The 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom gave a final, shuddering gasp as it rolled to a halt, its silver grille caked with the dust of forgotten roads. The engine didn't just die it suffocated, the last ticks of its cooling metal echoing like a dying pocketwatch left too long in a dead man's waistcoat. Lila Hart sat frozen in the driver's seat, her knuckles bone-white around the steering wheel. Through the rain-streaked windshield, the wrought-iron gates of Ashford Manor stood sentinel, their black bars twisted into ornate, almost cruel spirals like briars meant to bleed any hand that dared touch them.
A gust of wind moaned through the surrounding oaks, their gnarled branches scraping against the bruised twilight sky. Then
The gates swung open.
No creak of rusted hinges. No gust strong enough to move their weight. Just a slow, deliberate parting, as if the house itself had breathed in, drawing her toward its rotting heart.
Lila's breath fogged the glass. "This is stupid," she whispered, but her reflection disagreed wide amber eyes smudged with exhaustion, auburn hair escaping its braid like live wires crackling with static. She looked, she realized with a chill, like someone already half-tangled in the supernatural.
The sign beside the drive confirmed it.
Carved into a slab of wood so rotten it wept black sap, the letters bled moss-green:
ASHFORD MANOR. EST. 1890.
And beneath, in fresher, jagged strokes that gleamed wetly in the dying light:
BEWARE THE WEST WING.
Thunder detonated directly overhead, a sound so violent the car's windows trembled. The storm had arrived in earnest now, rain slashing diagonally, pinging off the hood like thrown nails.
Lila reached for the door handle
A click from the backseat.
She whipped around. Nothing. Just her lone suitcase toppled over, its latch popped open. Except
She'd locked it. Twice.
A droplet of ice-cold water landed on the back of her neck.
Her gaze snapped upward. The convertible's roof was sealed tight. No leaks.
Then where ?
Another drop. Then another.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
From the inside of the windshield this time, beading and streaking like tears down the glass.
Lila bolted from the car, the manor's silhouette looming as lightning split the sky. For a single, horrifying second, the entire facade lit up every window a flash of something moving behind the glass. Shadows with too many limbs. A silhouette in a top hat, standing too still. A woman's pale hands pressing against the panes from inside.
Then darkness.
And from deep within the house, the first, faltering notes of a piano. A melody that stopped her dead.
"Hush now, shadow, don't you cry..."
Her mother's lullaby. The one she'd made up the summer before she died. The one no one else had ever heard.
The wind howled through the trees, and this time, it shaped a word:
"Lila..."
Behind her, the car's headlights flickered once illuminating the manor's front door, now standing open.
And in the brief, blue-white glare, the portrait beside the entrance a man in a 1920s tuxedo, his eyes dark and knowing blink...
Rain lashed against the stained-glass windows, fracturing the dying light into blood-red puddles on the marble floor. Lila's boots squeaked as she entered, her breath hanging in the air like ghostly lace. The scent of old books and damp roses clung to the walls.
Then a shuffle of feet.
Mr. Holloway emerged from the shadows, his spine bent like a question mark. His gnarled fingers uncurled, revealing a key so rusted it looked like dried blood.
"You'll be needin' this," he wheezed. The kerosene lamp trembled in his other hand, casting jumpy shadows over his watery, crow-tracked eyes.
Lila reached for the key. Their fingers brushed
His skin was winter-river cold.
She yanked her hand back. "What's wrong with the music room?"
The old man's laugh sounded like a coffin lid scraping. "Young miss… the last pianist died at that grand. Dawn came, and there he sat " He mimed frozen fingers on invisible keys. "Still playin'. Still smilin'. Rigor mortis, the doctor said. But doctors don't know Ashford's secrets."
A gust slithered down the hallway, making the lamp sputter like a dying heartbeat.
Lila forced a smirk. "Great. A murder house. Do the ghosts charge rent?"
But Holloway wasn't laughing. His trembling, vein-knotted hand pointed upstairs. "That room's locked since '27. But sometimes…" His milky eyes flicked toward the ceiling. "Sometimes it unlocks itself."
Midningt....
Lila's candle guttered as she crept down the hallway at midnight. The house breathed around her floorboards sighing, walls whispering.
Then… music.
Not the tinny sound of a recording. This was alive. A piano's rich voice singing Clair de Lune, each note dripping like honey from the keys.
She pressed her ear to the music room door. The wood vibrated under her palms.
Click.
The lock turned by itself.
Inside, the grand piano gleamed under moonlight, its lid raised like a black wing. The sheet music on the stand was blank yet the keys dipped and rose, playing a song only the dead remembered.
Lila stepped closer. The air smelled suddenly of bergamot and rain-soaked earth a man's cologne.
Then she saw it.
In the piano's polished surface, her reflection wasn't alone.
A pair of long, elegant hands hovered above hers translucent, but unmistakably male. The left pinky crooked oddly, like it had been broken and badly set.
A whisper brushed her neck, warm as a lover's breath:
"Lila… you've forgotten our melody.".....