The house had been a steal. That's what Aidan Chen kept telling himself as he hauled the last box of books up the porch steps, trying not to think about why a place like this — two stories of Victorian-style charm with actual crown molding and hardwood floors that didn't creak — had been listed for less than a studio apartment in the city.
"Because it's in the middle of nowhere," he muttered, shouldering open the front door. "Because the nearest Thai restaurant is forty-five minutes away. Because you're an idiot who makes bad decisions after breakups."
The door swung shut behind him with a solid thunk that echoed through the empty foyer. Three days in, and he still hadn't gotten used to the silence. Not peaceful silence — the kind you'd expect in the countryside — but an active silence, if that made sense. The kind that felt like it was listening.
He dropped the box in what the realtor had optimistically called "the library" — a room with built-in shelves and a window seat that overlooked the glen itself. The natural depression the house sat in was steep enough that from this window, he could only see the hills rising on three sides, their tops crowned with bare trees that rattled in the October wind. The fourth side opened toward the road, but even that felt enclosed somehow, like the land itself wanted to cup the house in its palm.
Aidan unpacked books onto the shelves, trying to make the space feel lived-in. His copies of Sandman and Locke & Key went on the middle shelf. Some battered Pratchetts. A collection of Shirley Jackson stories that his ex had given him and that he should probably throw away but couldn't quite bring himself to.
The light was already fading. 4:47 PM, and the sun was slipping behind the western hill like it was in a hurry to be somewhere else.
His phone buzzed. A text from his mom: How's the new place? Settled in yet?
He typed back: Getting there. It's quiet. Really quiet.
Her response came immediately: Quiet is good! You needed quiet after everything with Marcus.
Aidan grimaced. He'd specifically asked her not to mention Marcus. The breakup was four months old now, and he was fine. Totally fine. Fine enough to buy a house sight-unseen at an online auction because the price was absurdly low and he'd been scrolling property listings at 2 AM with half a bottle of wine in him.
"Definitely fine," he said aloud, and his voice fell flat in the room, absorbed by the walls like they were hungry for it.
He finished shelving the books as the room darkened around him. The overhead light was one of those old-fashioned fixtures with a pull chain, and when he yanked it, the bulb flickered twice before catching. Warm light filled the space, but somehow the corners stayed dim. Shadows that didn't quite match the furniture.
His stomach growled. Right. Food. He'd been living on gas station sandwiches and the dregs of his moving-day groceries. Time to actually cook something, pretend he was a functional adult who owned a house and had his life together.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, separated from the main living area by a swinging door that the previous owners had painted a cheerful yellow. Aidan pushed through and stopped.
The temperature dropped like he'd walked into a walk-in freezer.
His breath misted in front of him. The overhead light was off — he was sure he'd left it on this morning — and the window above the sink showed nothing but darkness and his own reflection, pale and startled-looking.
"Okay," he said slowly. "That's... that's just draft. Old house. Bad insulation."
Except the house was only twenty-five years old. The realtor had made a point of that. "Practically new!" she'd chirped, her smile bright and desperate in a way that should have warned him.
He flicked the light switch. Nothing. Flicked it again. Still nothing.
"Breaker," he muttered. "Just the breaker."
But the living room light had worked. The library light had worked. Just the kitchen was dead, and cold enough that his fingers were already going numb.
He pulled out his phone, turned on the flashlight. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating butcher block counters, the ancient fridge that had come with the place, the basement door—
Wait.
The basement door was open.
Aidan's scalp prickled. He'd been down there exactly once, yesterday, to check the water heater. The stairs were steep and the space was unfinished, all exposed stone walls and a dirt floor that seemed wrong for a house built in 1998. He'd taken one look at the medieval-dungeon vibe of the place and noped right back upstairs, making a mental note to never go down there again if he could help it.
He definitely, definitely remembered closing that door.
The flashlight beam wavered as his hand shook. From the open doorway, a smell drifted up — damp stone and something else, something organic and old. Like meat that had been left in a fridge during a power outage.
"Hello?" His voice cracked. "If someone's down there, I should tell you I have a—"
What? A strongly worded complaint? A phone he could call the police with, assuming he had signal, which he wasn't sure he did because this place was in a dead zone and the WiFi wouldn't be installed until next week?
No sound from the basement. Just that smell, getting stronger, and the cold that seemed to be emanating from the open doorway like the basement was exhaling.
Aidan's finger hovered over the emergency call button on his phone. This was ridiculous. He was a grown man. He owned this house. He wasn't going to be scared off by a weird smell and a door he'd probably forgotten to latch.
He crossed to the doorway. The basement stairs descended into absolute darkness, the kind that his phone's flashlight seemed to barely touch. Stone walls glistened with moisture on either side.
"Okay," he whispered. "Okay. Just... check the breaker. Breaker's probably down there. Check it. Close the door. Make dinner. Normal evening."
He put his foot on the first step.
The temperature dropped another ten degrees. His breath came out in thick clouds. The smell intensified — not just rot now, but something mineral, like old blood on stone.
And from somewhere deep below, he heard it: a sound like chains dragging across rock.
