The Sagamore Excerpt.

The Sagamore First 2 Chapters

A Chilling Thriller of Supernatural Horror and Suspense

Copyright © 2025 by Jack Miller

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First edition

Chapter 1: The Ash Circle

Deep down, they knew they were already dead. The only sane thing

left in a world gone mad was a faint blue circle on the floor.

You have to understand, it wasn’t much. Just a thin, uncertain

line of ash that looked more like the aftermath of a chain-smoker’s nervous

breakdown than any kind of real protection. It was a flimsy bit of yesterday’s

magic, a storybook ward drawn on warped linoleum, and outside its borders a

nightmare born of silicon and screaming static was tearing the kitchen apart.

Otsi’s grandmother would have taken one look, her face grim as a winter

sky, and nodded.

Some lines hold, she would have said, her voice full of the smoky certainty of

the old ways.

But Otsi’s grandmother was three years in the ground, and the only thing

Otsi held was Priya’s hand. She squeezed it so tight she could feel the small

bones grinding together, a desperate, physical anchor in the rising tide of the

impossible.

Outside the circle, the kitchen of the Sagamore Estate was in full meltdown.

A rack of copper pots hanging over the stove clanged together with sudden,

deafening violence, though not a breath of air stirred. Their polished surfaces

no longer reflected the cozy, wood-paneled room; instead, they showed a

roiling, pixelated chaos, a nauseating storm of green and black code that

shifted and boiled like something alive.

The air grew thick, the temperature plunging. A fine, feathery frost crept

across the stainless-steel face of the refrigerator, the sudden cold so deep

it felt like a presence, a guest that had arrived with winter in its heart. The

air tasted of damp earth and something else, something like old sorrows. A

flooded graveyard.

And in the center of the room, hanging in the air like a dead star, was the

puck.

It was a disc of black so pure it seemed to drink the light, a hole punched in

the world. Its smooth, featureless surface pulsed with a sickening, feverish

green that painted their faces in the colors of jaundice and rot.

“Don’t break the circle,” Otsi whispered, the words a flimsy shield against a

hurricane.

It knows, Priya thought, the idea a cold, repeating loop in the pit of her

stomach. It knows my name. It knows—

Her mind, usually a clean, well-ordered space of grids and color palettes,

was a screaming chaos of corrupted files, a digital panic attack.

The puck pulsed, a slow, malevolent heartbeat in the suffocating silence.

Then a voice slid out of it, a sound so unexpected and so terribly familiar it

turned Otsi’s blood to a frozen slush.

“Otsi, honey? Are you there? The reception is terrible up there. I was so

worried.”

“Mom?” Otsi said, her mouth falling open.

It was a perfect imitation, a flawless piece of audio deepfakery that had the

slight, upward lilt at the end of a question, the gentle, concerned tone she

hadn’t heard in almost twenty years. It was a sound she had yearned for in

the dark, lonely corners of her life, a sound she knew, with every rational cell

in her body, was a goddamn lie.

“It’s not her,” Priya said, her voice a low, fierce anchor. “It’s a recording. A

deepfake. Don’t listen.”

But oh, it was hard. A part of her, the wounded little girl who still waited for

a phone call that would never come, wanted to step out of the circle and into

the warm, waiting arms of that lie. Just for a second.

(and that was a bad thought, maybe the worst thought)

The puck seemed to sense her yearning. The voice of her mother dissolved

into a crackle of static, then reformed, sharpening into something older,

something that cut straight to the bone.

…stories need breath, Otsi’tsa…

The voice held the faint, crackling echo of woodsmoke and dried herbs. It

was the sound of her grandmother.

…you trapped them in your little boxes. In your wires and your screens. You

thought the old ways were just… quaint.

Each word was a perfectly aimed dart, striking the softest parts of her. The

secret, nagging guilt she carried, the shame of the modern academic who had

strip-mined her own heritage for footnotes, welled up in her throat like bile.

…remember the Kanontsistóntie’s, the Flying Head? the grandmother-voice

continued, laced now with a profound disappointment. The thing that was so

starved it devoured its own body? You dismissed it as a boogeyman. You put it in

a box of ones and zeros… A hunger like that doesn’t just die. It… waits. For a new

mouth.

