at Leah, then Victor. “You wanted to exorcize your guilt? Well congratulations, someone’s dead!”

Leah spun, fury and terror unbalancing her. “We had no choice—none of us. We can’t just leave her!”

Darius slid down the banister, sweating, impossibly pale. “She was right next to me. I swear—I felt her.”

Victor retched something dark onto the warped wood, then spat, voice shredded: “We do not split up. Not ever. That’s how they get us, whatever this is.”

Somewhere high above, a girl’s laughter rippled, incongruous, echoing down the ruined stairwell. Leah raised her head in horror: it was unmistakably Stephanie’s voice—only not entirely hers. It sounded warped with another’s resonance, half-mocking, half-indescribably sad.

A slow, scraping sound began along the rafters, circling them. Darius muttered a string of prayers. For just a moment, Leah glimpsed a pair of small, white hands reaching through the balustrade above—just out of sight, just belonging to no one.

The mill answered them with cold.

They collapsed together in the near-dark. Arguments surged and died; blame bounced off the walls along with fear. Each accused, each denied; each, somewhere deep, knew the old curse had taken root, that even Stephanie’s warnings had not been enough.

She was gone. Or worse—taken, somewhere they could neither follow nor escape.

A low, hungry moan worked up from the walls, promising further violence should they attempt to leave.

“I can hear her singing,” Darius whispered finally, close to tears. “She’s calling us upstairs.”

But no one moved. In the sickly glow, they waited—trapped, conspiracy of the guilty—while outside, night pressed its fingers long and deep against the ruined glass.