The night did not feel different at first.
It was the same city Elias had lived in for months, the same streets he walked every day with his head lowered and his presence blurred.
The lamps still hummed softly above, moths still circled the light, and somewhere far away a train horn echoed through the concrete canyons. Nothing about the world announced that something was wrong.
That, more than anything, unsettled him.
Elias moved quietly through the back streets, his steps measured, his breathing even. Anyone watching would have assumed he was calm, another man returning home late, another silhouette swallowed by the city.
His face betrayed nothing. His eyes were half-lidded, unfocused, as though his thoughts were elsewhere.
Inside, he was doing everything in his power not to panic.
This is a mistake, he thought for the third time since leaving the funeral parlor.I shouldn't be here.
He did not like ghosts.
That had not changed simply because bodies were missing.
Two out of five.
The realization had hit him earlier that evening, quiet and devastating. Coffins lighter than they should have been. Soil disturbed not by animals, but by careful hands. The parents' cries still rang in his ears, not accusations, not anger, but something worse.
Hope.
They had knelt in front of him, hands trembling, voices breaking, asking him to do something.
As if he could.
As if Elias Graves had ever been someone who acted instead of watched.
His body had stood there, rigid and unmoving, his mouth forming polite, empty reassurances while his mind scrambled for excuses. Call the Association. Report it properly. Don't get involved. This wasn't his responsibility.
It had all sounded reasonable.
Until he remembered the girl at the window.
Until he remembered the way the bride ghost had laughed.
Until he remembered that the children's bodies were gone.
So now he was here, walking into alleys no one else used, following traces he wished he could not see.
The dark matter clung to his vision like an oil stain, subtle but unmistakable. He did not see ghosts the way exorcists did. No dramatic revelations. No glowing outlines, but he felt them. Pressure. Dissonance. A wrongness that made his skin crawl.
His body moved anyway.
That was the part he hated most.
Elias stopped at the mouth of an alley and stared in.
The air inside was heavy, stagnant, as though it had not been disturbed in a long time. The city noise dulled abruptly, swallowed by the narrow walls.
His fingers curled slightly at his side, instinctively rubbing against the umbrella tattoo hidden beneath his sleeve.
Just checking, he told himself. Just confirming.
He took one step inside.
Immediately, the temperature dropped.
Not enough to fog his breath, but enough to raise goosebumps along his arms. Elias swallowed and continued forward, every sense stretched taut. His heart thudded steadily in his chest, loud enough that he wondered if something else might hear it.
Ghosts, his mind whispered again.
He hated this part, the anticipation. The waiting for something to appear, to acknowledge him.
It sat deep and heavy in his gut, a constant reminder that he did not belong in places like this.
No, he thought flatly. Please no.
He did not turn around.
He did not call out.
He stood very still and pretended that he did not feel the presence gathering behind him, along the walls, above the fire escape. His face remained blank, his posture relaxed, as if fear were something that happened to other people.
The irony was bitter.
He had lived his entire life running from involvement, from responsibility, from anything that might demand action. Even now, a part of him wanted to leave, wanted to walk away and pretend he had seen nothing.
But the bodies had been taken.
And that mattered.
Elias exhaled slowly and took another step forward.
Dark shapes stirred at the edges of his vision, not fully formed. Monsters, if one could call them that. Things born not from forced summoning, but from excess sin and neglected death. They did not attack. They only watched, curious, wary.
Elias's fear spiked.
He hated ghosts.
He hated spirits.
He hated this entire world for existing at all.
And yet, his body kept moving.
"Just confirming," he murmured under his breath, his tone calm, almost bored. "That's all."
The alley offered no reassurance.
Only silence.
And the undeniable truth that something had gone very, very wrong
The place Elias found was not marked on any map.
It existed in the gaps, between two condemned buildings slated for redevelopment, behind a row of silent dumpsters that had not been emptied in weeks, beneath a fire escape that no longer led anywhere meaningful.
The alley was narrow enough that the walls seemed to lean inward, as though conspiring to trap whatever wandered inside.
Even the city lights avoided it, leaving the space dim and colorless, illuminated only by a single broken lamp that flickered without rhythm.
This was where they threw the bodies.
Elias knew it the moment he stepped closer.
The smell came first, not the sharp rot of something old, but the wet, coppery stench of blood that had soaked too deeply into concrete to ever be washed away.
It clung to the air, heavy and intimate, settling in the back of his throat. Beneath it was something else, something colder, like damp earth pulled from a grave too early.
Sigils lined the ground.
They were etched crudely into the stone, some carved with blades, others drawn with blood that had long since darkened to brown-black stains.
