Caretaker of the Devil

After Luc woke up, the silence changed.

It wasn’t quieter. Just heavier.

Like the house had inhaled something it wasn’t sure it wanted to keep.

Mara noticed it first in the way the staff moved—stiffer, more alert. They no longer nodded when she passed. No more polite glances or faint greetings. Now, their eyes flicked toward her, then away. Conversations paused when she entered a room. Doors shut a little faster.

By the third day, she stopped trying to greet anyone.

She wasn’t one of them anymore.

The halls felt colder too.

Not physically—something deeper. A stillness that sank into the walls.

She walked slower now. Checked over her shoulder more than once. Told herself she was being paranoid.

Luc hadn’t spoken since the day he touched her wrist. But he watched her every time she stepped inside his room. Like he’d been waiting. Like he always would be.

“You hear it now, don’t you?” he’d said quietly once, when the wind howled against the window.
“The house? It doesn’t like forgetting.”

She hadn’t asked what he meant.

She didn’t want to know.

That afternoon, she was on her way to the linen closet when she noticed something unusual.

A hallway she passed every day—the narrow one with the locked oak door at the end—was ajar.

Not wide. Just slightly open.

Mara paused.

She glanced behind her. No footsteps. No voices.

She stepped closer. The door groaned faintly as it drifted open with her approach.

Inside: dust, silence, shadows.

And a single framed photograph resting on a small table beneath a sheet of cracked glass.

She stepped into the room.

The photo was black and white—aged but crisp.

It showed a boy. Dark hair. Light eyes. Unsmiling. Standing in front of a wrought iron gate.

He couldn’t have been more than ten.

He looked exactly like Luc.

Before she could reach for the frame, she heard it:

“You shouldn’t be here.”

The woman in gray stood in the doorway, hands folded calmly, expression cold.

Mara turned, startled. “I—I didn’t mean to—”

“Some doors are locked for a reason.”

The door creaked closed behind her with a sound like warning.

Later that night, as Mara lay awake in her small bed, she thought about the boy in the photo.

The expression in his eyes.

He hadn’t looked scared.

He’d looked empty.

-
She was summoned without explanation.

A knock on her door at 6:00 a.m. sharp. No time for coffee. No time for a coat.

The woman in gray waited in the hall, expression unreadable. “They’re requesting your presence in the study.”