Aidan's foot froze on the step. His heart hammered against his ribs. That wasn't real. That was his imagination, his hindbrain conjuring horror movie nonsense because he was alone in a creepy old house and—
The sound came again. Closer. Deliberate.
He lurched backward, stumbled, caught himself on the counter. The basement door swung shut on its own with a soft, decisive click.
The kitchen light flickered on.
The temperature returned to normal so quickly that Aidan almost felt lightheaded from the change. The smell vanished. The only sound was his own ragged breathing and the hum of the refrigerator kicking on.
He stared at the closed basement door. His phone's flashlight beam shook against it.
"What the fuck," he whispered.
For a long moment, he just stood there, waiting for... what? The door to open again? Something to come up the stairs? A reasonable explanation to present itself?
Nothing happened. The kitchen was warm and bright and completely, utterly normal.
His phone buzzed, nearly making him drop it. Another text from his mom: Make sure you introduce yourself to the neighbors! Small towns are all about community.
Aidan laughed, a sharp, slightly hysterical sound. Right. Neighbors. Normal, human neighbors who could maybe explain why his basement was apparently a gateway to a meat locker in hell.
He grabbed his jacket from the hook by the back door and went outside, leaving the kitchen light blazing behind him.
The house to the left was a quarter mile down the road, a squat ranch with a well-maintained garden that someone had already put to bed for the winter. A rusted pickup sat in the driveway, and warm light glowed from the windows.
Aidan knocked. Waited. Knocked again.
The door opened to reveal a woman in her seventies, white hair pulled back in a bun, wearing a cardigan that had seen better decades. She looked him up and down with sharp blue eyes.
"You're the one who bought The Glen," she said. Not a question.
"Uh, yes. Hi. I'm Aidan Chen. I just moved in a few days ago, and I wanted to—"
"You should leave." She said it matter-of-factly, like she was commenting on the weather.
Aidan blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"The Glen. That land. You should leave." She leaned against the doorframe, not hostile exactly, just tired. "How much did they charge you for it?"
"I... that's kind of personal."
"Less than a hundred thousand, I'd bet. They always sell it cheap. Every twenty years or so, someone buys it, fixes it up, moves in." She shook her head. "Never lasts more than six months."
A chill ran down Aidan's spine that had nothing to do with the October air. "What do you mean, never lasts?"
"I mean they leave. Or disappear. Or—" She caught herself, lips pressing into a thin line. "You seem like a nice boy. Take an old woman's advice. Cut your losses. Leave."
"But why? What's wrong with the house?"
Mrs. Kowalski — she'd introduced herself now, though Aidan couldn't remember when — fixed him with a look that was equal parts pity and frustration. "It's not the house. It's what's under it. That land... there was a castle there once. Dunmorrow Keep. Bad place. Very bad place." She started to close the door. "Go to the library in town if you want to know more. Ask for Tom Reilly. But do it tomorrow, because you shouldn't be in that house after dark."
The door clicked shut, leaving Aidan standing on the porch with more questions than answers.
Aidan didn't go back to the house that night.
He told himself it was because he needed groceries anyway — proper groceries, not gas station fare — and the drive into town would give him time to think. Process. Come up with a rational explanation for doors that opened themselves and phantom chain-dragging sounds.
The rational explanation didn't materialize during the twenty-minute drive, nor while he wandered the aisles of the Save-Mart, throwing random items into his cart with the focus of someone who'd just been told their house might be genuinely haunted. He ended up with three frozen pizzas, a bag of apples, a rotisserie chicken, and, inexplicably, a bottle of holy water he'd found in the "ethnic foods" aisle next to the matzo.
The cashier — a kid who couldn't be older than nineteen, with a name tag that read TYLER and a face full of piercings — rang up his items with the glazed expression of someone working a closing shift on a Thursday.
"That'll be forty-two eighteen," Tyler droned, then paused, actually looking at Aidan for the first time. "Wait. You're the guy who bought The Glen."
Aidan's hand froze halfway to his wallet. "How do you—"
"Small town. Everyone knows everything." Tyler bagged the groceries with more energy now, almost excited. "Dude. Dude. You're living in the murder house."
"It's not a murder house."
"Okay, the haunted murder house built on top of an evil castle where a necromancer got executed and cursed the land with his dying breath." Tyler grinned. "That's metal as hell. You see anything weird yet?"
Aidan thought about the basement door. The cold. The chains. "Define weird."
"Like, apparitions? Phantom sounds? Things moving on their own? My cousin Jake did a dare where he spent an hour in that house back in 2015 and he said he saw a dude in medieval armor standing in the basement doorway." Tyler leaned forward conspiratorially. "He pissed himself. Won't talk about it to this day."
"That's... great. Very reassuring."
"Oh, you should definitely talk to Tom Reilly at the library. He's got like, a whole archive about that place. Newspaper clippings, old property records, all kinds of stuff." Tyler handed over the bags. "Good luck not dying, man."
Aidan took his groceries and left, feeling less reassured than when he'd arrived.
The parking lot was mostly empty, the streetlights casting orange pools on the cracked asphalt. He loaded the bags into his trunk and stood there for a moment, looking at the dark hills that surrounded the town. Somewhere out there, his house sat in its glen, waiting.
