Chapter 10: Into the Lion’s Den
We arrived back at the house at 2:00 p.m.
The sun was high. The neighborhood was quiet. The house looked infuriatingly normal. The beige siding, the white trim, the wind chime spinning lazily on the porch.
Dave parked his truck in the driveway, blocking my car in. He reached into the glove box and pulled out his handgun. He checked the chamber and tucked it into the back of his waistband. He also grabbed a heavy-duty flashlight and a crowbar.
“Stay behind me,” he said. “If I say run, you run to the truck and you drive away. Do not wait for me.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
We walked up the path. The front door was still standing wide open, just as I had left it. It swung slightly in the breeze.
We stepped across the threshold.
The smell hit us first.
It wasn’t the smell of crayons anymore. And it wasn’t just the “fear and lavender” Lily had mentioned. It was the smell of ozone—like the air after a lightning strike—mixed with something sweet and rotting. Like spoiled meat covered in perfume.
“Jesus,” Dave muttered, covering his nose with his sleeve.
“Buster?” I called out. My voice trembled. “Buster!”
Silence.
We moved into the living room. The TV was off. The rug was undisturbed.
We checked the kitchen. My coffee cup was still on the counter, cold. Lily’s drawings were scattered on the floor where I’d dropped them.
Dave pointed the flashlight down the hallway. “Bedrooms,” he signaled.
We moved slowly. The floorboards creaked under Dave’s work boots. Every sound sounded like a gunshot in the quiet house.
We reached Lily’s room first.
It was empty. The bed was made (I had made it automatically before the chaos started). But the wall…
I gasped.
The wall beside the bed—the spot where the Night Babysitter stood—was marked. The cream-colored paint was peeling, curling away in long strips as if it had been burned by intense heat. And in the center of the peeling paint, scratched into the drywall, were three words.
I SEE YOU.
The writing was jagged, deep. It looked like it had been carved with a claw.
“Dave,” I whimpered.
He touched the wall. “It’s cold,” he whispered. “Sarah, this wall is freezing.”
We backed out of the room and turned to the Master Bedroom. The door was ajar.
Dave pushed it open with the tip of the crowbar.
The room was trashed.
The mattress was flipped over. The dresser drawers were pulled out, clothes scattered everywhere. The mirror—the big vanity mirror—was shattered.
And in the middle of the chaos, lying on the pile of my clothes… was Buster’s collar.
Just the collar. It was buckled. Intact. But there was no dog.
Dave picked up the collar. It was covered in a thick, black slime. It had the consistency of tar.
“He’s not here,” Dave said, his voice tight. “Sarah, we need to go. Now.”
“But where is he?” I was sobbing now.
“I don’t know, but we are not staying to find out.”
We turned to leave. We were halfway down the hall when the door to the attic—the pull-down hatch in the ceiling—slammed open.
BANG.
The stairs didn’t slide down. Just the hatch fell open, swinging violently.
And from the darkness of the attic, a voice drifted down.
It wasn’t a human voice. It sounded like rocks grinding together. It sounded like audio played backward and then slowed down.
“Mo… mmy…”
It was mimicking Lily.
Dave didn’t hesitate. He raised his gun and fired three shots into the darkness of the attic hatch.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The deafening noise rang in my ears. Dust rained down.
For a second, there was silence.
Then, a laugh. A dry, wheezing laugh that echoed from the attic, then from the walls, then from the floorboards beneath our feet.
“Run!” Dave screamed.
We sprinted. We didn’t look back. We scrambled over the drawings in the kitchen, slipped on the hardwood, and practically fell out the front door.
We jumped into Dave’s truck. He threw it into reverse, peeling out of the driveway, taking out Mrs. Gable’s mailbox in the process.
As we sped away, I looked back at the house one last time.
The attic window. The small, circular window at the very top of the gable.
It was pressed against the glass. The face.
The pale, oval face. No eyes. And a smile that stretched so wide it seemed to split the head in two.
It lifted a hand. A hand with too many fingers.
And it waved.
Chapter 11: The Residue
We didn’t stop until we reached Dave’s house, three towns over.
We sat in his kitchen, trembling. His wife, Julie, took one look at us and poured two stiff whiskeys without asking questions. Lily was in the living room watching cartoons, blissfully unaware that her mother and uncle had just declared war on a nightmare.
“It knows we left,” I said, staring into my glass. “It knows where we are.”
“It’s a house, Sarah,” Dave said, though he didn’t sound convinced. ” ghosts are haunted houses. They don’t… travel.”
“Lily said he stood close. She said he didn’t need eyes.” I looked up at Dave. “The slime on the collar. Did you keep it?”
Dave reached into his pocket. He had wrapped the collar in a shop rag. He placed it on the table and carefully unwrapped it.
The black slime was still there. But it was moving.
It was bubbling, dissolving into the fabric of the rag. And as it dissolved, it gave off that smell again. Ozone and rot.
“I’m calling a priest,” Julie said, crossing herself.
“No,” Dave said. “Priests are for demons. This… this feels biological. It feels wrong.”
“I’m checking the camera,” I said.
I didn’t want to. God help me, I didn’t. But I had to know if they were still in the house.
I opened the Wyze app.
Connection Failed.
Camera Offline.
They had killed the power. Or the Wi-Fi.
But then, a new notification popped up. Not from Wyze. From my email.
I opened it.
Sender: Unknown Subject: We are hungry.
There was no text in the body of the email. Just an attachment.
It was a picture.
A picture taken inside Dave’s truck. From the backseat.