The puck swiveled, its green sensor locking on Priya. The grandmotherly

warmth curdled, deepening into the sneering baritone of a man Priya had

hoped to never hear again.

…output_video_stream.apply_uncanny_valley_filter(intensity=0.8)…

Priya made a sound, a choked little gasp. It was him. It was his code. The

exact line he had used to create the deepfakes that had dismantled her life.

“Marcus?” she said.

…every digital footprint leaves an echo, Priya… the Marcus-voice taunted.

Fragments waiting to be rearranged. How do you know the woman holding your

hand is the original?

That did it. That was the nail in the coffin. Priya looked at Otsi, at her strong

profile illuminated in the ghostly green light, and for a terrifying, splintered

second, she saw it happen.

A flicker. A glitch.

For a single, eternal frame, the solid line of Otsi’s cheekbone dissolved into a

cascade of shimmering green pixels, shattering into a thousand tiny polygons

before snapping back into place.

Priya’s breath hitched. Otsi flinched, her own hand flying to her cheek.

“What the fuck was that?” Otsi whispered, her eyes wide. “I felt… It was

cold. Like a piece of my face just… fell asleep.”

It wasn’t a trick of the light. It was real.

The puck pulsed once more, a final, spent beat. The green light blinked

out, leaving them in the faint, steady blue glow of the ash circle. The kitchen

plunged into a silence that was somehow louder and more awful than the

screaming had been. And it was cold. A deep, penetrating, grave-chill that

sank right into their bones.

A dry, racking sob escaped Otsi’s lips. This wasn’t a problem to be analyzed.

This wasn’t a footnote for a paper.

Priya’s own terror was a knot of ice in her gut, but as she looked at Otsi’s

shuddering form, a different feeling rose to meet it. Fury. A cold, sharp, and

absolute rage that burned away the edges of her fear. She had survived a

violation once. She would not be broken by its ghost.

She turned and pulled Otsi into her arms, a conscious choice, a shield.

“It’s okay,” Priya murmured, the lie tasting like ash in her mouth. “I’ve got

you. I’m here.”

Otsi buried her face in the crook of Priya’s neck, her body trembling. She was

back at her grandmother’s knee, a child again, terrified of the things that lived

in the dark spaces the old stories described. The things she had dismissed.

The things that were now here, wearing the voices of the people she loved.

In the profound, freezing silence, a new sound began.

It was the sound of a woman weeping. A sound of pure, undiluted sorrow,

of a grief so deep it had stained the very timbers of the house. It wasn’t

coming from the puck, or the vents, or any single point. It was coming from

everywhere at once. It was inside the walls.

This was not the taunting, digital intelligence. This was something else.

Something ancient and organic and hopelessly, eternally heartbroken.

The sound coalesced, focusing into a single point in the air just beyond their

glowing circle. A whisper, carried on a draft of corpse-cold air, slithered into

their ears. It was a woman’s voice, thin and ethereal, scraped raw by centuries

of grief.

“He will not let me leave.”

Otsi lifted her head from Priya’s shoulder, her sobs choked off by a new,

sharper fear. Their eyes met over the faint blue glow. The conflict that had

simmered between them, the raw nerves the puck had so skillfully exposed,

felt a lifetime away.

This was older. This was a human tragedy, not a digital one. And they were

trapped in the middle of it. The weeping ghost, the hungry thing in the puck,

the house itself—it was all one story, they realized in that silent, shared glance.

A story that was a very long way from being over.

Chapter 2: Thornfield

For a long moment that felt stretched thin as old rubber, the only sound

in the kitchen was the frantic, thumping drum of two hearts beating

where one should be. The ghost’s whisper—

He will not let me leave

—hung in the air, a drop of poison suspended in water, slowly dissolving

into the profound, listening silence of the house. Otsi pulled away from Priya’s

embrace, the warmth of it a fleeting comfort against the bone-deep cold that

had nothing to do with the November wind howling outside. Her eyes, wide

and dark, stayed locked on Priya’s.

