I paused at the door to the study—the room where Robert McGuffey had supposedly ended it all. I pushed the door open, the hinges groaning like a wounded animal. The portraits hanging along the walls stared at me—hollow-eyed, frozen smiles that didn’t quite touch their painted expressions. I hated the way they watched, as if judging the intrusion into this monument to someone’s tragedy.

The study was a war zone—furniture overturned, heavy gouges scratched along the surface of the mahogany desk. Blood splattered in gruesome patterns, mingling with shattered glass and upended ink. There were handprints smeared across the walls, dragging marks that led from the desk to the floor, where a dark, coagulated pool had formed. I could see where the cops had tried to clean it up—the streaks left behind by desperate scrubbing, as if they hoped to erase the horror with enough bleach and elbow grease. But this wasn’t something you could scrub away; it clung to the air, thick and wet, turning my stomach with every breath.

There's been some cowboys in here, Frank said.

A path of destruction led down the hallway, ending with the private study door—locked from the inside, the iron latch still hanging secure. A chilling detail—a paradox of impossible containment. Nothing added up, not with the sheer magnitude of the wreckage.

I moved upstairs, reaching the master bedroom. Odd—everything seemed untouched. A collection of jewelry, a bed made with military precision, and a bare spot on the nightstand, dust rings clearly marking where something had once been. A music box, if I had to guess. But the room didn’t feel… right. It felt untouched, yes, but like it was untouched by life, as if it were nothing but a stage set after the actors had long since abandoned the scene.

I rifled through the drawers, trying to ignore Frank’s snide remarks—“Oh, sure, because that’s where the clues are, Jack, next to the socks.“ Nothing substantial—just expensive silks and satin, unaffected by anything significant.

My attention turned back to the study, something gnawing at my thoughts. I returned, the air even colder now, almost oppressive, pressing down with the weight of what happened here. There—a faint seam in the wall, an imperceptible line only visible when you knew what to look for. My fingers traced along it, feeling for some inconsistency. A small indent gave way under pressure, and the wall shifted aside—a door within a door, sliding into darkness.

I toggled a filter, and the scene shifted. Heat signatures glowed faintly along the edges of the floor, marking where someone—or something—had passed recently. My breath hitched.

Inside, the passageway pressed in, narrow and suffocating—just wide enough for me to edge through, with shelves crowding both walls, their edges biting into me. The shelves were stuffed, cluttered—artifacts, old books, bizarre relics stacked side by side, drenched in dust and something else—an energy that made my skin crawl. It felt wrong, unholy—the kind of magic that left residue on your soul just by being near it. The relics whispered secrets from the past, but they were empty—dead echoes. Everything here was nothing but a shell of its former power.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

There were jars—dozens of them, filled with murky liquid, things suspended inside that I couldn’t quite make out. Shapes twisted and floated, their forms distorted, like fetuses or things pretending to be fetuses, each one staring back at me with milky, sightless eyes. I felt bile rise in my throat and forced it back down, the sour burn stinging my nostrils.

Except for that pedestal—a smooth surface, devoid of dust. Something had been here, and recently taken. My gut tightened, suspicion turning to certainty. My eyes swept the floor, catching the glint of something small and unexpected—a matchbox. Bright red, with garish lettering. Lux, a strip club down on the West Side. The kind of place where secrets were both currency and commodity. I knew it well, and that made my stomach drop.

Next to the matchbox was something else—a poker chip. Black with silver inlay and a sapphire embedded in the center. Sapphire Club. Cat’s place. The sight of it made my jaw tighten. So, McGuffey had a knack for the illegal to go along with his stupid.

As I pocketed the matchbox and chip, silence claimed the house once more, but this time, it was a waiting silence—an expectancy hanging in the air like a held breath.

The walls seemed to close in, and I could almost hear it—the low hum of something alive, something malevolent, lingering just beyond perception. The floor beneath my feet felt soft, as though it would give way at any moment, plunging me into the bowels of the earth. I shook the feeling off, but it clung to me like cobwebs. The stench of blood and rot thickened, the oppressive darkness pushing against my senses. The McGuffey estate wasn’t just haunted—it was damned, and I had a sinking feeling that whatever was left here wasn’t done with me yet.

I retraced my steps, the cold golden crystal in my chest thrumming where my heart should be, each beat reiterating the creak of the old boards beneath my weight. Each noise sounded like a sinister reminder of what had happened here, or worse, a hint of what was yet to come. The air thickened around me, felt almost heavy, like I was wading through something invisible but deeply oppressive. Shadows moved in ways that weren’t quite natural, shifting too quickly, clinging to corners and seeming to breathe on their own. I could swear I felt them brush against me, reaching, retreating, and then growing bold enough to return.

There was something wet on the banister—dried, crusted blood, fingerprints smudged into grotesque shapes. Whoever had been here before had tried to scrub it off, but some stains don’t leave. They just soak deeper, festering in the bones of the house. My hand jerked back, and I wiped it against my coat, swallowing down the disgust that rose up, hot and acidic.

I reached the kitchen—another place of supposed normalcy that had turned into something of a sick joke. Cabinets had been left open, their contents spilled out across the floor—glass shattered, herbs strewn, bags of flour torn open, the white powder mingling with streaks of dark red, coagulating in the corners. The refrigerator door hung open, and the light inside flickered intermittently, casting strange, stuttering flashes across the room. The rotting smell hit me before I even got close—a thick, fetid reek of spoiled meat and decay that made me gag. Something shifted in the fridge, and I dared not look closer.

On the floor, next to the scattered shards of a porcelain plate, was a trail of crimson droplets, leading me onward, like a breadcrumb path meant to lure in the foolish. Frank was silent, and that was the worst part—his usual snark absent, leaving me alone in a silence that seemed to pulse with malevolent intent.

“Don’t like this,” I whispered, my voice barely audible, swallowed by the dark maw of the house. My eyes followed the trail—it led back to the hall, to a door beneath the stairs I hadn’t noticed before. It was ajar, just barely, a thin line of darkness spilling out, like ink spreading across a page.