The Eldritch Heirloom

I first heard of the Weatherby House through an unadorned envelope sealed with black wax, its handwriting a spidery script that seemed to shift when I wasn’t looking. It had lain dormant in the bottom drawer of my late uncle's desk, hidden beneath yellowed receipts and brittle maps. The letter bore no signature, only the phrase: "The blood remembers. Return to Dunridge."

Dunridge was a speck on the New Hampshire coast, south of Portsmouth but a world apart. My uncle, Dr. Adrian Northrop, had spoken little of his youth there. A professor of folklore and antiquarian rites, he had spent his later years in a windowless apartment, surrounded by arcane texts, many bound in leather not of any beast I could name.

I arrived at Dunridge in October. Fog clung to the skeletal trees like clotted silk. The Weatherby House stood high above the slate-gray sea, its spires twisted with lichen and its windows veiled in grime. It looked less built than extruded from the bedrock—a blackened tooth in the jaw of the coast.

The caretaker, a man named Abel Crone, met me at the gate. His eyes were pale as milk and did not blink enough.

"You bear the mark," he said by way of greeting.

I said nothing, for I did not know what he meant, and silence seemed safer.

Inside, the air was heavy with salt and something older. The walls sweated faintly. Rooms stretched farther than seemed architecturally plausible, and doors appeared in places where I was sure there had been only wall. The library, in particular, defied comprehension—a room of impossible proportions, with a domed ceiling that bore a painted night sky not our own.

It was in that room I found the journal.

Bound in sea-worn hide and inscribed in a cipher I half-recognized from my uncle's notes, it spoke of a lineage cursed not by God or devil, but by remembrance. Of rites spoken in the language of deep waters, of bloodlines tied to That Which Wakes Beneath the Tide.

Each entry grew more frantic.

I hear them in the drainpipes. They call in reverse tongues. My dreams are not mine.

The stars above Dunridge do not match the charts. The sky here lies.

The mirror sees a version of me that smiles when I do not.

Soon, I too began to dream.

Of vast, roiling oceans beneath the cellar. Of pale faces with gills where cheeks should be, chanting in a cadence that defied rhythm. The dreams were not frightening in the usual sense. They were familiar.

One night, I awoke to wet footprints on the stairs. They led down.

The cellar door was ajar.

I should have fled. Any sane man would. But something pulled me downward. Not curiosity—that bright flame had long since dimmed—but obligation. The blood remembers.

The stairs descended far beyond what the foundation should allow. The air became briny, electric. I heard water lapping against stone.

At the bottom, I found a vast chamber lit by no source I could name. The walls pulsed. In the center stood a well, ancient and rimmed with barnacles. From it came a sound not unlike breathing.

And there, leaning against the stone, was a mirror.

But not a mirror. A window. It showed not my reflection, but another version of me—wet, grinning, eyes black and bottomless.

It raised its hand. So did I.

Then it spoke. Not aloud, but through the bones of my skull.

Come now. Join the remembering.

I stepped forward.

They say I was found a week later, wandering the beach, soaked and muttering in a language no one recognized. The house was empty. The cellar, a shallow crawlspace.

But I know what I saw. The mirror is still there, waiting. The tides are rising.

And some nights, when I am very still, I hear the waves inside me.

Calling me home.