The Veil-Taker at the Umbral House: Part Two

A Serial Horror by Avaline Rose Quinn — Part Two

The second night brought the same three taps at 2:17, spaced as evenly as beads on a string. Lenora’s body knew to wake a breath before the clock knew to chime; she sat upright and felt the chill move through the room like a thought someone else had. The knocking did not come from the front door. She felt it rise up from the bones of the house—the joists, the lath, the old ribs of it.

When she lit the candle, the flame pouted in a draft that had no easy source. The mirror, glimpsed from the bedroom doorway, had collected a film of breath. She raised the candle. In the glass, the hallway lay the way a drowned thing lies—colors dimmed, edges swollen, an old, obedient world. Her reflection stood there, candle held high, face the color of unspilled milk.

“Enough,” she told herself, to steady the shiver in her wrists. “Enough.”

The third night, she waited in the hall itself, beside the mirror, as the long hand crept toward the small, bright tyranny of 2:17.

Three taps.

The glass trembled, not with sound, but with a ripple like something swimming far below the surface. Her reflection did not start when she did. It did not inhale. It did not blink.

“Move,” Lenora whispered.

It did not.

Her own breath drew a crescent on the glass. In the fog she wrote, with her fingertip, L. The letter beaded and ran, the way water refuses a straight answer. On the other side of the glass—because there was another side; she knew it like you know rain by the smell—something traced a second letter half a beat later: F. And then a third: I.

“Lenora Finch is not I,” she said to no one, horrified by the grammar the way one is horrified by a misstep on a stair one knows too well. The reflection smiled.

Return tomorrow—at 2:17 AM EST sharp—for Part Three of The Veil-Taker at the Umbral House.

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