Chapter 5: The Box in the Attic

The business card sat on Ethan's kitchen counter like an accusation. Carol Hayes, his father's sister, had given it to him at the funeral eight years ago—a simple white rectangle with her name and a phone number in understated black text. He'd kept it all these years, buried in his wallet behind expired gym memberships and forgotten receipts, never quite able to throw it away.

Aunt Carol. The black sheep of the Hayes family, the one who'd asked uncomfortable questions at the funeral and made his mother's jaw tighten with barely suppressed anger. She'd been the only one to suggest that Daniel Hayes's death hadn't been as simple as cardiac arrest, the only one to hint that there were things about the family that Ethan didn't understand.

His mother had cut contact with Carol immediately after the funeral, forbidding any mention of her name in the house. Too morbid, she'd said. Too focused on dark things that were better left buried.

Now, sitting in his fortress of light with muddy footprints staining his closet floor and something wearing his father's face hunting him through the shadows, Ethan wondered if Carol's morbid fascination might actually be useful.

The phone rang four times before a gravelly voice answered. "Carol Hayes."

"Aunt Carol? It's... it's Ethan. Daniel's son."

Silence stretched across the line, long enough that Ethan wondered if she'd hung up. When she finally spoke, her voice was carefully controlled. "Ethan. It's been a long time. Eight years, if I'm counting correctly."

"Yes, I... I need to ask you about Dad. About his death."

Another pause, shorter this time. "What's brought this on? Your mother made it very clear that the subject was closed."

Ethan closed his eyes, trying to find words that wouldn't make him sound completely insane. "Something's been happening. Things that don't make sense. I think they might be connected to how Dad died."

"What kind of things?"

The question was sharp, urgent in a way that made Ethan's pulse quicken. She wasn't dismissing him. She wasn't suggesting therapy or grief counseling or any of the other comfortable explanations he'd been offered. She was taking him seriously.

"Someone's been following me. Someone who looks like Dad, but..." Ethan swallowed hard. "But wrong. Like his face doesn't fit properly. And there have been footprints in my apartment, muddy footprints that appear in places where no one should be able to walk."

Carol's intake of breath was sharp enough to carry across the phone line. "Jesus Christ. It's happening again."

"Again?"

"Not over the phone. Where are you now?"

"My apartment in Rogers Park."

"Pack a bag. Light clothes, nothing too heavy. And bring something metal—iron if you have it, steel if you don't. Meet me at the Starbucks on Clark and Armitage in two hours."

"Carol, what—"

"Two hours, Ethan. And whatever you do, don't let yourself be caught alone in the dark. Keep the lights on, stay in public spaces, and don't trust anything that looks familiar."

The line went dead.

Ethan stared at the phone, his mind racing. It's happening again. What was happening again? And why did Carol sound more terrified than surprised?

He packed quickly—change of clothes, toiletries, his laptop, and the heaviest wrench he could find in his building's maintenance closet. The entire time, he kept glancing at the windows, watching the afternoon light fade toward evening. He needed to meet Carol before full dark, needed to reach the safety of a public space before the thing that wore his father's face came hunting again.

The Starbucks was crowded with the usual mix of students, freelancers, and people who'd given up on going home at a reasonable hour. Ethan found Carol at a corner table, nursing a coffee that looked like it had gone cold hours ago.

She looked older than he remembered, her hair more gray than brown, but her eyes were as sharp as ever. She was the kind of woman who noticed things other people missed, who asked questions that made family gatherings uncomfortable.

"You look like hell," she said without preamble as he sat down.

"Thanks. Really what I needed to hear right now."

Carol studied his face with clinical detachment. "When did you last sleep? Really sleep, not just closing your eyes and hoping for the best."

"Three days, maybe four. It's hard to keep track."

She nodded grimly. "The exhaustion makes it worse. Weakens your defenses, makes you more susceptible to... influence." She leaned forward, lowering her voice. "Tell me everything. From the beginning. Every detail, no matter how strange it seems."

Ethan found himself spilling the entire story—Sycamore Lane, the hotel courtyard, the parking garage, the footprints in his closet. Carol listened without interruption, her expression growing darker with each detail.

When he finished, she was quiet for a long moment, staring into her cold coffee like it might contain answers.

"Your father never told you about the family history," she said finally. "Linda made sure of that. She thought if you didn't know, you'd be safe."

"Know what? What family history?"

Carol reached into her purse and pulled out a manila envelope, thick with papers and photographs. "The Hayes family has been dealing with things like this for generations. Your great-grandfather wrote about them, called them 'shadow walkers'—entities that could take the shape of the dead and use grief as a doorway into our world."

She slid a faded photograph across the table. It showed a man in his thirties, wearing the kind of formal clothes that marked it as early twentieth century. But it was the eyes that made Ethan's breath catch—intelligent, haunted eyes that looked disturbingly familiar.

"Your great-grandfather, Thomas Hayes. He spent most of his adult life researching these things, trying to understand how to fight them. The knowledge was passed down, father to son, each generation adding to the understanding."

"But Dad never—"

"Daniel tried to break the cycle. He thought if he ignored it, if he lived a normal suburban life and never spoke of such things, the darkness would pass you by." Carol's voice was bitter. "Your mother encouraged him. She wanted normal, wanted safe, wanted to pretend that some families aren't born with targets painted on their backs."

Ethan stared at the photograph, seeing his own features reflected in that long-dead face. "What happened to him? To Thomas?"

