Home Before Dark

Every house has a story to tell. I'm a designer who coaxes those stories out, restoring the past while building the future. But our family's house, Baneberry Hall, has a story that isn't its own. It's a ghost story. It's also a lie, one my father, Ewan Holt, turned into a bestselling book called *House of Horrors*. Now he is dead, and after twenty-five years, I have inherited the infamous house we fled in the middle of the night. His last words to me were a warning whispered through a morphine haze: “Promise me you'll never go back there. It's not safe there. Not for you.” But the only way to uncover the truth is to break that promise.

We knew the house had a past when we first saw it. The Realtor told us about the murder-suicide that had occurred within its walls less than a year before. Curtis Carver had smothered his young daughter, Katie, before taking his own life. My wife, Jess, was unnerved, but I saw only potential in the grand, neglected estate. On that first tour, the great brass chandelier swayed as if someone were walking on the floor above. A chill sliced through me as I crossed the threshold. Painted onto the stone above the great room fireplace was a portrait of the original owner, William Garson, his expression so haughty it felt like he was laughing at me. His daughter, Indigo, stared out from a similar portrait in the next room, a white rabbit in her lap. She had died at sixteen, another tragedy the house held close. But the price was too low to ignore. So, with a promise to Jess to let the past stay in the past, I carried her over the threshold.

Returning to Baneberry Hall after a quarter-century, I find the house just as we left it, frozen in time. My childhood clothes hang in the closet; my toys are scattered across the playroom floor. It seems my parents weren't lying when they said we fled with nothing but the clothes on our backs. The house is a time capsule of a life I don't remember, a place of excerpts instead of memories. As I explore, unsettling discoveries mount. In a dusty parlor desk, I find a note with a single, emphatic word written on it: WHERE?? That night, an old woman wanders into the house, mistaking me for her long-lost daughter, Petra. She is Elsa Ditmer, our former housekeeper, now lost to Alzheimer's. Her living daughter, Hannah, is cold and accusatory. She and Petra were characters in my father's book, and it's clear they despise its legacy as much as I do.

The strangeness began almost immediately. On our first night, my five-year-old self crept into my parents' bedroom, terrified. “Daddy, you need to check for ghosts,” I'd insisted. In my room, I saw them all the time. One of them even talked to me. “Mister Shadow,” I'd whispered, tears in my eyes. “He says we're going to die here.” The noises started then, too - thuds from the third-floor study at precisely 4:54 a.m., tapping in the hallway, and a record player that turned on by itself, playing the same lilting song over and over: “You are sixteen, going on seventeen…” The house was remembering, the caretaker had warned me. It was remembering all the tragedies that had happened within its walls, especially the deaths of young girls at the hands of their fathers.

My own investigation begins, aided by the handsome but cagey new caretaker, Dane Hibbets. In my father's old study, I find a shoebox containing a Polaroid camera and a stack of photos - images that seem to prove my father's story wasn't a complete fabrication. There's a photo from a sleepover, showing me with Hannah and Petra Ditmer. Another captures my mother and Petra staring up at a hole in the kitchen ceiling, a hole I know from the book was caused by a terrifying deluge of snakes. One photo shows me and my mother entering the woods behind the house, and in the shadows, a dark figure watches us. It's the same spot where I saw someone lurking on my first night back. My skepticism begins to crumble, replaced by a creeping dread that what my father wrote might be true.

The night of the sleepover, the house came alive. I stood on my bed, screaming at the armoire as the dresses my mother had hung there flew out and scattered across the room. “He's under there!” I shrieked, pointing beneath the bed. “Mister Shadow!” My father dropped to his knees and peered into the darkness, finding nothing. But then, Hannah screamed that something had touched her in the corner where I said another spirit, Miss Pennyface, was standing. The chaos escalated until I punched Hannah in the nose, sending blood flying. Later that night, my mother found me gasping for breath, red handprints circling my neck. She was convinced my father had done it. “It wasn't me, Jess,” he pleaded. “William Garson made me do it.” Believing he had gone mad, she packed our bags. We fled into the night, escaping a house that wanted our family to become its next tragedy.

Back in the present, the uncanny events intensify. A record player plays by itself. A teddy bear I find in a closet vanishes, only to reappear on the desk days later. It's all the work of Hannah Ditmer, who confesses she was sneaking in to steal antiques and trying to scare me away. But she denies moving the bear. The true turning point comes when the kitchen ceiling collapses. Instead of snakes, a canvas duffel bag crashes onto the table. Inside are the skeletal remains of Petra Ditmer. The police immediately suspect my father, and I can't shake his dying words: *So. Sorry.*

The truth is a story of layers, each one darker than the last. I discover a secret passage behind the armoire in my old bedroom, realizing someone had access to my room all those years ago. It wasn't a ghost whispering to me at night. It was a person. My search for answers leads me to Marta Carver, the woman whose husband and daughter died in the house before we arrived. She confesses that she was the one visiting my room - Miss Pennyface, with the moonlight glinting off her glasses. She just wanted to watch me sleep, to pretend I was her own lost daughter. But one night, Petra caught her. In the ensuing struggle at the top of the stairs, Petra fell to her death.

Marta, knowing I'm close to the truth, poisons me with a cherry pie laced with baneberries and tries to smother me with a pillow. I fight back, and we both tumble down the main staircase. As I lie broken at the bottom, I see a figure at the top of the stairs push Marta, sending her crashing down to her death. It is Elsa Ditmer, finally avenging her daughter. But the final, most devastating truth comes from a letter my father left for me. He reveals that my parents found Petra's body at the bottom of the stairs, with me beside her, bleeding from a fresh cut under my eye. They believed *I* had killed her. To protect me from a life ruined by a childhood mistake, my father hid the body and concocted the entire *House of Horrors* story - a lie so outrageous it would distract from the real secret buried beneath the floorboards. Every house has a story to tell. I thought I was here to uncover Baneberry Hall's. I was wrong. I was here to uncover my own.