The cabin in Hollow’s End had a dark reputation rotting timbers, fractured glass, and ten years of whispered disappearances. The town called it cursed. Clara called it nonsense . Ghost stories didn’t scare her. They hadn’t, not since the night her brother disappeared there. Now, with a lawyer’s letter threatening her inheritance; "Stay until sunrise, or forfeit the land". Without the inheritance, she’d have nowhere to go.  

She returned to the place that had stolen her brother and all she had to do was last until sunrise.  

The first scrape sounded at dusk, faint as a tree brushing the window. By midnight, it wasn’t faint at all. Wet, deliberate, dragging, like nails raking wood. Clara gripped her grandfather’s knife, its blade rusted but sharp enough. She cut herself testing it proven it would bleed, if it came to that.  

She heard it before she saw it. The floor groaned not under the weight of old boards settling but of something moving. Then it struck: a hunched figure, its skin ash-grey and charred, eyes like smoldering coals. Its hands were claws, jagged and twisted, and it moved like smoke caught in a storm.  

Clara didn’t scream. She lunged. The knife sank into its shoulder with a sound that made her stomach churn, but the wound sizzled closed, sealing as though the blade had never been there. It lashed out, its claws raking her cheek, fire-hot. Blood trickled down her jaw, staining her shirt black in the moonlight.  

Her brother’s voice echoed in her mind from his final, desperate call: “Don’t let it conquer you. Fight, Clara, or it’ll take you too.”

So she fought quick, ruthless, and dirty.  

When it lunged again, she dropped low, driving the blade into its throat with all her weight. The thing crumbled, choking out a gurgling scream, then collapsed into a heap of brittle ash and blackened twigs.  

The cabin fell silent, but her blood still burned.  

At dawn, she limped into town, her cheek wrapped in a torn shirt sleeve, the deed clutched in her fist. Townsfolk gawked no one spoke. The girl who’d entered the cursed cabin had walked out alive. But three nights later, the wound began to itch, fierce and relentless.  

When Clara peeled back the bandage, her breath caught. The scar wasn’t ordinary. It was glossy, black, twisted and it pulsed faintly beneath her skin, like a second heartbeat.  

Then she saw it. Not in the scar, but in the mirror. A shadow behind her, gaunt and grinning, its claws curled possessively around her neck.  

She’d won the fight. The scar was its trophy.  

The creature hadn’t died. It had marked her.  

And now, when Clara smiled at the world, it smiled back with her teeth.