Chapter 11: The Jukebox Plays for Danny

Chapter 11: The Jukebox Plays for Danny

The attic was a pressure cooker of stale air and impossible choices. Jedediah Hale’s final, terrified warning hung between them, a ghost in the dusty gloom. To break the pattern is to unmake the town. The words were a death sentence for their simple plan. Destroying the Keystone wasn’t cutting the puppet master’s strings; it was setting fire to the entire stage, with everyone they knew—real or otherwise—still on it.

Sarah hugged her knees tighter, her face buried in her arms. “My mom… my dad,” she whispered, her voice muffled. “Sam. Are they part of the pattern? If we break it, will they just… dissolve? Like the fog?”

The question was a physical weight on Eli’s chest. He looked at his bandaged right hand, the knuckles still a deep, angry purple. He had made his choice in that bathroom, a scream of defiance against the hollow peace The Murmur offered. He wouldn't become a puppet. But could he live with being an executioner?

“We don’t know,” he said, the words feeling thin and useless. “But we know what happens if we do nothing. It gets Sam. It gets your family. And when it’s done with them, it will find someone else. The pattern will be maintained. Forever.” He leaned forward, forcing her to look at him. “Ritter didn’t die so we could sit in an attic and wait for the end. He gave us a weapon. He told us to starve it.”

“By killing everyone?” she shot back, her eyes flashing with a desperate, fearful anger.

“No,” Eli insisted, his mind racing, latching onto the one thing he understood, the one rule he had seen in action. “By breaking the routine. Look what happened when I refused the offer. The fog, the whispers—they recoiled. They don't know how to handle defiance. They only know how to handle consistency. That’s its food, Sarah. Predictability. Routine. The same 3,417 souls, day in, day out, sleeping when they should be sleeping, walking where they should be walking.”

A spark of an idea, born from his horrifying encounter with David Shepherd, began to glow in his mind. The way the man had glitched, replaying a fragment of George Miller’s memory. The replacements weren’t just blank slates; they were vessels, loaded with the residual data of the people they’d overwritten.

“They’re puppets,” he said, thinking aloud, the plan taking shape. “And puppets follow their programming. But what if we introduce a new command? Something that clashes with the current code? Something loud and repetitive and out of place…” His eyes found Sarah’s. “What if we can make them all glitch at once?”

The town diner, “The Hollow,” sat dark and silent on Main Street, a relic of chrome and red vinyl that was the heart of the town’s social life. It was also where he and Danny had spent hundreds of hours, wasting away afternoons, feeding coins into the hulking Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner.

“Danny’s favorite song,” Eli said, the words tasting of grief and sudden, brilliant clarity. “'Last Nite' by The Strokes. He played it so much Mrs. Gable used to threaten to unplug the machine. It’s Selection B-12. I can still see it.” The memory was a painful, perfect anchor. A pattern. A piece of the old Hollow’s End, before Danny was erased. “If we can get in there and rig the jukebox to play that song, on a loop, just before 3:17… the replacements… they’re tied to the memories of this place. A strong, familiar pattern like that, blasting through the nightly silence… it should draw them. It’s an anomaly they’ll be forced to process.”

Sarah’s analytical mind caught on instantly. “You’re creating a feedback loop. A broken routine. It will draw the puppets, and if the puppets are drawn, their keepers will have to follow.”

“Brody,” Eli confirmed. “And anyone else who’s ‘aware.’ It will pull them all to Main Street. And that will give us a clear path to the old town hall on the edge of the woods.”

It was a wild, desperate gamble, built on a theory about a monster they barely understood. But it was better than doing nothing. It was action. It was a fight.

Slipping out of the house was like escaping a mausoleum. They moved through the silent streets, a two-person insurgency in a town of sleepers. The air was cold and carried the faint, electric tang of The Murmur’s presence, a constant, low-level hum just beneath the threshold of hearing. Every darkened window felt like an eye. The faint shimmer Sarah could now see clung to the edges of the manicured lawns and neat picket fences, a gossamer-thin veil over reality.

The back door of the diner was flimsy, its lock yielding to the combined force of Eli’s shoulder and a well-placed kick. They slipped inside, the familiar smell of stale coffee and fried food a ghostly welcome. Moonlight filtered through the large plate-glass windows, giving the chrome fixtures a skeletal gleam.

The jukebox was a silent, monolithic beast in the corner. Eli got to work, his tech-savviness, usually reserved for setting up security cameras or fixing his laptop, finding a new, desperate purpose. He pried open the back panel with a butter knife from the kitchen. Inside was a dizzying maze of wires and vacuum tubes.

“I need a timer,” he whispered.

Sarah unclipped her digital watch. “It’s 2:58. The alarm function is loud.”

Working with a surgeon’s focus, Eli stripped the ends of the watch’s battery wires, bypassing the coin mechanism and rigging a crude circuit. If his theory was right, when the alarm went off at 3:10 AM, it would complete the circuit and trigger Selection B-12. Over and over again.

They finished with minutes to spare, slipping back out the rear door and melting into the deep shadows of an alleyway across the street. Crouching behind a large, foul-smelling dumpster, they waited. The silence of Hollow’s End pressed in, absolute and expectant.

Eli’s phone screen read 3:09. His breath caught in his throat.

Then, at precisely 3:10 AM, the night shattered.

The thumping, frantic drum intro of “Last Nite” exploded from the diner, a raw, jagged pulse of sound that felt like a physical assault on the town’s sacred quiet. It was impossibly loud, a shout of rebellion echoing down the empty streets.

For a moment, nothing happened. Eli’s heart sank. Had he been wrong?

Then, a porch light flicked on down the street. A screen door creaked open. A figure emerged, walking with a slow, deliberate pace. It was Mr. Shepherd. His head was cocked, his expression utterly blank, like a machine trying to process a foreign sound.

Another door opened. Then another. From the side streets and the houses lining Main Street, they came. The replacements. They moved not like a mob, but like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Their steps were subtly uncoordinated, their eyes vacant, fixed on the source of the sound. They didn’t try to enter the diner. They simply gathered on the sidewalk in front of it, a silent, mesmerized congregation, their heads tilted in unison as the same song began its second loop. Among them, Eli saw the new family that lived where the Wilsons used to be, their faces slack with confusion. It was a convocation of the uncanny, a gathering of living ghosts.

The plan had worked.

A moment later, a vehicle turned onto Main Street, its headlights off. Sheriff Brody’s cruiser slid to a silent stop a block away. He got out, his face a mask of cold, controlled fury. He saw the crowd of mesmerized replacements, heard the defiant music, and his jaw tightened. He wasn't looking for Eli and Sarah. He was looking at his perfect, pristine garden, now overrun with malfunctioning scarecrows. Another man, a town council member Eli vaguely recognized, got out of a sedan behind Brody, his expression equally grim. The gardeners had arrived to deal with the weeds.

This was their chance.

“Now,” Sarah whispered, her voice trembling with adrenaline.

They exchanged a single, charged look—a silent acknowledgment of the fear, the grief, and the sliver of terrible hope that drove them. While every aware eye in Hollow’s End was fixed on the jukebox playing for Danny, they slipped from the alley, keeping to the deepest shadows. They moved away from the chaos on Main Street, their feet carrying them toward the dark, tangled woods at the edge of town, and the decaying old town hall that held the heart of their nightmare.