You shouldn't be in that house after dark.
He checked his phone. 8:47 PM. He could get a hotel room. Spend the night in town, visit the library first thing in the morning, armed with actual information instead of cryptic warnings and grocery store gossip.
Aidan didn't think. He ran.
Out of the kitchen, through the living room, his phone's flashlight beam bouncing wildly off walls and furniture. The front door — he needed to get to the front door, get outside, get away from whatever was happening in this house.
His hand closed on the doorknob. Twisted.
Locked.
"No no no—" He fumbled with the deadbolt, his fingers clumsy with panic. The bolt slid free with a solid thunk that should have meant escape, but when he yanked the door, it didn't budge. Like it was nailed shut. Like the house itself was holding it closed.
Behind him, the sound of chains grew louder. Not from the basement anymore — from everywhere. The walls. The floor. The air itself seemed to vibrate with the metallic scraping.
Aidan spun around, pressing his back against the door. His flashlight beam cut through the darkness of the living room, illuminating nothing, nothing, nothing—
A figure stood at the top of the stairs.
Tall. Impossibly tall. Wearing something that might have been robes or might have been shadows stitched into the shape of clothing. Its face was a blur, a smear of darkness where features should be, except for the eyes. Those were clear enough. Two points of cold light, like stars frozen in ice.
"Leave." The voice didn't come from the figure. It came from the house itself, resonating through the floorboards, the walls, Aidan's own chest. "Leave or serve."
"I—" Aidan's voice came out as a squeak. He tried again. "I can't. The door won't—"
"Then serve."
The figure descended one step. The temperature plummeted. Frost spread across the walls in crystalline patterns, and Aidan realized with a lurch of horror that they weren't random. They were words. Latin, maybe, or something older, crawling across the plaster like living things.
His phone died. The flashlight winked out, leaving only the faint glow from the kitchen candles and those two terrible points of light on the stairs.
Something inside Aidan snapped from panic into a different gear — not courage, exactly, but the desperate problem-solving instinct of someone who'd spent his entire career debugging impossible errors at 3 AM.
The door wouldn't open. Fine. There were windows.
He bolted for the living room, grabbed a floor lamp, and swung it at the nearest window with everything he had.
The lamp shattered. The window didn't crack.
"Oh, come on!" The absurdity of it — the sheer video game logic of being trapped in his own house — cut through some of the fear. "What is this, a Resident Evil boss fight? Do I need to find three medallions and a crank?"
The figure paused mid-step. Those cold eyes fixed on him with what might have been confusion.
The Chester Valley Public Library was a brick building wedged between a pizza place and a defunct video store, the kind of structure that looked like it had been there since the town's founding and would outlast its ending. A single light burned in an upper window despite the fact that, according to the hours posted on the door, the place had closed at nine.
Aidan sat in his car in the parking lot, shaking. Not from cold—the heater was blasting—but from the adrenaline crash. His hands wouldn't stop trembling. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw those frozen points of light and felt the spider-crawl sensation of walking through Casimir's form.
He should drive to the city. Find a hotel. Never come back. Let the bank foreclose on the property and count himself lucky to escape with his life.
Instead, he got out of the car and knocked on the library's front door.
Nothing. He knocked again, harder, and was about to give up when he saw movement behind the glass. A man in his sixties appeared, wearing a cardigan that matched Mrs. Kowalski's and the suspicious expression of someone used to being bothered after hours.
He pointed at the closed sign.
Aidan held up his phone, pulled up the photo he'd managed to take of his house's exterior before the battery died. "I live at The Glen," he shouted through the glass. "Mrs. Kowalski said you could help."
The man's expression shifted through several emotions too quickly to track—recognition, resignation, something that might have been guilt—before he unlocked the door.
"Tom Reilly," he said, stepping aside. "You look like you've seen a ghost. Which, given where you're living, is probably literal."
"He calls himself Casimir Dunmorrow." Aidan followed Tom inside, where the smell of old books and coffee created an oddly comforting atmosphere. "He's trapped in the basement. In the actual original castle basement that apparently still exists under my house. And he's really, really angry about being dead."
Tom locked the door behind them and gestured for Aidan to follow him deeper into the library. They passed rows of books, a children's section with a faded rainbow rug, a reference desk piled with papers, until they reached a back room marked ARCHIVES.
"How much did Regina tell you?" Tom asked, flipping on lights.
"Mrs. Kowalski? Just that people don't last in that house. That I should leave." Aidan leaned against a filing cabinet, suddenly exhausted. "She mentioned something about her husband?"
Tom's jaw tightened. "Robert. He was the one who built the current structure, back in '98. Regina had inherited the land from her father, who'd inherited it from his father. Everyone in town knew the stories, but Robert thought—" He pulled open a filing cabinet drawer, rifling through folders. "He thought the Catholic Church had consecrated it back in the seventies. That it was safe."
The motel was called the Sleepy Pine, which Aidan thought was optimistic given that he didn't sleep at all. He spent the night cross-legged on the scratchy comforter, reading Donnelly's journal by lamplight, cross-referencing with occult websites that were either completely legitimate or utterly insane—hard to tell which when you'd walked through a ghost.
