Three friends spend the night in an abandoned house on Blavatna Street, but the silence inside is wrong, and the darkness seems to be waiting for them.
A thick fog had settled over Flower Valley, softening the streets and swallowing the houses one by one. Well after midnight, Sara, Tom, and Lena slipped through the rusted gate of the old house on Blavatna Street, each carrying a torch and a sleeping bag, as if those things could make the place less threatening.
"I told you this was a stupid idea," Tom whispered, keeping to the edge of the path and scanning the garden for movement in the waist-high grass.
"That is exactly why it will be fun," Lena murmured back, adjusting her rucksack and forcing a grin. "Besides, maybe the ghost will be bored and come looking for company."
Sara did not laugh. She stared up at the house. Its windows were black and blind, the kind of darkness that felt occupied even when nothing moved behind it. The last tenants had left years ago, and the stories had only grown since then: footsteps in empty corridors, a figure at the upstairs window, smoke drifting from the chimney on windless nights.
The porch groaned under their weight. The front door was already ajar, hanging a little open as if someone had just stepped inside and forgotten to shut it behind them. Lena pushed it wider.
Cold air spilled out, carrying dust, damp wood, and something faintly sour. Their torch beams swept across peeling wallpaper, cobwebbed corners, and a row of old portraits whose faces had blurred with age.
"Did you hear that?" Tom asked.
From somewhere above them came a soft creak, slow and deliberate, like a floorboard settling under a careful step.
"Old house," Sara said too quickly. Her voice sounded smaller than she meant it to. The skin on her arms had gone tight.
They moved into the living room and set their sleeping bags around a cracked tiled stove. Lena tried to fill the silence with ghost stories, but her jokes kept catching on the edges of her own unease. The house listened. Every beam and wall seemed to hold its breath.
Then, without warning, all three torches died at once.
Darkness crashed over them so completely that Sara could not see her own hands. Nobody spoke. Even the fog outside seemed distant now, cut off by the blackness pressing in from every side.
"The batteries cannot all be dead," she said, but the words sounded useless the moment they left her mouth.
A heavy thud came from above.
Then another.
Slow footsteps began on the stairs.
They were not random. They were descending.
Closer. Slower. As if whatever was coming down knew exactly where the three of them were waiting in the dark.