Chapter 6: The Whispering Glass

The drive back to Ethan's apartment felt like descending into a predator's den. Carol followed in her Honda, the two vehicles forming a pathetic convoy against the encroaching darkness. The box of his father's research sat in Ethan's passenger seat like a talisman, filled with centuries of accumulated knowledge about fighting things that shouldn't exist.

But knowledge, Ethan was learning, was a double-edged sword. The more he understood about what was hunting him, the more he realized how little his father's protections had actually accomplished. They hadn't defeated the entity—they'd merely delayed it, bought time that had finally run out.

His apartment building looked different at night, shadows pooling in places where they shouldn't be able to gather. The lobby's fluorescent lights flickered as he passed, and the elevator made sounds he'd never noticed before—soft scraping noises that might have been mechanical failure or might have been something else entirely.

Carol was waiting by his door when he emerged from the elevator, her face grim. "We need to get inside quickly. It's almost full dark, and these things are stronger when the sun goes down."

Ethan's apartment blazed with light exactly as he'd left it, every lamp and bulb burning at maximum intensity. But something was wrong. The air felt thicker somehow, charged with a tension that made his teeth ache. And there was a smell—faint but persistent, like earth after rain mixed with something organic and rotting.

"Do you smell that?" he asked Carol as they set the research box on his kitchen table.

She nodded grimly. "Grave dirt. They carry the scent of the places they claim to come from." She began pulling journals from the box, spreading them across the table with practiced efficiency. "We need to find the renewal ritual, understand exactly what your father was trying to accomplish."

They worked by the harsh glare of his work lights, poring over generations of cramped handwriting and arcane diagrams. The Hayes family's war against the shadow walkers stretched back to the 1890s, each generation adding their own discoveries to the collective knowledge.

Thomas Hayes had been the first to document them systematically, describing entities that fed on grief and loss, that could perfectly mimic the dead to lure the living into darkness. His son Robert had discovered that iron and salt could provide temporary protection. Robert's son William had learned that certain places—crossroads, old churches, sites where violence had left psychic scars—were weak points where the barriers between worlds grew thin.

And Daniel Hayes had synthesized it all into a comprehensive system of protections, wards that could keep a family hidden from supernatural predators for decades at a time.

"Here," Carol said, pointing to a diagram in one of the newer journals. "The Blackwood Chapel ritual. It has to be performed on the anniversary of the first Hayes death—September 15th. That's in three days."

Ethan studied the ritual description, feeling his heart sink. It was complex, requiring specific materials and precise timing, and it had to be performed at the chapel itself—a ruined church in the middle of nowhere, the perfect place for an ambush.

"What if we don't wait?" he asked. "What if we try to perform it somewhere else, somewhere safer?"

"The ritual is tied to that specific location. The chapel sits on a confluence of ley lines, a place where the barriers between worlds are naturally thin. It's the only place where we can—"

She was interrupted by a sound that made them both freeze: a soft tapping against the living room window.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Rhythmic, patient, the sound of fingernails against glass. But Ethan's apartment was on the fifteenth floor. There was nothing outside that window except empty air and a forty-foot drop to the street below.

They moved to the living room together, Carol clutching one of the iron charms from the research box. The window looked out over the city, Chicago's lights stretching to the horizon in a glittering carpet of normalcy. But there, pressed against the glass from the outside, was a face.

Daniel Hayes smiled at his son through fifteen floors of empty air, his features exactly as Ethan remembered them but wrong in ways that made his mind refuse to process the details properly. The smile was too wide, stretching his father's familiar features into something obscene. His eyes caught the apartment's light and reflected it back like mirrors, cold and hungry and utterly alien.

And his mouth was moving, forming words that couldn't possibly carry through the glass but somehow reached Ethan's ears anyway:

"Why won't you let me in, son? I've been so cold out here, so alone. I just want to come home."

The voice was his father's exactly—the same cadence, the same slight Chicago accent, the same warm tone that had once read him bedtime stories and helped with homework. But underneath it was something else, something that made Ethan's skin crawl with primitive terror.

"I know you've missed me. I've missed you too. We could be together again, just like before. All you have to do is open the window."

Ethan took a step toward the glass, some deep part of him responding to that beloved voice despite everything his rational mind was screaming. This was his father. His dad, who had died too young and left too much unsaid between them. Maybe—

Carol's hand slammed into his chest, stopping him mid-step. "That's not him," she hissed. "Look with your eyes, not your heart."

Ethan forced himself to really look at the figure pressed against his window. The proportions were wrong—too tall, limbs too long for the torso. The smile stretched past the normal limits of human anatomy, revealing teeth that were sharp and numerous as a shark's. And the eyes... the eyes held no warmth, no recognition, no trace of the man who had loved Ethan enough to die protecting him.

