When I was a little girl, I used to see things in the shadows. For years, I forced myself to believe my imagination was just playing tricks on me. But you know that feeling, don't you? The sudden prickle on the back of your neck. The absolute certainty that something is watching you, or standing right behind you in the dark? It sounds crazy, but I lived it. As we get older, we choose to blind ourselves to what we can’t explain. But some of us see them all the time. They are always there—looking, waiting. But for what?
This year, this exact moment feels different.
As I get ready for my friend Isaac’s party, I try desperately to convince myself that the suffocating weight in the room is just in my head. I brush it off and head out into the crisp autumn air. On the streets, everyone is dressed in monstrous costumes, laughing and having a great time. Or at least, I think they are laughing. Underneath the plastic masks, it's hard to tell.
The moment I walk into Isaac's house, the loud music and pulsing lights swallow me up. I try to lose myself in the crowd, mingling and dancing, pretending to have a good time. Then, Isaac approaches me through the smoke machine's haze. His face is pale, his eyes wide and unblinking.
He leans in close and asks if we are ready to play a game.
Before I can answer, the throbbing music suddenly cuts out, plunging the house into a heavy, suffocating silence. The chatter dies instantly. I turn around and realize that every single person in the room has stopped moving. They aren't dancing anymore. They are all staring directly at me, their eyes fixed and vacant behind the slits of their plastic masks.
"It's a Halloween tradition," Isaac whispers, his voice sounding entirely too hollow. He pulls a dusty, wooden box from behind his back. It isn't a normal board game. The wood is scorched around the edges, and the hinges groan like metal teeth when he lifts the lid. Inside lie stacks of old, yellowed cards and a single, jagged piece of black glass.
"The Rules are simple," Isaac announces to the silent room, his gaze never leaving mine. "Once we begin, no one leaves the house. And whatever you do, don't look behind you. Because tonight, the things in the dark play too."
A cold draft sweeps through the living room, blowing out the candles on the mantle. In the sudden dimness, I feel it. A sharp, freezing breath brushing against the bare skin of my neck. Isaac sets the heavy wooden box on the table, and the latch pops open with a metallic snap. Inside sits an antique board, its paper surface cracked, yellowed, and stained with something dark.
The artwork on the board is deeply unsettling. It shows a hand-drawn map of a sprawling, Victorian-era graveyard, with winding dirt paths leading toward a massive, black mausoleum in the center. Instead of modern plastic pieces, there are four tokens carved out of old, smooth bone, and a heavy iron spinner shaped like a pointing, skeletal finger.
"My great-grandfather found it in an old cellar back in 1888," Isaac whispers, his voice cutting through the freezing air. "It's a board game called The Blind Man’s Daughter. The rules are simple. We each place our token on the graveyard gates. We spin the iron finger to move down the path. If you land on a 'Shadow' space, you have to close your eyes for sixty seconds, and you cannot open them—no matter what you hear whispering in your ear."
He places the heavy iron finger in the center of the board. It gives off a faint, metallic ring that seems to echo in the silence of the room.
"The first one to reach the mausoleum wins," Isaac says, looking up at me, his eyes entirely black in the dim candlelight. "But if the spinner stops on your turn and points directly at you... you become the Blind Man's Daughter. And the things in the house get to drag you into the board." "You go first," Isaac says, sliding the ancient board across the table toward me.
My heart hammers violently against my ribs. Every single masked guest in the room leans forward in unison, their heavy breathing the only sound in the suffocating silence. I want to laugh, to tell everyone that this is a ridiculous Halloween prank and walk out the front door. But my feet feel glued to the floorboards. A desperate, unseen force pushes my hand toward the center of the board.
I reach out, my fingers trembling as they touch the cold, heavy iron spinner. It feels freezing—like ice straight from a winter grave.
With a sharp intake of breath, I flick the skeletal finger.
The iron finger whirls around the yellowed graveyard map, making a loud, scraping screech against the ancient paper. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. As the spinner turns, the candles around the room flare up with an eerie, sickly green flame. The shadows on the wall stretch, twisting into long, distorted human shapes that seem to lean over the table with us.
The spinner begins to slow down. It passes a bone token. It passes the mausoleum.
With a final, metallic click, the skeletal finger snaps to a hard stop. It is pointing directly at my chest.
"A 'Shadow' space," Isaac whispers, a terrifying, wide grin spreading across his pale face. "Close your eyes. Sixty seconds. And remember the rule... don't open them, no matter what touches you."
Panic spikes in my chest, but the lights in the house instantly plunge into total, pitch-black darkness. I squeeze my eyes shut.
One. Two. Three.
Then, right behind my ear, the silence cuts open. A sharp, freezing whisper brushes against my neck, and it sounds exactly like my own voice: "Open your eyes, Tiffany. Look at what you did to us."
The whisper is too loud, too close, and too real. Total panic takes over, stripping away every ounce of my willpower.
I open my eyes.
