Ivy House Inherited: A Legacy of Shadows

My name is Eleanor Vance. I had not thought of Ivy House in a decade. Not since I was twelve, standing on its crumbling front porch while my grandmother whispered a single, terrible warning into my ear: Do not unlock what should remain closed. She died three days later. I was the senior curator at the Ashford Gallery, a woman who dealt in the clean, manageable horrors of ancient artefacts preserved behind glass. I had no time for ghosts. I had no time for the dark, pulsing thing that lived in the corners of my childhood recollections. And yet, when I read the lawyer's letter-formal, stark, wrapped in legalese that bled into the grain of the page-I felt that thing stir again. Ivy House was mine now. The last of my grandmother's estate. A gift, or a curse, depending on who you >The house was sealed. The key was buried in the lawyer's file, and I had buried the memory of that summer beneath years of city noise, of calculated ambitions, of a life I had built on the assumption that the past could be outrun. But a key does not forget its purpose.