Chapter One: The House on Bellamy Street
They said the old Carrick House was cursed.
Locals whispered about it — a place where grief soaked the walls and shadows whispered at night. Most stayed away. But Reese Calder was drawn to it, the way a wound draws flies.
She wasn’t a ghost hunter or an urban explorer. She didn’t come for thrills. She came because the house called to her — in dreams, in flashes, in emotions that weren’t her own.
Reese was an empath. She didn’t just feel people. She felt places. And this house… this house was screaming.
She stood on the cracked front steps, her fingers grazing the warped wood of the front door. Cold. Not from the air. From the past.
She pushed it open.
Inside, the house was still — dust suspended like smoke in the shaft of her flashlight. The air tasted of mold and old iron. But beneath that, she felt something deeper: despair. Anger. Guilt.
She stepped into the hallway. With each footfall, her body ached more — not hers, but someone else’s. Her throat tightened. Her chest pounded. Panic. She was walking through someone’s final moments.
The living room to her left was nearly gutted. Boards covered the windows. Furniture lay broken, as if a struggle had taken place. And there, near the fireplace, she felt it strongest — a sharp spike of terror that made her double over, gasping.
She dropped to her knees.
“Help…” she whispered. But it wasn’t her voice. It was hers — the girl. The one who died here. The one who never left.
And then the air changed.
Behind her, the floor creaked. Slowly. Intentionally.
Reese stood, flashlight trembling in her hand. She turned.
Nothing.
But something was watching.
She moved deeper into the house, drawn forward by a force she didn’t understand. It wasn’t just a haunting — it was personal. Someone had died here, yes. But someone had brought her here.
She entered the kitchen, and the smell hit her — rot, sharp and wet. She covered her mouth.
That’s when the whisper came.
“You feel it… don’t you?”
Reese froze. The voice was inches from her ear, though no one was there.
“I can show you,” it hissed. “If you let me in.”
The flashlight flickered. Then died.
Darkness swallowed her whole.
Chapter Two: The Imprint
The flashlight buzzed back to life in Reese’s hand — but the kitchen was no longer the same.
The walls had changed. Gone were the moldy tiles and broken cabinets. In their place stood a pristine kitchen: clean floors, lace curtains, a warm glow from a hanging light. And in the center, a girl — maybe seventeen — sat at the table, head bent over a notebook.
Reese knew this wasn’t real. It was an imprint — a psychic echo strong enough to recreate the past. Her abilities had never done this before. This was new… and dangerous.
The girl looked up. Pale. Brown curls tucked behind one ear. Her name came to Reese like a forgotten memory.
Clara.
Reese stepped closer, heart pounding.
Clara was speaking, but there was no sound. Only the thudding in Reese’s ears and the sensation of dread, swelling like a tide.
Then a man entered the room.
Tall. Unshaven. His presence made the light dim. Clara stiffened. She began to write faster in the notebook, glancing up only once — fear in her eyes.
Reese whispered, “Don’t.”
But it was too late.
The man grabbed the notebook and tore it in half. Clara screamed — but there was still no sound. Only feeling. Her terror slammed into Reese like a wave of cold water.
And just as suddenly — it was gone.
Reese stood in the kitchen again. Rotting. Real. Her hands were shaking.
She stumbled back into the hallway and spotted it — a stairwell leading down to the basement. There was something down there. She could feel it. Not just fear — rage. Twisted and ancient.
But before she could move, she heard it.
Laughter.
Low. Childlike. Not Clara’s.
Something else.
She turned.
At the end of the hallway stood a figure — small, distorted. A boy, maybe ten. His face shadowed. His eyes… wrong. Hollow, like glass marbles sunk into flesh.
He grinned.
Then he moved.
Not walked — glitched — vanishing and reappearing closer, closer, until Reese backed against the basement door.
“Clara didn’t invite you,” the boy whispered. “But he did.”
Reese turned, flung open the basement door, and fled into the dark.
The laughter followed.
Chapter Three: Beneath the Floorboards
The basement stairs groaned beneath Reese’s weight, each step slower than the last. Her flashlight barely cut through the black. The deeper she went, the heavier the air became — thick with mildew, dust, and something… older.
