Chapter 4: Are You My Mama?

Chapter 4: Are You My Mama?

The splintered wood of the chair wedged under her doorknob was Sofia’s only comfort. She’d scrambled away from Brandon’s spectral advance, throwing a heavy stack of textbooks at the space where he’d been. There was no satisfying thud, just the sound of books slapping against the closet door as the phantom boy dissolved like smoke. She had slammed the door, barricaded it with her dresser, and then fled to the other side of her tiny apartment, sealing the main entrance behind her.

Now she was a prisoner. A prisoner in a cage with a monster she couldn't see.

For two days, she existed in a state of hyper-vigilant terror. The physical agony of withdrawal was a raging storm inside her, turning her skin clammy and her bones to aching ice. Her thoughts were a fractured, paranoid mess. The bruise on her arm from the Raincoat Man had deepened to a venomous shade of purple, a constant, throbbing reminder of the threat that waited outside. The ghost of a hanged boy waited behind a flimsy wooden dresser inside. There was no escape.

Her only connection to the outside world was the laptop she’d come to both crave and despise. It chimed incessantly. A torrent of emails, a flood of commissions from the brokenhearted. A car crash victim in Ohio. An overdose in Seattle. A lonely old woman in Florida. Each email was a potential paycheck, a way to end the torment of her rebelling body. Each one was also a potential death sentence, an invitation for a new horror to manifest in her suffocating apartment.

She ignored them, letting the notifications pile up, each chime another turn of the screw. She rationed the last dregs of her whiskey, the burn in her throat a pale imitation of the relief she desperately needed. By the third day, the shaking was so bad she could barely hold the bottle. The world was narrowing to a single, screaming point of need. She was going to break.

That’s when the email arrived. It cut through the noise of the others, its subject line a simple, gut-wrenching plea: My son, Leo.

Sofia’s trembling fingers clicked it open. The message was from a woman named Eleanor Gable. Her seven-year-old son, Leo, had been abducted from a park playground three weeks ago. There had been no ransom, no witnesses, no trace. The police had given up hope. The case had gone cold.

“They tell me he’s gone,” Eleanor wrote, her words blurring through Sofia’s watery eyes. “But I can’t live in that silence. I can’t sleep, thinking about how scared he must have been. I need a different story. Can you write me one? Write me a story where he wasn’t scared. Where he found something magical and just… wandered off. A place where he’s safe and happy. I’ll pay anything. Five thousand dollars. Please.”

Five thousand dollars.

The number hung in the air, shimmering like a desert oasis. It wasn't just a fix. It was a month of rent. It was food. It was enough money to maybe, just maybe, get out of this city, run from the ghosts, and start over. It was a ticket out of hell.

The risk was enormous. What new horror would this commission unleash? An abductor? A child’s scream echoing in the walls? But the withdrawal was a tangible demon, its claws already deep in her flesh. The ghosts were just shadows. The pain was real.

Her choice was already made.

She dragged herself to the desk, her body a dead weight. She accepted the first half of the payment and the money appeared like a magic trick, a digital miracle. Then, she began to write the most dangerous lie of her life.

She didn't write a note from Leo. She wrote a story for Eleanor. A gentle, soothing fairy tale. She described a hidden gate in the roots of an old oak tree in the park. A secret garden, bathed in golden light, a place where lost children go.

Leo wasn’t taken, she wrote, the words feeling like shards of glass in her throat. He found a secret door. He saw a place with flowers that hummed and butterflies made of light. He wasn’t scared, Eleanor. He was enchanted. He’s in that garden now, playing. He’s safe. And he’s waiting for you.

It was a masterpiece of comforting bullshit, a treacly, poisonous balm for an incurable wound. She poured every ounce of her depleted creative energy into it, crafting a lie so beautiful it almost made her weep. She sent it, and the second half of the payment hit her account instantly.

Relief, potent and dizzying, washed over her. She scrambled for her phone, her fingers barely able to tap the screen, and ordered a delivery. Whiskey, pills—enough to silence the screaming demons for a week. They would leave it outside her door. She could survive. She had bought herself more time.

She sat on the floor, her back against the barricaded door, waiting. The silence in the apartment felt different now, charged with anticipation. She had meddled with a new kind of grief, not the grim finality of suicide, but the jagged, open wound of the unknown. She had filled that void with a saccharine fantasy. What would the echo of that lie sound like?

Then came the sound she was dreading.

A knock.

It wasn't at the barricaded main door.

It came from the thin, flimsy door that led from her living area to the fire escape.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Soft. Hesitant. The sound of a child’s knuckles against wood.

Sofia’s heart stopped. No one used the fire escape. No one even knew she was here. She crawled silently across the floor, every creak of the floorboards a thunderclap in her ears. Her apartment was on the fifth floor.

She peered through the peephole, a small, grimy circle of glass.

A small boy stood on the rusted metal landing, his back to her. He was wearing a red t-shirt and blue jeans, just as Eleanor Gable had described. His hair was a messy mop of brown curls. He was impossibly, terrifyingly small.

It was Leo.

A wave of vertigo sent the room spinning. This couldn’t be happening. Was this the real boy? Had he somehow escaped and found his way here? The desperate, insane hope lasted only a second before it was crushed by the chilling reality of her situation. This was no rescue. This was a summoning.

As if sensing her presence, the little boy slowly turned around. His face was pale and smudged with dirt, his eyes wide and eerily vacant. They weren't angry or menacing, just… empty. He looked lost.

He stared directly at the peephole, as if he could see her through it, and his small, pale lips parted. His voice was a soft, high-pitched whisper, carrying through the solid wood of the door as if it weren't there at all.

“Are you my mama?”

The question struck Sofia with the force of a physical blow, stealing the air from her lungs. She squeezed her eyes shut, a raw sob catching in her throat.

When she opened them again, the boy was still there. But he was doing something. He raised his small hand. Clutched in his fist was a triangular shard of green glass, the broken bottom of a beer bottle. Its edges were jagged and sharp.

While his empty eyes remained locked on the peephole, he pressed the point of the glass against the fabric of his red t-shirt, right over his heart. With a slow, steady pressure, he began to drag it downwards.

The fabric tore. Then the skin beneath it.

A thin, dark line of blood welled up, stark and crimson against his pale chest. He didn't flinch. He didn't make a sound. He simply continued to carve into his own flesh with a detached, focused curiosity. He wasn't hurting himself. He was drawing.

Sofia watched, paralyzed by a surreal, psychological horror that eclipsed everything she had experienced before. The Raincoat Man was a monster of rage. Brandon was a specter of despair. But this… this was an act of grotesque innocence.

The boy pulled the glass away, having completed his work. He looked down at the bleeding, five-petaled shape he had meticulously carved into his own chest.

He looked back up at the peephole, a faint, questioning smile gracing his lips. His whisper slithered through the door again, a direct quote from the lie she had sold his mother.

“Look,” he said, his voice filled with a hollow, childish pride as blood began to stain the front of his shirt. “A flower.”