It began with a sound so small it shouldn’t have had the power to paralyze us. A single footstep descending the stairs. But there was something dry about it. Something that whispered of dust and long, silent places. The sound of a shoe sole dragged across a step, followed by a silence so deep it felt calculated, like the intruder was listening to us breathe. Another step. Another scuff. Then that unnatural pause again, long enough for dread to crawl beneath the skin.
Whoever it was wasn’t sneaking. They were taking their time. Measuring every movement. We stared at each other, our faces washed in the dim glow of the lamp, but all color was already draining away. Then came another step. Followed by another impossibly long pause. As though the thing on the stairs wasn’t just moving- it was savoring the descent. The pauses were the worst. They weren’t normal human hesitations. They felt listening. Devious. As though whatever was coming down those stairs needed time to remember how to move inside a body. We didn’t speak. We barely breathed. The house had become a pressure chamber, each second squeezing tighter around us. Then came the movement through the kitchen. Slow. Dragging. Something about the rhythm was wrong. Unsteady, but not weak. Like limbs following a hand shrouded in mist, unseen and uncertain.
Someone using a body instead of inhabiting it. We were statues on the sofa, backs rigid, hands shaking in tiny invisible spasms. The vulnerability of the open doorway seemed to lean toward us, stretching forward, waiting to reveal whatever horror it carried.
Then… a darkness spilled across the doorway.
A shape stood just outside the living room, its shadow trembling on the walls as though whatever it was that was in our house disrupted the air around it. A figure stepped into view… Luci! Or rather, something wearing her shape. She had the white burial dress, creased, stiff, clinging to her like a shroud not meant to be disturbed. Her hair hung in brittle clumps, strands breaking off as she moved, drifting to the floor like dry reeds. Her skin held a faint bluish cast, not the soft hue of cold. It was the blue of something that had been emptied. But it was her eyes that rooted us in a deeper terror than I’d thought possible.
They were set too far back, swallowed in shadow, and there was a faint film over them that caught the dim light in a way that made it impossible to tell exactly where she was looking. It felt like she saw too much and not enough at the same time. Like the gaze of something that doesn’t blink because it has no need to.
