Chapter 5: A Conversation for One

Chapter 5: A Conversation for One

Dawn was a cruel joke. It bled through the tinfoil-covered windows, casting a weak, metallic light into the living room, illuminating the spot on the floor where Cal’s body had fallen. But the body was gone. The only evidence of the night’s horror was the acrid, lingering smell of burnt flesh and a scattering of tiny white buttons from Cal’s ripped shirt.

Leo hadn't moved from his spot on the floor inside his bedroom. He’d watched the blackness outside his door slowly turn to a bruised grey, every nerve coiled tight, waiting for the sound of shuffling feet, for the return of the thing that wore his roommate’s face. His singular, desperate desire was for it all to be over—one way or another. Either the monster would come for him now, or the sun would rise and burn the memory away.

What he got was far worse.

The scent of brewing coffee drifted under his door, a smell so aggressively, offensively normal that it felt like a hallucination. It was followed by the sound of a cupboard opening, the clink of a ceramic mug. Leo pushed himself to his feet, his muscles screaming in protest. He had to see. He had to know.

He opened his door and walked into the kitchen, his movements stiff and robotic. Cal was standing by the counter, his back to Leo, wearing a faded old bathrobe. He was humming, a tuneless, gravelly little song. He turned, holding a steaming mug, and a faint smile touched his lips. It was the most terrifying thing Leo had ever seen.

“Morning, sunshine,” Cal said, his voice completely normal, infused with its usual cynical warmth. “Rough night?”

The question was a bucket of ice water to Leo’s soul. He stared at Cal, at the familiar wrinkles around his eyes, the unkempt grey hair. There was no trace of the static-voiced entity, no hint of the malevolent intelligence that had looked out from those same eyes hours earlier. This was just Cal. The obstacle wasn't a monster anymore; it was a man pretending the monster didn't exist.

“Don’t you… Cal, don’t you remember?” Leo’s voice was a ragged whisper. “Last night. At 3:17. You… you weren’t you.”

Cal took a slow sip of his coffee, studying Leo over the rim of the mug. He sighed, a weary, paternal sound. “Kid, I don’t know what you got into last night, but you came crashing out of your room like the devil was on your tail. Woke me right up. You were standing there in the dark, shining your phone in my face, yelling nonsense. Figured you were having a bad trip. You look like you haven’t slept a wink.”

The gaslighting was so perfect, so complete, that Leo’s reality tilted on its axis. He felt a dizzying wave of self-doubt. Had he dreamt it? Had he stood in the living room, high and paranoid, and projected his fears onto his eccentric roommate?

No. He remembered the cold. He remembered the layered voice. And he remembered the smell.

“Your shirt,” Leo said, his voice gaining a sliver of strength. “You tore your shirt open.”

Cal chuckled, a dry, dismissive sound. “I tripped over the damn rug in the dark, trying to figure out what all the shouting was about. Caught my shirt on the edge of the coffee table. Ripped the whole thing. Now, are you going to have some coffee, or are you just going to stand there looking like you’ve seen a ghost?”

It was a perfect, plausible lie. Every piece of evidence, every terrifying moment, was being methodically explained away, painted as a product of Leo’s own unstable mind. He was being pushed into a corner, isolated not just from the outside world, but from his own sanity.

But there was one thing. One piece of proof so undeniable, so viscerally real, that no lie could cover it.

As Cal turned to place his mug on the counter, the belt of his bathrobe loosened, and the robe parted slightly. For a split second, Leo saw it. On the pale, gaunt skin of Cal’s chest, nestled in the sparse grey hair, was the raw, angry-red shape of the three-pronged symbol. It wasn't as fresh as it had been in the dark, the edges now a purplish-brown bruise, but it was unmistakably a burn. A brand.

Leo’s breath hitched. “Your chest,” he said, pointing with a trembling finger. “Cal, what happened to your chest?”

Cal glanced down, pulling his robe tighter with a flicker of annoyance. “Spilled some hot oil making bacon yesterday. Clumsy old fool.” He wouldn't meet Leo’s eyes. “Look, I get it. This place is weird, I’m weird. You’re stressed out, working that crappy job. Maybe you should lay off the weed for a few days, clear your head.”

That was it. The final, crushing dismissal. Cal wasn't just denying the event; he was diagnosing Leo as the problem. Leo felt a surge of cold fury mixed with terror. He knew what he saw. The burn wasn’t a random splatter of grease; its lines were too clean, its shape too deliberate. It was the Interface Mark. He wasn't crazy.

He turned without another word and walked back to his room, the image of the brand seared into his mind. He was trapped. Trapped in a house with a man who was either the world’s most convincing liar or a hollowed-out shell whose conscious mind was being actively shielded from the horrors his body was enduring. He didn't know which was worse.

The rest of the day passed in a suffocating, silent tension. Leo stayed in his room, the door locked. He could hear Cal moving around the house, the sounds of mundane life—the television playing a gameshow, the clatter of dishes being washed—all of it feeling like a grotesque parody of normalcy.

As night fell, a new kind of fear set in. A dread for the coming silence. For the inevitable arrival of 3:17 a.m.

It was around ten o’clock when Leo heard Cal’s bedroom door click shut. He waited, his ears straining, for a full hour. The house was quiet, but it was a normal quiet, not the oppressive, supernatural vacuum from before. Driven by a desperate need for any kind of answer, Leo unlocked his door and crept into the hallway.

He moved silently, his bare feet making no sound on the worn floorboards, until he was standing outside Cal’s room. He hesitated, his hand hovering near the door. What did he expect to hear? Snoring? Sleep-talking? He pressed his ear against the cool, painted wood.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then, he heard it.

It was Cal’s voice, low and weary, laced with a pain that was chillingly real.

“...it still hurts,” Cal mumbled. “You said it would fade.”

Leo’s blood ran cold. He was talking to someone.

A pause. And then, a second voice answered.

It was a sound that had no right to exist in the world. It was the dry hiss of static, the low-frequency hum of a massive transformer, and the faint, sibilant whisper of sand skittering across glass, all coalescing into something that resembled speech. It didn't sound like it was coming from a person’s throat. It sounded like it was being broadcast directly into the room from a faulty speaker.

“Pain… is a symptom of resistance,” the static voice rasped. “The vessel must be… conditioned.”

“You promised,” Cal’s voice pleaded, weaker now. “You promised you’d just show me the truth. Not… this. Not him.”

“The boy is irrelevant,” the inhuman voice replied, its tone flat and utterly devoid of emotion. “He is only a conduit. A future receiver. The current one decays too quickly.”

Leo recoiled from the door as if he’d been burned, clapping a hand over his mouth to stifle a scream. He stumbled backward, his mind reeling. He had thought the entity possessed Cal in episodes, that it came and went like some spectral tide. He was wrong.

It was in there with him. A separate, distinct presence. An inhabitant. Cal, the real Cal, was a prisoner in his own body, having a conversation with the cosmic horror that was steadily, patiently consuming him from the inside out. And they were talking about him.