Page 9 of Where The Devil Kneels

I lean against the door frame, arms crossed over my chest. “And will someone be up on my roof again tonight, making emergency repairs in the middle of the downpour?”

His eyes meet mine for the first time today, something unreadable flickering in their depths. “Lock your doors, Miss Hale. Not everything that wanders these woods is looking to help you.”

The statement settles between us like a physical presence. He doesn’t wait for my response, just shoulders his toolbox and heads for the door. I follow him onto the porch, watching as he loads the remaining supplies back into his truck.

“Rafe,” I call out as he opens the driver’s door. “If there’s someone living in my walls, I deserve to know.”

He freezes with one boot on the running board, half-turned toward me. His eyes flick from my face to the weathered facade looming behind me, then back again. The corner of his mouth twitches, not quite a smile.

“Houses like this one,” he says, voice coarse as the gravel beneath his tires, “they make their own decisions about who stays and who goes.”

Then he’s behind the wheel, the engine rumbling to life before I can ask what the hell that means.

I stand on the porch long after his truck disappears down the winding drive, the gravel dust settling in its wake. My mind races with new possibilities, new corridors to explore, both real and figurative. If my mysterious watcher uses these secret passages, I now have a way to find him. To confront him. To understand why, of all the empty rooms in this decaying mansion, he’s chosen to haunt mine.

I turn back to the house, my hand trembling slightly on the doorknob. The walls that yesterday seemed merely old now feel alive with possibility and danger. A network of secrets with someone lurking inside, watching my every move. My breath catches. I should call the police. I should run. Still beneath my fear pulses something I’m ashamed to name, a dark curiosity, a charged thrill at being the centre of someone’s complete attention. “What the hell is wrong with me?” I whisper, even as I step back inside, my mind already swarming with plans to flush my shadow from hiding.

The concealed passages transform my understanding of the house with brutal clarity. I stop mid-stride between bookshelves, my fingers frozen on the spine of a first-edition Austen. Someone could be standing three inches away, separated only by decorative panelling. Someone has been.

Every creak I’d dismissed, every object slightly moved, all of it engineered by flesh and blood, not some Victorian ghost story. I pace the library, calculating angles, sight lines, the precise geometry of observation. The air feels different now, charged with human intention rather than abstract dread. I need more than theories. More than dust patterns that could be blamed on poor housekeeping. I need to catch whoever’s been watching me with their eye pressed to the wall.

I survey the room with new eyes, scanning for potential observation points. Where would someone look through? Which decorative elements might conceal peepholes? The ornate medallion at the ceiling’s centre? The elaborate moulding around the door frame? The carved wooden panels flanking the fireplace? Any of them could hide a vantage point.

My plan forms methodically, each element clicking into place like tumblers in a lock, though my hands hesitate with every item I touch. I’m baiting someone—astranger—into my space. Is this clever or completely unhinged? I start with my desk, arranging books in calculated disarray, then nearly straighten them again. Three volumes of Victorian architecture were stacked carelessly, their bindings intentionally misaligned. I wince at the sight. My leather journal, the one containing my most private thoughts, I leave open to a blank page, the pen awkwardly placed across the binding, where it might leave an ink blot. What kind of person invites an intruder to touch their journal?

I move to the mantle next, reaching for my grandmother’s porcelain teacup, her last gift before the dementia took her memories of me. My fingers hesitate. Using it as bait feels like betrayal, but I need to know. I position it recklessly, then straighten it out of habit. I tilt it again, my hands trembling slightly. The silver spoon I place beside it, pointing it north instead of east, watching how the light gleams off of it at odd intervals. Like a distress signal. Like I’m sending out an SOS to the stranger hiding in my walls.

The windowsill becomes my final staging area. My hands shake as I position my Canon, the graduation gift I’ve never let anyone touch, facing slightly away from the perfect composition of light. I hesitate, digits lingering protectively on the familiar grip before deliberately leaving the lens cap half-on. The battery indicator blinks red, a warning I’d normally rush to address. What am I doing? This camera survived three continents with me, and now I’m using it as bait. I still angle it just so, creating disarray that’s invisible to a casual observer yet annoyingly obvious to anyone with specific attention to detail.

From the centre of the library, I take one last look at my deliberate chaos. The misaligned books, the tilted teacup, my camera with its half-secured lens cap, each a quiet question waiting for an answer. What will matter to the person watching me? Will they rush to save the teacup from its unsafe edge, or will they be more disturbed by the asymmetry of my journal on the desk?

My voice wavers as I force a theatrical volume. “I really need to get to town before the stores close,” I announce, checking my watch and wondering if this is madness, setting a trap in my own home. My fingers shake slightly as they close around my car keys. I jingle them loudly—too loudly?—while my mind races between exhilaration and terror. What if he’s dangerous? What if he’s not? I hesitate at the threshold, then make my steps ring purposefully down the hallway. The front door opens under my sweating palm, then closes with a firm bang.

