Chapter 2 - The Midnight ExtractionThe house was dead silent by 2:00 AM. The empty beer bottles and paper plates littered the living room like the aftermath of a war zone, smelling of stale alcohol and cheap cake. Upstairs, the rhythmic, heavy snoring of Julian echoed down the hallway from our master bedroom.
He had gone to sleep without uttering another word to me or checking on Lily, who was now resting fitfully in her small bed down the hall, clutching a stuffed rabbit to her chest. Her skin still bore the faint, angry red impression of the chain around her waist.
That was my final straw. The invisible thread holding my sanity together snapped.
I crept down the stairs in the dark, my bare feet making no sound on the hardwood floor. I knew where Eleanor kept her spare keys—in a small, velvet-lined box tucked away in the back of the mahogany study desk. It took me three agonizing minutes of fumbling in the dark before my fingers brushed against a cold, metallic ring of keys.
One of them belonged to the old Victorian carriage house at the very back of the sprawling estate, a place Julian and Eleanor had strictly forbidden me from entering ever since we moved in. They always claimed it was structurally unsafe, a hazard full of rotting timber and asbestos.
But tonight, the forbidden house called to me.
Outside, a thick, damp fog rolled in from the nearby coast, swallowing the moonlight and turning the twisted oak trees into gnarled, shadowy monsters. I pulled my woolen coat tightly around myself, clutching a heavy-duty flashlight in my right hand as I hurried across the damp grass.
The carriage house looked more like a tomb than a storage shed. Its paint was peeling in long, scabby strips, and the windows were caked in decades of grime. I found the heavy iron padlock on the double doors and tried three different keys from Eleanor’s ring before the third one clicked.
With a low, agonizing groan that sounded eerily like a dying breath, the heavy wooden doors swung inward.
I flicked on my flashlight, sweeping the beam across the cavernous interior. Dust motes danced frantically in the pale circle of light. It wasn’t full of old furniture or garden tools as I had expected. Instead, the space was dominated by an enormous, dust-covered tarp in the center of the room.
My breath caught in my throat. I stepped forward, my boots crunching on broken glass, and grabbed the edge of the tarp. With a sharp tug, I pulled it away.
Coughing against the sudden cloud of suffocating dust, I lowered my flashlight to illuminate what lay beneath.
It was a shrine to the past.
Rows upon rows of neatly organized cardboard boxes lined the floor, but it was the wall behind them that made my blood run ice-cold. It was entirely covered in newspaper clippings, old photographs, and handwritten index cards, all connected by a chaotic web of red yarn.
At the dead center of the web was a faded, black-and-white photograph of a young man with striking, piercing eyes and a sharp jawline. He looked strikingly, unmistakably familiar.
My heart skipped a beat as I read the handwritten name scrawled in bold black ink across the bottom of the photograph: Arthur Sterling, 1988.
And right beside it, clipped from a local newspaper with a date I could barely comprehend, was an obituary headline that read: LOCAL MAN VANISHES WITHOUT A TRACE AFTER FIERY ESTATE COLLAPSE.
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I stepped closer, my mind racing a mile a minute. I didn't know who Arthur Sterling was, but looking at his face, looking at the exact shape of his eyes and the distinctive slope of his nose... I felt a violent shudder rack my body.
It was the exact same face looking back at me every single morning when I brushed my daughter Lily’s hair.
