Even before she disappeared, there was talk in the town. Talk of the beautiful house with its red panes of wood and still-polished roof and gold-engraved windows and doors. Talk of how it had been twenty years since the last time but still nothing had changed of it. Nothing particularly suspicious had happened since that awful day, they said. Yet somehow the house seemed… ageless. Never rusting, even with no one dusting its rooms and doors and windowsills, they said.

Talk, talk, talk. Talk between the old women, between the children, and the adults. Talk under the covers when best friends whispered scary stories to keep themselves awake at night. Talk in front of a crackling fireplace, when worried parents sat in worn red armchairs and murmured quietly. Talk in the trains, in the buses, everywhere. Talk, talk, talk. Talk everywhere.

The talkers always assumed they knew the whole story, you see. But they were wrong. They didn’t know that those they thought were gone still walked among them.

They didn’t know that those they talked about were…

Listening.

When the new family moved in from out of town, everyone knew it couldn’t be good news. These fancy, naïve, almost foreign people. These people who always brought trouble. These people who always…

Oh. Did I forget to mention?

They were moving into the old house.

Down in the basement, they were watching. Watching this beautiful, chestnut-skinned, slender, wide-eyed, dark-haired girl called Avani prance around her new house.

And that made them angry. For the first time in twenty years, they began to stir. And, oh, when they stirred, they brought forgotten things with them. Things that were perhaps better to be left that way. Things that were dark as a starless night.

They watched. Careful and sly as foxes. Furious, jealous, and ancient.

Yes, ancient. Very much so.

I grabbed some big Uhaul boxes and began to take them down to the basement. I wanted to get out as quickly as possible. For some reason, that place gave me the creeps.

Well, actually… maybe there was a reason. Like the way I would hear footsteps, turn around, and see red streaks like angry brush strokes on the ground behind me that would disappear a second later. The way I could hear pages rustle  because of an invisible wind but could never see anything. Leaving me to wonder whether I was losing my mind… or if there was something more sinister at play here.

I wish I could see what it is, I thought bitterly. Then maybe I wouldn’t feel like I’m going crazy.

Ridiculous thing to wish for.

As soon as I opened the door, I felt that sense of unsettling cold hit me. Except this time, it was… worse.

Much worse.

In fact, I felt like I had been thrown inside a case of pure ice. It hurt to breathe. My teeth rattled inside my skull.

I stumbled down the stairs unstably. Not by will, of course. But something was pushing me from behind. The hands were freezing cold, clutching my ribs and turning them to ice.

“MOM!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “DAD!”

No answer. The door swung shut, and I heard the lock click as my breathing sped up.

Suddenly, the hands holding me multiplied. Thousandfold. And they weren’t cold anymore. They were burning hot.

I screamed, feeling my loose green sweater turning to paper, doing nothing to protect me. The wind howled in my ears, even though I was inside.

Then, through a red haze of pain, I realized I wasn’t hearing wind.

I was hearing voices. Screaming in pain like a gale uprooting trees and destroying houses. I heard them in a blaze of fury and ear-splitting noise.

“You think you feel pain, girl?”

“You have not felt ours.”

“We the forgotten…”

“Murdered…”

“Made insignificant…”

“You wished to see, did you not? See…”

I groaned as I wilted to the ground, curled up into a ball. Finally, finally, my muscles burning like the hands that had been gripping me, I rose.

And I found myself surrounded by…

Bookshelves?

Yes. Mahogany, wooden bookshelves, filled to the brim with ancient, paper-thin books: red, green, blue, and purple. They looked feeble but oddly, eeirly majestic at the same time.

Ancient symbols were scratched into them, faded and beaten down like worn rock. It took me a second to realize they were languages. Forgotten languages.

I could feel the magic emanating from the pages even though I couldn’t see anything. Magic that turned me numb and made me feel small. Tales of gods and of lore and of monsters and fear and love and pain and joy and…

“See what we have become?”

“Figments of history…”

“Your imagination of us…”

I couldn’t resist. I reached out and touched one. They started to glow an unearthly shade of green, one after the other, in a domino-like pattern.

I realized what I had done, my stomach collapsing into an abyss of dread and despair.

“You have discovered the secrets of this house.”

“It is the last living link to the ancient world.”

“Your life force, so strong and curious, is what we needed to come back to life.”

“We will restore the world back to its proper order.”

“Back to the old days.”

The whooshing got louder, and the voices became indistinct once more. I felt like I was trapped inside a hurricane, unable to move or breathe. Books flew around me, still glowing, cracking open slowly, like whatever was inside them was trying to make its way out.

One of them hit me on the leg, and I felt a searing pain there. Worse even than the time I broke my arm. With a great effort, I leaned over to look at it and saw a strange symbol there — engraved into my flesh, surrounded by a dripping pool of my own blood.

I felt the life being slowly sapped out of me, as if there was more power in the symbol now etched into me than just the blood it was drawing.

Suddenly, everything froze, as if I were in the eye of the raging hurricane. I realized sluggishly that I was floating in midair on my back as my breathing quickened, my heart beating too loud for the rest of me, blood flowing from my leg and falling onto the ground with a sickly shh, shh noise. I was surrounded by a hazy white mist, and the last thing I saw was a pair of cloudlike hands reach into the bookshelf, take out a burning red book that glowed so fiercely it hurt my eyes to look at it, and throw it straight at me — right at my heart.

A blast of fiery pain, hands clutching my throat, my body burning…

And darkness.