The House of Quiet Teeth

When Mara Ellison accepts a winter contract at Blackmere House, a cliffside rehabilitation retreat for the wealthy and the dying, she expects grief, silence, and the usual polished lies of the desperate rich. Instead, she finds a place built over an old sinkhole where the dead were once buried too shallow, and a staff that insists every guest is improving even as their reflections begin to lag behind them. The house is immaculate, the sea is always below, and at night something beneath the foundations knocks in patient, human rhythms.

Mara came here for answers about her brother, who vanished after his own stay at Blackmere years ago, but the deeper she digs, the less certain she becomes of what she remembers. Rooms rearrange themselves. Guests wake speaking in voices they do not own. Flesh changes in small, horrible ways, as if the house is teaching bodies to make room for something larger. And in the dark under the house, behind a door that should not exist, something is counting the living like pieces in a mouth.