"He died protecting his family from something that had taken his wife's shape. But not before he documented everything he'd learned, every ritual and protection he'd discovered." Carol's fingers drummed against the table. "Your father inherited that knowledge, used it to keep your family safe for years. But something went wrong eight years ago."

"The night he died."

"The night the protections failed." Carol leaned back in her chair, suddenly looking every one of her sixty-plus years. "Daniel called me that evening, said something was wrong, that the barriers were weakening. He was going to renew them, perform the ritual that had kept your family hidden. But he never got the chance."

The pieces were starting to fit together, forming a picture that was both terrifying and strangely liberating. His father hadn't died of natural causes. He'd died fighting something that was now hunting Ethan.

"Where is it? Thomas's research, Dad's notes, all of it?"

"In storage. I've been keeping it safe, waiting for the day when you'd need it." Carol glanced around the coffee shop, noting the thinning crowd as evening approached. "But we need to move. These things are stronger in the dark, and I don't want to be caught in the open when the sun goes down."

They drove in Carol's ancient Honda to a storage facility on the north side, a complex of low buildings and roll-up doors that looked like it had been designed by someone with no imagination whatsoever. Carol's unit was near the back, Unit 247, secured with two separate padlocks and what looked like some kind of charm made of twisted metal and small stones.

"Iron and salt," Carol explained, noticing his stare. "Old protections, but effective ones."

The storage unit was larger than it looked from outside, crammed with boxes and filing cabinets and the accumulated detritus of decades. But it was the box in the center of the space that drew Ethan's attention—an old wooden chest, dark with age, carved with symbols that seemed to shift and writhe when he wasn't looking directly at them.

"Your father's legacy," Carol said, lifting the lid with reverent care. "Everything Thomas learned, everything Daniel added to the collection. Maps, journals, photographs of things that shouldn't exist. And most importantly, the rituals."

Ethan peered into the box and felt his world shift again. There were dozens of leather-bound journals, their pages filled with cramped handwriting in multiple hands. Photographs of shadows that looked too solid, too purposeful to be natural. And scattered throughout, sheets of paper covered with symbols that made his eyes water if he stared too long.

He picked up one of the journals at random, flipping to a page marked with a faded ribbon. The handwriting was his father's, neat and precise:

"The entity appeared again last night, standing at the edge of the yard. E doesn't see it yet—thank God—but Linda is starting to notice the signs. Temperature drops, electronics failing, that feeling of being watched. The protections are holding, but barely. I may need to consider more permanent measures."

The entry was dated three months before his father's death.

"He was protecting us," Ethan whispered. "All those years, he was fighting this thing to keep it away from me and Mom."

"And succeeding, until something went wrong." Carol pulled out another journal, this one bound in black leather and locked with a small brass clasp. "This was his last journal, the one he was writing in the weeks before he died. I've never been able to open it—the lock is more than mechanical."

Ethan took the journal, and the clasp clicked open at his touch. Carol's eyes widened.

"Bloodline recognition," she breathed. "It was keyed to Hayes family members."

The pages inside were filled with increasingly frantic entries, his father's neat handwriting growing more and more erratic as the dates approached September 15th:

"The barriers are failing faster than I can repair them. Something has changed, some fundamental shift that I don't understand. The entity is stronger, more aggressive. It knows E is almost old enough to see it clearly, to become a proper target. I have to find a way to strengthen the protections, to buy him more time."

"Linda refuses to listen, won't let me explain the danger. She thinks I'm having some kind of breakdown, talking about family curses and shadow creatures. Maybe she's right. Maybe I am losing my mind. But the footprints in E's closet this morning were real enough."

"It's September 14th. Tomorrow is the anniversary—not of any human death, but of the first time a Hayes died protecting his family from these things. The entity will be strongest then, most able to cross over. I have to perform the renewal tonight, no matter the cost."

The final entry was just three words, written in shaking letters: "It's too late."

Ethan closed the journal, his hands trembling. "He went out that night to protect us. To renew whatever was keeping that thing away from our family."

"And something went wrong. The ritual failed, the protections collapsed, and Daniel paid the price." Carol was already pulling more items from the box—candles, small bags of what looked like salt, and a knife with symbols etched into the blade. "But he left us the tools to fight back. Everything we need to finish what he started."

"You mean the ritual? The thing he was trying to do when he died?"

Carol nodded grimly. "The Blackwood Chapel, about an hour north of the city. It's where every Hayes for the past century has gone to renew the family protections. Your father's research indicates it's some kind of... thin place, where our world and theirs overlap. The perfect place for both the ritual and for them to break through."

Ethan looked at the assembled materials—the journals full of arcane knowledge, the tools that looked like they belonged in a medieval witch's arsenal, the photographs that proved his family had been fighting monsters for generations.

"How do we know this will work? How do we know we won't just end up like Dad?"

Carol's smile was sharp and humorless. "We don't. But the alternative is letting that thing hunt you down piece by piece, feeding on your grief until there's nothing left of you but a hollow shell. At least this way, we're taking the fight to it."

Outside the storage unit, full dark had fallen. Ethan could feel it like a physical presence, pressing against the thin walls of the building, patient and hungry and wearing his father's beloved face.

Somewhere in that darkness, the thing that had killed Daniel Hayes was waiting for its chance to finish what it had started eight years ago.

But now Ethan had something his father hadn't: the complete knowledge of four generations of shadow fighters, and the desperate fury of a son who finally understood how his father had really died.

The war that had claimed Daniel Hayes was about to enter its final phase.