Letters from the Dead

Alistair Graves

Welcome, dear listeners, to another journey into the unknown. You have found your way back to *Whispers from the Fog*. I trust the shadows in your corner of the world have been kind since last we met.

Alistair Graves

Tonight, our tale begins in a house—an old, quiet place that wears its secrets like layers of peeling paint. It belonged to a woman, now long gone, whose life left behind whispers in the form of ink and paper. These whispers were meant to be hidden, sealed away, but now they have found new eyes.

Alistair Graves

How do letters written by a hand that should no longer exist find their way to the living? And even more troubling—why do they still hold the power to reshape the lives they touch?

Alistair Graves

Settle in, my friends. Let the fog outside your window thicken, and let us open a door to a story that has been waiting far too long to be told.

Alistair Graves

Our story truly takes form with Clara, a woman in her late twenties who, like so many of us, perhaps thought she knew her world well enough—only to find it shifting beneath her feet like shadows in the twilight.

Alistair Graves

After her grandmother’s passing, Clara inherited the old family home. To call it a house, however, would be to diminish its presence. No, this place, nestled in a quiet and timeworn neighborhood, seemed less a building and more a memory, solidified in brick and mortar.

Alistair Graves

Each room was a ghost of itself, untouched for years—decades, maybe. Lace curtains hung heavy with dust, and the wallpaper had begun to fade and peel, revealing layers of forgotten lives beneath. It was a shrine to the past, preserved in a way that almost felt… deliberate.

Alistair Graves

On the day she moved in, Clara walked through the house slowly, her footsteps muffled by thick carpets long past their prime. She was almost hesitant to breathe, as though exhaling too sharply might disturb whatever stillness kept this place intact.

Alistair Graves

And so it was, with a careful push of the swinging door, that she stepped into the kitchen—the heart of any home, though this one felt strangely lifeless. Or rather, it should have. For there, on the old wooden table, was something that did not belong.

Alistair Graves

A stack of letters. Neatly arranged, sitting quietly as if they had always been there, waiting. The sight of them stopped Clara in her tracks. Confusion flickered through her thoughts first, soon followed by skepticism. How had they come to be here?

Alistair Graves

She approached the table cautiously, as though expecting the letters to shift under her gaze. Old mail, she reasoned at first, resurfaced by mistake. A misplaced bundle uncovered during the shuffle of her moving in. But there was something about the way the stack sat—too precise, too deliberate. As though it had been placed with purpose.

Alistair Graves

Clara reached for the top letter, picking it up gingerly as though the faintest touch might shatter its fragile edges. And then she saw it.

Alistair Graves

The handwriting on the envelope was unmistakable. Clara’s breath caught as she traced the loops and lines with her eyes. It was his—her grandfather's. Unyielding and familiar, the ink seemed reluctant to yield its secrets, as though time had tried and failed to erase them fully. She hesitated before slipping her finger beneath the flap, lifting it open with the care one might give to an ancient relic.

Alistair Graves

The letter inside was simple, unassuming at first. A single sheet of paper, folded neatly. She unfolded it, the sound of creased paper breaking the oppressive silence in the room. The words were mundane—almost painfully so. A brief message remarking on the weather, some idle musings about the garden. Things he’d—he’d always written about.

Alistair Graves

Her head tilted slightly as she read, her lips moving silently over the words. At first, Clara convinced herself it was a... a misplacement, an aged letter tucked away too well by her grandmother, only now surfacing. But the ink—aged though it was—didn’t belong to years long past. No, the message felt fresh, as though written with purpose. For her.

Alistair Graves

Her unease grew where curiosity should have blossomed. This—this wasn’t eerie, she told herself. It was odd, certainly, but harmless. Perhaps even a prank, some misplaced attempt to rattle her by a distant relative or a bored neighbor. Yes. Yes, that made sense, didn’t it?

Alistair Graves

And yet she could feel it, deep beneath her thoughts—an inkling, a cold whisper curling against the walls of her mind. The kind of feeling you try to shake off when you sense you’re walking where you do not belong.

Alistair Graves

Still, her hands moved again, reaching for another envelope. Another letter.

Alistair Graves

Clara’s breaths quickened as she sifted through the stack, her fingers trembling slightly with each envelope she opened. Letter after letter, the same handwriting stared back at her, insistent as though it demanded to be read. Her grandfather’s neat, deliberate script. But the contents—oh, the contents—shifted rapidly from the benign to something far more sinister.

Alistair Graves

What had begun as wistful recollections—passing remarks about the roses in summer and the creak of the garden gate—soon unraveled into something fractured, desperate. Warnings veiled in opaque phrasing, sentences that stopped midway as though the writer had become suddenly… distracted. A chilling sensation pooled in Clara’s gut with every new line. And when she flipped to the final page of one particular letter, her hands froze on the paper, her blood seeming to still within her veins.

Alistair Graves

The message, scrawled hastily near the bottom, as if the pen had almost darted off the edge in its urgency, read: *Do not open them all.*

Alistair Graves

She stammered out a half-hearted laugh—a reflex, perhaps—and set the letter down as if it might burn her skin. There was no logic in it. None of this should have *been*. Letters don’t arrive decades after their writers have passed, and they certainly don’t… plead with their readers.

Alistair Graves

The room, once stifling with Clara’s frantic movements, now hung heavy with silence. A silence so deep it seemed to press against the walls, suffocating in its weight. And in that moment, she heard it—a soft creak, low and deliberate, drawing her eyes toward the hallway beyond the kitchen door.

Alistair Graves

She stopped breathing, her gaze locked to that darkened corridor. It was an old house, prone to its murmurs and aches, wasn’t it? And yet Clara felt it—a presence, unseen but palpable, inching closer with predatory intent. She was not alone. She *knew* she was not alone.

Alistair Graves

And then, as though a shroud had fallen from her mind, realization washed over her. She turned slowly back to the letters, her thoughts colliding in chaotic disarray, one single question gnawing louder than the rest:

Alistair Graves

Why had her grandmother kept these? Why had she never spoken of them? And more chillingly… who—or what—had made sure they were waiting for Clara now?

Alistair Graves

Some places in this world… they refuse to fade, don’t they? Like a deep wound that never quite heals—a mark that time itself cannot erase. They linger, etched into the fabric of existence, waiting for the right shadow to pass their way again.

Alistair Graves

And memories, well—some memories are the same. They cling tighter than cobwebs in forgotten corners. Caught between the past and the present, they pull at us, urging us to remember—or, perhaps, warning us not to.

Alistair Graves

Yet there’s a peculiar discomfort in wondering. In a house like that, where whispers hide beneath peeling wallpaper and unseen eyes seem to linger just beyond the light… Do you ever truly close the door on what’s come before? Or do *some things* simply… wait?

Alistair Graves

Perhaps Clara should have let the past rest. Perhaps it is within human nature to scratch at sealed doors, to peer through cracks better left unsealed. But curiosity, dear listeners, has a way of pulling us into places we do not belong… and sometimes, those places pull back.

Alistair Graves

And so, we leave this tale here for now. Letters unopened, questions unanswered, and a silence in the air that feels far from empty. But this… this is far from the only story the shadows have to offer.

Alistair Graves

Next week, another tale awaits us. The story of a man, plagued for years by an unyielding knock at his window. A sound he ignored, night after night, until… he answered. What waits beyond that fragile pane of glass, tapping so insistently to be let in? Well, you and I shall find out together.

Alistair Graves

Until then, my friends, stay curious, stay cautious… and perhaps tonight, leave the light on. Goodnight.