"Come on, man. Stop being a wuss."
Anthony tightened his grip on his phone, the cracked screen digging into his palm. The house loomed at the top of the hill like it had grown there—crooked, rotting, patient. Its windows weren't just dark; they were blacked out, as if someone had painted the inside of the glass, making them dull, solid pupils in a skeletal face. They didn't reflect the moonlight or the distant streetlights. They just swallowed the light, and something inside didn't want to be seen.
"I'm not a wuss," he snapped, the words tasting thin. "Just—give me a damn second, alright?"
Behind him, laughter cut through the night air, sharp and brittle. It was the sound of someone trying too hard to prove they weren't scared.
"A second? You've had five minutes," Brad's voice came, smooth and heavy with mockery. Tall, broad-shouldered, blond—everything about him screamed confidence bought with money. He crossed his arms, the expensive fabric of his jacket pulling tight. "You lost the bet. Rules are rules. The Hayes Special: one solo tour of the Murder Shack."
A girl scoffed. "Oh my god, Anthony, you're wasting my time." She flicked her hair back, the scent of her vanilla perfume a sickly contrast to the wet earth smell of the hill. "There's no such thing as a real haunted house. It's just some abandoned dump. Probably full of rats and raccoon shit."
Anthony didn't turn around. His eyes stayed locked on the front door. It wasn't just a door; it was a mouth, the peeling paint like cracked lips, the gap beneath it a dark tongue.
The house looked worse up close. The wooden boards were split and swollen from years of rain, weeping dark moisture. Rust crawled along the hinges like dried, flaking blood. Mold bloomed in dark, furry patches across the clapboard walls, and the whole porch sagged in the middle, bowing under its own weight as if the ground beneath it was softening. A faint smell drifted down the hill—damp wood, sweet rot… and something metallic and sour beneath it, like old pennies and spoiled milk.
"I know that," Anthony muttered, more to himself than to them. "I know it's stupid. But it's not your ass going in there alone."
Brad stepped forward, gravel crunching under his designer sneakers. "Wow. Zip it. Don't talk to my girl like that." He jabbed a thumb toward the house, a gesture both casual and cruel. "Fifty bucks or five minutes. Clock's ticking."
Anthony swallowed. The saliva felt thick in his dry throat.
He wanted to tell them all to screw off. Wanted to say the bet was dumb, that this place sat in his gut like a cold stone, that his chest felt tight for no reason he could name. But the words stayed stuck, a tangled knot of pride and fear. Four pairs of eyes burned into his back, waiting for him to break. Their silence was a weapon.
He sighed, long and shaky, the sound swallowed by the vast, quiet dark around the property.
"Alright. Fine. Whatever."
The laughter stopped as he started up the hill. The world seemed to contract. The distant, comforting glow of Brad's car headlights receded. The chatter of his friends faded into a low murmur, then nothing.
With every step, the night seemed to quiet. No insects chirped. No wind stirred the dead oak leaves clinging to the gutters. Even the distant hum of traffic from the interstate two miles away faded until there was only the sound of his own breathing and the crunch-crunch-crunch of his shoes on the gravel drive and the brittle corpses of last autumn's leaves.
When he reached the porch, the air changed.
It felt heavier—denser, like walking underwater. His ears rang faintly, a thin, high-pitched whine just at the edge of hearing, the kind that makes your jaw ache and your teeth feel too big for your mouth. Anthony hesitated, his hand hovering inches from the tarnished brass doorknob. It was filigreed with grime, and in the dim light, it looked wet.
This is stupid, he told himself, the thought a frantic, familiar rhythm. You're gonna open the door, step one foot inside, count to ten, step right back out. That's it. Proof. Then you walk down and take their money and never speak to these people again.
He glanced over his shoulder.
His friends were still there, small, blurry shapes at the bottom of the hill, their faces now lit by the cool glow of phone screens. Brad gave him a lazy, two-fingered salute.
Anthony turned back. The house waited.
The doorknob was cold. Colder than the night air. Colder than metal had any right to be. It sucked the warmth from his fingers instantly.
