Chapter 1: The House on Sycamore Lane

Ethan Hayes sat in his rental car for the third time in ten minutes, engine running, air conditioning fighting the late afternoon heat. Through the windshield, 1247 Sycamore Lane stared back at him—a modest two-story colonial with faded blue shutters and a lawn that had seen better days. The new owners had painted the front door red, a cheerful splash of color that felt wrong somehow, like lipstick on a corpse.

Eight years. Eight years since he'd fled this place, this street, this entire zip code. Eight years of therapy sessions, sleepless nights, and the kind of carefully constructed normalcy that required constant maintenance. His therapist, Dr. Martinez, had suggested this visit as part of his "closure work."

Face the past to free your future, she'd said in that gentle, practiced tone that made him want to punch something.

Ethan killed the engine and stepped out, immediately regretting it as the humid Chicago air hit him like a wet blanket. The neighborhood looked smaller than he remembered, shabbier. Mrs. Peterson's prize-winning rose garden had been replaced by xeriscaping. The Kowalskis' swing set was gone, leaving only four mysterious holes in their backyard. Time moved forward, apparently, even when you weren't paying attention.

He walked slowly down the sidewalk, each step feeling heavier than the last. The muscle memory was still there—crack in the pavement where he'd wiped out on his bike, the storm drain where he'd lost his favorite baseball, the oak tree his father had helped him climb when he was seven and afraid of everything except the man who could make any shadow less frightening just by being there.

Dad.

The thought hit him like a physical blow, stealing his breath. Daniel Hayes had died on this street, just two houses down from their own front door. Massive heart attack at forty-two, the paramedics said. Gone before anyone could do anything. Gone before Ethan could say goodbye, could tell him about the scholarship, could ask him why the hell he'd been walking alone at midnight on a Tuesday.

That last question had haunted him for years. Dad never walked at night. Never. He was a creature of habit, a man who locked the doors at sunset and settled in with his crossword puzzles and Discovery Channel documentaries. What had driven him out into the darkness that night? What had he been looking for?

Ethan forced himself to keep walking until he stood directly across from his childhood home. The red door really was an abomination. His mother had loved the old green one, had spent an entire Saturday painting it the color of sea glass. She'd remarried three years ago—Tom, a perfectly nice accountant from Milwaukee—and they lived in a bland subdivision where all the houses looked the same and nobody died mysteriously in the street at midnight.

The familiar ache of old anger twisted in his chest. She'd moved on. Remarried. Started over. Meanwhile, Ethan couldn't even drive past a hospital without his hands shaking.

He pulled out his phone, thinking he might take a picture for Dr. Martinez, proof that he'd actually done this thing she'd assigned. As he fumbled with the camera app, something moved in his peripheral vision.

Ethan looked up, and his blood turned to ice water.

Across the street, standing in the shadow between the Hendersons' house and their neighbor's tall hedge, was a figure. A man. Tall, wearing the kind of casual khakis and polo shirt that had been his father's weekend uniform. The figure stood perfectly still, hands at his sides, face obscured by shadow.

But Ethan knew that posture. Knew the exact slope of those shoulders, the way the man held his head slightly tilted to the right when he was thinking.

"Dad?" The word escaped before he could stop it, barely a whisper but somehow the loudest sound in the universe.

The figure didn't move. Didn't respond. Just stood there in the stripe of shadow, impossibly still in a way that living people never were. Even from fifty feet away, Ethan could feel eyes on him, watching with an intensity that made his skin crawl.

His phone slipped from suddenly nerveless fingers, clattering onto the pavement. When he looked up again, fumbling to retrieve it, the shadow was empty.

Ethan stared at the space for a full minute, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The rational part of his mind—the part that had kept him functional for eight years—began its familiar work. Trick of the light. Grief hallucination. Stress response. He'd been dreading this visit for weeks; of course his traumatized brain would conjure his father's ghost at the moment of maximum emotional vulnerability.

Except.

Except the figure had been too tall. His father had been five-foot-ten on a good day. This man had been at least six feet, maybe more. And there had been something wrong with the way he stood, something that tickled the back of Ethan's mind like a half-remembered nightmare.

A car horn blared behind him, and Ethan realized he was standing in the middle of Sycamore Lane, phone in one hand, the other pressed against his chest like he was trying to hold his heart in place. A woman in a minivan was glaring at him through her windshield, three kids strapped into car seats behind her.

He stumbled back to the sidewalk, mumbling an apology, and looked again at the shadow between the houses. Still empty. Of course it was empty. Dead people didn't lurk in suburban shadows, no matter how much the living might want them to.

But as he walked back to his rental car on unsteady legs, Ethan couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching him go. The sensation crawled between his shoulder blades like ice water, persistent and wrong. He didn't look back until he was safely behind the wheel, doors locked, engine running.

The street looked normal in the rearview mirror. Quiet suburban tableau of mailboxes and driveways and the gentle rustle of leaves in the summer breeze. But shadows, he realized, were everywhere. Between houses, under trees, in the spaces where sunlight couldn't quite reach. And any one of them could be hiding something that wore his father's shape but wasn't his father at all.

Ethan put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb, careful not to speed despite every instinct screaming at him to floor it. In the rearview mirror, Sycamore Lane grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared entirely.

He'd come looking for closure, for some kind of peace with his past.

Instead, he had the terrible suspicion that his past had found him first.

The drive back to his hotel should have been simple—forty minutes of highway that would take him from the familiar hell of his childhood to the anonymous safety of a Marriott near the airport. Tomorrow he had a conference to attend, presentations to give, a carefully structured life to return to. Normal things. Sane things.

But fifteen minutes into the drive, as he merged onto I-94, Ethan couldn't shake the feeling that the shadows in his rearview mirror were deeper than they should be. And when he glanced at the passenger seat, just for a second, he could have sworn he saw the ghost of a smile that was far too wide for any human face.

His hands tightened on the steering wheel, and Ethan Hayes drove toward whatever was waiting for him in the dark, knowing with sick certainty that his father's death had been just the beginning of something much worse.