They were just killing time. Marc was driving, as usual, elbow out the window despite the October chill, while Ryan rode shotgun, animated as always, re-living the final minutes of the match they’d just seen. His scarf still tied too tightly around his neck, his voice two notches too loud, usual stuff.

In the backseat, Dani was fading in and out of a food coma-nap, hood pulled over his head, while Luca was finishing the fries Marc had given up on ten minutes earlier. They weren’t drunk, mind you. Just full, sleepy and content. A perfectly normal night after enjoying a win of their favourite team. 

Marc took the usual shortcut off the state road, not because it saved that much time (barely 10 minutes), but because he liked the silence out there. Long stretches of cracked pavement, just a couple of streetlights at forgotten, neglected intersections, and then nothing but the occasional open field and sagging telephone pole. “Trust me, it’s ten minutes faster,” he always said, and nobody used to argue. The mood in the car was slow and joking.

The trees widened, and in the plains at the outskirts of the city the GPS flickered like always, and someone made the usual joke:

"Still haunted?"
"Nah, exorcised last spring. Groupon deal."
They laughed. A stupid, sleepy kind of laugh, the kind that dies mid-breath when someone says:
“Wait. What the hell is that light?”

Marc slowed down, then stopped the car, and four heads turned at once: on the right side of the road, across a patch of overgrown gravel, stood Veeska Palace. They knew it, everyone did. Officially listed as an abandoned property since forever, changing owners every 1 or 2 years, and technically now owned by “a holding group” that no one had ever heard of. The city had tried to demolish it. Several times during several decades. Every attempt had fallen through, though, halted by missing paperwork, delayed inspections, legal disputes no one remembered even filing. It had been that way for those decades: forgotten, but still standing.

But it wasn’t what it was supposed to be that unsettled them. The place was a shell: burned, crumbling, windows empty like eye sockets. No gate. No vines. Just open. The kind of place you'd pass every day and never, ever think to step inside unless you're a vandal.

Except tonight there was a light. Faint, golden. Flickering maybe? They couldn't be sure. At first, they thought it was a streetlight reflection, then maybe squatters. Then maybe... something else.

They stopped the car. The light came from the ground floor, right where the main door once stood, now nothing but a scorched archway into shadows, and just beyond that arch, clearly visible, was a room. And inside the room, a poker table, and at that table, an elegant man, dressed in a red suit.

He was alone, sitting upright, facing something unseen inside the room. A chandelier above him, somehow still hanging, swayed slightly, casting dull reflections across the floor. His left hand tapped a rhythm on the green felt of the table while his right hand hovered inches above a spread of cards.



From that distance, they couldn't be sure. But those cards... they weren’t still. They were moving. On their own.

None of them spoke, but Marc somehow found the courage to open the door and get out of the car, taking a couple of steps forward to see better. He was the only one who played poker: weekly home games, tactics, pot odds, strategies... he was a true poker game lover, and something about the scene pulled at him. Something about the man’s posture, his calmness, his focus. But it wasn't curiosity, he would later recall, he felt like he was just... drawn. He would later say it felt like being invited. Like the man had been waiting someone.

“Marc. MARC! Hey, why don't we... why don't we leave? Like, right now?” Ryan said, stepping out of the car right behind him, fear in his voice. 
“He’s not looking at us,” Marc replied quietly, almost to himself. “He’s looking at... the seats?”.

Marc took another two steps forward before the others reached him. Dani grabbed his wrist, Luca blocked his path and he didn't fight them. He just stood there, staring at the man under the swaying chandelier.

Then the light went out. No fade. No flicker. Just gone. Black. The inside of the mansion swallowed itself back into shadow.

That's when not even Marc wanted to stay a second longer. They got back in the car and he pushed on the pedal, tires screeching, the old engine roaring to life to take them far away from that place. The road felt... colder, and the night heavier.  Marc didn’t speak up until they got back in town, he just kept his eyes ahead. But Ryan, the last to look away, checked the side mirror, and... he saw that man again. Standing in the doorway now, still, watching.

They never drove that road again.

A couple of months later, during a party, Ryan found the courage to ask Marc about that night once again.
“Would you have really went in? I mean, that night, at the Veeska Palace?”

Marc shrugged. Took a sip of beer. Then he looked at his friend and quietly said:

“I have no idea. I don't think he was waiting for me, or for us. Maybe that's why the light went out."