By 4 AM, he had a plan. It was a terrible plan. It had maybe a thirty percent chance of working. But it was a plan.
By 6 AM, he'd made two phone calls—one to his mom ("Everything's fine, just checking in"), one to Marcus ("I know we're not together anymore but I need to know if your binding circle research was real or aesthetic"). Marcus, to his credit, had answered despite the hour and despite their history.
By 8 AM, Aidan was back at Tom's library, where he found not just Tom but Regina Kowalski waiting for him.
"You're going back," Regina said. Not a question.
"I'm going back."
She set a wooden box on the table between them. Old, scarred, with a tarnished lock. "Then you'll need this."
Aidan opened it. Inside, wrapped in velvet, was a knife. Not a kitchen knife—a ritual blade, the kind Marcus would have called an athame. The handle was carved with symbols that matched the ones in Donnelly's journal.
"This belonged to Casimir," Regina said quietly. "Robert found it in the basement, hidden in a crevice in the stone. He was going to destroy it, but—" Her voice cracked. "He disappeared before he could."
"Why didn't you—"
"Destroy it myself? Go back down there?" She smiled, bitter. "Because I'm a coward. I've lived with that for twenty-five years. But you're not a coward. You're just an idiot. So take the knife."
Tom spread out a hand-drawn map of the basement on the table. "If you're really doing this—and I still think you shouldn't—then at least do it right. The binding circle is here, around the altar. Donnelly's notes say it was created in haste. The magistrates were afraid Casimir would escape even after death, so they rushed the execution and the binding. Which means—"
"There are gaps," Aidan finished, studying the diagram. "Weak points. Marcus said the same thing—any circle drawn under duress has flaws."
"Three weak points, according to Donnelly. Here, here, and here." Tom marked them on the map. "You'll need to break the circle at all three points simultaneously."
"How am I supposed to—"
"You're not. You'll need help." Tom straightened, meeting his eyes. "I'm coming with you."
"Tom—"
"I was there," Tom said. "The night Donnelly disappeared. I was seventeen. I helped him carry his equipment. I saw—" He stopped, swallowed. "I saw what happened when Casimir took him. I ran. I've regretted it every day since."
The Glen | Skeinscribe
His banking app showed his checking account balance: $847.23. The mortgage had cleaned him out. He'd been counting on his freelance web design gigs to keep him afloat until he found steady work, but those wouldn't pay out for another two weeks.
A hotel would cost at least seventy dollars. Money he didn't really have to spend on what was probably just his overactive imagination and some weird plumbing issues.
"It's just a house," he said aloud. "A house you own. That you paid actual money for. You're not going to let some old lady's ghost stories scare you out of your own home."
The drive back felt longer than it should have. The road wound through dense forest, his headlights catching the reflective eyes of animals in the underbrush. Once, something large crossed the road ahead — a deer, probably, but it moved wrong, too fluid, and by the time his brain registered he should look more carefully, it was gone.
The house came into view around the final bend, and Aidan's stomach clenched. Every light he'd left on was off. The structure sat in absolute darkness, a black silhouette against the marginally less-black hills behind it.
"Power outage," he muttered, pulling into the gravel driveway. "Just a power outage. Happens all the time in the country."
Except Mrs. Kowalski's lights had been on. And he could see the distant glow of other houses further down the valley. Just The Glen sat in darkness.
He grabbed the groceries and the holy water — might as well, at this point — and approached the front door. His keys jingled too loud in the silence. The sound of the key sliding into the lock seemed amplified, metallic, wrong.
The door swung open on darkness so complete it felt solid.
Aidan fumbled for his phone, got the flashlight on. The beam cut through the foyer, illuminating the stairs, the doorway to the living room, everything exactly as he'd left it.
The breaker box was in the basement.
Of course it was.
"Nope," he said. "Absolutely not. I'll just... I'll light some candles. Deal with it in the morning."
He'd bought candles during his initial moving-in shopping spree, the big jar kind that were supposed to smell like "autumn harvest" or some nonsense. He found them in the kitchen — which was cold again, he noticed, his breath misting slightly — and used his lighter to get three of them going.
The flickering light helped. A little. The shadows moved and danced, but at least they were normal shadows, caused by normal fire, not whatever the hell had been happening earlier.
Aidan put the groceries away by candlelight, trying to ignore the basement door. It was closed. It was staying closed. He was going to eat his rotisserie chicken and frozen pizza — wait, the freezer wouldn't work without power. He'd have to eat the pizza tonight.
He preheated the oven — gas, thank god — and slid a pizza in. While it cooked, he sat at the kitchen table and googled "Dunmorrow Keep" on his phone.
The search yielded more results than he'd expected.
Dunmorrow Keep - Historical Site - Ireland
Wrong continent.