The house is still buried in pitch-black darkness, but as my eyes adjust, I realize the room is no longer empty. A towering, shadowy figure is looming directly over me. Before I can draw breath to scream, a hand drops heavily onto my right shoulder.
It isn't a human hand. The fingers are impossibly long, skeletal, and freezing cold, pinning me to my chair. The grip tightens, squeezing so hard that the bone in my shoulder groans under the pressure. I can feel sharp, jagged fingernails digging straight through my shirt and cutting into my skin.
I try to pull away, but the grip is vice-like. From the darkness right in front of my face, two hollow, sunken eyes begin to glow with a faint, sickly green light—matching the color of the dying candles.
"You broke the rule, Tiffany," Isaac’s voice echoes from somewhere across the room, but it sounds miles away, muffled as if he is underwater.
The entity leaning over me lets out a low, wet rasping sound. The iron finger on the board game begins to spin all on its own, faster and faster, clicking rapidly in the dark. The bone token representing my character on the board suddenly slides across the paper, dragging itself straight into the black mausoleum.
As the token drops into the center of the board, the hand on my shoulder squeezes one last time, violently yanking me backward into the dark. The world flips upside down. I fall backward through empty air, plunging into a freezing, suffocating void. When my back finally hits the solid ground, the breath is knocked completely out of my lungs.
I gasp, looking up. The ceiling of Isaac's house is gone. Above me is a swirling, pitch-black sky, and the air smells heavily of damp earth and rotting leaves. I look down at my hands and realize I am sitting on a dirt path. Towering, crooked iron gates loom in the distance, and crumbling stone tombs surround me.
I am inside the board game. I am in the graveyard.
"Help!" a voice screams from the darkness ahead. I look up and see Isaac. But it isn't the creepy, pale Isaac from the party. He looks terrified, his plastic costume mask ripped in half as he clings desperately to the edge of a massive, open stone mausoleum.
Suddenly, the ground beneath me begins to churn. From the black soil, dozens of pale, decayed hands shoot upward, grabbing at my ankles, my jeans, and my wrists. The things from my childhood—the shadows I always tried to ignore—have faces now. They are hollow-eyed, skeletal, and grinning. They wrap their icy fingers around my limbs, violently dragging me downward, trying to bury me alive in the dirt.
“Stay with us,” they chorus, their voices a synchronized, scratching whisper inside my brain. “You belong to the game now.”
Adrenaline surges through my veins. The pain in my bleeding shoulder flares, and with a raw scream, I kick fiercely, tearing my leg free from a rotting grip. I scramble forward on my hands and knees, fighting against the heavy, invisible weight pulling me backward.
I reach Isaac just as a massive, shadow-like entity emerges from the mausoleum behind him. Isaac reaches his hand out to me, crying, begging for help.
But as I look at his hand, I see the bone token from the board game clutched tightly in his palm.
In a split-second decision, I don't grab his hand—I snatch the bone token.
The moment my fingers lock around the carved bone, the graveyard shudders. The hands holding my ankles let out a deafening, frustrated shriek as they are violently ripped away from me. The shadow behind Isaac wraps its impossibly long arms around his chest, dragging him backward into the pitch-black mouth of the tomb.
"Tiffany, please!" Isaac screams, his voice echoing through the void.
I close my eyes and squeeze the bone token as hard as I can.
A blinding flash of green light forces my eyes shut, and the deafening screams of the graveyard suddenly vanish.
I gasp for air, my chest heaving as I tumble forward onto a hard surface. The smell of damp earth is replaced by the scent of cheap smoke machines and stale punch. I open my eyes. I am back on the living room floor of Isaac's house.
The lights are back on. The music is pulsing through the speakers again. Around me, the party guests are laughing, drinking, and dancing as if nothing ever happened. Nobody is looking at me.
I look down at the table. The ancient wooden board game is sitting right where it was, completely still. But when I look closer, my blood turns to ice.
There are no longer four bone tokens on the starting gate. There are only three.
Deep inside the illustration of the black mausoleum in the center of the board, a new, tiny figure has been freshly hand-drawn onto the yellowed paper. It’s a sketch of a boy wearing a torn Halloween costume, his paper hands pressed flat against the inside of the tomb, screaming.
A cold sweat breaks out across my forehead. I glance around the crowded room, desperately searching for Isaac. He is nowhere to be found.
Then, a hand drops heavily onto my right shoulder.
I freeze, my breath catching in my throat as a familiar, vice-like grip squeezes my bone. A freezing chill spreads down my spine. Slowly, painfully, I turn my head around to look at whoever is standing behind me.
It’s one of the party guests dressed in a plastic witch mask. But underneath the plastic slits of the eyes, there is nothing but empty, pitch-black darkness.
The mask tilts, and a voice whispers directly into my ear—not the voice of a guest, but the voice of Isaac, sounding hollow, desperate, and trapped under miles of dirt:
"Thanks for taking my turn, Tiffany. Now... who wants to go next?"