I stand motionless in the entryway, keys still in hand, listening. Nothing but the soft settling of an old house, floorboards decompressing, pipes expanding when the afternoon sun warms the western walls. I slip off my boots, leaving them bythe door as if I’ve departed, and pad silently back down the hallway in my sock feet, careful to avoid the boards I’ve already identified as squeaky.

The linen closet in the upstairs hallway beckons, perfectly positioned with a clear view of the library entrance, yet tucked inside shadows. I reach for the corroding handle, then hesitate. What am I becoming? An exhibitionist in my own home, crouching in darkness to spy on someone who’s already spying on me? My fingers tremble against the brass. I could still call the police. I could still leave. Instead, I ease the door open, stomach clenching at the betraying moan of hinges. Inside, musty sheets and threadbare blankets await like partners in crime. “This is insane,” I whisper, even as I pull the door nearly closed, leaving just enough space to peer through the crack.

Minutes tick by with excruciating slowness. My left foot begins to tingle with pins and needles. A spider explores the back of my hand, but I remain motionless, unwilling to risk detection for something as minor as arachnophobia. Dust tickles my nose, and I fight the urge to sneeze with every fibre of my being, tears forming in my eyes from the effort.

Fifteen minutes pass. Then twenty. The house creaks and sighs around me, but no human movement disturbs its rhythm. Doubt begins to creep in. What if I’m wrong? What if the passages are sealed, unusable? What if my observer only comes at night, when I’m asleep or distracted? What if the dust patterns were just,

A sound, there, gone, my ears strain until they hurt. The air changes, compresses against my eardrums like the moment before lightning strikes. A hidden door has opened. My heart slams violently against my sternum, each beat so loud I’m certain it will give me away. I clamp my jaw shut, lungs aching as I hold my breath until black spots dance near the edges of my vision. Seconds stretch into eternities. Then movement. Fabric rustles against wood with frightening precision, each measured step a predator’s calculation. He’s in my house. He’s always been in my house. Moving through these walls like a spider moving through its web, knowing exactly which boards would scream underneath his weight and avoiding them with practised, dangerous grace.

I strain my eyes toward the library door, but the angle is wrong; I can see only a sliver of the room beyond. Another sound, this one clearer, the quiet tap of something being set down carefully. My teacup, perhaps, was rescued from its delicate perch.

I don’t move for half an hour, my muscles screaming in protest, while someone moves through the library with impossible stealth. The sounds barely register, fabric gliding against wood, the soft clink of porcelain, a nearly undetectableexhale. Then the air itself changes. The room empties of presence like a tide retreating from shore, leaving nothing but hollow space where a person had been. He’s gone now. I’m certain of it.

Five more minutes pass before I unfold myself from the closet’s confines. Pins and needles shoot through my calves as circulation returns. Each stride toward the library feels like walking a tightrope. My pulse drums in my ears, drowning out the creaking planks below my socked feet.

The library looks… wrong. Or maybe too right. Like someone’s fixed everything I deliberately messed up, but with this demented obsessiveness that makes my skin crawl. My books aren’t just straightened, they’re lined up like little soldiers, shortest to tallest, without a millimetre out of place. Grandma’s teacup sits dead-centre on its saucer, that silver spoon lined up exactly with the edge of the mantel, as if someone had used a ruler. And my camera, God, they didn’t just fix the lens cap, they swapped in my spare battery. Who does that? Who even knew where my spare battery was?

Most unsettling of all, my journal has been closed, its pages unmarred, but repositioned to create a perfect right angle with the edge of the desk. The pen rests beside it, cap secured, aligned with mathematical precision. My breath catches, and I’m torn between wanting to shove everything into disarray and an unexpected urge to maintain this sacred order. I should be terrified, but there’s something almost… tender in the arrangement. This isn’t a random invasion; this is devotion, obsession. Someone who watches me so closely they’ve imagined a rendition of me that doesn’t exist, a careful Elara who craves this kind of perfection. I hate that they’re right. I hate even more that part of me is oddly flattered.

My hands shake as I pick up the camera and flip through the photos. There’s the journal, lined up perfectly with the desk edge. The books stood like soldiers on parade. My teacup is sitting dead-centre on its saucer. Looking at these normal things through my camera makes them feel like proof. My heart pounds, half excited I was right, half terrified of what it. means. Someone is definitely here. Someone is watching me. Someone knows my routines so well that they can guess what I desire before I even know myself.

Yet as I snap photos of it all, I’m both delighted and simultaneously creeped out. Whoever did this didn’t just touch my stuff; they handled it like they’ve been watching me for ages, learning exactly how I like things. It’s not someone just poking around; it’s someone who’s been paying attention to me. Really paying attention.

“Who are you?” I murmur to the empty room that suddenly doesn’t feel so empty. “What do you want from me?”