The Dunmorrow Tragedy: A Dark Chapter in Colonial History
That looked more promising. He clicked through to a scanned article from a historical society newsletter dated 1983:
"Lord Casimir Dunmorrow arrived in the New World in 1712, establishing his keep in what would later become Chester Valley. Contemporary accounts describe him as a learned man, though rumors of dark practices followed him from the old country. By 1743, these rumors had grown into accusations. Local magistrates charged Dunmorrow with necromancy, murder, and 'congress with forces inimical to Christian souls.' His trial lasted three days. The verdict: death by hanging, to be carried out on the keep's grounds. According to witnesses, Dunmorrow's final words were a curse upon the land itself, promising that he would 'rise again from stone and soil to reclaim what was stolen.' The keep was torn down in 1744. Local legend claims the land has been cursed ever since."
Aidan's pizza was burning. He could smell it, but he couldn't stop reading.
"Multiple attempts to build on the site have ended in tragedy or abandonment. In 1823, the Morrison family lasted six weeks before fleeing, claiming 'demonic manifestations.' In 1891, the land was purchased by the Catholic Church, which attempted to consecrate it. The priest, Father Donnelly, disappeared during the ceremony. His body was never found. The most recent incident occurred in 1978, when Robert Kowalski entered the basement of his newly built home and—"
The oven timer shrieked.
Aidan jerked so hard he knocked over his chair. The sound split the silence like a knife, electronic and shrill and completely at odds with the fact that the power was supposed to be out.
He scrambled to the oven, yanked it open. The pizza was fine. Perfect, even. Golden brown, cheese bubbling.
The oven timer continued to scream.
He punched the button to silence it. The sound cut off, leaving his ears ringing.
In the sudden quiet, he heard it again: the slow drag of chains on stone, rising from beneath his feet.
The basement door rattled in its frame.
"Are you..." Aidan laughed, a high, slightly unhinged sound. "Are you offended that I'm not scared enough? Is that not the right emotional response to the scary ghost man?"
"I am no ghost." The voice carried weight now, something ancient and angry. "I am Casimir Dunmorrow, Lord of—"
"Lord of a pile of rocks that got torn down three hundred years ago, yeah, I read the Wikipedia article." Aidan was backing toward the kitchen as he spoke, keeping his eyes on the figure. This was insane. He was trash-talking a demonic entity. But talking meant thinking, and thinking meant not dissolving into a useless puddle of terror. "Look, Cas — can I call you Cas? This is all very atmospheric, great production values, but I've had a really long day and I just want to eat my pizza and go to bed."
He burst through the kitchen door. The candles were still burning, casting their warm glow. The basement door stood closed.
The holy water sat on the counter where he'd left it.
Aidan grabbed it. The plastic bottle felt ridiculous in his hand — something you'd buy to put in a squirt gun at a church carnival. But it was all he had.
The kitchen door swung open. The figure filled the doorway, and up close Aidan could see that it wasn't formless at all. There was a face under that darkness — gaunt, aristocratic, with a neat beard and eyes that had once been human before something had frozen them into chips of malice.
"You dare mock me?" Casimir's form solidified further, robes becoming visible, threadbare and stained. A noose hung around his neck, the rope end trailing down his chest like a obscene tie. "I who have studied the deepest mysteries? I who have conquered death itself?"
"Conquered it? Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but you're haunting a basement. That's not conquering death, that's being the world's worst roommate." Aidan unscrewed the holy water cap. His hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped it. "And I'm going to give you one chance to unlock my doors and leave me alone, or I'm going to—"
"What? Splash me with water? Do you think I fear the superstitions of fools?" Casimir glided forward, and Aidan could smell him now — old parchment and grave dirt and something chemical, like formaldehyde. "This is my land. Built on my bones. Watered with my blood. You are nothing but another frightened child, alone in the dark."
He was right about the alone part. That was the thing that finally crystallized in Aidan's mind. Mrs. Kowalski had said it: people came here and disappeared, or left. Always alone. Always isolated.
Small towns are all about community, his mom had texted.
Aidan threw the holy water.
It splashed across Casimir's chest, and for a moment nothing happened. The figure just stood there, dripping, looking vaguely insulted.
Then he started to laugh. "Did you truly—"
"No," Aidan said. "That was just a distraction."
He ran. Not for the front door this time, but for the basement door. If this thing wanted him scared and isolated, wanted him trapped — then the basement was the last place he should go. Which meant it was exactly where he needed to go.
The logic was insane. He knew it was insane. But he'd spent three hours researching JavaScript frameworks once and come out the other side convinced that the only way to fix a broken build was to delete the node_modules folder and start over. Sometimes the only way out was through.
He yanked open the basement door and plunged down the stairs before his rational mind could catch up with his body.
The darkness swallowed him whole. His feet hit stone steps — not wood, stone, which made no sense for a house built in 1998. The air was thick and damp and tasted like copper.
Behind him, Casimir's laughter cut off. "No. No. Come back, you fool!"
Interesting. The scary ghost man didn't want him in the basement. That seemed like useful information.
Aidan kept going down. The stairs seemed to go on forever, spiraling deeper than any basement had a right to. His phone was dead, but there was light coming from below — a sickly green phosphorescence that clung to the stone walls like fungus.
