Marco froze.
The scratching came again.
Slow.
Weak.
Almost like tiny fingers dragging across old wood.
Vittoria's face turned pale.
"No..."
She stepped backward, shaking her head.
Marco leaned closer to the floor.
A narrow gap between two floorboards caught his attention.
Something moved beneath it.
His breathing stopped.
Tiny pale fingers slowly reached upward through the darkness.
For one terrifying second, nobody moved.
Vittoria screamed.
"Please don't!"
But Marco had already grabbed the nearby crowbar.
Ignoring every warning, he lifted it high above his head.
Then brought it crashing down.
The old floorboards exploded apart.
Splinters flew across the room.
Dust filled the air.
Marco tore away another board with trembling hands.
The small hand disappeared into the darkness.
Heart pounding, he leaned over the opening.
His face drained of color.
"Emilio..."
The whispered name escaped his lips before he even realized he had spoken.
Beside him, Sofia burst into tears.
She pointed into the hole.
"There..."
Hidden beneath the floor wasn't the ghost everyone feared.
It was a terrified little boy, barely alive inside a cramped hidden crawl space.
Dirty, frightened, and shaking, he blinked against the sudden light after days trapped in darkness.
Investigators would later discover that the hidden chamber had once been used decades earlier to conceal children during wartime.
Someone in recent days had unknowingly sealed the entrance during renovation work, trapping the missing child inside without anyone realizing it.
Marco carefully lifted the weak boy into his arms while Vittoria called for an ambulance through tears.
As emergency sirens approached the old mansion, one mystery remained impossible to explain.
No one had told Sofia there was a child beneath the floor.
Yet somehow...
She had heard him crying when no one else could.