Hello brave readers...!!

You all might have read several types of horror and gothic novels, but this might be a different experience for you all. This novel might not be as simple as you think.

I guarantee you a spine-chilling read through this novel .....

So my dear readers....!!

Immerse yourself in a gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing until the ultimate surprising turn.

Prologue:

They say Willow House breathes.

At night, beneath the hush of rustling trees and the cry of wind that circles the hill, the old manor exhales—soft creaks of aged floorboards, faint sighs from forgotten halls, a rhythm like something alive, sleeping lightly in its bones.

“They say the Willow House watches. That it remembers every soul who sets foot inside. And it never lets go.”

It had been asleep for years.

Until the child came.

And the house stirred—walls shivering in the silence, dust shifting like breath drawn in. As if it sensed a presence, or the return of something it had long been waiting for.

She arrived with no footsteps, no name, and no memory. Just wide, glassy eyes and a faded ribbon in her hair. The villagers spoke of her in whispers. Some claimed she wandered out of the woods alone. Others swore she’d always been in that house, waiting, watching. The doors never opened. Yet sometimes, late at night, a light flickered behind the windows, and a shadow moved across the glass.

They called her cursed.

No one dared enter Willow House.

Not until he came.

Elias Thorne had forgotten the place, buried it with the rest of his childhood like something dead. But blood binds tighter than memory. A letter, written in a trembling hand and sealed with the family crest, summoned him back to the estate after a decade of silence.

“Come home,” it said. “The house remembers you.”

On his first night, he found the girl sitting at the top of the stairs, as if she’d known he was coming. As if she'd been waiting for him. A chill climbed his spine, not from fear, but recognition. He felt, absurdly, that he had seen her before—perhaps in a dream he had forgotten or a memory not his own. She said nothing. She only stared at him with those eyes—too old for her face, too knowing.

And then the whispering began....!

From the walls. The floorboards. The mirrors. His dreams.

Names that were not his, stories that were never told. A lullaby hummed by a voice long dead. Each night, the past crept closer, dragging its cold hands through Elias’s thoughts, unraveling truths he'd never lived but somehow remembered.

And through it all, the child never spoke a single word.

But sometimes—just sometimes—when Elias turned away, he swore he saw her lips move, mouthing something only the house could hear.

Something like a warning.

Or a promise.

Or a secret the house could no longer keep.

__End of the prologue__

May I grab your attention's dear readers!

I hope that the prologue was intriguing !!

See you all in the very first chapter of this novel...

Somewhere between the fading edges of memory and myth, perched like a wounded bird on a fog-draped hill, stood the Willow House. It had no neighbors. No footpaths led to its doors. Even the birds avoided its trees, as though nature itself had reached an unspoken agreement to give the place a wide berth.

Once, long ago, someone had cared for the gardens. There were traces of symmetry beneath the rot—sunken flowerbeds filled with brittle stems that shivered in the wind, iron trellises choked with ghostly vines, and a crumbling fountain in the shape of a weeping cherub whose eyes forever overflowed when it rained. Moss blanketed the stone steps like a burial shroud. The wrought-iron gate hung half open, eternally inviting, eternally warning.

The house itself was built in a time when craftsmanship mattered, when every stone and timber was placed with intent. But the years had warped its grandeur into something... unnatural. Something that defied the natural order of decay. The shutters hung askew, like slitted eyes watching without blinking. Its steep gables split the sky like broken teeth. Windows, smeared with dust and time, glinted faintly in the mist as if blinking back tears or memories. Even its silence was not true silence—within its walls there were murmurs, soft as breath, rustling through empty halls and hollow rooms, that stirred even when no wind passed through.

Locals told stories about Willow House, but never in daylight. After sunset, behind closed doors, they whispered of lights glowing in rooms no one had entered in years. Of a piano playing faintly in the dead of night, a single, off-key lullaby. Of a scent that drifted from the attic window under a full moon: lavender, sweet and sickly, laced with the unmistakable metallic tang of blood.

No one remembered who built the house. No records were kept, and even the elders, sharp of mind and long of memory, could only shrug and mutter that it had always been there, like a thorn in the land’s side. No one knew why it had remained standing, untended and yet somehow untouched by time’s decay. It was as though the Willow House had simply risen from the earth one day, fully formed, and rooted itself into the hillside like a parasite.

