Chapter 8: Liam's Concern

Chapter 8: Liam's Concern

The cozy, modern apartment they had built together as a sanctuary had become Elara’s war room. Liam’s architectural magazines were buried under stacks of clinical neurology journals. His sleek glass coffee table was a chaotic landscape of medical textbooks, printouts of obscure academic papers, and books whose titles made his stomach turn. He’d found one half-hidden under a cushion: Parasitic Consciousness: A Theosophical Study.

For days, he had tried to be the anchor. He’d listened. He’d held her through the night sweats. He’d made her tea she never drank and meals she only picked at. He’d cleaned up the "soot" and told himself it was a stress-induced hallucination. But the woman he loved was disappearing, replaced by this haunted, feral creature with dark circles under her eyes and a tremor in her hands that never quite went away. She spoke in hushed, frantic tones on the phone with the neurologist, Dr. Petrova, and spent hours staring at her laptop, her face illuminated by the cold blue light of a screen filled with things he didn't want to understand.

His patience finally snapped on a Thursday night. He came home from a long day of placating clients to find her pacing the living room, a phone pressed to her ear, a fresh pile of books from the university library on the floor.

“No, Anya, it’s not just about inducing the state,” Elara was saying, her voice a low, urgent hum. “We have to understand the mechanism. The Cyclofane isn’t the cause, it’s the key. It opens the door, but why? What frequency does it attune the brain to?”

Liam stood in the entryway, the scent of the takeout he’d brought turning to ash in his mouth. He listened as she talked about brainwaves, quantum entanglement, and the horrifying, whispering chorus in the long-term care ward. He felt a cold dread wash over him. This wasn't a search for answers anymore. This was a descent into madness.

He cleared his throat.

Elara started, whirling around to face him, her eyes wide and wild. “I have to go,” she said into the phone and hung up without another word. “You’re home early.”

“It’s eight o’clock, Elara,” he said, his voice flat. He set the bag of food on the kitchen counter, the gesture feeling hollow and absurd. “What is all this?” He swept his arm out, indicating the chaotic sprawl of her research.

“It’s work,” she said defensively, gathering a few loose papers as if to hide the evidence. “Anya—Dr. Petrova—and I think we’ve found a link. A real, scientific link.”

He picked up one of the library books. Its cover was dark, embossed with a stylized, ancient symbol. The Corpus Umbra: A Compendium of Shadow Entities. “Is this part of your ‘scientific’ link?” he asked, his voice sharper than he intended.

“You don't understand,” she said, snatching the book from his hand. “You have to look outside the established framework when the framework is failing.”

“The framework is failing you, Elara!” he shot back, his worry finally boiling over into a raw, angry frustration. “Look at yourself! You’re not sleeping, you’re not eating, you’re locked in here with… with this!” He kicked at a stack of printouts, sending papers skittering across the floor. One landed face-up: a grainy, black-and-white photo of a medieval woodcut depicting a gaunt creature with a wide smile whispering into a sleeping woman’s ear.

“I’m trying to save my life, Liam!” she cried, her voice cracking. “I am trying to save my mind! It’s real. I saw its victims at St. Jude’s. They were just… empty shells. And they whispered, Liam. They knew I was the door. They said it wants my hands. It wants my hands!”

She held them out, her surgeon’s hands, trembling under the warm light of their living room. To him, they were the hands that had held his, that had traced the lines of his face in the dark. To her, they were now just a set of tools a monster coveted.

The sheer, unhinged terror in her voice broke his heart and terrified him in equal measure. He softened his tone, moving towards her, his hands up in a gesture of peace.

“Okay. Okay, Elara. Let’s calm down,” he said, his voice low and soothing, the way one speaks to a frightened animal. “I believe that you are seeing these things. I believe that you are terrified. But there are rational explanations. Post-traumatic stress from Mr. Holloway’s death. Extreme anxiety over your suspension. Your mind is building a narrative to cope with it.”

“It’s not a narrative!” she insisted, backing away from him. “It stood at the foot of our bed! It left footprints on the floor!”

“It was soot, Elara!” he said, his voice rising again. “It was soot from a vent, and you were having a nightmare!”

“And the smile Dr. Evans saw in my eyes? The way Mrs. Gable screamed that it was looking out of my face? The scars on the patients in the ward? Are those all just a story I’m telling myself?” Each question was a desperate plea for him to cross the chasm between his world and hers.

But he couldn't. For her sake, he wouldn't.

“I want you to see someone,” he said, the words tasting like betrayal. “A professional. Dr. Matthews. My dad saw him after my mom died. He helps people process trauma.”

Elara stared at him, her face collapsing. The wild, frantic energy drained away, leaving behind a hollow, wounded stillness. He wasn’t her ally. He was just another person trying to lock her away in a neat, clinical box labeled ‘delusional.’ He was her anchor, and he was trying to convince her the storm was only in her head.

“So that’s it,” she whispered, her voice devoid of heat, filled only with a chilling emptiness. “I’m just crazy. All of this… it’s easier for you to believe that I’ve lost my mind than to believe that something is wrong with the world.”

“No,” he said, his own voice thick with emotion. “It’s easier for me to believe you can be helped! That I can get you back! Because the alternative… the alternative means that there’s a monster in our apartment that I can’t see, and that I can’t protect you from it. And I can’t live with that, Elara.”

The raw honesty of his fear was a punch to her gut, but it didn’t matter. He had made his choice. He had chosen his reality over hers.

She turned away from him, her shoulders slumped in defeat. “You should go,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Go stay at your brother’s for a few days.”

“Elara, no. I’m not leaving you alone like this.”

“You already have,” she said, without turning around. “You left me the moment you decided I was broken. Please. Just go.”

The silence that followed was heavy and final. After a long moment, she heard his footsteps, the soft click of the front door opening, and the final, devastating thud of it closing.

She was alone. Utterly and completely alone.

She sank to the floor amidst the scattered papers, the lore of a world she now inhabited. The last bastion of her old life, her connection to normalcy and love, had just walked out the door. There was no one left to tell her she was sane. There was no one left to hold her. The grief was a physical weight, pressing the air from her lungs.

She sat there for what felt like hours, the city lights beginning to glitter in the vast, dark window. Her tablet lay on the floor beside her, its screen dark. As she stared at her own faint reflection in the black glass, a flicker of movement caught her eye.

In the reflection, her own mouth, which was set in a firm, grief-stricken line, slowly, unnaturally, began to curve upwards at the corners. It wasn't her own muscles moving. It was a dreadful, independent action. The reflected lips pulled into a thin, pale, waxy crescent.

It was his smile. Worn on her face.

A whisper, as soft as her own thoughts, slithered into her mind. It wasn't a rasping, external sound this time. It was an internal voice, intimate and terrifyingly familiar.

See? He couldn't help you.

The reflection held the smile for a moment longer, a look of serene, proprietary satisfaction in its—her—eyes.

They will all leave you. But I am always here.