Chapter 6: The Man Who Escaped

Chapter 6: The Man Who Escaped

The phone number felt like a talisman in Brett’s hand, a holy relic that promised to banish the shadows. The drive was a three-county pilgrimage away from the oppressive darkness of Bluff Wood and back toward the world of reason. With every mile, the memory of the tall, thin shape that flitted between the trees seemed less like a concrete observation and more like a hallucination born of sleeplessness and fear. The scraping sound outside Jameson's house could have been anything—a tree branch, the wind, a trick of his frayed nerves. He had to believe that. The alternative was unthinkable.

He clutched this fragile hope all the way to a desolate trailer park on the industrial outskirts of a forgotten town. Rust-streaked mobile homes sat on cinder blocks, their yards choked with weeds and discarded machinery. It was a place where people went to disappear. Brett found the right number—a single-wide trailer with a crooked wooden porch and aluminum foil taped over one of its windows. A fat, lethargic cat watched him from the roof with indifferent yellow eyes.

The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke and damp decay. Brett took a deep breath, the guilt over Jameson a hot stone in his gut. This was it. The end of the line. He knocked on the flimsy aluminum door.

After a long moment, the door creaked open a few inches. A man’s face appeared in the gloom, framed by a cloud of blue-gray smoke. He was exactly as the character prompt in Brett’s mind had painted him: late fifties, his face a roadmap of hard living, with a salt-and-pepper mustache stained yellow by nicotine. His eyes, sunken and weary, held a deep, profound exhaustion.

“What do you want?” the man rasped, his voice like gravel grinding together.

“Are you Daniel Sorez?” Brett asked, his own voice sounding young and foolish to his ears.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s asking?”

“My name is Brett Sanders.” He held up the cardboard shoebox. “I found something that belonged to you. A long time ago.”

Daniel’s gaze fell to the box, and for a split second, something flickered in the depths of his tired eyes—not recognition, but the ghost of an old, buried pain. He was silent for a long moment before letting out a harsh, rattling cough. He opened the door wider. “Get in. Before you let all the damn cold in.”

The inside of the trailer was dark and cluttered, every surface covered in a layer of dust and grime. An old television played a game show on low volume, its cheerful colors a stark contrast to the oppressive gloom. Daniel sank into a worn-out armchair, a cigarette already dangling from his lips. He gestured for Brett to sit on a rickety kitchen chair.

Brett placed the box on the grimy coffee table between them. “I found your letters,” he began, his heart pounding. “In the house on Bluff Wood Road.”

Daniel took a long, slow drag from his cigarette, his eyes fixed on the box. He didn't seem surprised, merely resigned. “Thought that old bitch would have burned ‘em,” he muttered, exhaling a plume of smoke.

“Mrs. Everly?” Brett prompted, leaning forward.

Daniel let out a short, bitter laugh that turned into another coughing fit. “That’s what she called herself. Crazy as a shithouse rat, that one. Lived out there in the woods like some kind of animal.”

Brett’s carefully constructed timeline, his yarn-web of supernatural connections, all felt absurdly academic in the face of this man’s raw, lived-in cynicism. “The letters,” Brett pressed, “they talk about… things. Rituals. A monster. The Watcher.”

Daniel looked at him, truly looked at him, and Brett saw not a hint of fear, only a deep, bottomless pity. “Kid, how old are you? Twenty?”

“Nineteen.”

“Nineteen,” Daniel repeated, shaking his head. He stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. “You believe in monsters?”

“I… I don’t know what to believe. The letters are so detailed…”

“They were written by a terrified ten-year-old kid who was being held captive by a psychotic old woman who was poisoning him.”

The sentence landed with the flat, heavy thud of objective fact. It was the rational explanation Brett had been so desperate to find, but hearing it felt… hollow.

“Poisoning him?” Brett asked.

“She’d brew this god-awful tea,” Daniel said, his voice a low, gravelly monotone. “Tasted of dirt and mushrooms. Said it would ‘open my eyes to the woods.’ What it did was make me see things. Lights in the trees, faces in the bark. Made me so sick I couldn’t have run if I’d wanted to.”