"Don't listen to her, Ethan. She never understood our family, never understood what we mean to each other. I've been waiting for you, watching over you, just like I always did. Open the window and let me come home."

The tapping became more insistent, the sound of those too-long fingers against the glass taking on an urgent rhythm. And beneath his father's voice, Ethan could hear other sounds—whispers in languages he didn't recognize, the soft scratch of claws against stone, the distant howl of wind through empty places.

"Do you remember the camping trip when you were eight? When you got scared of the dark and I sat with you all night, telling you stories about brave knights and sleeping dragons? I'm still here, son. I'm still protecting you. Just let me in."

The memory hit like a physical blow. Ethan did remember that camping trip, remembered being terrified of the shadows outside their tent, remembered his father's patient voice weaving stories that turned the darkness into something magical instead of threatening. It had been one of their best weekends together, one of the memories he treasured most.

But how could this thing know about it? How could it have access to his most private, precious moments with his father?

"I know what you're thinking," the voice continued, growing more urgent. "You're wondering how I could know these things if I'm not really your father. But I am him, Ethan. Death changes us, but it doesn't erase love. I've been fighting to get back to you for eight years, fighting through darkness and cold and spaces between spaces. Don't let that fight be in vain."

Tears were streaming down Ethan's face now, his heart at war with his reason. The rational part of his mind knew this was exactly the kind of psychological manipulation his father's journals warned about—these entities fed on grief, used love as a weapon against the living. But the desperate, broken part of him that had never stopped missing his father wanted so badly to believe.

"Remember what I used to tell you when you had nightmares? That monsters weren't real, that they were just shadows our minds created when we were afraid? I was wrong, son. Monsters are real. But so is love, and love is stronger than any darkness. Let me prove that to you. Let me come home."

The window began to fog with impossible breath, condensation appearing on the inside surface of the glass despite the fact that nothing living could be breathing on it from the outside. In the fog, words began to appear, traced by an invisible finger:

I LOVE YOU

I'M SORRY

PLEASE

Ethan reached toward the window latch, his hand moving without conscious volition. Behind him, Carol was shouting something, but her words seemed to come from very far away. All that mattered was his father's voice, his father's love, his father's desperate need to come home after eight years of wandering in darkness.

The latch turned under his fingers.

The window began to slide open.

And in that moment, the thing wearing his father's face revealed its true nature. The smile stretched impossibly wide, splitting Daniel Hayes's beloved features like a seam coming apart. The eyes became pits of starlight and shadow, ancient and hungry and utterly inhuman. The voice, when it spoke again, was still his father's but layered with harmonics that belonged to no earthly throat:

"Thank you, son. Now we can be together forever."

The iron charm Carol threw struck the thing square in what passed for its face, and the reaction was immediate and violent. The pseudo-Daniel shrieked—a sound like metal tearing and wind through bone—and recoiled from the window. For a moment, its stolen features wavered, revealing glimpses of something underneath that Ethan's mind refused to process.

Then it was gone, vanished into the night as if it had never been there at all.

Ethan collapsed to his knees, the window still half-open, cool night air rushing into his overheated apartment. Carol slammed the window shut and locked it, then began pulling more iron charms from her pockets, pressing them against the glass and muttering what sounded like Latin prayers.

"It's getting stronger," she said, not looking at him. "More sophisticated. Your father's journals mention this—as the anniversary approaches, they become better at mimicry, better at psychological manipulation."

"It knew," Ethan whispered, his voice broken. "It knew about the camping trip, about things only Dad and I shared. How is that possible?"

Carol's face was grim. "They don't just wear the faces of the dead. They consume them, digest their memories, their personalities, everything that made them who they were. The longer they exist, the more complete the imitation becomes."

The implications hit Ethan like a sledgehammer. "You mean it actually has Dad's memories? It really is him, in some way?"

"No." Carol's voice was sharp, definitive. "It's a parasite wearing your father's skin and speaking with his stolen voice. The Daniel Hayes you loved, the man who died protecting you—he's gone. What's left is just bait, designed to lure you close enough for it to feed."

Ethan looked back at the window, where the condensation was already fading. But the words were still visible, ghostly impressions on the glass: I LOVE YOU. I'M SORRY. PLEASE.

"Three more days," he said. "We have to survive three more days, and then we can end this."

"If we make it that long." Carol was already packing the journals back into their box. "And if the ritual works the way your father intended. There are no guarantees, Ethan. This thing has been hunting your family for generations. It's patient, intelligent, and it learns from every encounter."

As if summoned by her words, the lights flickered. Not all of them—just the ones near the windows, creating a brief moment of deeper shadow where something might lurk and watch and plan.

In that moment of dimness, Ethan could swear he heard his father's voice again, distant and mournful, calling his name from somewhere in the walls.

The war for his soul had entered its final phase, and the enemy was using every weapon at its disposal—including the love of a dead father for his grieving son.