Chapter 10: The Mark on the Wall

Chapter 10: The Mark on the Wall

Five years.

Five years was a lifetime. Long enough for Alex to grow into a young man, his lanky teenage frame filled out with the lean muscle of adulthood. Long enough for the raw, screaming terror of that summer to scab over, leaving behind a network of scars on his soul that ached whenever the weather changed.

The city was his fortress. He had chosen a college in the densest, most unapologetically urban part of the state, a place of concrete, steel, and glass. A place where the only trees were confined to neat, rectangular plots in the pavement and the only untamed wilderness was the snarl of downtown traffic. He’d thrown himself into the cold, hard logic of computer science, building firewalls in his code and in his mind. He surrounded himself with the predictable hum of servers and the binary certainty of ones and zeros—a direct, deliberate antidote to a world where the laws of physics could fray at the edges.

They never spoke of it. That was the unspoken, unbreakable rule. The three of them—Alex, Maya, and their father—had formed a silent pact. The official story, the one they told the police, the therapists, and the concerned relatives, was that Sarah Miller had suffered a breakdown. She had wandered into the woods and vanished. The search parties had found nothing. The case went cold. She became a photograph on a missing persons bulletin, her warm, familiar smile a tragic, public lie.

Their father, Mark, had crumbled. The man who had shattered a door to save them had been shattered in turn by the memory of what he’d left behind. He was a ghost in his own life now, a quiet, hollowed-out man who worked, came home, and drank bourbon in a silent living room. He never picked up a rifle again. The woods had taken not only his wife, but the core of who he was.

Maya, now seventeen, coped with a fierce, brittle control. Her life was a fortress of routine and schedules. She was a straight-A student, a volunteer, a planner. She built her life like a high wall, brick by brick, leaving no cracks for the darkness to seep through. But Alex saw it in the way she always needed to know where he was, the faint tremor in her hand if a room was too quiet, the way she still couldn't sleep without a light on in the hall.

Alex himself had become a chronicler of his own paranoia. He saw patterns everywhere. A man wearing a heavy coat on a warm day would make his heart seize, the image of the Winter Man flickering at the edge of his vision. A billboard with a smile just a little too wide would make his stomach churn. Sometimes, late at night, when the city was quiet, he thought he could smell it—that cold, metallic scent of ozone and earth that had filled the vandalized cabin. He would dismiss it as a phantom, a trick of a mind scarred by trauma. He had to. The alternative was unthinkable.

He was walking across campus to meet Maya for lunch. It was a crisp autumn afternoon, students milling about in sweaters and scarves. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue. It was a perfect, normal day. Alex clutched the strap of his messenger bag, the rhythm of his steps on the pavement a comforting, solid sound. He was okay. They were okay. They had survived.

He cut through the library, the hushed silence a welcome relief. He passed a row of computers, his eyes scanning the screens—code, essays, social media. Logic. Order. Safety. He was almost convinced.

His phone buzzed. It was Maya. Running 5 mins late. Grab us a table outside?

Alex texted back a quick reply and pushed through the far doors of the library, taking a familiar shortcut through a service alley that ran behind the science building. It was a narrow canyon of brick and concrete, dumpsters lined up against one wall, the ambient noise of the campus muffled and distant. He’d walked this way a hundred times.

But today, something felt different. The air in the alley was still, and unnaturally cold. The sunlight didn't seem to reach the pavement. He was halfway down the narrow passage when he heard a sound that made him freeze.

Click. Scrape. Click.

The sound of claws on concrete.

His head snapped up. A woman was walking a small terrier at the far end of the alley. The dog strained on its leash, its claws making the faint, scraping sound. Alex’s heart, which had leaped into his throat, slowly settled back into his chest. It’s just a dog, he told himself, his hand trembling slightly. It’s just a damn dog.

He took a deep breath, annoyed at his own reflexive panic. He started walking again, his eyes on the ground. That’s when he saw it.

On the grimy brick wall of the science building, about chest high, was a carving. It wasn't the faded, layered graffiti that covered the rest of the alley. This was new. The marks were sharp and deep, gouged into the concrete footer beneath the brick, the dust from the carving still settled in a faint, pale powder on the ground below it.

It was a spiral. A crooked, looping sigil that twisted in on itself.

Alex’s breath hitched. The world tilted on its axis. The sounds of the campus, the distant traffic, the crisp autumn air—it all vanished, replaced by the suffocating silence of the deep woods. He could smell the pines, feel the damp earth under his feet, hear the whisper of a voice with a smile too wide.

He reached out a trembling hand, his fingers hovering over the rough-carved lines. This wasn't a memory. This wasn't a phantom. This was real. Solid. He could feel the cold grit of the concrete. He recognized the specific, jagged turn at the center, the way the outer loop almost doubled back on itself. It was the exact same symbol that had been painted on the walls of the cabin. The same mark that had adorned the grotesque altar of the Rabbit Tree.

A wave of icy dread washed over him, so powerful it made him physically sick. He stumbled back, his eyes wide with a horror he thought he had left behind in the Appalachian hills. He scanned the alley, the empty windows of the buildings, the slice of blue sky above. He felt a familiar pressure on the back of his neck, the chilling sensation of being watched by unseen eyes.

It wasn't a place. The horror wasn’t locked away in that forgotten holler in the mountains. It had never been about the woods, or the cabin. Those things were just its hunting ground. A place where it had learned their faces, their fears. A place where it had taken a piece of them, a piece it still held. His mother's face, trapped and screaming behind the monster’s eyes, flashed in his mind.

It had an anchor. It had a connection.

And now it was here. In his fortress of concrete and steel, miles and lifetimes away from that terrible summer. The echo from the crooked mile had not faded. It had only grown quieter, more patient.

He stood frozen in the cold shadow of the alley, the freshly carved symbol a declaration of war. A promise. He looked at the mark, then back towards the bustling, sunlit campus where his sister was waiting, blissfully unaware. They hadn't escaped. They had only been given a head start.

It had followed them.