Dark Roast: Brewed in Shadows

The house on Sycamore Lane had been empty for over two decades, yet every evening, without fail, a dim yellow light flickered on in the attic. Some said it was faulty wiring. Others whispered about ghosts. But Ellie Morrow wasn’t afraid of rumors. She was a journalist, trained to chase stories, not shadows.

Ellie had returned to her hometown of Greyfield to care for her ailing mother, and while cleaning out the attic one rainy afternoon, she stumbled across an old cassette tape labeled simply, “Do Not Play.”

Naturally, she played it.

The static gave way to a gravelly voice she didn’t recognize. Male. Calm. Too calm.

“If you’ve found this, I’m probably dead. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the truth. And the truth is... some secrets are better left unfiltered.”

The recording cut to silence, but the tape wasn’t over. Seconds later, a woman’s scream pierced through the speakers, followed by a haunting melody—something between a lullaby and a warning. Ellie snatched the tape out of the recorder, her heart hammering in her chest.

Who was the man? What secret was he talking about?

She did what any journalist would: she started digging.

The Morrow house had belonged to her grandmother, Evelyn, a quiet woman who’d lived most of her life behind lace curtains and locked doors. After her death, Ellie’s mother had refused to step inside. Now Ellie understood why.

In the basement, behind a false wall, Ellie discovered a hidden room. Inside, there were shelves of old VHS tapes, handwritten journals, and more cassette tapes—each marked with dates ranging from 1973 to 1991.

She listened to everyone.

The voice on the tapes belonged to a man named Victor Lang, a private investigator from Chicago who had mysteriously vanished in 1992. According to his tapes, he had been hired by Evelyn to investigate a group that called themselves The Unfiltered. Victor claimed they were a secretive collective of artists, intellectuals, and former intelligence officers who believed in preserving the raw, unedited truth of the world—no matter the cost.

They recorded everything: conversations, breakdowns, confessions, even deaths.

But here’s the terrifying part: they didn’t just record these moments—they shared them.

Victor’s last few tapes documented his realization that Evelyn, Ellie’s grandmother, wasn’t just a client. She was one of them.

A leader.

Suddenly, Ellie’s childhood memories of strange visitors, late-night whispers, and the attic door that never quite shut made sense.

One entry in the journal chilled her more than the tapes:

“Truth is a fire. It cleanses, but it also consumes. Ellie is too young to understand now. But one day, she will hear the voices, and the fire will call her.”

Ellie tried to dismiss it as ramblings, the madness of a secret cult—but her mother’s declining health had started with hallucinations. Voices. Dreams. And now Ellie was hearing things too.

Each night, the yellow light in the attic flickered on, though she hadn’t touched the switch since that first day.

Determined to understand, she contacted an old college friend, Marcus, now a sound engineer, and asked him to analyze the tapes. Three days later, he called her in the middle of the night.

“Ellie… these aren’t just audio logs. The frequencies—they’re layered. There’s something encoded beneath the surface, like a subsonic message.”

That’s when Ellie realized the tapes weren’t meant to be heard. They were meant to be felt.

Victor had discovered the truth too late. So had her grandmother. And now Ellie was on the same path.

The house began to change.

Mirrors reflected people who weren’t there. The shadows whispered in voices she didn’t recognize. On more than one occasion, she woke up to find the attic door open, even though she had locked it.

She tried to burn the tapes, but the fire wouldn’t catch. Not on the tapes. Not on the journals. It was as if the truth refused to be destroyed.

On her final night in the house, she sat in front of the recorder, a new blank tape inserted.

“If you’re listening to this, I’ve probably gone mad,” she began, echoing Victor’s words. “But madness isn’t the scariest thing. The scariest thing is realizing the truth has been inside your blood all along. The Unfiltered didn’t find me. I am one of them.”

She hit stop.

But before she could eject the tape, the recorder began to play on its own. Not a recording—but a live feed.

Her own voice echoed back at her: not the message she’d just recorded, but a different one. A message she had no memory of ever saying.

“It ends tonight. The fire will burn. And when it does, the truth will rise.”

That was the last thing Ellie remembered before the attic light flickered off—and the house fell silent.

The next morning, the neighbors reported smoke but found no fire. The house stood still, untouched, as if it had never held a soul.

No trace of Ellie was ever found. Only the tape, sitting neatly on the wooden table, labelled with a single phrase:

“Some secrets are better left unfiltered.”