Not just death.
Suppression.
Her heart pounded with emotions not her own: panic, urgency, the helpless scream of a girl trying to leave a message that no one would hear.
Clara.
Reese reached the bottom. The flashlight flickered again but held. Stone walls surrounded her. Shelves sagged under rusted tools, coils of wire, a child’s bike with bent handlebars. But at the far end of the room, she saw it:
A wooden door.
Small. Child-sized. Built into the stone like it didn’t belong.
Reese’s breath caught. Every inch of her body recoiled from it, but she moved forward, drawn not by curiosity — but connection. This wasn’t just Clara’s past. The emotions left here had a signature, a frequency. And it was beginning to match Reese’s own.
She dropped to her knees, pressing her palm against the door.
A vision struck like lightning.
Clara, frantically carving into the back wall with something sharp — a key, maybe. Her hands bled, her breath ragged. Behind her, that distorted boy watched from the shadows, whispering lies.
“You’ll never leave. No one will find it.”
Clara turned, defiant even through tears. “Someone like me will.”
The vision snapped away.
Reese’s hand trembled. She felt warmth in her palm. She looked down — blood. Not hers. A single word had burned itself into her skin, in Clara’s jagged handwriting:
LOOK.
She shoved open the door.
Inside was a crawlspace, barely tall enough to sit. The walls were covered in scratches, symbols, and writing — desperate, frantic. Clara had documented everything. Her father’s rage. The thing in the house. The shadow-boy who grew stronger each time someone felt afraid.
And one line repeated over and over:
“The house doesn’t feed on blood. It feeds on suffering.”
Behind the writing, part of the stone wall had been chipped away. Reese dug her fingers into the cracks. Something thin and wrapped in plastic was wedged inside.
She pulled it free.
A notebook.
Clara’s final record.
As she opened it, the flashlight died completely.
Then the boy’s voice came, soft in the dark:
“You shouldn’t have found that.”
The basement door slammed shut.
Chapter Four: Whisperlight
Reese froze.
The darkness was no longer empty. It breathed.
She pressed her back to the stone wall, clutching Clara’s notebook tight against her chest. Somewhere above, the door was shut — not locked. Just… gone. As if the house had swallowed it.
The boy’s voice echoed again, softer now, amused.
“She cried for days. But no one came.”
Reese gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. She’d trained herself over the years not to let other people’s emotions pull her under — but here, the emotions weren’t just old echoes. They were alive. Moving. Twisting around her like vines.
She reached inward, past the static and noise of the house, into that quiet place she used to hide as a child. A place she called the Still.
Show me, Clara. Show me what happened to you.
The air changed.
In a flash, the crawlspace vanished — replaced by a wide, colorless field. Wind rushed through dry grass. A scarecrow slumped crooked in the distance. Clara stood near a tree, barefoot, arms wrapped around herself.
She looked at Reese, her mouth moving, though her voice came in flickers.
“You… felt me. You’re the first one who ever did.”
Reese stepped forward. “You left the notebook for someone like me.”
Clara nodded. “He didn’t like that. He hates truth. Hates feeling. That’s why he traps people like us.”
Reese’s pulse quickened. “The boy. He’s not a ghost, is he?”
Clara shook her head. “He was made by the house. Not born. He’s not a soul. He’s a wound. He fed off my father’s rage. He gets inside your mind, makes you see things. Hear things. But when you feel too much — when you see the truth — that’s when he can’t hide anymore.”
The wind picked up.
Clara looked over her shoulder. Her eyes widened. “He knows you’re here. He’s coming.”
“How do I stop him?”
Clara’s eyes locked on hers. “You don’t stop him with light. You stop him with truth. But he’ll try to bury it. He’ll use your memories. Your grief. He’ll use her.”
Before Reese could ask who, Clara’s image ripped away like a page in a burning book.
The field vanished.
She was back in the crawlspace — and she wasn’t alone.
The boy crouched across from her, eyes now pitch black, mouth stretching impossibly wide.
“Wanna see something sad?” he hissed.