But the truth was—the Willow House did not wish to be forgotten. It hungered for remembrance, for attention. It dreamed in silence and listened in the stillness. And it waited.

Beneath its rotting floorboards, something slept—something that had once been human, perhaps, or something that had never been. A secret. A sorrow. A voice. It was trapped, or anchored, or maybe simply too old to leave.

And now, someone was coming. A man hollowed by grief, drifting through the ruins of his life. A girl—silent, pale, with eyes too old for her face. The house knew them. It had heard their names long before they were born.

The Willow House was waking.

And it was ready to whisper again.

The road ended long before the house appeared.

Elias Thorne sat in his dust-covered car, engine ticking like a wound trying to close, and stared at the narrow path that wound up the hillside like a scar. The trees on either side leaned in, gnarled and ancient, as if conspiring to keep secrets trapped between their trunks.

He hadn't meant to come back. In truth, he had never meant to return to anywhere. Cities blurred together when one traveled only to escape. But then came the letter. No return address. Just five words scribbled on yellowing paper:

"She waits at Willow House."

There was no signature. No explanation. Just the feeling that settled cold and sharp beneath his ribs—that someone knew. That something still watched.

Elias stepped out of the car, boots sinking into moss and wet earth. The air was heavy with damp and rot, like breath left to curdle in a closed room. The manor still wasn’t visible, but he felt it—like a pressure in the chest, a hum just outside the range of hearing.

He walked.

With each step, the world seemed to fold in on itself. Birds fell silent. The trees grew too still. Even the wind changed direction, tugging at his coat like fingers. Then—through the tangled branches—it emerged.

The Willow House.

It looked exactly as it did in the photograph he’d once found in his father’s desk drawer, the one he wasn’t supposed to see. The windows stared like blind eyes. The porch sagged under its own weight. Ivy coiled up the stone like veins on the back of a dying hand.

And yet…

A candle flickered in the upper window. Just one. A pinpoint of gold in the gray.

He didn’t remember lighting it. He hadn’t been inside yet.

Still, he climbed the steps. They groaned beneath his weight, but did not break. The front door opened on its own with a soft creak—as if the house had been holding its breath, and now, it exhaled.

Inside, the air was stale but warm. Dust curled in the shafts of light like ash. The furniture was still covered, but there were footprints in the layer of grime on the floor. Small ones. Bare.

Elias froze.

He hadn’t come alone.

Somewhere deeper in the house, a music box began to play. A slow, wheezing lullaby—off-key, but familiar.

He hadn’t heard it in twenty years.

The melody stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Elias stood frozen at the threshold of the parlor, breath shallow, ears straining against the thick silence. The room was dim, lit only by the late afternoon light filtering through stained curtains, casting bruised colors on the dust-heavy air.

He stepped inside.

The room hadn’t been touched in decades—furniture draped in white sheets like ghosts awaiting resurrection. The scent of old wood and something sweeter—decaying lavender—clung to everything. But in the far corner, on a small table near the fireplace, something shone.

A music box.

It was porcelain, shaped like a carousel, painted with delicate ivy vines that mirrored the ones clawing up the outside walls. Elias stared at it, stomach tightening. He had seen this before. He knew he had. But how?

His fingers trembled as he reached for it. The top was warm. Not just recently played—warm like flesh. He drew back instinctively.

And then his eye caught something in the fireplace. He knelt.

Half-buried in ash and char was a blackened scrap of parchment. Carefully, he tugged it free.

Most of the writing was scorched(burnt) away, but a few words remained—written in a spidery, ink-heavy hand:

“…his blood will wake the house.”

Beneath it was a name, barely legible: J. Allerton

Elias's heartbeat grew louder in his ears. "Allerton" he hadn’t heard that name since he was a child—maybe not even truly heard it, just felt it, like a warning lodged deep in bone.

He folded the paper and slipped it into his coat pocket, trying to quiet the rising pulse in his throat.

The boards creaked behind him.

He spun around.

A girl stood in the hallway.

Pale. Barefoot. Wearing a faded blue nightgown. Her hair hung in tangled waves, and her eyes—too large for her face—were fixed on him with an expression that didn’t belong to a child. It was the kind of gaze one earns, not inherits. A watcher’s gaze.

Elias opened his mouth, but no sound came.

Then she spoke. Calm. Soft. Unblinking.

"You came too late."