“And he castces, seeking rest... and finding none.”  The Lost Gospel of Abel

The wind began to speak again.

It slithered through the iron-grated windows like a serpent through bone, brushing against Gareth’s neck as he knelt before the bundle of cursed pages. The fire had dulled in the hearth, and now only the moonlight

He opened the page that bore the serpent-sigil once more. And there, scrawled in the corner beneath a circle of overlapping stars, were the words:

“Ad Me, veniant damnati.”

"Let the damned come to me."

Gareth murmured it aloud, not as incantation, but recognition.

It was from the Codex Umbrae, a volume burned by papal decree in 1312. He had only seen fragments. The original was said to have been inked in human blood and crow’s bile, bound with the flesh of a seer who screamed until her death.

And yet here it was, staring up at him from a house long buried by time.

The house was revealing itself.

He moved toward the stairwell again, this time climbing slower, senses attuned. The wood beneath his feet creaked not with age, but as though it were testing him. He could feel the walls... watching, not just containing.

At the top of the stairs, the hallway seemed longer than before.

To the left: the study where he kept his old texts.

To the right: the guestroom he had never entered.

Straight ahead: the master bedroom.

And beneath his feet, buried behind planks and stone the old root cellar.

The villagers had warned him. Not directly. They didn’t speak of Hollow End. But the way they crossed themselves, the subtle mention of a priest who vanished, the little girl who screamed when she passed the gate…

No one spoke of the cellar.

Yet he had felt it the moment he stepped through the threshold.

Something woke below.

Gareth turned into the study.

Candles lit themselves as he entered. Each flame leapt to life with a hush, illuminating the pages spread across his desk. Notebooks. Grimoire fragments. The Grand Clavicula, Testamentum Salomonis, and a brittle, annotated version of the 7 Books of Moses, its final pages frayed from repetition.

He pulled the Book of the Spirits toward him.

Fingered through until he reached a familiar passage.

“When they die in pain, the soul does not pass.

When they die in ritual, the soul remains open.”

His wife had died screaming.

But not alone.

Gareth whispered a phrase in Enochian, and the candlelight once hue now blue, soft, shivering.

The shadows recoiled.

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He placed his hand upon the center of the table, where the sigil of union and summoning had been carved in chalk and blood. Slowly, carefully, he drew a line across his palm with a ritual blade, and let a single drop fall.

The flame turned black.

The room went cold.

And then beneath the floor he heard it.

Not footsteps.

Not wind.

But breathing.

Wet. Close. Inside the house.

And with it came a voice, distant yet intimate, rising not from the throat but from the gut of the world:

“You are not the first… but you may be the last.”

Gareth didn’t move. Didn’t blink. His hand tightened on the desk.

“I have buried prophets,” he said, voice low. “I have spoken with angels. I’ve kissed demons in the dark. If you’re here for fear, you chose the wrong man.”

The house creaked.

Not in reply but in warning.

Because Gareth Monroe was not just a grieving widower.

He was the last of the Sigilites, the Black Shepherd once excommunicated by five orders of the sacred church. His love for his wife had not dulled the heretic in his bones. If anything, it had sharpened it.

And this house would learn...

He was here to dig up what Heaven buried.

He liked it here.

Gareth set down his bag, its leather cracked and marked with chalk symbols. He unzipped the side, revealing the bound texts he never traveled without. The Sefer Raziel, Grand Grimoire, Testament of Solomon, and the Seventh Book of Moses each one marked with notes in Eleanor’s hand.

He would live here. He would work here. And he would try again.

Even if it damned him.

Even if the walls whispered in the tongue of the Nephilim.

Even if Hollow End was never meant for the living.

That first night, Gareth didn’t sleep.

He sat in the narrow parlor beneath the weight of silence, surrounded by timeworn books and shadows too still to be innocent. The candlelight burned low, casting warping reflections across the faded mirror above the fireplace. Its surface didn’t reflect as much as it remembered.

On the hearth lay scattered bones of some small animal long dried. Not placed there by rodents. Arranged.

Ritualistically.

As though a child had tried to summon something and nearly succeeded.

The wind outside was restless now. It pulled through the eaves, humming through the slats in half-formed tones. At times it resembled speech, fragments of dead tongues Gareth half-recognized. Aramaic. Chaldean. Something that rhymed with Genesis but bled like Revelation.

A knock came.

Not at the door but in the walls.

Three slow taps.

Then silence.

Then the cry of a night bird long and sharp, like a scream muffled by centuries. Gareth didn’t move. Instead, he reached for his notebook and scrawled:

> “They’re testing me. This place listens. And it remembers.”

Then he opened the drawer beneath the rusted reading desk. Inside was a sigil carved into the wood. Old. Deep. Sealed with wax long since dried and cracked. He recognized it immediately Agares, the demon who teaches languages, and causes souls to flee their bodies. A low-level prince in the Goetia, yet rarely summoned for reasonless ends.

A warning. Or a signature.

Someone had worked in this house before him.

He stood and walked upstairs.

The second floor was narrower, like the bones of the house had shifted over time squeezed inward by unseen pressure. Each step groaned. At the top, a single hallway stretched in either direction. One side led to the bedroom where Eleanor’s books now rested on the floor like sleeping ghosts. The other to a locked door.8

Painted black. Bolted thrice.

The key hung on a nail beside it, as if daring him.

Gareth reached for it.

He held it in his palm. It was cold. Too cold. Metal shouldn't feel like that not indoors, not at this hour. He raised it toward the lock, then hesitated. The silence was too loud now. A living thing.

Then the door breathed.

Just once.

A slow inhale through wood and shadow. Not quite audible, but deeply felt like the breath of something ancient waking up, remembering it used to be hungry.

He stepped back.

Not out of fear. Gareth wasn’t a man who feared.

But he was a man who waited.

He marked the door with a blood-chalk rune from the Red Psalms of Andronicus, whispering, “Not tonight. Let the dead sleep in their shame.”

He returned to the bedroom and lay down fully clothed, one hand beneath his pillow where the black dagger rested obsidian, consecrated with salt and ash.

Just before the candle gave its final shudder, he whispered her name.

“Eleanor…”

And in the dark, something whispered back.

But it wasn’t her.