Là-Bas
  • 36
  • 0
  • 24
  • Reads 36
  • 0
  • Part 24
Completed, First published Mar 02, 2026

The air hangs thick with incense and decay, a miasma rising from the crypts of provincial France. Old Chantraine, a disillusioned aristocrat, drifts towards the shadowed corners of Drieux, drawn by the spectral magnetism of a charismatic, debauched priest. This is not a story of piety, but of rot—a slow, deliberate unearthing of ancient paganisms festering beneath the veneer of Catholic ritual. Each stone of the ruined abbey breathes with a forgotten lust, each Mass a perverse echo of forgotten rites. The narrative clings to the damp earth, to the smell of mouldering flesh and the whispered blasphemies of a man consumed by the lure of the grotesque. Fog coils around the crumbling buildings, obscuring not just the physical landscape but the boundaries of sanity itself. The world narrows to the obsessive gaze of Chantraine, fixated on the monstrous fertility of the priest's garden, on the bestial communion enacted in the darkness. It is a descent into a France where the sacred has curdled, where the peasantry hold fast to the oldest, darkest superstitions, and where the very soil seems to weep with the memory of things better left buried. The light is always failing, the shadows deepening, and the silence…the silence is a breeding ground for the unspeakable.
Copyright: Public Domain
This license allows anyone to use your story for any purpose, including printing, selling, or adapting it into a film freely.
Recommended for you
21 Part
A suffocating heat clings to the docks of colonial Saigon, thick with the scent of jasmine and decay. The narrative unravels not with grand adventure, but with the stifled desperation of a man purchased – a phantom commodity traded between shadowy brokers. He’s known only as the Passenger, his origins a deliberate erasure etched in the ledger as ‘Ticket No. 9672.’ The air itself feels haunted by the weight of forgotten currencies, of lives quantified and sold. Each chapter is a peeling layer of circumstance, revealing a man consumed by a creeping, nameless dread. He exists in the humid confines of a crumbling mansion, a gilded cage furnished with the whispers of opium dens and the mournful cries of caged birds. His captors are less concerned with his loyalty than his silence—a silence he struggles to maintain as fragments of a former life bleed into the present. The story doesn't soar with rockets to the moon, but spirals downward into the claustrophobic labyrinth of a mind unraveling. The descriptions are saturated with the oppressive weight of velvet drapes, the glint of tarnished silver, and the sickly sweet aroma of rotting fruit. It’s a story of imprisonment not by bars, but by the insidious erosion of memory, the slow suffocation of identity within a system designed to erase every trace of self. The final pages hint at a reckoning not of escape, but of acceptance, as the Passenger discovers he's not merely owned—but *constructed* by the very forces he seeks to defy.
47 Part
A creeping dread clings to the shadowed halls of Ashworth Manor, where the legacy of Silas Blackwood, a man rumored to have made pacts with something ancient and hungry, festers in the very stones. The air hangs thick with the scent of decay and forgotten sin, mirroring the rot within the Blackwood family itself. A suffocating inheritance binds young Arthur to a lineage steeped in whispered accusations of devilry, and the manor’s sprawling, overgrown grounds seem to pulse with a life both alluring and menacing. Every antique mirror reflects not faces, but fleeting glimpses of something *other*, and the relentless drumming of rain against the leaded windows feels less like weather and more like a desperate plea for release. The novel unravels with a slow, agonizing unraveling of sanity, the narrative choked by claustrophobic interiors and the oppressive weight of a past that refuses to stay buried. A creeping paranoia descends, blurring the line between the living and the dead, as Arthur discovers his inheritance is not merely land and title, but a monstrous legacy etched into his very blood. The narrative unfolds like a fever dream, punctuated by stolen glances at shadowed figures, the scent of damp earth clinging to every breath, and a chilling sense that something malevolent stalks the corridors, always just beyond the periphery of vision. A suffocating dread permeates every page, where the true horror lies not in what is seen, but in what is *felt* - the suffocating presence of a darkness that has waited centuries to claim its due.
86 Part
Dust motes dance in the oppressive heat of a Hong Kong summer, mirroring the suffocating stillness of Katherine’s marriage. A gilded cage, woven with silk and silence, holds her fast to Walter, a man whose cold precision dissects affection as readily as a laboratory specimen. But the cholera epidemic is a fever dream of rot and revelation, a landscape of shadowed alleys and whispered fears where Katherine, driven to desperate charity, dons a veil—not of mourning, but of disguise. The air hangs thick with the scent of jasmine and decay as she infiltrates a remote, lawless village, trading her identity for a cure. The deeper she ventures into the heart of the plague, the more Walter’s rigid composure cracks, revealing a man haunted by his own sterile ambition. Each act of kindness, each shared moment under the suffocating weight of the epidemic, peels back layers of their carefully constructed lives. The world bleeds into a bruised palette of ochre and grey, the sun a malevolent eye watching as Katherine navigates a moral labyrinth. The veil becomes not just a shield against contagion, but a mask for a woman shedding her own brittle illusions. It’s a descent into a shadowed intimacy, where love and loathing twist together like the roots of a strangling vine, and the only certainty is the creeping, insidious dread of what—or whom—they’ve left behind. The weight of the silk is a constant reminder: salvation, or a slow, beautiful unraveling.
16 Part
A creeping dread clings to the Yorkshire moors, mirroring the decay within Ravensthorpe Manor. The estate, a skeletal silhouette against perpetual twilight, holds a silence thicker than the November fog—a silence punctuated only by the frantic whispers of servants and the brittle coughs of its ailing master, Sir Alistair. He is a man haunted by shadows, both real and imagined, obsessed with uncovering a family curse tied to a missing heir and a portrait whose eyes seem to follow every movement. The narrative unfolds through fragmented diary entries and feverish accounts from those trapped within Ravensthorpe’s stone embrace. Each revelation unravels not a solution, but another layer of suffocating grief and ancestral guilt. The scent of damp earth and dying roses permeates every room, clinging to the velvet drapes and tarnished silver. A suffocating claustrophobia settles over the reader as the investigation descends into a labyrinth of secret passages, forgotten crypts, and the chilling echoes of past tragedies. The manor itself is a character, breathing with a malevolent history. Rain lashes against the leaded windows, mirroring the tempest brewing within the hearts of those who dare to seek the truth. But the truth, when it finally surfaces, is not a grand revelation, but a splintering of sanity, a descent into the madness that has always festered within Ravensthorpe’s walls. It is a tragedy not merely witnessed, but inhaled—a slow, insidious poisoning of the soul.