When he twisted it, the mechanism gave with a rusty, grinding shriek that felt too loud in the profound silence, a sound that didn't just echo in the air but seemed to vibrate up through the porch boards into the bones of his legs. The door creaked open, not smoothly, but in a jerking, reluctant motion, like the house was exhaling a long-held, putrid breath.
The smell that rolled out was stronger—a physical presence. Rotting wood, damp plaster, old rust. And beneath it, that faintly sweet, cloying scent, unmistakable now: spoiled meat, just beginning to turn.
He took one step across the threshold.
The door swung shut behind him.
Not slammed. Not blown. Swing-shut, with a soft, definitive click of the latch engaging.
Anthony froze, the blood in his veins turning to ice water.
He hadn't touched it. He hadn't even felt a draft.
The darkness inside the house was absolute, a velvet black that pressed against his skin, clogged his nostrils. The sliver of moonlight that had followed him in was now gone, severed by the closed door. After a few seconds, his eyes began to desperately adjust, pulling shapes from the void. Warped, tilted floorboards. The faint outline of a stairway directly ahead, ascending into deeper black. The walls weren't just dirty; they were carved with deep, parallel grooves—claw marks, but too regular, too many, forming swirling, mind-numbing patterns that made his vision slide away if he looked too long.
His own breathing was deafening, a ragged, wet noise in the perfect quiet.
"Hello?" he called out, his voice cracking on the second syllable, small and pathetic in the swallowing dark.
Something shifted upstairs.
Not footsteps. Not the creak of a board.
It was a drag-shift, like something heavy and soft being pulled a few inches across bare floor. Then a slow, wet inhale.
Anthony backed up, heart hammering against his ribs like a frantic bird, one hand reaching blindly behind him for the door, fingers scrambling over splintered wood, searching for the knob—
And then the high-pitched ringing in his ears stopped.
Abruptly. Completely.
The silence that followed was total. It was a vacuum. It was the silence of a deep cave, of a coffin, of a place where sound had never been born. It was worse than any noise he could imagine.
In that perfect, screaming silence, he heard the drag-shift again. Closer now. At the top of the stairs.
***
The classroom buzzed with a low, anxious energy long before the bell rang.
Chairs scraped against the linoleum floor in fits and starts. Backpacks hit desks with heavy, careless thumps. Conversations overlapped in half-whispers and nervous laughter, the usual morning gossip now laced with a sharp, thrilling undercurrent of fear. The clock above the whiteboard read 8:07 a.m., its red second hand ticking with a steady, mechanical indifference.
The room was large—two doors at the back, rows of desks packed tight like teeth, tall windows along one wall letting in a dull, grey morning light that did nothing to warm the space. Around fifty students filled it, the air thick with the smell of old textbooks, dry-erase markers, and unspoken dread.
The door at the front creaked open.
A few heads turned as Ace Eldren stepped inside, but most were too wrapped in their own murmured dramas to notice. He was fifteen, tall for his age, just under six feet. Lean and athletic—not bulky, but with a contained strength in his shoulders, the kind built from something more practical than a school gym. His dark hair fell into his eyes in the front and brushed the back of his neck, an uneven mod cut that looked more like he'd done it himself than paid for it. There was something deliberate, economical, about the way he moved down the aisle. He didn't meander; he navigated, his gaze flicking to the corners of the room, the exits, the faces, cataloging and dismissing in the same glance.
As he walked, a faint, familiar pressure brushed against the back of his neck—a cold prickle, like the ghost of a spider's leg. It was gone as quickly as it came, leaving only a residue of unease. He frowned slightly, his steps barely faltering. Probably nothing. Just the collective nerves of fifty kids spooking themselves.
He slid into the seat beside Marco, the plastic chair groaning under his weight.
Marco, already slumped in his seat, grinned and bumped fists with him. "Wassup, dude. You look like you slept in a ditch."
"Wassup," Ace replied, the corner of his mouth twitching. He dropped his bag—a worn, black canvas thing—under the desk without looking.
Marco leaned closer, his voice dropping from a shout to a conspiratorial murmur. "Yo. For real. You hear about the news?"
