Adventure of Lexy

The haunted house squats beyond Reno’s last streetlights, its windows blind with dust. In the yard, an adult woman in a stained gray coat, with a lean build, sallow skin, cropped dark hair, and a white scar through one eyebrow kneels beside a fresh patch of dirt, her embalmer’s gloves trembling.

A child-sized shadow, its edges ragged and its form unnaturally narrow slides across the house wall, passing over peeling paint and the embalmer’s face. Nothing stands between the porch light and the wall to cast it.

She presses a cold iron object into the dirt. Frost feathers outward around her glove, though the Reno night is dry and mild.

The iron object gives one soft knock from below. Under the porch, the child-sized shadow turns its head toward Lexy, though the wall has no face.

Lexy searches past the cold iron and the disturbed dirt. Curiosity pulls them toward the porch despite every instinct to keep distance, nose low and senses fixed.

Preternatural awareness cuts through dust, darkness, and the false shape on the wall. Lexy perceives a presence crouched below the porch, not cast there but bound there.

The shadow peels away from the wall and gathers beneath the porch steps. Its narrow outline faces Lexy directly, while the frost around Mara’s iron object melts.