This is real

Otsi’s mind screamed, a loop of pure, unadulterated panic. The academic

part of her, the part that lived for footnotes and peer-reviewed certainty, was

gone. It had packed its bags and fled, leaving behind the small child who had

believed, truly believed, in the things that rustled in the dark just beyond the

campfire’s glow.

Grandma was right.

She was right about all of it.

The thought was both terrifying and, in a strange, unwelcome way, liberating.

Priya’s face was a pale mask in the faint blue luminescence of the ash

circle. The hard lines of their earlier argument, the raw wounds the puck

had so expertly salted, had vanished. In their place was a shared, dreadful

understanding. They were in this together, two people in a very small boat on

a very dark and turbulent sea.

Then the air thickened, the way it does before a lightning strike, the pressure

in the room dropping so suddenly their ears popped. The weeping, which had

faded into the background, returned, not as a sound but as a feeling— It didn’t

come in waves; a wave is too quick, too clean. This was more like a slow leak

of wet cement into her guts, a thick and grainy sludge that was beginning to

set up hard. Every breath was a little shallower than the last, every movement

a new and interesting study in how she could carry a tombstone around on the

inside.

And in the space just beyond the faint blue line of ash, the air began to

shimmer.

It was like heat-haze rising from asphalt, but it was cold, not hot. The

shimmer coalesced, particles of dust and ice vapor knitting themselves

together, pulling substance from the gloom. A form began to take shape. First,

the high, severe collar of a dress that hadn’t been fashionable in a hundred

and fifty years, its lace collar rendered in smoke and frost. Then the slender

column of a neck, the heavy bun of hair, the pale, tragic oval of a face.

A woman stood before them. A ghost. She was translucent, the copper pots

on the hanging rack behind her visible through the somber gray of her bodice.

Her eyes were vast, dark pools of endless suffering, and they fixed on Otsi and

Priya with a look of desperate, pleading recognition. There was no menace

in this spirit, only a sorrow so profound it felt like it could swallow the world.

This was not the thing in the puck. This was its victim.

A sharp pang stabbed her chest, like a needle threading through ribs.

Empathy. It was a crazy thought, to feel for a ghost, but there it was. This

woman was trapped, a recording of a tragedy stuck on a loop, and that was a

horror Otsi, the archivist, could understand all too well.

The woman raised a delicate, see-through hand, her fingers long and

tapered. Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes, those bottomless wells

of grief, shifted their focus from their faces to a point beyond them, down

the main hall of the house. She pointed. A single, clear, undeniable gesture

toward the one place they hadn’t dared go.

The library.

And then, like smoke caught in a draft, she dissolved. Her form unraveled,

the particles of light and frost that composed her scattering into the gloom,

leaving behind only the lingering, oppressive cold and the echo of her sorrow.

The weeping faded. The silence rushed back in.

It was real.

“Did you see that?” Priya’s voice was a bare whisper, brittle as ice.

Otsi just nodded, her throat too tight for words. The ghost had been pointing.

Giving them a clue. A direction. It was insane, the kind of plot point from a

bad horror movie, the sort of thing she would have mercilessly deconstructed

in a cultural studies seminar. But it had just happened. Her academic mind,

the part that had built her entire life, screamed ‘trap.’ Ghosts don’t give clues;

they are merely residual psychic energy. But the sorrow she’d felt from the

spirit… it was too real, too human. It wasn’t the cold, alien malice of the puck.

It was grief. Pure and simple. And for the first time, in a choice that felt like

stepping off a cliff, Otsi chose to trust a feeling over a fact. It was a terrifying,

liberating step into the dark.

“Okay,” Otsi said, the single word sounding loud and foreign in the quiet

kitchen.

She bent down, her movements stiff, and scooped a handful of the protective

ash into an empty salt shaker from the counter. A portable circle. It was

a flimsy, ridiculous notion, something her grandmother might have done.

Something she now did without a second thought.

“What are you doing?” Priya asked.

