Chapter 3: Whispers Beneath the Floorboards
The wind that night was unlike any they'd heard before. It didn't just blow—it wept. It clawed at the shutters and moaned through the eaves, a sound both hollow and aching, like grief itself had found a voice.
The fire had long since burned down to ashes in the hearth, leaving the room dim and cold. But it wasn't the chill that roused Dorian from sleep. It was something colder still—a breath, sudden and spectral, curling like frost against the nape of his neck.
He jolted upright, his breath catching.
Beside him, Lyra lay peacefully, her arm resting protectively over her growing belly, her features soft in slumber. The room was dark but calm. Ordinary.
But Dorian knew. The breath hadn't come from her.
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, feet meeting the old wooden floor. The silence was too deep, unnatural. A pressure hung in the air like the moments before a storm, and then—so faint it could have been imagined—he heard it.
A melody.
Not just any tune.
A lullaby.
> "Hush now, darling, close your eyes..."
A voice from memory.
His chest tightened. Evelyn's voice—ghostly and sweet—rose like mist from beneath the floorboards. The song she used to hum, half-forgotten, now impossibly alive again.
Drawn forward as if by some invisible thread, Dorian crossed the room, each step slow and trembling. He knelt near the fireplace, where the boards were old and warped. His hands, pale and shaking, slid over the floor until he found it—one plank, loose at the edges.
It came up with little effort.
Beneath it, nestled in a bed of cold, dry soil, lay a single withered rose. Its petals were blackened, brittle. Time had turned it into something delicate and dead.
But from it came a whisper, as intimate as a lover's sigh.
> "You said you'd never forget me…"
Dorian stared, paralyzed. His heart pounded in his ears.
Then, as he reached for it, the rose crumbled in his hand—nothing more than dust and memory.
---
The days that followed blurred like brushstrokes in a storm.
Dorian became... quieter. He watched the mirrors too long. Stared into corners that held nothing. He began to see Evelyn—not fully, but in glimpses. A pale face behind the glass, a shadow that shouldn't be there, the whisper of a presence just out of sight.
He tried to hide it from Lyra.
But at night, her name left his lips—soft, broken, longing.
"Evelyn..."
The first time Lyra heard it, she turned away, willing herself to believe it had been part of a dream. The second time, her heart broke. The third, she quietly took her pillow and moved to the nursery.
She wrote in her journal that night:
> "How do you fight the dead,
when their ghost lives inside
the one you love most?"
---
The cradle had been a gift.
Dorian carved it with his own hands, sanding each curve with care, with hope. A father's hands. When it was complete, they placed it by the nursery window, where soft morning light would spill across the baby's face when she arrived.
But peace was a fleeting thing.
One evening, they returned from dinner to find the cradle rocking.
Back and forth.
No wind. No open window. No one had touched it.
Just motion.
Lyra stepped forward, one hand clutching her belly. She hesitated—then leaned in to look.
The cradle was empty.
And then—
It wasn't.
A shape, small and terrible, curled where the baby should have lain. Blackened skin, eyes like empty voids.
It shrieked—one piercing, unnatural cry—and vanished.
The cradle shattered.
Splinters flew across the room, and Lyra screamed, collapsing into Dorian's arms. He caught her, held her close, unable to speak for a long time.
When he did, his voice was low and hollow.
> "She's not just angry," he murmured. "She's jealous."
---
That night, Lyra dreamed.
Fog. Endless and thick. She wandered through a garden of ruin—roses with blood-colored thorns choking old statues, trees twisted into agonized shapes.
At the center of it all stood a dry fountain. The sound of water was gone. Only silence and decay remained.
And Evelyn.
She stood by the broken stone, her white dress stained with soil and time, her hair tangled like vines. In her palm gleamed a knife—small, silver, cruelly delicate.
Her smile was beautiful. And terrible.
> "Give him back," Evelyn said, gently.
"And I'll leave your child untouched."
Lyra couldn't move. Couldn't speak. The dream was a prison, and Evelyn was the warden.
She awoke with a gasp, drenched in sweat.
The air smelled of rust.
Blood.
She scrambled from bed, fingers trembling—only to find red on her hands. Streaks across her fingertips.
But no wound.
---
Still, love fought its way through.
One golden evening, clouds parted and bathed the hills in light. Dorian and Lyra lay in the grass among the wildflowers, silence soft between them.
Dorian read to her from a favorite book, the words shaky but warm. Then he paused and told her the truth.
He spoke of Evelyn—not as a ghost, but as a girl.
A girl who had once saved him from himself. Who had made him laugh when the world offered only sorrow. Who had loved him with the kind of purity that becomes poison when betrayed.
And how the guilt of her death had never left him.
Lyra reached up, tracing his face with slow, reverent fingers.
> "I'm not here to erase her," she whispered.
"I'm here to help you carry her—so she can finally rest."
And for a brief moment, peace returned.
---
But Evelyn would not rest.
One night, as thunder split the sky, a sound rose from the garden—a low, heart-wrenching wail.
Lyra clutched Dorian's arm.
He kissed her forehead and went alone.
She watched from the window as he stepped into the storm.
There, at the garden wall, stood a silhouette. A woman hunched in sorrow.
He approached, his voice barely audible over the rain.
"Evelyn?"
She turned.
Her face was gone. A smooth, blank void. A mask of nothing.
Then—the wall bled.
Thick, black ichor seeped from the cracks in the stone, slithering downward until it formed words:
> "You chose her."
---
In desperation, they sought answers the old world had buried.
To the north, at the edge of the forest, they found a crumbling village—a place lost to time. There, in a moss-laden chapel, they met a priestess whose eyes were pale as bone.
She lit candles. Burned herbs. Whispered in a forgotten tongue.
Then she looked into Lyra's aura and gasped.
The bones she held clattered to the floor.
> "There is a thread of soul knotted to your unborn child," she whispered.
"But it's not only Evelyn. Something else rides her spirit. A darker force. A binding."
Dorian's stomach turned cold.
A name came to him unbidden.
The Zeolat Cult.
He had thought them destroyed in the fire years ago. But something had survived.
And now, they wanted in.
Through the child.
Through blood.
Through Evelyn's rage.
Dorian took Lyra's hand, his grip trembling but unyielding.
> "We stop this," he said, eyes blazing.
"Before she's born. No matter what it takes."