Ace was pulling a notebook from his bag. He didn't look up. "What news?"
"A kid from St. Caldron. Went missing last night." Marco's eyes were wide, his usual joking manner sanded down by genuine alarm.
Ace's fingers stilled on the spiral binding. He lifted his head. "Missing how?"
"Like… vanished." Marco glanced around before leaning in even further, his desk scraping forward an inch. "Name was Anthony Hayes. Senior. People are saying he went into that haunted house up on Briar Hill. The one near the old woods. On a dare. And never came out."
Ace's expression hardened, his eyes going flat and focused for just a second—a shutter slamming down—before smoothing out into careful neutrality. He leaned back in his chair, the casual pose at odds with the sudden tension in his jaw.
"The old Victorian? With the collapsed porch?" he asked, his voice deliberately even.
"Yeah, that one." Marco nodded, swallowing. "Cops and everything were out there all night. My brother's a volunteer firefighter. He said they searched it top to bottom. Found nothing. No blood. No backpack. No signs of a struggle. Just… empty. Like the dude just… evaporated."
Ace's gaze drifted to the window, but he wasn't seeing the soccer fields outside. He was seeing that house, perched on its hill like a rotten tooth. He'd driven past it with his mom last winter. He'd felt it then, too—a low-grade wrongness, a silent, patient hum of malice that vibrated just below the surface of the world. It had made the hair on his arms stand up. He'd written it off as creepiness, the power of suggestion over a spooky location. Now, he wondered.
"That's messed up," he said quietly, the words feeling inadequate.
"No kidding." Marco shuddered, a full-body shake. "Everyone's been talking about it all morning. Ghost stories on steroids."
Before Ace could respond—before he could decide how to respond—the classroom doors at the back swung open with a decisive click.
The teacher, Ms. Green, entered, her low heels striking the floor with a sound like snapping bones. The overlapping conversations frayed and then severed into a thick, waiting silence. She set her leather bag on the desk with a soft thump, her face a careful mask of somber authority.
"Good morning, students," she began, her voice cutting the quiet. "I'm sure by now most of you have heard about the… unfortunate incident involving a student from our neighboring school."
Marco leaned toward Ace, not bothering to whisper now. "Told ya."
Ace didn't look at him. His eyes were fixed on the teacher, his body very still.
Ms. Green clasped her hands together on the desk, a gesture meant to look concerned but which only seemed rigid. "While the authorities are handling the situation, I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone to be prudent. Return home directly after school. Do not linger. Do not, under any circumstances, engage in reckless behavior or attempt to visit sites associated with this… tragedy." She paused, letting the word tragedy hang in the air, already stripped of its raw horror and wrapped in administrative caution. "Curiosity is natural, but it can be dangerous. Let this be a lesson."
Ace felt a hot, sharp twist in his gut. He muttered under his breath, words meant only for the grain of the desk, "Someone gets eaten by the dark and she turns it into a fucking public safety announcement."
Next to him, Marco heard. He snorted quietly, a strained sound. "Cold as hell, man."
The teacher continued, unfazed by the ripple of discomfort in the room. "This is a serious matter. I expect you all to learn from it. Now, open your textbooks to page 214. We have a unit test on Friday, and disappearing acts won't be on the curriculum."
A few nervous titters escaped, quickly stifled. Ace stared at the clock again. 8:11 a.m. The red second hand jerked forward, a captive marching to its end.
Marco shifted in his seat, the nervous energy coming off him in waves. He crumpled a corner of his notebook page. "So…" he started, his voice tentative.
Ace glanced at him, his own thoughts a thousand miles away—up a hill, at a dark door. "So?"
"You wanna… you know. Check out that place? After school? Just to look from the road or something?"
Ace turned fully toward him this time. The movement was slow, deliberate. His face, usually open and relaxed around Marco, had closed off. The friendly mask was gone, replaced by something older and harder.
"No."
Marco blinked, taken aback by the flat, final tone. "What? C'mon, man—"
"No," Ace repeated, the word firmer, leaving no room for argument. It wasn't a suggestion. It was a boundary. "That's a monumentally bad idea."