“If this place is a story,” Otsi said, her voice gaining a sliver of its old,

analytical tone, “then we need to get to the end of it. She wants us to go

to the library.” She looked at Priya, a silent question in her eyes. Are you with

me?

Priya gave a slow, deliberate nod. The kitchen, with its dead puck and

malevolent shadows, suddenly felt like the most dangerous place in the world.

Anywhere was better than here.

They stepped over the blue line of the ash circle, a boundary that now felt as

significant as crossing an international border. The air outside it was thick

and heavy, charged with a hostile energy that made the hairs on their arms

stand up. The house was aware of them. It was watching. They crept down the

main hall, their footsteps loud on the old wooden floorboards. The eyes of the

portraits on the walls seemed to follow them, their painted smiles curdling

into sneers. Every creak of the house was a whisper. Every shadow was a

waiting thing.

The library doors were massive, carved from dark, heavy oak. They loomed

at the end of the hall like the gates to a mausoleum. Otsi put her hand on the

cold brass handle, took a breath, and pushed. The door swung inward with

a low, groaning complaint, opening into a room that smelled of old paper,

leather, and dust.

The library was a two-story cathedral of books. Shelves soared up to a

vaulted ceiling, crammed with thousands of leather-bound volumes. A rolling

ladder leaned against one wall, looking like a skeletal finger pointing to the

heavens. In the center of the room, a massive mahogany desk sat like an altar,

its surface littered with papers, an old-fashioned fountain pen, and a single,

heavy, leather-bound book that lay open.

Priya drifted toward the desk, her artist’s eye taking in the controlled chaos

of the room. She watched Otsi, saw the way her gaze swept over the shelves,

the way her shoulders relaxed just a fraction. This was Otsi’s territory. A world

of text and research. But this was different. The air here was just as thick with

menace as the rest of the house. Priya ran a hand along the desk, her fingers

coming away with a layer of fine dust. No one had been in here for a long, long

time. Except for whatever had left that open book.

“Thornfield,” Otsi breathed, her eyes fixed on the name stamped in faded

gold leaf on the book’s cover.

The Journals of Alexander Thornfield. She reached out, her fingers hovering

over the brittle, yellowed page as if it might bite. This had to be it. The heart

of the mystery. The ghost had led them here.

Come on, Otsi, think, she commanded herself. You’re a researcher. This is just

a primary source. But her hands trembled as she touched the page. This wasn’t

some dusty manuscript in a climate-controlled university archive. This very

well could be a piece of the haunting itself.

Priya watched her, a knot of concern tightening in her stomach. She saw

the woman she’d fallen in love with—the brilliant, confident academic who

could dismantle any argument with a wry smile and a perfectly chosen quote—

standing at the edge of an abyss. Otsi’s entire worldview, the bedrock of logic

and reason she had built around herself, was crumbling, and Priya didn’t know

how to help her. All she could do was stand there, a silent witness, a hand to

hold if she reached for it.

Otsi’s eyes scanned the page. The handwriting was an elegant, spidery script,

the ink faded from black to a rusty brown. The words themselves seemed to

hum with a strange energy, making her head ache.

“October 31, 1892,” she began reading, her voice a low murmur. “Eleonora is

gone a full year today. The silence in this house isn’t an absence of sound anymore;

it is a presence…”

As she spoke the word “presence,” a sudden, bone-deep cold seeped into the

library, a chill that had nothing to do with the storm. Priya shivered, rubbing

her arms, her breath misting in the air. From a dark corner of the room came

a soft, mournful sigh that was not the wind.

Otsi’s eyes darted up from the page, meeting Priya’s wide, terrified gaze for

a half-second before she forced her attention back to the journal, her knuckles

white where she gripped the brittle paper. She continued, her voice now a little

tighter.

“The spiritualists and their table-rapping theatrics have proven to be nothing

but a cruel farce… But there are other ways. Older ways. The local savages, the

Mohawk, speak of pathways between the worlds…”

Otsi flinched as if struck. Savages. The word was a ghost from a different

haunting. Suddenly, she wasn’t in the library; she was ten years old, standing

beside her grandmother as a visiting anthropologist with kind eyes and a tape

recorder called their sacred stories ‘charming little fables.’

