The Veil-Taker at the Umbral House: Part Three

A Serial Horror by Avaline Rose Quinn — Part Three

By daylight, she searched. The Umbral House had kept certain secrets out of convenience and others out of habit. She found a loose board beneath the bed in the small room at the landing; beneath it, a narrow diary in a hand so tight and firm it looked like a row of teeth.

January 14
Heard it again. Three. It has learned my name by the sound of my sleep.

January 21
They called him in the old tongue Morthveil—the Veil-Taker. Not a man, though he wears the suggestion of one like a child wears its father’s coat. He does not knock to come in. He knocks to remind me it is almost time to go.

February 2
The mirror is not the witness. The mirror is the door. Do not look too long.

Lenora closed the diary and felt the paper hold its last warmth from her fingers like a cheek.

When did you begin to look, she asked herself. When did you stop?

She tried not to look at the mirror for a day and managed half of one. At dusk the hedges went black at the edges and the sky thinned to a bruise, and she carried the diary to the stair to read aloud, as one reads to an invalid to keep them with the world.

“Morthveil,” she tried, shaping the syllables like an unfamiliar prayer. The house deadened the name, as if out of politeness.

That night, the knock came not from the hall, but from the glass itself. It was soft as knuckles tapped through glove leather. She felt it in her teeth.

She set the candle down. “What do you want?” she asked, because it is human folly to demand terms of doors.

Her reflection tilted its head a fraction. It was not an unkind movement. It was a student’s curiosity, a mathematician’s.

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

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