He described the mud rituals not as a defense against a monster, but as a cruel form of punishment and control, a way for the old woman to break his spirit. The dancing until his feet bled was a sadistic game she played, feeding her own twisted delusions. The entire terrifying mythology that Brett had spent days mapping out was dismantled in minutes, reduced to the pathetic, tragic abuse of a child.

“And the Watcher?” Brett asked, the words feeling childish on his tongue. “The tall thing with the static for a face?”

Daniel actually chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. “Kid, that’s what your brain does when it’s being poisoned and you’re scared out of your mind in the dark. It fills in the blanks with the worst thing it can imagine. There was no monster. There was just her.” His expression darkened, the weariness replaced by a flash of old, cold hatred. “She was the monster.”

“So what happened?” Brett asked, his voice barely a whisper. “How did you get away?”

Daniel lit another cigarette, his hand steady. He stared past Brett, his eyes focused on a memory a lifetime away. “She got careless. Got sick one winter. Weak. I knew if I didn’t leave then, I’d die there. She tried to stop me down by the creek.” He paused, taking a long drag. “I hit her with a rock. And then I kept hitting her until she stopped moving. I was eleven years old.”

He said it with no emotion, no remorse. It was a simple statement of fact, the grim answer to a grim equation.

A wave of profound disappointment washed over Brett. It was a bitter, nauseating feeling. This was the truth. This was the answer to the great mystery. Not a cosmic horror, not an ancient, unknowable entity, but a sad, human crime. A story of abuse, delusion, and a desperate act of violence. The scraping sound, the shape in the trees—all just his own mind, primed by the letters, filling in the blanks.

He had broken his best friend’s arm for this. He had destroyed his life, abandoned his responsibilities, and terrified himself half to death, all in pursuit of a squalid little tragedy. He hadn't uncovered a secret of the universe; he'd just picked at a stranger's old scar.

“I’m sorry,” Brett said, standing up. The words felt pathetic. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“Yeah, you shouldn’t have,” Daniel agreed, not looking at him. “Some things are better left buried.”

Brett turned and walked toward the door, the box of letters on the table feeling like a box of lies, a monument to his own foolishness. He had his hand on the doorknob when Daniel’s voice, sharp and suddenly different, cut through the smoky air.

“Wait.”

Brett turned back. Daniel was leaning forward in his chair, the cigarette forgotten between his fingers. The cynical, weary mask had shattered. In its place was a raw, naked terror, a deep and primal fear that radiated from him in palpable waves. His eyes were wide, fixed on Brett, and they were the eyes of the ten-year-old boy from the letters, staring at something horrible in the twilight woods.

Before Brett could speak, Daniel was out of his chair and crossing the small room in two quick strides. He grabbed Brett’s arm, his grip shockingly strong, his calloused fingers digging into Brett’s flesh like a vise.

“Listen to me,” Daniel hissed, his face inches from Brett’s. The smell of stale smoke and sheer terror washed over him. “That story I told you? You believe it. You hear me? You believe it and you walk away.”

Brett was too stunned to speak, his mind reeling from the violent shift. The man who had calmly admitted to murder was now trembling with a fear so profound it made the hair on Brett’s arms stand on end.

“Burn the letters,” Daniel whispered, his voice cracking. “Don’t just put them away. Burn them until they’re ash. Forget the house. Forget my name. Forget you ever saw them.”

He leaned closer, his eyes pleading, desperate.

“There are things out there, kid. Things you are better off not knowing about. You opened a door you were never meant to touch. Now, for God’s sake, close it before it notices you’re looking.”

He shoved Brett back, releasing his arm. He stumbled back against the door, his mind a whirlwind of confusion and dawning horror. The cynical story was a lie. A wall Daniel had built to protect himself. And Brett had just smashed it to pieces.

The man who escaped, the sole survivor of the nightmare, was still running.