The stairs ended in a chamber that couldn't possibly exist. It was huge, cathedral-sized, with vaulted ceilings and pillars carved with symbols that hurt to look at. The walls were the original stone of Dunmorrow Keep, he realized. Not buried. Not destroyed. Just built over, hidden, waiting.
In the center of the chamber stood an altar.
On the altar lay a skeleton, still wearing the rotted remains of fine clothing. The noose around its neck was still intact, tied to a beam that shouldn't exist in a basement but somehow did.
"Well," Aidan said to the skeleton. "This is awkward."
The skeleton didn't respond, which was actually the most reassuring thing that had happened all night.
Footsteps on the stairs behind him. Slow. Deliberate. Casimir was coming, but he was taking his time now. No more gliding, no more theatrics.
"You shouldn't have come down here," the voice echoed. "This is where I died. Where my power is strongest. Where I can finally take a body again, after so long..."
Aidan looked at the skeleton. Looked at the altar. Looked at the symbols carved into the stone.
His ex-boyfriend Marcus had been into occult stuff. Not seriously — more as an aesthetic thing, the way some people were into astrology or crystals. But Aidan had absorbed enough by osmosis to recognize a binding circle when he saw one.
The symbols weren't holding Casimir in the basement. They were holding him to it. Tied to his bones. Trapped in the place where he'd died.
"Oh," Aidan said. "Oh, you can't leave."
Casimir appeared at the base of the stairs, his form flickering. "What?"
"That's why you scare people away instead of just killing them. You can't. Not really. You can make creepy noises and slam doors and probably give someone a heart attack if they're old enough, but you can't actually leave this basement." Aidan started to laugh. "You're not a conqueror of death. You're a prisoner. And you've been stuck down here for almost three hundred years."
The temperature dropped so fast that Aidan's breath turned to ice crystals. Casimir's face twisted with rage, the aristocratic features melting into something bestial.
"I will make you suffer—"
"Yeah, probably," Aidan agreed. "But first, I'm going to call someone who actually knows what they're doing."
His phone was dead, but he'd seen an old rotary phone in the library upstairs. If the house would let him leave. If Casimir couldn't actually stop him.
He walked toward the stairs.
Casimir stepped into his path.
Aidan walked through him.
It was like walking through a freezer full of spiders — every nerve screaming, his skin crawling, cold that burned like fire. But he kept walking, and Casimir's form scattered like smoke, and then Aidan was on the stairs, climbing back up, his legs shaking and his lungs burning but moving.
Behind him, Casimir's scream shook the foundations.
Aidan reached the kitchen. The basement door slammed shut behind him hard enough to crack the frame. The front door stood open, letting in the clean night air.
He ran for his car, started the engine, and didn't stop driving until he reached town.
"What happened to him?"
"He went into the basement to check the water heater. Regina found his truck in the driveway three days later. The basement door was open. Robert was gone." Tom pulled out a thick folder, dropped it on a reading table. "No body. No blood. No evidence. Just gone."
Aidan's stomach lurched, remembering the skeleton on the altar. The rotted clothing that might have been from the 1700s, or might have been more recent than that.
"The police investigated?" he asked, though he could already guess the answer.
"For about a week. Then the investigation quietly closed. Ruled it a voluntary disappearance. Regina knew better, but—" Tom opened the folder, revealing newspaper clippings, photocopies of old documents, handwritten notes. "The town has a vested interest in not believing the land is cursed. Property values. Tourism. The Glenwood Resort development that keeps getting proposed and never happening."
"So you just let people buy it. Let them move in. Even though you know—"
"We warn them." Tom's voice had an edge now. "Every single time. Regina goes over. I make myself available. Tyler at the Save-Mart will literally tell anyone who'll listen. But people don't believe it. They think it's local color, superstition. By the time they realize we're serious—"
"It's too late." Aidan sank into a chair, looking at the spread of documents. "How many? How many people have disappeared?"
Tom was quiet for a long moment. "Since 1744? Twenty-seven that we know of. Could be more."
The number hit like a physical blow. Twenty-seven people. Twenty-seven lives swallowed by whatever was happening in that basement, and the town just... let it keep happening.
"There has to be a way to stop it," Aidan said. "To destroy him. End this."
"People have tried." Tom pulled out a specific document—a photocopy of a leather-bound journal, the handwriting spidery and old-fashioned. "This belonged to Father Donnelly. The priest who disappeared in '78 during the consecration attempt. Regina found it in Robert's things after he vanished. He'd been researching, trying to find a way to break the curse before building on the land."
Aidan leaned forward, scanning the pages. The text was dense, written in a mix of English and Latin, but certain phrases jumped out: "binding requires the original bones" and "reversal must be performed at the site of death" and, most ominously, "the necromancer's power waxes with each soul claimed."
"Twenty-seven souls," he whispered. "He's been getting stronger."
"Yes. And according to Donnelly's research, there's a threshold. Thirty souls, and Casimir will have enough power to break the binding himself. To leave the basement." Tom's finger traced a line in the journal. "Which is why the town started warning people more aggressively after Robert. Why we've tried to keep the property from selling. We've managed to keep it vacant for stretches, but—"
"But eventually someone always buys it." Aidan felt sick. "And I'm victim number twenty-eight."
