The Locked Room

The invitation arrived with no return address, written in elegant script: “You are
cordially invited to a private unveiling at Ravenhall Manor. Midnight. No guests.”
Daniel Lorne, a freelance journalist with a taste for the strange, almost dismissed
it—until he remembered the name. Ravenhall had been abandoned since the art
collector who lived there vanished twenty years ago. His final painting, rumored to
be cursed, was never found.

The manor was shrouded in ivy and fog, perched on a cliff that frowned down over
the sea. Inside, everything was untouched, preserved like a museum of dust. At
exactly midnight, a grandfather clock chimed. The lights flickered on in the main
hall. A velvet rope blocked a single door: the study. Hanging above it was a plaque
—“Exhibit Closed Until All Guests Arrive.” Daniel looked around. He was alone. Or
so he thought.

Moments later, a soft creak came from behind. Five others stepped from the shadows—
each holding identical invitations. A historian, a painter, a psychic, a thief, and
a woman who said nothing at all. The rope dropped on its own. Drawn by something
they couldn’t name, they entered the room. It was circular, windowless, and bare—
except for the painting. It showed the six of them standing in that very room, in
the same clothes, under the same light. But in the painting, one of them was
missing their face.

The psychic gasped and collapsed. The thief checked the back of the canvas for a
mechanism. The woman just stared. Then the lights went out. Screams, footsteps, the
sound of glass shattering—and silence. When the lights returned, Daniel was alone
again. The painting had changed. Now he was the one without a face. And worse, the
others were gone. No bodies. No evidence they’d ever been there at all.

The next morning, police found Daniel wandering the grounds, unable to speak. The
painting was gone. The study was empty. But every year on that night, new
invitations are sent. And each time, a new face disappears—first from the painting,
then from the world.