Chapter 5: The New Neighbors

Chapter 5: The New Neighbors

The walk home from the library felt like a journey through enemy territory. Eli saw Hollow’s End with new, cursed eyes. Every familiar face passing in a car, every neighbor waving from their porch, was now a question mark. Were they real? Had they always been here? Or were they just… filling a space? The number Sarah had uncovered—3,417—was no longer a statistic; it was the bars of a cage built around them all, and he was the only one who could see it.

He turned onto Oakhaven Drive, his sneakers scuffing on the familiar pavement, his mind still a chaotic whirl of empty record drawers and Ritter’s grim warnings. He was so lost in thought that he almost didn’t see it.

The Millers’ house was back.

He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, his breath catching in his lungs. The two-story colonial, which had been a void of impossible black forest just two nights ago, now stood pristine and solid under the afternoon sun. The lawn was freshly mowed. The windows gleamed. A shiny, new-model sedan he’d never seen before was parked in the driveway. As he watched, a large moving truck, its back ramp still down, rumbled to life at the curb and pulled away, its diesel engine a jarringly normal sound in the suddenly alien landscape.

A family was moving in. Or rather, a family had already moved in.

A woman was placing a pot of aggressively cheerful yellow flowers on the porch railing. A boy, maybe ten years old, was methodically bouncing a basketball in the driveway, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump echoing in the quiet street. A man was fussing with a brand-new sprinkler on the lawn.

From a distance, they looked perfect. Too perfect. A family straight from a catalogue. Eli felt a cold knot of dread tighten in his stomach. He ducked behind the thick trunk of an old oak tree across the street, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm. He needed to see. He needed to be sure.

He watched them for a solid ten minutes. Their movements were… economical. When the woman finished with her flowers, she turned and walked back into the house with a smooth, unhesitating gait. The boy didn’t vary the rhythm of his bouncing, his eyes fixed on the pavement with an unnerving intensity. The man adjusted the sprinkler head with small, jerky twists, his head cocked at an odd angle. And their smiles. When they occasionally looked at each other, they smiled. The smiles didn’t touch their eyes. They were wide, placid, and identical, like masks they had all agreed to wear.

This was it. A replacement. The machine of Hollow’s End, the hungry thing that liked things neat and tidy, was filling the vacancy left by the Millers. The population had to remain 3,417.

Eli knew he had to do something. Watching from the shadows wasn’t enough. The note in his pocket, with its shaky, aged version of his own handwriting, felt heavy with warning: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO SEE US. Poking the bear, Ritter had called it. But he had to know. He had to hear them speak, to see if they were just strange people, or something else entirely.

Taking a deep, shaky breath, he stepped out from behind the tree and forced his feet to move. He crossed the street, his footsteps feeling loud and clumsy on the asphalt. He aimed for the man on the lawn, plastering a weak, neighborly smile on his own face.

“Hey there,” Eli said, his voice coming out as a croak. He cleared his throat. “Just saw the truck leaving. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

The man looked up. His face was pleasant, unremarkable, with sandy hair and pale blue eyes. But the smile he offered was the same one Eli had seen from across the street. Too wide. Too static.

“Thank you, son,” the man said. His voice was a smooth, even baritone, completely devoid of warmth. “Good to be here. I’m David Shepherd. This is my wife, Clara, and our son, Leo.” He gestured vaguely toward the house and the boy, who didn’t look up from his basketball.

“Eli Vance. I live just down the street,” Eli managed, his own smile feeling like a painful grimace. “The Millers lived here before. Did you know them?”

He threw the name out like a stone, watching for the ripple. For a moment, nothing happened. David Shepherd’s blank smile remained fixed. Then, something flickered deep in his pale blue eyes. A disconnect. A brief, terrifying short-circuit.

His eyes lost focus, the pupils dilating slightly. The smile vanished, replaced by a slack-jawed expression of mild confusion. His posture, which had been stiff and formal, suddenly relaxed. He chuckled, a deep, familiar, booming sound that shot a bolt of pure ice through Eli’s veins. It was Mr. Miller’s laugh.

“The Millers?” the man said, and the voice was no longer the flat baritone of David Shepherd. It was the hearty, cheerful tenor of George Miller, the man who had taught Eli how to throw a curveball. “Kid, you’re looking at him! Funny joke.”

Eli took an involuntary step back, his blood running cold.

The man who looked like David Shepherd but sounded like George Miller clapped his hands together, a gesture Eli had seen a thousand times. “Hey, now that you’re here, you tell your folks we’re still on for that barbecue Saturday, right? Susan’s making her famous potato salad. Don’t you dare be late.” He winked, a perfect, crinkly-eyed George Miller wink. He was accessing a memory. A memory of a conversation about a barbecue that was supposed to happen last weekend. A barbecue that never happened because the Millers and their house had been erased from existence.

The moment stretched, taut and horrifying. The thing wearing David Shepherd’s face stood there, channeling the ghost of the man it had replaced, its mind playing back a fragment of a dead man’s life.

Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was over.

The man’s eyes snapped back into focus. He blinked twice, a flicker of genuine confusion crossing his features. The friendly, relaxed posture vanished, and he was once again the stiff, formal David Shepherd. The wide, empty smile slid back into place.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice returned to its flat baritone. He shook his head slightly, as if clearing a fog. “Zoned out there for a second. Long day of unpacking.”

He turned away from Eli without another word, kneeling down to make a final, jerky adjustment to the sprinkler head. The conversation, the glitch, the horrifying peek behind the curtain—it was all dismissed as a moment of tiredness.

Eli didn’t say goodbye. He just backed away, his legs shaking uncontrollably. He turned and ran, not stopping until he was inside his own house with the door locked, the chain slid, and his back pressed against the wood.

He finally understood. The people taken by the 3:17 event weren’t just gone. Their lives, their memories, their very mannerisms were stored somewhere, like data on a corrupted hard drive. The replacements weren’t just new people. They were puppets, hollow shells walking around in the daylight, and sometimes—just sometimes—the old ghosts spoke through them.