And with a flash, he shoved her into her own mind — memories she hadn’t touched in years — the hospital room, the ventilator, the sterile light above her sister’s body.
You were too late.
You weren’t there when she died.
Reese collapsed, chest heaving. Pain throbbed through her spine like a hot knife. But even through the grief, she felt something else — a tether.
Clara.
The notebook in her hand began to glow faintly — the ink shimmering silver.
A single phrase pulsed across the page:
Feel everything. Then fight.
Chapter Five: The Flood
Reese was on her knees, shaking.
Memories blurred at the edge of her vision — not just her own, but others too. Clara’s last days. Her father’s fury. A woman screaming upstairs. Children crying behind the walls. The house was a vault of suffering. And the boy — no, the thing wearing a boy’s shape — fed on every drop of it.
The notebook in her hands pulsed, ink bleeding and reshaping itself.
She turned to the next page.
A map — crude and sketched by hand, but layered with emotion. Red swirls marked areas of anger. Black crosses meant death. And one glowing point in the basement was marked with a simple word: KEY.
The boy hissed behind her.
“You don’t even know what’s yours anymore, do you? Your pain. Her pain. All that feeling. You can’t hold it forever.”
Reese stood.
But she wasn’t afraid this time.
She pressed a hand to the cold stone wall and opened herself — not to the boy, but to everything else. She let the grief in. Let the fear tear through her. Let Clara’s sorrow, the pain of the other trapped souls, and her own buried rage rise up like a storm.
The boy staggered back, hissing.
“Stop—”
Reese took a step forward. “You said it yourself. You feed on suffering. But you forgot what happens when an empath owns it. When we don’t run from it anymore.”
She screamed — not in fear, but in defiance.
The house shuddered.
Pipes burst. Floorboards cracked. Whispers turned to wails.
And behind the wall, something clicked.
Reese shoved her hand into the gap where Clara had hidden the notebook — and found a metal object. Cold. Heavy.
A key.
But as she gripped it, the floor below her split open — not physically, but psychically. Her mind was thrown into a vision again, violent and unstable. This time it was her own childhood home.
She was back in her sister’s hospital room.
But something was wrong.
The boy sat in the corner, legs swinging. “You never said goodbye.”
Reese turned toward the bed — only to see herself there, crying. Her sister lay still.
But this time, she moved.
Her sister sat up, eyes open, whispering, “You can still save her.”
Reese blinked.
“Save who?”
Then the scene twisted — Clara, screaming behind a sealed door. Her father pounding on it with a hammer. The boy laughing.
Clara’s not the only one trapped.
There are others. More rooms. More ghosts.
The house was bigger than Reese realized.
It was a labyrinth of suffering.
And she had just unlocked the first door.
Chapter Six: The First Door
The key felt heavier than it should have, almost warm in Reese’s hand — like it knew it had been waiting for her. She shoved it into her jacket pocket and crawled out of the small hidden space. The air had shifted. The house was holding its breath.
She swept the flashlight across the basement.
A door now stood where there had been only stone before — tall, iron-bound, dripping with condensation. Its surface was carved with dozens of names, some scratched so deep the wood splintered. Not a door meant to keep something out. A door meant to keep something in.
The boy was at the far end of the room, his shape flickering like static.
“You open it,” he said, voice sharper now, “and you’ll wish you’d stayed upstairs.”
Reese ignored him and slid the key into the lock.
The click was deafening.
The door groaned open, revealing a hallway she’d never seen on any floor plan. Narrow. Endless. Its walls pulsed faintly, like they were alive. The smell of rust and damp earth filled her lungs.
Her empathic senses surged the moment she stepped inside.
Dozens — no, hundreds — of emotions screamed at once. Grief. Regret. Desperation. Rage. Each one a tether to someone… or something… still here.
Shadows shifted in the corners, forming into silhouettes — translucent, blurred faces staring at her. Some were human. Some… were not.
One woman stepped forward, pale and gaunt, her mouth moving soundlessly. Reese felt the truth in her chest before the words reached her mind.
He keeps us here. Feeds on what we can’t let go.
Reese’s throat tightened. “I can help you leave.”