"If you leave now, you'd only be number twenty-eight if you go back." Tom met his eyes. "You escaped. That's more than most people manage. Take the out."
Aidan thought about it. He really did. Thought about his empty bank account and his freelance career and the fact that he could probably crash on his mom's couch until he figured something out. Thought about how easy it would be to just walk away, let someone else deal with this nightmare.
Then he thought about the skeleton on the altar. About Mrs. Kowalski, who'd lived for twenty-five years knowing her husband's bones were probably still in that basement. About the next person who'd buy the property, the next victim, the one who'd push Casimir over the threshold.
"What does the journal say about the reversal?" he asked.
Tom stared at him. "You can't be serious."
"I'm incredibly not serious. I'm the least serious person in this entire situation. But I'm also the idiot who owns the property, which means I'm the only one who can legally access it without breaking and entering." Aidan pulled the journal closer. "And if there's even a chance of ending this—of making sure no one else disappears—then I have to try. So what does the reversal require?"
Tom hesitated, then flipped through the photocopied pages until he found a section marked with sticky notes. "According to Donnelly, the binding was created by Dunmorrow's contemporaries. Local magistrates who realized he was actually practicing necromancy, actually killing people for his rituals. They executed him on his own altar and bound his spirit to the place of his death, thinking it would contain him."
"But it didn't."
"No. Because they didn't account for his knowledge. He'd already prepared contingencies—ways to anchor himself, to persist. The binding trapped him, but it didn't end him." Tom pointed to a diagram in the journal. "To fully break the curse, you'd need to destroy the binding circle, burn his bones, and consecrate the ground. In that order. All while he's actively trying to stop you."
"Great. Simple. Easy." Aidan laughed without humor. "What could possibly go wrong?"
"Everything. Donnelly went in with holy water, blessed salt, prayers of banishment. He had training in exorcism. He knew what he was doing." Tom's expression was grim. "And he still disappeared. His body was never found, but Regina said Robert found something in the basement before he vanished. A priest's collar. Burned black."
Aidan absorbed that. A trained exorcist with proper preparation had failed. What chance did a web designer with anxiety and a bottle of Save-Mart holy water have?
"Is there anyone else who could help?" he asked. "Another priest? A paranormal investigator? Ghostbusters?"
"The diocese won't touch it. Not after Donnelly. And I don't know any legitimate paranormal investigators—just con artists and TV personalities." Tom closed the journal carefully. "Listen to me. I've lived in this town my whole life. I've watched good people vanish into that basement. I've kept these records, documented everything, hoping someone would eventually find a way to end it. But I've also made peace with the fact that some evils can't be destroyed. Only avoided."
"So your solution is to just... let it keep happening? Hope nobody buys the property?"
"My solution is to not throw more lives away on a problem that's survived three centuries." Tom's voice softened. "You seem like a good kid. Don't become number twenty-eight. Don't give Casimir what he wants."
Aidan stood, gathering the photocopied journal pages. "Can I take these?"
"You're not listening—"
"I'm listening. I just don't agree." He tucked the papers under his arm. "I need to know what Donnelly tried, what didn't work. I need to understand the binding circle, the ritual, all of it. Because maybe he failed, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means he didn't have the right approach."
"And you do?"
"No. But I'm a really good debugger." Aidan headed for the door, then paused. "Thank you. For keeping the records. For trying to warn people. That matters."
Tom followed him out, unlocking the front door. "Where will you go?"
"Motel, probably. Spend tomorrow researching. Maybe call a few people who actually know about this stuff." Aidan stepped out into the cold night air. "Then I'll figure out my next move."
"Don't go back there alone," Tom said. "Promise me."
Aidan nodded, but he didn't make the promise. Because standing in the library parking lot, looking at the dark hills where his house waited, he could feel it—the pull. Like a fish hook lodged somewhere behind his sternum, reeling him in.
Casimir wanted him back. And the terrible thing was, Aidan knew he'd go.
Just not tonight.
Regina stood. "Then you'll need three. One for each point."
They argued. Aidan insisted he couldn't ask them to risk this. Regina told him she'd been waiting twenty-five years for a chance at revenge. Tom said he was coming whether Aidan liked it or not. The argument ended when Aidan realized he'd never actually win, and that maybe—just maybe—having backup was better than his original plan of "go in and hope for the best."
They drove in convoy—Tom's sedan leading, Aidan's car following, Regina's pickup bringing up the rear. The sun was fully up now, bright autumn light making the glen look almost peaceful. Almost.
The house stood waiting. In daylight it looked normal. Victorian-style, good bones, the kind of place that should be featured in home renovation magazines. But Aidan could see it now—the wrongness. The way the shadows fell at angles that didn't match the sun. The way the windows seemed to watch them approach.
"Once we go in," Tom said as they gathered by the front door, "we don't stop. Don't listen to him. Don't let him in your head. Get to your position, break the circle, and we burn his bones. Understood?"
Aidan nodded. Regina clutched a bag of blessed salt—actual blessed salt, from a church three towns over that didn't know about Dunmorrow. Tom had a sledgehammer. Aidan had the knife.
