LUNAR CURSE

The mansion was ancient and dark, such a pitch it was smothering; it seemed to have wrung even the most minor rays out of their light. The air was heavy with the stench of rotten wood and moistness. Every step one made resounded menacingly; the house was alive and was waiting, always watching. People said that no one ever came out from here after the fall of evening sunlight. The whispers were always there, inaudible in the beginning but growing louder with each successive moment, sucking them deeper into the abyss.

Samantha adjusted the strap of her backpack as she stepped through the broken doorway, the thin beam of the flashlight slicing through suffocating blackness. She had heard the stories since childhood: tales of vengeful spirits and voices that called out to whatever ill-advised soul dared to enter. Still, she wasn't here for thrills. She was here for answers.

All those years ago, her brother had vanished into these very walls, leaving behind nothing but his journal, which she found discarded just beyond the property. The pages were riddled with frantic scribbles, nonsensical phrases, and one sentence repeated many times: "The whispers know." The words haunted her dreams and brought her to this moment.

The first room she entered was the parlor, its furniture ghostly in dusty white sheets, having stood unmoving for years and years. The cold fireplace was cracked and discolored on its stone facade. It was colder here; it was as if the house had exhaled a breath of icy malice upon her arrival. She swept the flashlight around the room; her heart was racing with every movement of the shadows, buckling and twisting to avoid the light.

And then she heard it.

A faint, almost imperceptible sound. A whisper.

Low and indistinct, like leaves rustling on a windless night, it was. Samantha froze, straining her ears to catch it again. Her mind told her that it was the creaking of the old house, that the wind slipped through the cracks, but deep inside, she knew the contrary.

"Who's there?" she called out, trying to sound much braver than she felt.

There was no response, only silence so deep it pressed against her chest like a physical weight. But then, in a matter of seconds, the whisper was back, this time louder, and it wasn't just noise-a soft, insidious voice uttering indecipherable words.

She clenching her teeth propelled herself further inside the manor. It was as if the whispers followed her, with every step she took clear as, no longer murmurs but words, sentences, pieces of a conversation that seemed to be issued from every side.

"Samantha.

Her name, in that hushed and raspy voice, sent a shiver down her spine as she turned around, flashing her flashlight into the dark. Nobody was there. The beam showed peeling wallpaper, cobwebs, and the hollow emptiness of the house.

"Who are you?" she shouted, her voice cracked, as is beginning to let in some fear.

The whispers didn't answer her directly; instead, they grew louder, overlapping in a cacophony of hidden voices, each one vying for her attention. Some were pleading, others mocking. But all of them seemed to know her, to speak as though they had waited for her.

"You shouldn't have come."

"Stay."

"The truth. lies below.

The last phrase seemed to ring in her ears, some kind of perpetual drumbeat that seeped into her brain. Samantha tried shaking it off, but to no avail. She had this inexplicable compulsion to follow the voices as if they were leading her to something she was meant to find.

Her feet carried her to a big staircase, its bannister carved with intricate designs now faded and worn. The wood groaned under her weight as she ascended, each step feeling heavier than the last. The whispers seemed to guide her, growing louder as she neared the top.

She found at the far end of the hall a door, standing just a bit ajar - the edges warped with age. The whisperings were loudest here; a cacophony of voices seemingly all hollering as one. Samantha hesitated; her hand came out to reach for the door knob, then just started shaking.

The other room was tiny and empty except for one piece of furniture: a mirror whose surface was cracked so over with grime one could barely see oneself. The whispering ceased the instant she entered, and what replaced it was an awful feeling of foreboding. Samantha approached the mirror with trepidation, her figure ruffled on its fractured glass.

She stood there, and as she stared, something moved behind her—a shadow that didn't belong. She spun around, her flashlight cutting through the darkness, but the room was empty. When she turned back to the mirror, her reflection no longer resembled herself.

The figure in the glass was a woman, pale of face, hollow-eyed as if the orbs in her head had sunken into black as voids. Her lips moved, though no sound was produced, and it was a thing that slowly, slowly dawned on Samantha's growing horror that the whispers came from her.

"Who are you?" Samantha whispered, hardly audible to her ears.

Its lips stilled, and for a moment, the creature said nothing. Then it spoke in a voice both known to her and strange: "We are the forgotten, and you. are one of us.".

The lights in the room started to flutter wildly, and the whispers started again, louder and louder it seemed, until they were deafening. Samantha fell backward, her mind reeling as the room seemed to close in on her. She felt an unseen force pulling at her, dragging her toward the mirror.

"Stop!" she screamed, but her voice was drowned out by the cacophony of whispers.

Just as she was sure she would be consumed, the force released her and she dropped to the floor, gasping for breath. The room fell silent once more, but the atmosphere within it was thick with unspoken threat. She scrambled to her feet and ran, her flashlight flickering as she tried to find her way through the labyrinthine halls of the manor.

Whispers followed her-constant, relentless, jeering-poisoning her mind with their words. She didn't know where she was going; she only knew she had to get away. But somehow the house seemed to shift about her, the corridors lengthening and twisting, trapping her in some kind of endless maze.

At last, she found a stairwell down into a basement; with every downward step, the chill multiplied and the whispers ceased her, or so it seemed like, when suddenly it was one single voice, telling her "Below. Below. Below."

The basement was enormous, full of shades, and had old symbols etched along its walls, shining faintly in the dark. There was a stone altar in the middle of the room, stained on its surface with something dark and undistinguishable.

Samantha approached it warily, her heart pounding in her chest as the weight of hundreds of eyes upon her seemed to press in from the darkness. On the altar lay a book, bound in cracked and worn leather, its pages filled with the same twisting symbols that seemed to dance upon the walls.

She leaned forward and touched it; the whispers ceased abruptly. In that very moment, as her fingers came in contact with the book, a current of energy swept through her body, and she was blinded by visions-flashes from the past, the old dwellers of the manor, rituals, sacrifices, and souls accursed, consumed by darkness.

The truth was, the whispers were those that came first, caught by the house while their souls were committed to the will of the malevolent house; and now she joined them.

The book fell from her hands as she tumbled backward, the voices rising once more this time with a cruel laughter. The last thing she saw before the darkness took her was the blood-red glow of the moon through a cracked basement window, its light casting an eerie shadow over the altar.

Whispers in the dark would never release her.