The wind is screaming over the hills when I count the flock and come up short. One missing. Again. three in two nights. The fog is thick, curling over the low grass, swelling everything more than a few feet away. My Lantern barely cuts through it. I pull my cloak tighter, grip the knife at my belt and listen. Nothing.

No distant bleating, No scurrying from the underbrush, no rustling from the trees beyond the ridge. Simply silence. Something is Hunting them. I stepped forward, boots sinking into the damp Earth. The Sheep huddle together, eyes wide, but I leave them behind. If I wait for morning, I'll only find a carcass or worse nothing at all.

The trees loom ahead, Twisted black against the last warm light of the setting sun. I've walked these Woods a hundred times, but tonight the air is wrong. It's still, as always yet it's too heavy.

I press on regardless. The fog closes in around me. My breath becomes shallow, misting in the cold. The deeper I go the more the trees seem to shift their branches. I know it's just a wind but my gut disagrees.

Then I see it. Half hidden in the Mist, just beyond the trees stands a simple house. I stopped dead in my tracks. It shouldn't be there.

The Mansion is old, Stone blackened with age, it's Windows gaping like empty eye sockets. The iron gate hangs open, rusted and broken at the hinges. Maybe decades. Maybe, but there are tracks in the mud.

A low Rumble rolls across the sky. The storm that's been threatening all evening is finally coming. I glance back the way I came, but the fog is too thick now, and I won't find my way back before the rain hits. My only choice is forward. The air is thick with the scent of the damp Stone as I step through the gate. The wind groans through the broken windows comma but inside all is still. My boots Echo against the marble floor of the entrance hall. A grand staircase rises before me. its railing warped and splintered. Dust coats everything, thick and undisturbed.

Lightning flashes through the shattered Skylight illuminating the walls. I freeze.

There are portraits lining the hall. Faces in oils, pale  and severe, dressed in the fashion of a century past. But their eyes… They look at me.

I swallow hard and force myself forward, gripping the lantern tight. The eyes are simply an illusion of the flame. Nothing more.

Another flash of lightning, and I see the door at the end of the hallway made of heavy wood, slightly off center. A slight scraping sound I hear from the other end.

Should I turn back? Should I run into the storm, risk the dark, risk the hills, risk the cliffs, anything but this? Of course not, I need to know. I push the door open

The first thing I noticed is the horrid sound that the door made, the second is the smell. The pungent smell, damp and rotten, almost of iron. My Lantern flickers. A carcass.

Sheep, gutted in half rotten, arranged in a pattern on the floor. In the center of the small room, a chair. 

Occupied.

The figure occupying it is wrong. It's not alive, not quite dead either. A man, or what remains of one, wrapped in tattered finery, eyes dark as midnight. His mouth stretches onto something that might have once been a grin. My Lantern shutters in my hand.

And then he stood.

I don't remember screaming. Maybe I didn't. Maybe the sound was only in my head. But I do know that I ran. Out of that room, through the hall, past those staring portraits, and back into the storm. I don't know how long I ran before I tripped. Before the world went dark.

When I wake, I am in the chair.

The fire on the Hearth is roaring, though I do not entirely remember lighting it. The walls are alive with Whispers, curling around me like a smoke. The portraits are closer now they're painted faces grinning, eyes bright with something I don't understand. Or maybe I do. Hard to tell.

The storm rages outside, but I do not leave. I cannot leave. The house is warm. The house is waiting! The house has been waiting for me.

And outside, beyond the woods, deep in the fields, the Sheep are still dying. ❦