None of them were clean. Lines overlapped, symbols bled into one another, and several had been scratched out and redrawn multiple times, as if whoever made them could not decide what they were trying to summon or repel.
Elias stood at the mouth of the alley and did not move.
His face was still. His breathing measured.
Inside, his heart had already begun to pound.
Ghosts, his mind supplied unhelpfully.
This place reeked of them.
He hated ghosts.
Not the theatrical kind people imagined, white sheets, rattling chains but the quiet ones. The ones that lingered. The ones that did not scream or threaten, but watched. The ones that remembered being human.
Elias swallowed and stepped forward anyway.
The further he went, the darker the alley became, until the broken lamp behind him cast his shadow long and distorted along the wall.
Blood coated the ground in irregular patches, some pooled, others smeared as though bodies had been dragged rather than carried. In several places, the concrete had cracked under the pressure of accumulated dark matter, thin veins spreading outward like black frost.
Something shifted.
Elias froze, where instinct screamed louder than reason.
They watched him.
Elias felt it the way prey must feel the gaze of predators—an invisible pressure against the skin, a crawling awareness that he was no longer alone.
Don't look, part of him begged.
So he didn't.
He kept his eyes on the sigils, on the blood, on the patterns that told a story no one else had bothered to read.
This was not a feeding ground.
This was a dumping site.
Bodies brought here were not meant to rise. They were meant to contribute. Their deaths fed the sigils, reinforced the barrier between this place and whatever lay beneath it. Children's bodies, especially a small, spiritually malleable, heavy with unfulfilled potential, were ideal.
Elias clenched his jaw.
The monsters shifted again, emboldened by his silence. One crept closer, its form rippling like oil on water. Another clung to the wall upside-down, its many eyes blinking asynchronously.
Elias felt sweat trickle down his spine.
I don't like this, he thought, very calmly, very clearly.
But fear did not make him turn around.
He crouched near the largest sigil, careful not to step directly into it. The symbol at its center was distorted, but the intention behind it was unmistakable.
Containment.
Not summoning.
Whatever the cult had tried to create here, it had failed. Spectacularly. The original ritual must have collapsed, leaving behind backlash strong enough to attract these lesser entities.
The alley had become a wound that never quite closed, leaking dark matter into the surrounding streets.
A soft sound reached his ears.
Not footsteps.
Breathing.
Elias's fingers twitched at his side.
From behind a stack of broken crates, a figure emerged.
A ghost.
She looked young. Younger than she should have. Her dress was torn and stained, her feet bare against the blood-slick ground. A thin rope-mark circled her neck like a necklace she could never remove. Her eyes were wide, unfocused, fixed on something Elias could not see.
His stomach dropped.
Of course there was a ghost.
His face remained empty, as if carved from stone.
"…"
He did not greet her.
Ghosts noticed that sort of thing.
She turned slowly, her gaze sliding toward him. For a moment, Elias feared she would scream, or cry, or rush at him with desperate hands.
Instead, she only stared.
"You're late," she said.
Her voice was soft. Almost disappointed.
Elias's throat tightened.
"I didn't know there was an appointment," he replied evenly.
Inside, his nerves were screaming.
"They came here," the ghost continued, pointing vaguely at the sigils. "They threw us down like we were nothing. Said it was necessary."
Her head tilted at an unnatural angle.
"They promised we'd be useful."
Elias exhaled slowly.
This was why he hated ghosts.
They remembered too much.
"I see," he said.
The ghost studied him with unsettling intensity. "You don't look like them."
"That's reassuring," Elias answered, because saying anything else felt dangerous.
The alley shook.
Not violently, just enough to be noticed. The sigils flared faintly, dark light pulsing through the carved lines like a heartbeat. The monsters hissed, retreating further into the shadows.
Elias straightened.
So this place wasn't just a grave.
It was a lid.
And whatever lay beneath it was starting to wake.
The ghost smiled then, slow and hollow. "They're coming back tonight."
Elias met her gaze at last.
"For what?"
"For the rest," she replied, eyes drifting toward the far end of the alley. "They don't like leaving things unfinished."
Elias nodded once.
"Thank you," he said.
The ghost blinked, surprised, and then, like mist under sunlight, she faded away.
The alley fell silent again.
Elias stood alone amid blood, sigils, and watching monsters, his face still calm, his posture relaxed, as if he had not just confirmed something deeply, profoundly wrong.
He turned and walked out of the alley without looking back.
Only when he reached the street, only when the city noise swallowed him whole, did his knees threaten to give out.
He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
Ghosts, he thought again, faintly exhausted.
He really, truly hated ghosts.
But tonight, hatred would have to wait.
Because now he knew where the bodies went.
And he knew when they will comeback.