The dust in the attic was a century thick, tasting of forgotten things and dead air. Eleanor shifted another crate, her flashlight beam cutting a shaky path through the gloom until it landed on the shape in the corner.
Not more junk. A box.
She froze, a thread of cold tracing her spine. The old house was too silent, too full of sheet-draped ghosts of furniture. This attic was the worst—a graveyard of family memory.
The box was small, dark rosewood, unadorned but for the worn-smooth edges. It sat precisely, unnaturally neat amidst the chaos. It had been placed here.
Her grandmother had been the last living soul here, and she'd never mentioned it.
After a long minute, Eleanor bent and picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, cool to the touch. No lock. Her fingers found the seam and pried.
A soft click echoed.
Inside, no jewels or letters. Only a thin, brittle folio. The pages were foxed, edges nibbled by time. Blank cover. She lifted it out carefully.
The first page was a family register, names and birth dates in precise, faded ink. She recognized a few from grandmother's stories. All died young. Her heart thudded once, hard. She flipped faster.
The format changed. Names on the left. Dates and brief causes on the right.
Alistair Wren, 1900. September 9th. Thrown from horse.
Margaret Wren (née Cole), 1900. September 9th. Sudden seizure.
Thomas Wren, 1934. September 9th. Drowned.
Caroline Wren, 1967. September 9th. Hanged.
Robert Wren, 1995. September 9th. House fire.
…
Name after name. Death after death. Methods varied—accident, illness, suicide, mishap. But the date. September 9th. It bled through every page, a poisoned stitch in the family fabric.
Eleanor's hands went cold. She flipped to the last entry.
Helen Wren (Grandmother), 2022. September 9th. Heart failure.
Nana. Last year. Peacefully, at the hospice. The certificate said 'natural causes.' The date…
She looked up, through the dusty rafters as if she could see the sky. Today was September 2nd.
Seven days.
The cold seeped into her bones. She slammed the folio shut, the sound like a gunshot in the silence. A horrible joke? A macabre family record? Nana never spoke of this. But those deaths…
She stumbled downstairs, legs weak, and grabbed her laptop. Her fingers trembled as she typed names, dates, adding "obituary," "accident."
Fragments surfaced. A great-uncle, an industrial accident dated September 9th in a digitized newspaper snippet. A great-aunt, a footnote in a local archive: "died September 9th, presumed suicide."
Coincidence? A string of them, spanning a century?
She sat on a shrouded sofa, watching twilight claim the overgrown garden. This wasn't an inheritance. It was a sentence.
No.
The thought was a spark. She clutched it. No.
She spent the next two days fortifying. A security company installed heavy-duty locks, sensors on every window and door. She mounted motion-activated cameras around the perimeter, their red lights winking in the dusk. She checked the gas lines, the fuses, anything that could fail.
She devoured archives, local records, searching for a link between the deaths beyond the date. Nothing. Her ancestors were scattered, their lives disparate. The only common thread was this house. They had all lived here, however briefly.
On the third afternoon, in a locked drawer of Nana's old bureau (key found in another trinket box), she found letters. Ordinary correspondence, except for a handful—different senders, different decades—that mentioned receiving "a family keepsake" or "an heirloom." Vague. Nana's replies were equally opaque: "Keep it safe."
A keepsake?
The rosewood box. The folio was the message; the box was the vessel. She raced back to the attic, examined the box under her phone's bright light. The lining was faded velvet. In one corner, a tiny, dark stain. Rust-brown. Or blood.
A theory, terrifying and nebulous, took shape. What if each marked person received one?
On the fourth day, she visited the oldest locals. Mrs. Peabody, nearly a hundred, her mind a dusty attic of its own.
"The Wren place… bad soil there," the old woman muttered, sunken eyes squinting. "My ma said… it gathered shadows. Gave things. Gave wrong things."
"What things?" Eleanor pressed.
Mrs. Peabody just shook her head, waving a gnarled hand. "Don't take it. Once taken, never free."
Never free.
The words echoed as Eleanor walked back, her shadow long and thin on the path. The cameras watched. The locks held. It all felt like tissue paper against the ancient, shapeless malice she now felt breathing down her neck.
Then she saw it.
Just inside the heavy front door, on the polished floorboards she'd cleaned that morning, sat a box.
Dark rosewood. Small. Worn edges.
Identical to the one from the attic.
The blood drained from her head, leaving a hollow, ringing silence. She'd been gone two hours. Everything was locked. Alarmed.
She stared, then lunged for the monitor in the study, pulling up the camera feed for the foyer.
She watched herself leave. The door closed. Nothing. For almost two hours, nothing. Then, between one second and the next—a flicker, a blink—the box was simply there. On the floor. No one entered. No movement.
Impossible.
She stood, cold sweat plastering her shirt to her back, staring from the screen to the real box five feet away. It had come. Her keepsake.
Time stretched. Finally, moving like a sleepwalker, she approached. She knelt. Her hand, steady now with a terrible certainty, reached out and lifted the lid.
No mechanism. No poison. Just a single photograph.
A black-and-white photograph.
She pulled it out. Glossy. Cool.
It was her. A head-and-shoulders portrait. She wore the same cream-colored sweater she had on now. Her hair was tied back the same way, a few strands loose in the same places. The background was pure black. Her face was pallid, eyes vacant, staring straight ahead. A faint, unreadable twist to her lips.
A perfect funeral portrait.
A choked sound escaped her. The photo fluttered from her fingers, landing face-up. Those empty eyes stared at the ceiling, at her.
September 9th.
Nausea rose. She gripped the doorframe, breathing hard. After a moment, she forced herself to turn the photo over.
Words. In blue ink. The handwriting…
Her breath hitched.
It was hers. The rounded, slightly messy script from her late teens, early college. She'd know it anywhere.
She forced her eyes to focus on the words.
"You're home now."
Home. The house? Or… the state captured in the photo?
Rage, white and hot, cut through the fear. A sick joke. Who could mimic her old writing? Who took this picture? How did they get the box inside?
She snatched the photo, stormed to the study, and pulled out old journals, letters, anything with her handwriting. She laid the photo beside them.
It was a perfect match. The idiosyncratic curl of the 'y,' the dash across the 't'—all hers.
The confirmation was a physical blow. She sagged against the desk, the world tilting. Then her eyes fell on the photo again.
The cream sweater. The hair. The pale, dead face.
And on the wrist of the woman in the photo—her in the photo—was a watch.
A sleek, silver-banded watch with a black minimalist face.
She'd misplaced that watch yesterday morning. Turned her room upside down. Thought it must have fallen into a donation bag.
Now it was there, clear as day, encircling the wrist in the photograph. The glass face caught a highlight, the hands distinct, pointing to a specific, unchanging time.
Eleanor's own left wrist was bare.
The last of her resistance shattered. A cold, heavy dread filled her veins, weighing her down. She slid to the floor, her back against the wall, the photograph clutched in her hand.
It wasn't a forgery.
It wasn't a prank.
It knew. It had always known.
It was here.
With seven days left.