The Serpent

James Crandall needs one thing: a quiet place to finish his final semester. The old Victorian at the end of the cracked driveway is cheap, available, and extraordinary - hand-carved woodwork in every room, feathered serpent motifs hidden in the baseboards, and a century of history sealed in the walls. For an archeology student writing his thesis on pre-Columbian ritual objects, it feels like fate.

Then he finds the statue.

Ivory. Warm to the touch. Inscribed in a language that hasn't been spoken in five hundred years. It is the most important artifact he has ever held, and it will be the last. Because the house was not built as a home. It was built as a vessel. And the inscription is not a relic of a dead religion. It is an invitation - one that has been answered before, by every tenant who came before him, none of whom were ever seen again.

Kara, the waitress who knows more than she should. Ruford, the landlord whose hands are too young for his face. The letters in the attic from a man who died in this house over a century ago, describing the same sounds, the same bite marks, the same statue moving on its own. The warnings are everywhere. But James is a scholar, and scholars don't leave mysteries unsolved.

Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed. Some words, once spoken, cannot be taken back. And some gods, once woken, must be fed.