Nela and Philip slip into an abandoned manor where every floorboard seems to listen. In the attic, among old wardrobes and dead lanterns, something begins to stir.
Nela stopped in the middle of the empty courtyard and stared up at the manor. It loomed through the mist, pale and sharp-edged, like a frozen castle that had drifted out of a dream and forgotten to leave again. Beside her, Philip dug his fingers into her sleeve.
"Do you think it's really haunted?" he whispered.
He tried to sound brave, but his voice wobbled on the last word.
Nela gave his hand a squeeze. Her own heart was thumping hard enough to hurt. "If it is," she said, forcing a grin, "we'll find out before it finds us."
That earned her a nervous huff of laughter from Philip, and for a moment the fear loosened its grip.
The front steps were slick with frost. Dead leaves skittered across the stone path as they crossed to the door, and the manor answered them with a long, hollow groan. The sound made Philip flinch.
Inside, the air was colder than outside. Dust hung in the beam of Nela's torch, turning every breath into a silver cloud. The corridor stretched ahead in a dim blur of warped wallpaper, crooked portraits, and broken furniture draped in sheets that had gone yellow with age. Their footsteps came back to them from the walls, but not quite alone.
Nela slowed. There it was again - a whisper, soft as breath against glass.
Philip heard it too. His face drained of colour. "Nela?"
"It's probably the wind," she said, though the manor had no windows near enough for wind to reach them.
They moved on anyway, because turning back now would mean admitting the house had won. A stack of old trunks blocked part of the hall. Beside them stood cracked boxes stuffed with damp notebooks and ribbons gone dull with mould. The faces in the portraits followed the beam of the torch with glassy, watchful eyes, and Nela had the strange feeling that the house was waiting for them to make the first mistake.
At the foot of the attic stairs, she stopped again.
The whispers were louder here, slipping through the boards above in broken threads of sound. Not words exactly. More like someone trying to speak from very far away.
Philip swallowed. "Do we really have to go up?"
Nela looked at the narrow staircase, the dark trapdoor above it, and the line of frost that glimmered across the wood as if something icy had touched it from the other side.
Then came a crash from upstairs - sharp, sudden, and close.
Both of them froze.
Above their heads, the attic door began to swing inward on its own, slow and protesting on its hinges. A breath of icy mist poured down the stairs, curling around their ankles. Nela raised her torch.
In the fog, between the old wardrobes and the extinguished lanterns, something was standing very still and listening.