The sun never seemed to shine over DaMira Mansion. Even in daylight, the sky above remained gray, and the air around it thick with silence. Rhea stood at the mansion's edge again, staring up at the broken windows, the shattered glass like jagged teeth in an open mouth.
She didn't want to go back inside.
But she had to.
Her camera was strapped to her chest. She wasn't recording for Urban Unseen anymore—this was personal now. The diary, the whispering voice, the blood on the ceiling, the woman with sewn lips—none of it made sense. But something told her that if she stopped now, she'd never be free.
She stepped inside.
This time, the front door closed on its own, gently… almost politely. The chill in the air was immediate, hugging her skin like cold water. She made her way back to the hallway near the red door, but stopped suddenly. The blood writing had faded, as if someone had wiped it clean.
Instead, something new was scratched into the floorboards below her feet:
"Find her grave."
Rhea's breath caught in her throat.
"She who?" she whispered.
No answer—only the sound of distant crying. Soft, muffled. A woman's voice. It was coming from deeper inside the house. She followed it, past peeling wallpaper and broken picture frames, until she reached a narrow hallway she hadn't noticed before.
It wasn't on the map.
At the end stood a door barely hanging on its hinges. Behind it was a staircase leading downward—not to the basement she had already seen, but to a hidden cellar. It smelled of earth and old wood. The crying grew louder as she descended.
At the bottom was a dirt room—no floorboards, no walls, just raw earth, like a grave already dug. In the center, under a beam of light that shouldn't exist, lay a mound of dirt.
And a cross made of bones.
Rhea's hand shook as she reached out to touch the cross, but before her fingers could graze it, the earth beneath it trembled.
Then split.
A skeletal hand burst out of the dirt, grabbing her wrist.
She screamed, stumbling back, falling onto her side. The hand twitched once, then retreated into the soil. The crying had stopped.
Silence.
She crawled backward, heart racing, and that's when she saw it—letters carved into the wall behind the grave, written in charcoal or blood, she couldn't tell.
"She was buried alive."
Rhea felt sick. She stared at the grave. Was this her? The woman from the diary? The one who tried to stop her brothers?
Suddenly, the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut.
Darkness crushed the room. The flashlight flickered.
Then the whisper returned—close, cold, and right behind her ear.
"She's still down here."
Rhea didn't scream this time.
She ran.
Scrambling up the stairs, kicking open the door, and bursting into the hall, she barely registered the portrait on the wall. But something made her stop.
The eyes in the painting had changed.
They were bleeding.
Thick, red trails ran down the painted cheeks of the woman in the frame. The same woman from the diary? From the basement? The tears stained the wooden frame, and below it, carved newly into the wall, were more words:
"Not everything buried is dead."
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To be continued…....