Marco's frown deepened, a mix of confusion and wounded pride. "Since when are you scared of a stupid story?"
Ace exhaled slowly, a controlled release of breath. He chose his next words with the care of someone handling live wires. "I'm not. I just don't want you—or anyone—getting into something you can't get out of." He held Marco's gaze, willing him to understand the subtext he couldn't voice. This isn't a game.
"It's just a house," Marco insisted, but his voice had lost some of its conviction.
"Yeah," Ace said, his voice dropping so low Marco had to lean in to catch it. "And people don't just disappear from just a house for no reason."
Marco hesitated, his bravado deflating under Ace's unshakeable certainty. He looked down at his ruined notebook page, then shrugged, a defeated gesture. "Damn. Okay. Fine. Guess we'll just… not get cursed today."
Ace forced a small, tight smile, the mask slipping back into place. "Sounds like a solid plan."
The morning bell rang then, sharp and punitive, scattering the tense silence.
The class settled into the numbing routine—the drone of the teacher's voice, the scratch of pens, the rustle of textbook pages. A semblance of normalcy, paper-thin and fragile. But Ace's mind was a world away, trapped on a hill under a moonless sky.
Whatever had taken Anthony Hayes hadn't been a prank, hadn't been an accident.
It had been a choice the house made.
And sitting there in the fluorescent light, feeling the echo of that cold prickle on his neck, Ace knew with a hunter's cold certainty: It wasn't done.
***
The bell rang, sharp and sudden, slicing through the drone of the teacher's lecture.
It triggered a release of pent-up energy. Students poured out into the corridors in a river of chatter and slamming books, the grim topic of the morning already being diluted by the immediate concerns of passing periods and gossip. Life was moving on, the machinery of the school grinding the bizarre into just another piece of drama. Ace stepped into the hallway and was immediately engulfed by it.
The buzz was different now, more charged. He didn't just hear it; he parsed it.
"Did you hear they found his phone—" "...completely empty, like a horror movie—" "My brother said the cops looked spooked—"
Break time had transformed the tiled hallway into a fertile rumor mill. Ace leaned against a cold metal locker, arms crossed over his chest, his posture deceptively casual. He listened without appearing to, his gaze skimming over the crowd, separating fearful embellishment from possible kernels of truth. Most of it was useless—spectral hitchhikers, serial killer lairs, government experiments. It was fear dressing itself up in costumes, trying to make the incomprehensible into a story that could be understood, and therefore dismissed.
His eyes found Cedric near the humming vending machines, an island of stillness in the current.
Cedric stood out by not trying to. Same age as Ace, a little shorter, but he carried himself with a compact, ready ease. His sharp eyes missed nothing, but his expression was one of detached, almost bored calm, as if the chaos swirling around him was a mildly interesting documentary. His uniform was neat but not stiff, his posture relaxed in a way that felt deliberate, a performance of normalcy that was a shade too perfect. His dark hair was a messy fringe he was constantly brushing from his eyes.
Ace pushed off the locker and walked over, the crowd parting slightly around him without anyone seeming to notice.
"Yo," Ace said, coming to a stop beside him.
Cedric glanced up from the vending machine's glowing selections, a ghost of a smirk touching his lips. "Took you long enough. I was starting to think you'd joined a study group."
They bumped fists, a quick, practiced motion.
"You hearing this shit?" Ace asked, tilting his head slightly toward a cluster of freshmen weaving an elaborate tale about ghostly wails.
Cedric followed his gaze, his smirk not fading but shifting into something more analytical. "Hard not to. The signal-to-noise ratio in this place is terrible today."
Ace lowered his voice, the ambient noise providing decent cover. "Anthony Hayes. St. Caldron senior. The old house on Briar Hill."
Cedric's expression shifted—not into shock or fear, but into a focused, listening stillness. The casual air evaporated, replaced by a professional attentiveness.
"Yeah," he said, his voice now flat, clear. "I heard. The broadcast was thin, but it pinged."
Ace studied him. "Thoughts?"