The shadows rippled — and the boy appeared between her and the spirits, grinning.
“She’s lying. She doesn’t even know how.”
Reese’s hands shook, but she remembered Clara’s words: Feel everything. Then fight.
She opened herself again — but this time, she didn’t just receive the flood of emotion. She channeled it. All the pain, all the fear, every ounce of rage that the trapped souls carried — she took it in and let it build until her skin felt like it was buzzing.
Then she released it.
The hallway exploded in light and sound. The boy screamed, his shape unraveling into black smoke. The walls shook violently, and several of the shadow-people dissolved, their emotions slipping away into nothing. Freed.
But the light didn’t last.
The boy reformed — taller now, his eyes like burning coals.
“You let them go,” he growled. “So I’ll take something from you.”
The hallway slammed shut behind her.
And she realized she was no longer in the Carrick House at all.
She was inside his world now.
Chapter Seven: The Labyrinth of Pain
Reese stumbled into the hallway, her lungs burning from fear and exertion. But this was no longer the physical Carrick House. The walls pulsed like living tissue, stretching and contracting with every heartbeat. Shadows slithered across the floors and ceilings, writhing with faces she couldn’t place — yet somehow recognized.
Her hand went to the notebook, clutched tightly against her chest. Clara’s last messages glimmered faintly in the dark: Follow the emotions. Trust the pain. It will guide you.
She focused. Let the flood of grief, anger, and fear wash over her. She let herself feel every whisper of suffering in the walls — every phantom heartbeat, every trapped scream — and slowly, a path opened before her.
The first spirit emerged: a woman, thin and pale, fingers trembling. No face, just sorrow made visible. Her voice, when it came, wasn’t spoken — it slammed into Reese’s mind.
Please… help me.
Reese swallowed her terror. “I can. I’ll help you all.”
The woman’s form brightened. She moved toward Reese, leaving a faint silver trail. Reese realized these were the anchors — spirits that could guide her through the maze if she followed them carefully.
The boy’s laughter echoed, louder now, twisting the labyrinth into grotesque shapes. Floors cracked into nothingness. Walls expanded and contracted, sometimes swallowing her whole.
“You’re strong,” he hissed, “but your heart is full of fear. And I love fear.”
Reese steadied herself. She had no weapons but her gift, and she remembered Clara’s words: Feel everything. Then fight.
She reached deep, letting the pain of the trapped spirits — the suffering the house had hoarded for decades — surge through her. Not just to feel it, but to channel it. The shadows in the labyrinth recoiled, the air crackling with energy.
Another spirit appeared: a boy, crouched in a corner, crying silently. He extended his hand. Reese took it, and a warm pulse ran through her chest. The labyrinth shifted slightly, revealing a narrow path forward.
The boy-entity screeched in frustration. “You cannot hold them all!”
“I can,” Reese said, voice shaking but steady. “And I will.”
Each step she took through the labyrinth strengthened her bond with the spirits. Together, they guided her to the center — the place where the boy’s psychic presence was strongest. There, a massive door loomed, carved with symbols and names — a twisted record of every life the house had fed upon.
The spirits whispered, encouraging her. This is it. The heart. You can end this.
Reese gripped Clara’s notebook and the metal key she had found. She knew the next step would either destroy her… or destroy him.
And beyond that door, she could feel the boy waiting. Not just watching. Hunting.
The hallway trembled as the air thickened. The labyrinth was aware. It was alive. And it did not want her to succeed.
But Reese stepped forward, determined. Fear would not bind her. Suffering would not chain her. She was ready.
The door loomed ahead — and the boy’s laughter echoed from behind it, promising a confrontation unlike any she had faced.
Chapter Eight: Heart of the House
Reese’s hand trembled as she pushed the massive carved door open. Beyond it lay a vast chamber that defied the laws of the Carrick House — ceilings stretched impossibly high, shadows crawling along walls that seemed to breathe. The air was thick, sweet with the metallic scent of old blood and raw fear.
At the center, the boy waited. Not the small, twisted child she’d first seen — now he towered, a silhouette of smoke and malice, eyes like molten coals, mouth stretched into a permanent grin. Every corner of the room pulsed with his presence.
