Chapter 3: Echoes in the Hall

Chapter 3: Echoes in the Hall

The transition was jarring, a violent tearing of realities. One moment I was diving through a rift in a rain-lashed garden, the next I was standing on a polished parquet floor, the air still and dry. The thunderous assault from Kaelen’s team was gone, replaced by the gentle, tinny strains of a waltz. The portal I’d slipped through had vanished, leaving only a wall covered in faded, gilded wallpaper. There was no seam, no door, no trace of my entry. I was sealed in.

My desire was simple: find the spirit from the window and figure out what this house truly was. But the scene before me was the first, and most profound, obstacle. This wasn't the dark, dilapidated ruin I’d seen from the outside. I stood in the grand entryway of a mansion at the height of its glory. Gaslight chandeliers cast a warm, honeyed glow over everything, glinting off the crystal glasses in the hands of elegantly dressed men and women. They drifted through the hall, their laughter a soft murmur beneath the music, their attire a perfect snapshot of a bygone century—women in elegant bustled gowns, men in sharp tailcoats. The air smelled not of decay and damp, but of expensive perfume, cigar smoke, and floor wax.

My practical trench coat and sturdy boots were an anachronism, an ugly smear of the 21st century on a perfect Victorian canvas. Yet, no one seemed to notice me. I stood frozen for a full minute, a stone in a flowing river of ghosts, and not a single person so much as glanced in my direction. They waltzed around me, their conversations weaving through me, their ghostly forms so solid they seemed more real than I did.

"The Governor's speech was dreadfully dull," a woman with a feathered hat whispered to her companion, her form passing so close I should have felt the brush of her silk dress. I felt nothing.

This wasn't a standard haunting. Ghosts are echoes of trauma, usually tied to a specific place or event, replaying a moment of intense emotion. They rarely form a complete, functioning scene of this complexity. My initial action was pure instinct: investigate. I moved cautiously from the entryway into the main ballroom, my boots making no sound on the polished wood. I needed to understand the rules of this place before I could hope to navigate it.

I reached out a hand to touch the sleeve of a man leaning against a pillar, his mustache a magnificent, waxed sculpture. My fingers met no resistance. They passed straight through his arm, the sensation like plunging my hand into chilled, static air. He didn't flinch, his gaze fixed on the dancers.

It confirmed my suspicion. I wasn't in a house full of ghosts. I was inside a memory. A recording, imprinted onto the very bones of the building. A Temporal Echo. I’d read about them in obscure texts, theoretical constructs created by chronomancers of immense power. They were meant to be harmless replays of the past. But the parasitic energy I'd seen from outside, the raw hunger I'd felt when I performed the Resonance Ritual, told me this was no harmless recording. It was a beautiful, gilded cage, and the memory was the bait in the trap.

I closed my eyes, activating my Spectral Sight.

The warm, golden light of the ballroom vanished, replaced by a nauseating reality. The elegant guests became shimmering, unstable constructs of pale blue temporal energy, their forms flickering at the edges. The music was a pulsing, rhythmic wave of power. And beneath it all, woven through the very fabric of the echo, were those same diseased, purple-black tendrils of the parasite. The memory wasn't just playing; it was being puppeted, powered by the stolen energy from the city's ley line. This grand party was a defensive illusion, a Venus flytrap lined with velvet.

And I, the fly, had just been noticed.

The turning point was subtle, but utterly terrifying. A young woman dancing in the center of the room, her face alight with laughter, suddenly faltered in her steps. Her partner continued to move, but she froze, her head turning with an unnatural, grinding slowness. The chatter and music continued, but a pocket of chilling silence had opened around her. Her gaze swept the room, passing over the other apparitions, until her eyes—her bright, lively eyes—locked directly onto mine.

She saw me. The real me, the observer hidden behind the veil.

The smile on her face didn't fade, but it became a fixed, predatory thing. Then, the life in her eyes winked out. The vibrant irises dissolved, replaced by two gaping, empty voids of pure blackness. It was like looking into the vacuum of space. The warmth of the room seemed to drain into those twin abysses.

A man beside her, who had been laughing at a joke, also stopped. His head snapped in my direction. His eyes, too, became voids. One by one, like a contagion sweeping through the ballroom, the dancers and onlookers stopped their charade. The music stuttered, the waltz warping into a discordant, dragging groan. Laughter died in throats. Every single head in the room turned towards me. Every pair of eyes became a soulless black pit.

The front door. My immediate, panicked thought was to get out the way Kaelen was trying to get in. Even facing the Concordate's wrath was better than this. I spun around and bolted back towards the entryway, shoving my way through the now-hostile figures. Their touch was no longer ethereal. It was solid, their fingers icy cold, grasping at my coat with surprising strength.

I ripped my sleeve from a man's grip and scrambled into the foyer. I threw myself at the spot where the grand oak doors should have been, my hands slapping against solid, unyielding wall.

Panic clawed at my throat. The door was gone. The entire wall was a seamless stretch of gilded wallpaper. The house had let me in, and now it had erased the exit. The trap had been sprung.

The scraping sound of shoes on the parquet floor made me turn. The party guests, all of them, were advancing on me from the ballroom. They no longer moved with grace. They shuffled and jerked like marionettes with their strings cut, their void-eyes fixed on me, a low, guttural moan beginning to emanate from their collective throats. They were no longer memories of people. They were extensions of the house's will—antibodies rushing to destroy an infection.

I was trapped. My investigative mission had just become a desperate fight for survival. There was no way out behind me. The only path left was forward, deeper into the house's corrupted heart. I took one last, desperate look at the solid wall, then turned and ran, plunging down a dark, narrow hallway as the first of the grasping, black-eyed figures lunged for me. The elegant waltz was gone, replaced by the sound of my own ragged breathing and the relentless, scraping pursuit of the echoes in the hall.