The air hung thick with the cloying perfume of decay dried lavender turning to dust in their porcelain bowls, the sweet rot stench of roses left too long in their gilded vase. Lady Eleanor's fingers trembled as she pressed them against the cold glass of her chamber window. The moon, a jaundiced eye, stared back.
She walks tonight, the wallpaper sighed. Not the voice of servants, nor the wind through the cracks this was older. The voice of the house itself, its timber bones groaning with the memory of hanged maids and strangled heirs. Eleanor's breath fogged the glass. When it cleared, a woman's face hovered in the reflection behind her not her own.

"Do you remember the nursery fire?" the reflection whispered. Eleanor's scalp prickled. There had been no fire. She was an only child. Yet the scent of burning hair filled her nostrils.

A knife sharp knock at the door.

"Milady?"

The house maid's voice was muffled, as though speaking through wool. Dr. Grayson has come. He says... he says you sent for him.

Eleanor's stomach turned to ice. She had summoned no doctor. Yet when she wrenched open the door, the man standing there wore her father's pocket watch the one buried with him. His smile showed too many teeth.

"We must speak of your sister," said the doctor.

Behind him, the hallway stretched impossibly long, its walls pulsing like a throat. ........

The doctor’s gloved hand closed around Eleanor’s wrist too cold, too smooth, like marble left in a churchyard. -Come- he murmured, his breath reeking of laudanum and something fouler,
" the house wishes to show you something."

The hallway stretched, the walls warping as though viewed through old glass. Portraits of ancestors melted into one another, their faces pooling like wax. A door that had never been there before stood ajar at the end of the corridor, exhaling a draft that smelled of wet earth and copper. 

The cellar, whispered the voice in the wallpaper. Where the first sin took root.

Inside, the darkness breathed.

Rusted tools hung from the ceiling pruning shears, a bone saw, things meant for garden and grave alike. A surgeon’s table stood at the center, its leather straps stained black. And there, in the corner… 

A cradle.

Its lace curtains were speckled with mildew, rocking gently though no hand touched it. Eleanor’s pulse hammered in her throat. "I—I don’t"

"Look closer," urged the doctor. His reflection in a hanging scalpel showed no eyes, only hollows. 

Beneath the cradle’s frills, tiny bones gleamed. A child’s skull, cleft down the middle. 
The walls sang: 
"Sister... sister... split... in... twain, 
One for pleasure, one for pain."

Then the doctor’s mouth unstitched itself into a grin.
"You remember now, don’t you?"