Chapter 9: The Monster's Pet

Chapter 9: The Monster's Pet

The slow, groaning invitation of the cabin door pulled Brett down from the ridge. His descent was a reckless, controlled slide down the steep incline, dirt and loose stones skittering away from his feet. The fear was still there, a cold, hard knot in his gut, but it was overshadowed by a sense of grim, inevitable purpose. He had come seeking the heart of the story, and now its door was open. To turn back would be a cowardice more profound than the fear itself.

He stepped onto the sagging porch, the rotten wood groaning under his weight. The air inside the doorway was frigid, a dead, still cold that had nothing to do with the evening temperature. It smelled of deep, damp earth, of century-old rot, and something else—a faint, acrid scent like ozone after a lightning strike. He paused on the threshold, his eyes struggling to adjust to the oppressive darkness within.

The interior was sparse, a single room dominated by a crumbling stone fireplace. A crude wooden table and a single chair were the only furniture, both thick with a blanket of grey dust that seemed to absorb the light. It was a place where time had died.

“You came,” a voice whispered.

The sound was like the rustling of dry, dead leaves. It came from the darkest corner of the room, a space where the shadows seemed to congeal into a solid mass. Brett’s heart hammered against his ribs. He couldn't see anything, but he felt a presence, ancient and impossibly weary.

Slowly, a figure began to resolve from the gloom. It wasn’t that she stepped forward; it was more like his eyes were finally granted permission to see her. She was a desiccated, skeletal woman, her form wavering at the edges as if she were a heat-haze in the cold air. Her gown, once white, was the color of old cobwebs and tattered to rags. Her skin was a tight, grey parchment stretched over bone, and her eyes were cloudy white pits that held no light, only a vast, empty depth.

“Mrs. Everly?” Brett breathed, the name a prayer and a curse.

The spectral figure inclined her head, a dry, cracking sound accompanying the movement. “For a time. That name has grown thin, like an old coat.”

“The monster,” Brett said, the words tumbling out, desperate and raw. “Daniel… the boy… he said it was just you. A story you made up.”

A terrible, soundless laugh seemed to shake her insubstantial form. “The boy lied. He had to. It was the only way his mind could bear it. He built a cage of years and rational lies around the truth, but he knows. Every night when he closes his eyes, he knows who is watching him from the woods of his memory.”

Her dead, white eyes fixed on him. “You came for the truth, didn’t you, Brett Sanders? You broke your friend and trespassed and followed the whispers all for the truth.”

“Is it real?” he pleaded, the question that had consumed his life.

“Real?” she whispered, a hint of something—bitterness, perhaps even pity—in her dry tone. “He is more real than the stone in this fireplace. More real than the trees outside. He is this place. He was here before the first tree, and He will be here after the last mountain has crumbled to dust. I was simply the first.”

“The first what?”

“The first pet,” she rasped. Her form seemed to flicker, and for a terrifying instant, Brett could see the faint outline of the room’s back wall through her torso. “He found me when my own heart was broken, lost in these woods centuries ago. He is… lonely. That is the closest word your language has for it. Imagine an existence that spans eons, silent and solitary. It tires of being alone. It craves a thing to watch it. A witness to its long, quiet life. Someone to share the silence with.”

The cosmic, existential horror of her words washed over Brett, a cold tide that extinguished the last embers of his rational mind. This wasn't a creature that hunted or killed for sustenance. It was a sentient black hole of loneliness, collecting souls to stave off its own eternal ennui.

“So you lure people here for it?” he asked, a new, chilling understanding dawning.

Her head snapped toward him, the movement sharp, and for the first time, he felt the cold sting of her malevolence. “Do not mistake me for a willing servant. I am a prisoner. A forgotten toy. He tires of those who have forgotten the outside world. He craves the fresh memories, the echoes of sunlight and noise and people. That is what He brought Daniel for. And that is what He has brought you for.” She paused, a slow, cruel satisfaction creeping into her whispering voice. “I didn't lure the boy here. He did. He whispers on the edge of things—curiosity, ambition, obsession. He finds the cracks in a soul and widens them. I was merely the boy’s teacher. His jailer. As I will be yours.”

The finality in her words was absolute. This wasn't a puzzle to be solved. It was a trap he had willingly, eagerly walked into. He had mistaken the bait for the prize.

“No,” Brett stammered, taking a step back. “No, I just wanted to know…”

“And now you do,” she hissed.

It was then that the sound came from outside.

It was a screech, a sound that violated the very laws of acoustics. It was the shriek of tearing metal and the agony of a living thing combined, amplified until the air in the cabin vibrated with it. It was a sound that was not meant for human ears, and it seemed to scrape along the inside of Brett’s skull.

Mrs. Everly’s face split into a smile. It was an anatomical impossibility, her mouth stretching impossibly wide, her grey, scarred skin pulling taut against her skull. The smile was a black, silent chasm of pure, sadistic joy.

“It likes you,” she rasped, her voice bubbling with a terrifying glee. “It finds your obsession… charming.”

Brett spun toward the open doorway. The thing that stood there was not a creature of flesh and bone. It was a glitch in reality. Impossibly tall and slender, its form was a roiling column of visual static, like a television tuned to a dead channel. Its skin was the dark, knotted bark of a dead tree, but its limbs and its face—where a face should be—were a chaotic, buzzing blur that made his eyes water and his brain ache. It didn't cast a shadow; it seemed to devour the light around it. The scraping sound he’d heard outside Jameson’s house—that was this thing. This was the long finger dragging against the world.

He couldn't scream. He couldn't move. He could only stare as his mind buckled under the weight of what he was seeing.

The creature took a step into the cabin. It didn't move its legs. It simply ceased to be in the doorway and began to be inside, the air crackling around it. It raised one of its long, spindly arms, its fingers like sharpened twigs. Brett flinched, expecting to be torn apart.

But it didn't attack. It simply opened its hand.

A fountain pen—a simple, old-fashioned black pen—and a thick stack of fresh, blank, yellowed envelopes tumbled from its grasp, clattering onto the dusty floorboards at Brett’s feet.

The monster tilted its buzzing, static void of a head. It made no sound, but a thought bloomed in Brett’s mind, cold and clear and utterly alien. Begin.

An overwhelming, irresistible compulsion seized him. It was stronger than hunger, stronger than fear, stronger than his own will to live. His desire for answers, the obsessive fire that had driven him here, had been hijacked and twisted into a new, singular purpose. He had to write. He had to tell his story. He had to set the next hook.

He looked from the pen on the floor to Mrs. Everly’s ecstatic, smiling face, and he finally, truly understood. Daniel hadn’t been writing to warn anyone. He had been compelled to write, to create the bait, to lure the next curious soul—the next pet—into the monster’s quiet, lonely world.

Slowly, his movements jerky and robotic, Brett Sanders knelt down. His trembling hand reached out and closed around the cool, smooth plastic of the pen. He was no longer a student, no longer an investigator. He was a story waiting to be told. He was the next chapter. He was the lure.