Cedric leaned back against the humming machine, arms folding. He looked past Ace, his eyes losing focus as he accessed a mental catalogue. "Could be nothing. A kid running away. A coincidence that smells weird."
Ace just waited, one eyebrow imperceptibly raised.
"Or," Cedric continued, his gaze snapping back, sharp and clear, "it could be something pretending to be nothing. Blob-type entities are good at that. Clean consumption, leaves a void. So are certain subspecies of goblin, depending on the local mineral content. They like to hoard shiny things, and sometimes… people."
Ace snorted quietly, a soft puff of air. "Of course. And everyone out here is just throwing around 'ghost' like it explains a damn thing."
"Ghosts are lazy answers for people who don't want real ones," Cedric said, a flicker of disdain in his tone. "If it was a standard haunting, there'd be a history. Cold spots. Emotional echoes. Repeat phenomena in the same pattern. This is a single, discrete event. A snatch-and-grab."
"So what then?" Ace pressed, his own mind running parallel tracks. "Something that just moved in?"
Cedric tilted his head, considering. "Chupacabra's unlikely. Wrong urban-fringe environment, not enough livestock. Skinwalker's… possible. But they're usually nomadic, territorial markers over miles. They don't tend to squat in one structure for long."
Ace went quiet. The noise of the hallway—the laughter, the shouts, the slamming lockers—seemed to recede, fading into a dull background hum as their shared focus narrowed the world down to this one point of wrongness.
Cedric noticed the shift in him. He leaned forward a fraction. "You're thinking the same thing I am, aren't you?"
"That the house has been there for decades," Ace said slowly, each word measured. "Empty. Creepy. A local legend. And it only took someone now. Why last night? What was the trigger?"
Cedric nodded once. "Exactly. It wasn't random. It was opportune. Or hungry enough to stop being careful."
The unspoken conclusion hung between them, solid and heavy.
Cedric glanced at him, his eyes intent. "We should check it out."
Ace didn't respond immediately. He looked down the crowded hallway, his hunter's instinct automatically mapping exits, noting faces, reading the patterns of movement for anything that didn't fit. He saw none. Just kids. Just noise.
Cedric raised a brow. "After school. Daylight. Just observation. Perimeter check. No hero shit, no crossing the threshold. Strictly intel."
Ace let out a long, slow sigh through his nose. "I figured you'd say that."
"So?" Cedric pressed, his tone leaving no room for evasion.
Ace scratched the back of his neck, a faint, familiar tension settling in his shoulders. "I gotta ask my mom first."
Cedric blinked, the professional mask slipping for a second into genuine surprise. "You're serious?"
"Dead serious."
A quiet laugh escaped Cedric, a sound of amused disbelief. "You're a bona fide, second-generation hunter who can probably field-strip a ward in the dark, and you still need a permission slip?"
Ace shot him a look that was half warning, half weary acknowledgment. "I live under her roof. I follow her rules. That's the deal."
"Fair," Cedric said, the amusement fading into respect. He nodded slowly. "Smart, actually. Keeps the lines clear."
Ace glanced back down the hallway, his eyes instinctively tracing the path to the main doors, then up, toward the hill he couldn't see. "If she says no, we don't go. Not tonight. Not even for a look."
Cedric nodded again, this time without a hint of argument. "Then we don't go. We watch the news and wait for the next weird thing to pop up. Protocol."
The bell rang again, a harsh, electronic shriek calling them back to the performance of being students.
As their classmates groaned and began the slow shuffle toward classrooms, Cedric pushed off the vending machine.
"Text me," he said, his voice low and clear. "Let me know the verdict."
Ace met his eyes and gave a single, firm nod. "Yeah."
They split off, moving in opposite directions through the thinning crowd.
Ace walked back toward his next class, the noise of the school closing in around him once more—a cacophony of ordinary life. But his mind was already elsewhere, locked on the geometry of a rotting porch, the physics of a door that closed by itself, and the patient, hungry silence that had followed.
Whatever had taken Anthony Hayes wasn't a myth from a campfire story.
It was a concrete problem. A breach.
And soon, one way or another, Ace and Cedric would be the ones to assess it.