It showed the back of Dave’s head. And the back of my head. Taken while we were driving away.
We thought we had escaped. We thought we were alone in the truck.
But something had been sitting in the backseat with us. Something invisible. Something that knew how to use a phone.
And if it was in the truck…
I slowly turned my head toward the living room, where the sound of cartoons had suddenly stopped.
“Lily?” I called out.
Silence.
“Lily!”
I ran into the living room.
The TV was off. The remote was on the floor.
Lily was gone.
The back door, leading to Dave’s wooded backyard, was wide open.
And leading out the door, stamped onto the hardwood floor, were footprints.
Black, tar-like footprints.
They weren’t shoe prints. They were bare feet. But they were long. Too long. And they had no toes.
Chapter 12: The Trail of Tar
Panic is a cold thing. People say it’s hot, like fire, but it’s not. It’s ice. It freezes your lungs and makes your fingers numb.
I stood in Dave’s living room, staring at the open back door. The cool Oregon breeze drifted in, carrying the scent of pine and that other smell—the sickly sweet rot of ozone.
“Julie, call the police,” Dave barked, snapping me out of my trance. He was already moving, checking the magazine of his handgun again. “Tell them my niece has been abducted. Tell them we are pursuing a suspect into the woods behind the property. Do not mention the monsters. Do not mention the slime. Just say a man took her.”
Julie was sobbing, clutching the phone to her chest. “Dave, you can’t go out there. It’s dark.”
“I don’t care if it’s hell,” Dave said, his voice dropping to a gravelly growl I’d never heard before. “Sarah, grab the flashlight. Stay on my hip. If you see movement, you yell.”
I grabbed the heavy Maglite from the counter. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped it.
We stepped out the back door.
The footprints were distinct on the wooden deck, burning into the varnish like acid. But once they hit the grass, they became harder to track. The black slime matted the grass down, creating a faint, glistening trail under the beam of our flashlights.
The woods behind Dave’s house were dense. Douglas firs, ferns, tangled underbrush. It was a labyrinth even in the daylight. At night, it was a mouth waiting to swallow us.
“Lily!” I screamed. The name ripped out of my throat, raw and painful. “Lily, baby! Mommy is coming!”
“Shh,” Dave hissed, stopping abruptly. He held up a hand.
“Don’t shush me, Dave! She’s my daughter!”
“Listen,” he whispered urgently.
I strained my ears against the ambient noise of the wind in the trees.
At first, nothing. Then, from deep in the treeline, about a hundred yards north… a giggle.
It was high-pitched. Innocent.
“I’m hiding!” the voice sang out.
It was Lily.
“Lily!” I shouted, sprinting toward the sound.
“Sarah, wait!” Dave lunged for me, but I was already running. I didn’t care about the dark. I didn’t care about the thing with the oval face. I just heard my baby.
Chapter 13: The Distortion
I crashed through the ferns, briars tearing at my jeans. The flashlight beam bounced wildly, illuminating tree trunks and spiderwebs.
“Lily! Keep talking to Mommy! Where are you?”
“Over here!” The voice came from the left now. Closer.
I veered left, sliding on a patch of mud. I scrambled up, panting.
“I see you!” the voice giggled.
It sounded wrong.
I stopped, my chest heaving. The adrenaline was fading just enough for my brain to process the sound.
It was Lily’s voice. But the cadence… it was too perfect. It was a loop. The giggle was identical every time. The inflection on “I see you” was exactly the same as when she played peek-a-boo three years ago.
“Sarah!” Dave crashed through the brush behind me, breathless. He grabbed my arm, spinning me around. “Stop running. You’re walking into a trap.”
“She’s right there, Dave. Didn’t you hear her?”
“I heard it,” Dave said grimly, sweeping his gun and flashlight in an arc. “But look at the ground.”
I looked down.
We had lost the trail of tar. The grass here was clean. Undisturbed.
“Over here!” the voice called again. This time, it came from behind us. From the direction of the house.
I spun around. “What? But she was just…”
“Up here!” The voice came from above now. High in the canopy.
“I’m hiding!” The voice came from the right.
“It’s throwing its voice,” Dave whispered, sweat beading on his forehead. “Or there’s more than one.”
Then, a new sound cut through the woods.
It wasn’t a giggle. It was a scream.
But it wasn’t Lily’s scream. It was Buster.
My dog. The dog we had left behind miles away.
The sound was a horrific yelp of pain, cut short by a wet crunch. It sounded like it was ten feet away, behind a massive oak tree.
“Buster?” I whispered.
Dave raised the gun. “Stay behind me.”
He moved toward the oak tree, circling it slowly. The flashlight beam sliced through the dark.
He reached the other side of the tree.
“Oh god,” Dave choked out.
I peeked around his shoulder.
There was no dog. There was no blood.
Stuck to the bark of the tree, at eye level, was a small, black speaker. A Bluetooth speaker. The kind kids clip to their backpacks.
It was oozing that black tar. The slime was pulsing, moving in and out of the speaker mesh like it was breathing.
And from the speaker, the sound came again. Buster’s yelp.
“It’s… it’s playing recordings,” I realized, horror dawning on me. “It’s using technology. The phone in the truck. The camera. It’s learning.”
“Destroy it,” Dave said. He smashed the butt of his gun against the speaker, shattering the plastic. The black slime hissed, retreating into the cracks of the tree bark.
“Mommy?”
This time, the voice was faint. Weak. And it didn’t sound like a loop.
“Mommy, I don’t like this game.”
It came from further down the slope. Toward the creek.
“That’s her,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “That’s really her.”
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