They thought the hill was just a wrong turn. They thought the old man was just a strange hermit. They were wrong. In the house on the hill, you don’t die just once.

The rain on Hilltop Ridge wasn’t water; it was a cold, grey curtain that swallowed the hiking trail whole. Four friends—Akira, Ben, Leo, and Mia—were lost, soaked, and arguing when they saw it: a crooked house, clinging to the hillside like a rotten tooth.

An old man answered their desperate knock. He didn’t speak, just stared with milky eyes before stepping aside. A crow sat motionless on his shoulder. Its feathers were the black of a starless night, but its eyes were worse—pits of pure, depthless black that drank the light and gave nothing back. It didn’t caw, didn’t shuffle. It only watched.

“Creepy bird,” Ben whispered later, as the old man gave them a sparse, dusty room for the night.

The old man brought them thin stew. The crow watched from a high shelf. Mia tried to smile at it. “Why are its eyes like that?”

The old man’s voice was the sound of dry leaves. “Yoru sees everything. He is… a good listener.” He left, and the oppressive silence returned, broken only by the storm and the weight of that unblinking, lightless gaze.

They tried to sleep. Akira was the first to hear it—a slow, scraping sound in the hall. Not an animal. Something heavy being dragged.

“The old man?” Leo mumbled, peering out.

The hallway was empty. But on the floor, a single, black feather lay. At the far end, the crow stood on a table, its head tilted at an impossible angle, just watching.

The attack came an hour later.

Ben went to find a bathroom. His scream was cut short, replaced by a wet, tearing sound. They found the door locked. From the other side, they heard the old man’s raspy hum… and the faint, silent rustle of wings.

Panic set in. They tried the front door. It was sealed shut, like it had never been there. Leo, the biggest, grabbed a fireplace poker and confronted the old man at the top of the stairs.

“What did you do?!” Leo roared.

The old man just smiled, empty. Leo didn’t hesitate. He drove the iron point straight into the man’s chest.

The old man looked down. He pulled the poker out with a grating sound. No blood. Only a trickle of black, oily dust. His smile widened. Behind him, perched on a rafter, the crow stared, its black eyes shimmering for a fleeting second.

“Run!” Mia screamed.

The night became a chase through a house that seemed to shift and grow. The old man was everywhere, moving with a slow, inevitable certainty. Bullets from Ben’s hiking pack did nothing. A knife slash did nothing. He was a puppet with cut strings that kept re-knotting.

Mia was next. She tried to hide in a closet. They heard her muffled pleas, then a sudden silence. When Akira and Leo found the closet, it was empty except for the scent of old soil and a single, black feather resting on the floor.

Cowering in the kitchen as dawn bled grey light through the grimy windows, Leo gasped, his eyes wide with a terrible understanding. “It’s the crow… Did you see? Every time we hurt the old man, the crow flinches. Its eyes… change for a second. He’s not in that body. He’s in the bird!”

Akira remembered the utter blackness of those eyes—no reflection, no life, just a void holding a soul. It made a horrible sense.

“So we kill the bird,” Akira said, voice trembling.

Leo nodded, gripping a heavy kitchen cleaver. “We end this.”

They found the crow in the main hall, standing on the mantelpiece above the cold fireplace. The old man’s body lay slumped in a chair below it, empty as a discarded shell.

“Now!” Leo charged, cleaver raised.

The crow’s head swiveled. Those bottomless black eyes fixed on Leo. The old man’s body didn’t move, but the crow’s beak opened in a soundless shriek.

Leo brought the cleaver down.

The blade struck true, a thunk of metal on wood. The crow was gone, vanished into a puff of black smoke. Leo stood, panting over the chopped mantel. A shaky laugh escaped him. “We did it! We—”

A wet gasp cut him off. Leo looked down. The tip of a rusty fire iron bloomed from his chest. Behind him, the old man’s “empty” body stood, one hand gripping the weapon, a fresh, vital light now burning in its once-milky eyes. Over its other shoulder, materializing from a shadow, the crow reappeared, its void-like eyes locking on the horrified Akira. The old man’s new, vibrant voice echoed in the silent hall.

“Thank you,” he rasped with a ghastly smile. “This body was getting so… stiff.”

Akira was alone. And the crow was watching.

Thanks for reading 

Part 1 End ~ 

Part 2 on Next week Saturday .