Story 1106: Ashes Beneath the Floorboards

Evelyn Blackmoor had grown used to silence. But this silence—thick, choking, watchful—pressed against her skin as she crossed the threshold of an old cottage nestled within the outskirts of Greymarrow’s cursed woods.

The air inside was stale, tinged with soot and something older… charred bone. Dust motes hung like spirits in the lantern light. She’d come here following whispers of a fire that had never burned out.

The house once belonged to Annaliese Grey, a reclusive woman who vanished the same year children started disappearing from the village. Locals claimed her house “breathed wrong.” Doors opened on their own. Wood groaned as if it remembered.

Evelyn stepped lightly across warped floorboards that groaned beneath her weight. Her lantern pulsed faintly, drawing her toward the hearth. There, she noticed something odd—ashes spread not inside the fireplace, but leading away from it, seeping from beneath a cracked section of floorboards.

She knelt, fingers brushing soot.