AN IDLE HAND

Chapter Three: The Barn

I didn't sleep well.

Not because of nightmares, or sounds, or anything I could point to and say *that's what kept me awake.* It was simpler and stupider than that — the bed was unfamiliar, the mattress decades old and shaped by someone else's body, and every time I drifted off I'd wake again with the strange, crawling sense that I'd forgotten to do something. Lock a door. Turn off a stove. Something.

By the time gray morning light finally crept through the curtains, I gave up entirely and went downstairs, rubbing the grit from my eyes, craving coffee I knew didn't exist anywhere in this house.

The kitchen was colder than I remembered it being the night before. I found an old kettle, scrubbed it out, boiled water on the ancient gas stove that lit with a *whump* loud enough to make me flinch. No coffee. Just a tin of black tea that had probably been there since before I was born. I drank it anyway, standing at the window, looking out at the yard.

That's when I saw the barn properly for the first time. In daylight.

It looked worse than it had the evening before — somehow both more decayed and more solid, like it had been built specifically to survive collapsing. The wood had gone the color of old bone. One of the big double doors hung half-open on a single hinge, swaying very slightly even though I couldn't feel any wind through the cracked window glass.

*You're not allowed in there, Caleb.*

I hadn't thought about that voice in twenty-five years, and it arrived now so clearly it was like she'd whispered it directly into my ear. My grandmother, that one summer, gripping my shoulder hard enough to leave little half-moon marks from her nails, her face doing something I hadn't understood at the time and couldn't really name now either. Not anger. *Fear.* She'd been afraid. Of a barn.

I'd asked her why, of course — what kid wouldn't — and she'd just said, *Because some doors are closed for a reason, and you don't go opening them just because you're curious.* And then she'd given me a slice of pie and turned on the television and that, as far as nine-year-old me was concerned, had been the end of it.

Twenty-five years later, standing in her kitchen with cold tea in my hand and absolutely nothing else to do with my day, that warning felt less like a warning and more like an invitation.

---

The grass was wet, soaking through my sneakers within the first ten steps. The morning air smelled of damp earth and something else underneath it — something faintly metallic, like the smell right before a thunderstorm, except the sky was a flat, featureless white with no storm in it at all.

Up close, the barn was bigger than it looked from the house. The wood groaned even in the absence of wind, settling sounds that came from deep inside the structure, low and almost rhythmic, like breathing.

*Buildings make noise,* I told myself. *Old wood contracts and expands. That's all this is.*

The half-open door resisted when I pushed it, swollen with decades of damp, and then gave all at once with a shriek of rusted metal that seemed to go on far longer than it should have, echoing inside the space like the barn itself was screaming.

Inside, it took my eyes a moment to adjust. Thin blades of light came through gaps in the walls and roof, cutting the darkness into strips. Dust — or maybe chaff, old hay turned to powder — hung suspended in those beams, swirling slowly even though, again, there was no wind.

The space was mostly empty. A few rusted farm tools hung on one wall, shapes I couldn't immediately identify, their edges gone orange and flaking. Old crates were stacked in a corner, collapsed under their own weight. And in the center of the dirt floor —

A circle.

Not painted. *Burned* — scorched directly into the packed earth, a perfect ring maybe ten feet across, the soil inside it blacker and finer than the ground around it, almost like ash. Around the edge of the circle, symbols had been carved into the dirt itself, deep grooves that hadn't filled in despite — what, years? decades? — of weather and time.

They were the same symbols. The same ones from the box in my grandmother's room. I was sure of it, even though I'd only glanced at that box for a few seconds the night before. Some part of my brain had filed those shapes away, and now, looking at the matching marks carved into the floor of this barn, that part of my brain was screaming at me to leave.

I didn't leave.

I crouched at the edge of the circle instead, close enough that I could feel — or thought I could feel — a strange shift in temperature, the air inside the ring colder than the air around it, like standing too close to an open freezer.

There were things scattered around the inner edge of the circle. Small, dark shapes I'd mistaken for stones at first. I picked one up.

It was a bird's skull. Tiny, delicate, bleached white with age — except for the eye sockets, which were stained black, like something had been burned into them from the inside.

I dropped it immediately, and it landed with a sound far too loud for something so small, a *crack* that echoed up into the rafters and didn't seem to stop, bouncing around the empty barn long after it should have faded.

And in that echo — underneath it, woven into it — I heard something else.

A breath. Slow. Deliberate. Coming from somewhere above me.

I looked up.

The loft. A dark rectangle of open space near the roofline, accessible by a ladder bolted to the wall, rungs slick with rot. I couldn't see anything up there — just darkness, deeper than it should have been given the slats of light coming through elsewhere in the barn.

But I could *feel* something looking back.

I don't know how else to describe it. The hair on my arms stood up. My skin went tight and cold all over, the specific, primal feeling of being watched by something that had been watching for a long time before I ever walked in.

"Hello?" My voice came out smaller than I meant it to, swallowed instantly by the space around me.

Nothing answered. Of course nothing answered.

But the breathing — if that's what it had been — stopped.

And somewhere above me, in that black rectangle of loft, something shifted. Wood creaked under weight. A slow, dragging sound, like something pulling itself across the floorboards.

I didn't run. I want to be clear about that, because afterward — later, when things got so much worse — I tried to remember if I'd run, if some animal instinct had kicked in and gotten me out of there. But it hadn't. I'd *walked.* Calm, deliberate steps, backward, out through the broken door and into the gray morning light, my eyes never leaving that black square in the loft until I was outside and the barn door swung shut behind me on its own, with no wind to push it.

I stood in the wet grass, breathing hard, staring at the barn.

The symbols. The circle. The skull with its burned-black eyes.

And carved into the dirt by the door, where I hadn't noticed it on the way in — fresh, the edges sharp and unweathered, like it had been made only recently —

A single handprint.

Pressed into the wood of the doorframe, fingers splayed.

Too large to be a child's. Too small, somehow, to be a man's.

I went back inside the house and locked every door for the first time since I'd arrived, and I didn't go near my grandmother's room.

Not yet.