The Last Breath:

First, however, she repeated the words, words that sucked the warmth from her body: "The past never dies, Lena. Nor should your father be an exception."

In her sweaty palm, she held a piece of parchment. The sender was anonymous. The scroll was sealed in what appeared to be wax and bore the emblem-a crow, perched atop of a gravestone, with burning-red eyes-that vaguely reminded her of a parchment from ages ago.

As for Lena

The night he vanished was when the change began within the town. They talked in hushed, fearful whispers and kept glancing over their shoulders as if afraid of being overheard. Some said that Samuel Wilder had dabbled into forbidden knowledge-the calling forth of powers beyond mortal comprehension. Others said he himself would be called forth into that dark void, taken there by creatures of the very same knowledge.

These whisperings had never formed a convincing equation into her mind. Somewhere deep inside dified, she imagined her father had dug too deep to be able to return alive. Until she received the letter.

The sins of Samuel Wilder have come to follow him home.

As Lena sat by her window, she peered into the fog, which pressed hard up against the walls of her home like something alive, feeling as if the ghosts of the town were stirring. In her mind, a whispered spell of dread began from every creak of old floorboards, and every whistling wind through trees set the hairs on end.

That night beginning to fold into fitful sleep, dreams started to take shape.

Far back within a graveyard, black clouds filled the sky. The full moon hung low within the night, allowing dismal yellow shadows on the old crumbled tombstones. The air had a strange chill in it. Each footstep was a heavy one, sinking her feet deeper into the soft wet soil. Heart pounding, she began gingerly scanning the gravestones for something she couldn't see.