Clara Mayes didn't believe in Ghosts. She didn't believe in small-town curses, haunted woods, or the things that made her grandmother cross herself when the wind changed direction.
But by the third night in Ashvale, she started to believe in something.
The house sat at the edge of town, crooked and grey, with paint peeling like old skin and windows that seemed too dark even when the sun was out. The real estate agent had called it "a fixer upper with charm," which Clara assumed was code for "cheap and a little haunted."
She didn't mind. In fact, she preferred the quiet. After the past year, a brutal breakup, job loss, and her mother's passing, Clara needed stillness like most people needed air. Somewhere she could think, maybe write again, maybe stop feeling like she was unravelling.
The first two days passed in dusty silence. She unpacked slowly. Cleaned the kitchen. Ignored the cellar. Told herself the floorboards creaked because the house was old, not because someone or something was pacing beneath them.
Then, on the third night, it happened.
A knock.
Three soft knocks.
Not frantic. Not a pounding. Just a calm, measured knock at the front door.
Clara sat up in bed, heart frozen, the kind of alert that slides into your bloodstream before your brain can catch up. She glanced at her phone: 3:00 AM. On the dot.
"Who the hell…?" she whispered to herself.
She waited, breath held. Another knock never came.
Downstairs, the hallway was black. She padded across the cold floor and peeked through the curtain beside the door. No one was there. Just her overgrown yard, the twisted oak tree at the fence, and fog, thick and unmoving.
She opened the door.
The porch was empty.
But there was something else. A wet footprint just beyond the threshold. Bare. Small. Like a child's.
Clara closed the door.
Locked it.
Went back to bed and told herself it was just a prank. Kids. Maybe a lost traveler. Or maybe her brain, worn thin from stress and solitude, had imagined it all.
But when it happened again the next night at the exact same time she started to understand what the people in town wouldn't say out loud.
Something came knocking at the dead hour, and it didn't care if you believed in it or not.