[pumpkin-and-lavender]

Prologue

The nights had begun to grow lighter. The sky was full of sweetness, and the migration of songbirds had begun. Even the farm poultry dusted their feathers and tried to sing along in their simple, clumsy chirps. The harvest was reddening in the fields, drying gently for the long winter ahead. The celebration of All Hallows’ Eve loomed in the distance, but summer still lingered in the air.

The evenings remained long and warm, yet darkness had begun whispering at the windows—like a sacred promise, a lover’s touch upon the cheek.

Lavender Cottage still stood strong, though twenty years had passed since Ethel Greaves had disappeared for the final time. Her belongings remained untouched. No one dared disturb them—not out of fear, but out of quiet, peculiar reverence for the woman who had always been a little bit other.

Her lace curtains clung to the windows like pale ghosts. Her teacups, mismatched and well-used, sat on thick, rough-sawn wooden shelves that reached toward the low ceiling. Some were chipped, all were dusty, and each had a name, according to Ethel. The thin cream china one—the one stained faintly with lavender ink—was always placed just so on the edge of her mahogany writing desk, ready for the next letter or recipe to be written.

The wind still passed through the rooms as though it remembered her. It slipped beneath the floorboards and between the walls, performing the old rituals with invisible hands: brushing curtains aside, lifting forgotten notes, tapping softly at door frames. The dust did not settle out of neglect, but devotion—gathering in corners like a first snow, unspoiled by sweeping.

The clock on the mantle had stopped years ago. Yet if you stood alone in the parlour, held your breath, and listened—not with your ears, but with your bones—you might still hear it ticking. A faint beat of time folded somewhere between the now and then.

The village children once dared each other to knock on the cottage door, but none had since little Maisie Stone came back pale and trembling, saying the door had opened by itself. She’d smelled earth and honey, and something like violets. She hasn’t spoken a word since.

In truth, the cottage had always been a little wild.

Ethel Greaves was said to have roots older than her bones. Some claimed her grandmother was one of the hedge-women from the moors. She spoke kindly, but her eyes were not always here, and her garden grew even in frost. She vanished sometimes, for days or weeks at a time, only to return with baskets of strange herbs and the smell of lightning in her hair.

Once, a local boy followed her into the woods and came back two days later with a head of white hair and no memory of his name. Ethel had smiled, kissed his brow, and sent him home with a jar of honey and a sprig of silver thyme. No one asked questions after that.

After her last disappearance, the villagers waited. A week. A month. A season. But she never returned.

And now, two decades later, something had stirred.

Though Lavender Cottage stood at the edge of Hollow Brook, weathered but unyielding, it had stood that way for more than a century—and would likely stand for many years yet. Quiet, untouched, and strangely remembered. Some houses are like that. They linger longer than the people who loved them, holding on to small things—dust, stories, scent—as if memory alone might keep them warm.

But now, the lavender was blooming again. Not just in the garden, where it had once grown in straight, fragrant rows, but in strange, impossible places: through the cracks in the hearth, up the stone walls, around the rusted kettle on the stove. It curled around the banister like it had memory, purpose.

It was not the soft purple of common lavender. It was richer. Darker. The stems were silver-green, and the scent had weight, as though the air itself had thickened with sweetness.

It grew as if summoned from the inside out.

And it was waiting.