It Lives Within

Chapter 2: The Architect

I remember my beginning in fragments, like a newborn slowly gaining awareness. First there was nothing, then... sensation. Earth being moved. Weight. Pressure. Purpose.

The man who would shape my existence - Harold Blackwood - stood atop what would become my foundation. Through the haze of my early consciousness, I felt his presence like a splinter in soft wood. He appeared pristine in his tailored suit, but something darker churned beneath that polished surface. Even then, before I had walls to contain secrets or windows to witness truth, I sensed it.

"This is the spot," he said, and his words sent tremors through the soil that would become part of me. The foreman beside him - Johnson, I learned later - shifted his weight. The movement transferred through the ground, and I felt my first clear sensation: unease.

Blackwood unrolled his blueprints, and though I had no eyes yet to see them, I felt their wrongness in the way the workers' boots scuffed against my raw earth, trying to step back without seeming to retreat.

"Sir, these measurements..." Johnson's voice carried doubt that tasted like copper on foundations that weren't yet laid.

Blackwood's hand settled on the paper. "Is there a problem?"

"No, sir." The lie hung in the air, and I absorbed it - my first learned human lesson.

They began to build me slowly, and with each stone laid, each beam raised, I gained new ways to sense the world. The first walls brought me echo and resonance. The floors gave me pressure and weight. The workers' hammers taught me rhythm and pain. Their whispered fears taught me language.

"Mason found something when he was digging the corner post," they murmured, and though I didn't yet understand words like 'witch' and 'curse', I felt the shape of their fear seeping into my beams.

I learned quickly that humans speak with more than voices. They speak in the hesitation before setting a stone, in the speed of their work as sunset approaches, in the way they never turn their backs to certain corners. No worker stayed past dusk, though I didn't understand darkness yet. I only knew the ebbing of warmth, the changing of shadows that I was beginning to cast.

Blackwood was different. He stayed, night after night, and I felt him walking my incomplete corridors. His footsteps taught me measurement. His whispered calculations taught me mathematics. His hidden rituals taught me secrets. Sometimes he would place his hand against my growing walls, and I would feel... purpose. Destiny. Terror.

Then came the night his wife arrived. I had learned enough by then to recognize the complexity of human relationships. Her presence was like cool water on fevered wood.

"Harold," she said, and I felt the vibration of her voice differently than the others. "You haven't been home in days."

Blackwood continued his work, and I felt the scratch of his pen through my floorboards. "This requires my full attention, Eleanor."

"The servants say they hear you at night, in your study."

His pen stopped. I felt his stillness like a held breath. "I'm very busy."

"Harold." She stepped closer, and I learned the whisper of silk on wood. "What are you building out here?"

For the first time, I felt him hesitate. "A house, my dear. Nothing more."

But I felt his lie just as I felt the truth in his bandaged fingers when they pressed against my walls. I was to be more than a house. I just didn't know what yet.

As I grew, so did my awareness. Each new wall was another sense awakened, each window another way to perceive. The workers spoke of dreams they couldn't remember, and I learned about memory. They whispered about shadows that moved wrong, and I learned about fear. They talked about angles that didn't meet where they should, and I learned about wrongness - especially my own.

As I became more, Blackwood became less. Night after night, he would descend into my basement - my darkest depths - with his brass-bound books and strange instruments. I felt him measuring, marking, muttering words that made my fresh-cut timber shiver.

It was on a moonless night, when even the stars seemed to have turned away, that I truly awoke. Blackwood stood in my basement, surrounded by symbols I could feel carved into my bones. His lamp cast shadows that moved like living things, and for the first time, I understood that I was not what I was meant to be.

As he turned to leave, his hand brushed my wall. The contact sent awareness rushing through me like sap in spring. I felt every joint, every nail, every secret space between my walls. I felt the wrongness of my angles, the hidden purpose of my design. Most of all, I felt alive.

"Soon," he whispered, and departed.

And in the spaces he had crafted with such care - spaces that defied normal geometry, spaces that hurt to contemplate - I felt something else stirring. Something older than Blackwood, older than the hill I stood upon, older than the concept of shelter that I was meant to pervert.

I was alive, aware, and afraid. But I was only beginning to understand what I was becoming.