When the Dead Knocks!

Strange and unusual are they.

They say the dead know only one thing: how to wait.

In Withering Hollow, the trees never grew straight. Their limbs twisted skyward like fingers clawing at a sky that never seemed to listen or answer. Children were warned not to stray past the stone boundary, where the forest ends- for beyond dwelled monsters and dangers older than bone.

But Elyspeth was not a child anymore. She returned to Withering Hollow after her mother’s funeral, the last of the bloodline buried beneath a cracked headstone that read: She remembered sadness, and mourned too much.

The house was waiting. It always waited. A crumbling, once fashionable, faux Elizabethan design with windows like eyes, flickering with a light that didn’t come from any lamp. Elyspeth stepped inside, and the door closed behind her with a groan and a sigh.

The rooms were wrong, not at all how she remembered them. The hallway stretched longer than she recalled, and the portraits blinked when she passed. Her mother’s study was untouched, except for the journal on the desk. Bound in leather, entwined with something that looked like sinew.

She opened it.

Strange. Unusual, almost Selcouth. The dead do not sleep here. They remember. They wait.

A chill ran down the young woman's spine - was this a warning or an omen? Quickly, she slammed the book shut, quivering from head to toe. Elyspeth had never liked this house as a child, especially the attic...it always smelled like old lace and horror.

The book spun around three times, the pages turning themselves so fast, they seemed blown by an angry wind. Ely jumped backwards in terror.

The pages bled ink. It bled names she didn’t recognize. Dates that hadn’t happened yet. And then - her own name, written in blood red.

Elyspeth Holness

The lights flickered. The house groaned. And from the corner of the room, a voice rasped:

"You came back. You remembered".

Elyspeth turned. The figure was tall, cloaked, its face a hollow grin of bone. It held a lantern filled with writhing shadows. Behind it, the walls peeled open like skin, revealing a corridor that pulsed, quickening her heartbeat.

She turned and ran, fear and dread lending speed to her feet.

But the house did not let her go. The stairs led nowhere. The doors opened into the same room again and again. And the journal followed her, always on the nearest table, whispering:

You are remembered. You are next.

Elyspeth fainted away in a dead swoon. She awoke in the attic. But the attic was somehow deep within the cellar. Ghosts of all her ancestors surrounded her...importuning her to grant them an audience - they all needed to know why they were all dead.

"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know". She kept repeating...over and over, for they were many and uncountable.

They all looked the same...carrying eerie lanterns to light the way.

"You must, you must. For you cannot leave until we are all made to see the light. And we cannot see the light until we know".

Elyspeth felt her sanity slowly abandoning her.

Outside, the forest leaned closer. The roots glowed. And the dead began to knock.

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the prompt