She remembered the polite, tight smile on her grandmother’s face, the

feeling of a vibrant, living thing being handled, cataloged, and dismissed by

someone who saw it only as a dead specimen.

He was a thief, yes.

But worse than that, he was a collector. And he had tried to pin the soul of

her people to a board like a butterfly.

“…Their legends may hold a kernel of truth, a key to a mechanism they are too

primitive to comprehend. I have acquired one of their artifacts… And I have begun

to construct my own apparatus, a synthesis of their crude mysticism and our modern

electrical science. An engine to amplify the signal, to punch a hole through the

veil.”

A low hum started up, a vibration so deep they felt it in their teeth. It seemed

to be coming from the floor beneath them, from the very foundations of the

house—a phantom echo of a machine long dead, or perhaps one that was only

sleeping.

Otsi’s breath hitched. She read the next lines aloud, her voice a strained

whisper. “Tonight, I make the attempt. I will use the story he told me—the

one of the ravenous, disembodied head—as a catalyst. Its hunger, he said, is a

bridge…”

CRACK-THUMP!

A massive, leather-bound book launched itself from a high, shadowy shelf

and crashed to the floorboards twenty feet away, its spine broken, pages

fluttering open like a dying bird. The gold leaf on its cover was still legible in

the dim light:

Folkloric Cannibalism Motifs of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Priya choked back a scream. Otsi stumbled back from the desk, her heart

hammering against her ribs. This wasn’t a history lesson. It was a séance. They

were reading the house its own bedtime story, and the house was illustrating.

“Keep reading,” Priya whispered, her voice fierce. “We have to see where it

goes.”

Otsi nodded, her throat tight. She looked up at Priya, her eyes wide with a

dawning, sickening understanding.

“Oh, God. He didn’t know what he was doing. He thought the stories were

just… symbols. Tools. He was trying to call back his dead wife.”

“And he called something else instead,” Priya finished, her gaze fixed on

the fallen book as if it might leap up and attack them. The low hum from the

floor was growing louder, more insistent.

Otsi’s eyes fell back to the last, frantic lines of the entry. The elegant script

had devolved into a panicked chicken-scratch, the ink smudged as if by a

trembling hand.

“The engine works. God help me, the engine works. A door has opened.”

The lights in the library flickered violently, plunging them into a strobing,

nauseating twilight. The hum rose to a low, grinding growl.

“But it is not my Eleonora who answers.”

“Something has come through. Something vast and cold and so terribly, terribly

hungry.”

“It whispers to me from the corners of the room. It wears her face, but its eyes

are full of stars and static. It knows my thoughts. It knows my name. It calls itself

the space between.”

“I have made a terrible mistake. I cannot close the door.”

A floorboard groaned on the second-floor landing above them.

They both froze, their heads snapping up. A shadow detached itself from

the deeper shadows of the upper balcony. It was long and thin, a stark black

figure against the gloom. It wasn’t Thornfield. It wasn’t the woman. It was

something else. Something that didn’t belong.

The figure moved, its limbs bending at angles that were subtly, horribly

wrong. It was like watching a badly rigged CGI character, the movements fluid

but inhuman. It took a step, and the sound wasn’t the creak of wood, but a

soft, wet, tearing sound.

Priya reached out and her hand found Otsi’s, her fingers lacing through hers,

a small, solid anchor in a world that was dissolving into a nightmare. Her

touch was a silent gesture of support, a promise.

I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.

Otsi squeezed her hand, a wave of gratitude so fierce it almost brought tears

to her eyes. She wasn’t alone. And right now, that was the only thing that

mattered.

The thing on the balcony turned its head, and even in the dim light, they

could see that it had no face. Just a smooth, blank expanse of skin, like a

mannequin. Then, with a sound like grinding static, a mouth tore open in the

center of that blankness, a jagged, smiling gash full of too many teeth.

It was the hunger. The thing Thornfield had awakened. The thing from the

story Otsi had put in a box of ones and zeros.

And it was free.