“Finally,” he hissed, voice like glass scraping stone. “The little empath comes to play. I’ve been waiting.”
Reese steadied herself. Clara’s notebook throbbed in her hands, ink shimmering with silver lines that crawled across the pages. She could feel the spirits she had freed, hovering nearby, their energy coiling around her like a shield.
“This ends now,” she said.
The boy laughed, and the floor beneath her warped, turning into jagged spikes of shadow. Images flashed in her mind — her own childhood memories twisted, the hospital room where her sister had died, Clara trapped behind the door, screaming. Every ounce of guilt and fear the boy had ever fed on came rushing at her.
Reese closed her eyes, taking a deep, steadying breath. She let it all in. The grief of the trapped spirits. The rage of Clara’s final moments. The terror the boy had sown for decades.
And then she sent it back.
A wave of empathic energy surged outward from her chest, crashing into the boy like a hurricane. Shadows tore themselves apart, screaming in agony as the force of pure emotion hit them. He staggered, shrieking, unable to maintain his form against the combined strength of her empathy and the spirits’ own released energy.
“I… am not yours!” she yelled.
The boy lunged, his hands like claws reaching for her mind. But Reese had prepared. She focused, feeling every tether, every soul he had claimed. One by one, they joined her. Their combined power wrapped around him like chains of light and sound, forcing him back.
The chamber trembled. Walls cracked. The house screamed in protest. Reese’s heart pounded, her body trembling, but she stood firm.
With a final, guttural roar, the boy’s form unraveled, smoke and shadow peeling away like tattered fabric. The names carved into the walls glowed briefly — then shattered, releasing a flood of warmth and light.
The spirits she had freed floated around her, smiling faintly, fading into peace. Clara appeared one last time, smiling softly.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You finished what I couldn’t.”
Reese sank to her knees, exhausted, clutching the notebook. The house groaned once more, a sound of surrender. And then — silence.
The walls no longer pulsed. Shadows no longer slithered. The Carrick House, while still standing, had lost its hold over the living and the dead.
Outside, the rain had stopped. The first rays of dawn filtered through the broken windows. Reese stepped over the cracked floorboards and into the morning light, carrying Clara’s notebook and the memory of every soul she had freed.
The horror was over. For now.
But she knew the Carrick House, or something like it, would never truly be gone. And neither would her gift.
She was an empath. And she had learned that sometimes, to save others, you must feel everything — and survive.
Chapter Nine: Breaking the Curse
Reese stepped out of the Carrick House just as the sun broke over the treeline. For the first time since she had arrived, the air felt clean — no heaviness pressing down on her chest, no unseen hands clinging to her skin.
The front door groaned shut behind her, as though the house were exhaling its final breath.
She turned back once. The windows were dark, lifeless. The house looked like nothing more than an abandoned shell now. But Reese knew better. It hadn’t just been a building. It had been a wound — festering, hungry, alive.
And wounds always left scars.
Her fingers tightened around Clara’s notebook. The pages, once nearly illegible, had rearranged themselves during the battle. Where there had been frantic scribbles, there were now clear words, Clara’s voice preserved. Warnings. Instructions. Maps.
And on the very last page, a new line shimmered faintly, written in a hand Reese didn’t recognize:
The house is quiet, but others are not.
Reese swallowed hard.
The thought had already been gnawing at her since she left the basement: if Carrick House was capable of creating something like the boy, how many other places existed like it? How many other wounds were still feeding, hidden in plain sight?
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, startling her. She fumbled it out — no missed calls, no messages. The screen was cracked. She hadn’t noticed before.
When she pressed the home button, the background wallpaper flickered. For a second, just a second, it wasn’t her normal photo.
It was the boy’s grin.
Reese’s stomach dropped. She blinked, and it was gone. Just her wallpaper again.
She slid the phone away, heart hammering.
The Carrick House stood silent behind her, but deep in her bones, she knew this wasn’t an ending. It was only an initiation.
Her gift was no longer just a curse. It was a responsibility.
Because whatever had fed here… wasn’t unique.
And it was still hungry.