Chapter 14: The Gallery in the Glade
We moved slower this time. Dave kept the gun trained forward. I swept the beam side to side.
The woods began to change as we descended toward the creek. The trees… they didn’t look right.
The bark on the pines wasn’t rough anymore. It looked smooth. Waxy.
“Dave,” I whispered, touching a tree trunk. “Look.”
My finger smeared the bark. It wasn’t wood. It was crayon.
The trees were turning into drawings.
The further we went, the more the reality degraded. The ferns looked like green scribbles. The ground beneath our feet felt spongy, like layers of paper. The air smelled intensely of wax and ozone.
“We’re in it,” Dave muttered. “We’re in the damn drawing.”
We burst into a small clearing by the creek bed.
And there she was.
Lily was sitting on a large, flat rock in the middle of the shallow water. She was holding a stick, swirling it in the water.
But the water wasn’t water. The creek was flowing with black ink. Thick, viscous ink.
Standing around the clearing, like sentinels, were five figures.
They were crude. Rough shapes made of tangled branches and black slime. They looked like stick figures brought to horrific, three-dimensional life. They had no faces. Just smooth, black ovals.
They weren’t moving. They were just… watching.
“Lily!” I screamed.
She looked up. Her eyes were glassy. She looked like she was sleepwalking.
“Hi, Mommy,” she said dreamily. “They wanted me to draw the ending.”
“Don’t move, sweetie,” Dave said, his voice trembling. He aimed the gun at the closest stick-figure. “Sarah, grab her. On three. One… two… THREE!”
I splashed into the ink-creek. It was cold and sticky, like molasses. I scrambled up the rock and grabbed Lily.
She felt light. Too light.
“I’m not done yet,” she murmured, resisting me. “The Night Babysitter needs a face.”
I looked at the rock she was sitting on. She hadn’t been swirling the stick in the water. She had been drawing on the stone.
She had drawn a face. My face.
But she had crossed the eyes out with frantic, heavy black circles.
Chapter 15: The Hunger
“We are leaving!” I yelled, hoisting her into my arms.
The moment I touched her, the five stick-figures moved.
They didn’t walk. They snapped. Their limbs jerked in unnatural, stop-motion angles. Crack. Snap. Crack.
They closed in on the circle.
BAM! BAM!
Dave fired. Two shots hit the closest figure in the chest.
The bullets passed straight through the slime and branches, thudding into the trees behind it. The figure didn’t even slow down.
“It’s not working!” Dave shouted. “Run, Sarah! Get up the bank!”
I scrambled off the rock, slipping in the ink. Lily was dead weight in my arms.
“He wants to be real,” Lily whispered into my ear. “He needs more paper. He needs more skin.”
One of the figures lunged at Dave. A long, branch-like arm whipped out, striking him across the chest.
Dave flew backward, hitting a tree with a sickening thud. He groaned, the gun flying from his hand and landing in the creek.
“Dave!” I screamed.
I was torn. My brother was down. My daughter was in my arms. The monsters were closing in.
The figure that hit Dave loomed over him. It lowered its blank face. A slit opened where the mouth should be—a vertical slit, not horizontal.
“Leave him!” Dave coughed, clutching his ribs. “Go!”
I turned to run, but the largest figure—the one wearing a tattered suit made of shadows—blocked my path.
It stood seven feet tall. It had no eyes. But it had the smile. The red crayon smile Lily had drawn that morning. It was etched into the black flesh of its face, glowing faintly.
It reached out a hand.
“Give… us…”
The voice wasn’t audio this time. It vibrated inside my skull.
“Give… us… the… maker.”
They wanted Lily. She was the architect. Her imagination was the fuel. They were formless thoughts, hungry for shape, and she was the factory.
I looked down at the black ink rushing around my ankles. I looked at the Maglite in my hand.
Drawings. Wax. Paper.
“Dave!” I screamed. “The lighter! Do you have your lighter?”
Dave was a smoker. He always had a Zippo.
Dave looked up, dazed. He saw me staring. He realized what I meant.
The world around us—the waxy trees, the paper ground. It was flammable.
“Burn it!” I shrieked.
Dave fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out the silver lighter.
The entity in front of me recoiled. It sensed the intent. It shrieked—a sound like tearing metal.
It lunged for me.
I ducked, clutching Lily tight, and swung the heavy Maglite with everything I had.
CRACK.
I hit the entity square in the knee. It didn’t break bone; it sounded like hitting a bag of wet clay. But it stumbled.
“Dave, now!”
Dave flicked the lighter. The flame sparked.
He dropped it into the creek.
Chapter 16: The Inferno
The reaction was instantaneous.
The black ink didn’t just burn; it exploded.
WOOSH.
A wall of blue and orange fire erupted from the creek bed. The heat was blistering.
The waxy trees caught fire instantly. The ground—the spongy, paper-like moss—ignited.
The entities screamed. It was a chorus of agony. The fire seemed to hurt them more than bullets ever could. The one blocking my path burst into flames, its shadowy suit curling up like burning plastic.
“Run!” I screamed, shielding Lily’s face from the heat.
I grabbed Dave’s collar and hauled him up. He was wheezing, but he found his footing.
We scrambled up the muddy bank, the fire roaring at our heels. The woods were turning into an oven.
We didn’t look back. We ran through the burning, scribbled forest. The illusion was breaking. The trees were snapping back to normal wood as the “glamour” burned away.
We burst out of the treeline and onto Dave’s lawn just as the first sirens wailed in the distance.
I collapsed on the grass, clutching Lily. Dave fell beside me, coughing up soot.
I looked back at the woods.
The fire was raging, but it was… contained. It was only burning the section near the creek. The flames were strange—blue and silent.
“Did we kill them?” Dave wheezed.
I looked down at Lily. She was awake now. Her eyes were clear. The glassy look was gone.
“Mommy?” she asked, looking at the fire. “Why did you burn the pictures?”
“Because they were bad pictures, baby,” I sobbed, kissing her soot-stained forehead.
She looked at me, dead serious.
“But Mommy… you can’t burn the ones in the cloud.”
My blood ran cold.
“What?”
“The pictures,” she said, pointing to my pocket where my broken phone lay. “The Night Babysitter said he lives in the cloud now. He said he sent himself to everyone.”
I froze.
The email. The photo from the truck.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. The screen was cracked, but it lit up.
Upload Complete.
Sent to: All Contacts.
My work email. My family group chat. My Facebook friends.
The image of the smiling, eyeless face.
And below it, a caption I didn’t write:
Do you see me? I need you to draw me.
My phone started buzzing.
Notifications. Comments. Likes.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Hundreds of them.
“Cool drawing, Sarah!” “Is this for a movie?” “My kid saw this and wants to draw one too!”
I looked at the woods. The fire was dying.
But in the smoke drifting up into the night sky, I saw it.
Not one face.
Thousands.
Forming in the clouds.
[THE END]
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