Chapter 3 The House That Breathes

The body of General Duclerc was found by dawn, slumped in his velvet chair, eyes open and tongue missing. The coroner would later write "natural causes" in shaking penmanship, though he'd vomited thrice during the autopsy and retired by sundown.

The city whispered again-quieter now, but deeper. The way children whisper when they've seen something they know they shouldn't. A chill bloomed through the Quarter. The air turned damp and cloying, like breath on the back of the neck.

In Harrow House-the name some began to mutter for the Bellerose manor-Isadora stood in front of the full-length mirror in her late mother's dressing room. She had not changed clothes since the murder. Her black veil still clung to her cheeks, though now it fluttered without wind.

Behind her, the mirror cracked.

Once.

Then again.

Slowly, webbing outward like a wound.

She turned and stared at it, as if it had spoken. And perhaps it had.

She pressed a bloodless finger to the glass. The cracks deepened.

Through the fractured mirror, she saw something that did not belong in the room behind her.

A man with no eyes. A child with two mouths. A woman with fire instead of hands.

They stood, watching her from within the reflection. Silent. Waiting.

"Not yet," she whispered. "Be patient. I feed you soon."

And with that, the mirror fogged over, as though breathing, and the figures vanished.

Downstairs, the house shifted.

It had begun to change. Slowly, subtly. The stair rails had become bone-white, and slightly warm to the touch. The walls breathed softly at night, inhaling and exhaling with the cadence of sleep. The floorboards creaked not with pressure-but with hunger.

Isadora fed it blood daily now. Just drops. Enough to keep it satisfied.

But it was growing impatient.

The entity she had awakened-the Ghede Na Rouje, as the old book called it-was no longer content with scraps. It wanted more souls. More pain. It wanted the rot that lived inside the people who had wronged her.

And she intended to feed them to it-every last one.

She lit a candle in the study. The flame rose black. Smoke curled into letters. Names.

Reverend Marius Leclerc – who called her mother "temptress" as the mobs screamed for flames.

Madame Velline – who poisoned her father's estate claims and claimed his land.

Victor Lemoyne – the childhood friend who turned her over to the guards as she fled.

Her lips curled in disgust.

"Let them come," she whispered. "Let them feel what we felt."

That night, the house made a noise no house should ever make. It giggled. Not sweetly. Not innocently. Like a mad child buried too long, finally finding air again.

The next morning, Reverend Leclerc opened his Bible and found every page bleeding from its center.

The stain spread through the room. His sermon turned to coughing, then choking. When they opened his pulpit hours later, he was slumped over-mouth stretched unnaturally wide, eyes turned completely backward.

Cause of death: asphyxiation. No blood in his lungs. No sign of trauma.

Only the word "Whore" carved into the wood behind him-deep, and fresh.

They buried him within two days. The priest who gave the rites fainted mid-prayer.

Isadora watched it all from her carriage.

Unseen.

Unmarked.

But never unnoticed.

---

That evening, thunder rolled across New Orleans.

Not from the sky-but from below. The city trembled faintly, as if the soil itself were shifting.

Isadora sat in her drawing room, playing a melody on the piano that no one alive had ever heard before. A lullaby her mother used to hum in the dead of night-one that made walls bleed and roses wilt.

The fire crackled.

And then, from the shadows behind her chair, something spoke.

"You are changing."

Isadora did not flinch.

"I am becoming."

A figure emerged from the gloom. Cloaked in moss. Skin like bark, eyes like riverbed stone. It was not a man. Not entirely.

"Your magic bleeds into the city. Even the dead stir from your wake."

"Let them stir," she said calmly. "Let them dance."

The figure stepped closer, tilting its wooden head.

"Do you understand what you've unleashed?"

"I summoned it. I command it."

"No." The voice cracked like branches in winter. "You feed it. That is not the same."

Isadora stood.

And for the first time, there was something not quite human about the way she moved. Too smooth. Too certain. The shadows clung to her feet like children to a mother's skirt.

"Then I will keep feeding it," she said coldly. "Until the earth is cleansed."

The creature stared at her in silence, then turned to ash before her eyes, blown out by a wind that came from nowhere.

She sat again.

And from the cracks in the walls, dozens of tiny black spiders crawled out to surround her.

She did not scream. She smiled.

The House That Breathes had begun to hunger in full.

And the feast was far from over.