The front door was unlocked. Of course it was. Casimir was expecting him.
The temperature dropped as soon as they crossed the threshold. Their breath misted in the air. The basement door stood open, and from below came that familiar smell—damp stone and old blood and patient malice.
"Hello, little bird," Casimir's voice drifted up from the dark. "You've brought friends. How thoughtful. Three souls instead of one."
"Ignore him," Tom muttered, clicking on a flashlight. "Go."
They descended.
The stairs seemed longer than Aidan remembered, spiraling down into that impossible cathedral space. The green phosphorescence clung to the walls, brighter now, almost eager. And there at the bottom, standing before his altar, was Casimir.
He looked more solid than before. More real. His face was fully formed now—aristocratic and cruel, with eyes like winter ice. The noose still hung around his neck, but he wore it like a badge of honor.
"Tom Reilly," he said, and his voice was almost warm. "Still running, I see. And Regina Kowalski. How is Robert? Oh, wait—" He gestured at the altar, where the skeleton lay. "Let me introduce you."
Regina made a sound low in her throat. The skeleton wore a flannel shirt, rotted to rags. A wedding ring glinted on one finger bone.
"You bastard," she whispered.
"I prefer 'Lord Dunmorrow,' but we can work with bastard." Casimir smiled. "Now then. Shall we discuss the terms of your surrender, or would you prefer to join your husband immediately?"
"Now!" Tom shouted.
They scattered—Tom to the left weak point, Regina to the right, Aidan charging straight for the altar and the third point directly behind it. Casimir's smile vanished, replaced by rage.
"You dare—"
Tom swung the sledgehammer into the carved stone at his position. The binding circle flared with light, ancient power crackling. Regina poured salt across her section, words of banishment tumbling from her lips—not Latin, but something older, something she must have practiced for years in the dark.
Aidan reached the altar. The knife burned cold in his hand. He could see the weak point now—a gap in the carved symbols, a place where the magistrates had rushed, made a mistake.
He drove the knife into the stone.
The binding circle shattered.
Light exploded through the chamber—not the sickly green phosphorescence, but something clean and terrible. Casimir screamed, his form flickering, and for a moment Aidan saw not the aristocratic lord but something else underneath. Something that had been human once but had carved away everything human in pursuit of power, until only hunger remained.
"Burn the bones!" Tom yelled. "Now!"
Regina was already moving, pulling a bottle from her bag—not holy water, but lighter fluid. She doused the skeletons—both of them, Casimir's ancient bones and Robert's newer ones—and Aidan understood. She wasn't just ending the curse. She was bringing her husband home.
Tom threw a lit road flare.
The flames caught instantly, roaring up in a column of heat and light. Casimir's scream became something beyond sound, a vibration that shook the foundations and sent cracks spiderwebbing through the ancient stone. His form was dissolving, being pulled into the flames, and Aidan could see faces in the fire—twenty-seven of them, all the souls Casimir had claimed, finally being released.
The chamber began to collapse.
"Go!" Tom grabbed Aidan's arm, hauling him toward the stairs. Regina followed, her face wet with tears but her expression fierce. They ran as the ceiling came down behind them, stone and earth reclaiming the space that should never have existed.
They burst out of the basement into the kitchen. The door slammed shut behind them with a sound like a coffin closing. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the house groaned. The floor tilted. And Aidan realized with a lurch of horror that without the supernatural foundation, the house was just a structure built over a sinkhole.
They ran.
Out the front door, across the porch, into the yard as the house folded in on itself with a roar of splintering wood and shattering glass. The ground opened, swallowing the structure into the earth, and for just a moment Aidan swore he saw Casimir's face in the debris—still screaming, still raging, disappearing into the dark.
Then it was over.
They stood in the glen, breathing hard, covered in dust. Where the house had been, there was only a depression in the earth. A glen within the glen.
"Well," Aidan said after a long moment. "I guess I'm not getting my deposit back."
Regina started laughing. Then Tom. Then Aidan, until all three of them were bent over, gasping with laughter that was maybe sixty percent hysteria but one hundred percent earned.
The town helped him deal with the insurance claim. Turns out "the house collapsed into a previously unknown sinkhole" was just plausible enough to avoid too many questions. The land was condemned, permanently. The county bought it from Aidan for the original purchase price plus his moving costs, with the stipulation that it could never be developed.
He moved into an apartment in town. Got a job doing IT for the county. Started dating the pierced cashier from Save-Mart, who thought the whole thing was metal as hell and kept calling him "the guy who killed a necromancer."
On quiet nights, Aidan sometimes drove out to the glen. The depression was still there, slowly filling with rainwater. By spring, Tom said, it would be a pond. A peaceful place.
Standing at the edge, Aidan couldn't feel the pull anymore. No hook behind his sternum. No sense of being watched. Just land. Just earth and water and sky.
"Rest in peace, you absolute bastard," he said to the pond.
The wind rustled through the trees, carrying the scent of autumn leaves and fresh rain.
For the first time since moving to Chester Valley, Aidan felt like he could breathe.
He turned and walked back to his car, leaving the glen behind.