Chapter 13: It's Here for Me

Chapter 13: It's Here for Me

The drive back to campus was a long, silent scream. They left Uncle Mark standing amidst the ash, a man dwarfed by the catastrophic scale of his mistake. They left the single-wide trailer, a tiny, flickering beacon of madness where an old man sat clutching a can of beans, waiting for the end he had cultivated for fifty years. The SUV ate up the miles of dark highway, but the silence inside was heavier and more suffocating than any grave.

Leo stared out the passenger window, but he didn't see the fleeting lights of passing towns or the dark, looming shapes of the trees. He saw his own reflection, a pale, haunted mask superimposed over the rushing darkness. It knows the blood. His grandfather’s words were a death sentence. He looked down at the crescent-shaped scar on his palm, the forgotten childhood wound that was, in fact, a brand. A mark of ownership. A promise of a future meal. All this time, he’d been running from a past he didn’t understand, only to discover he was carrying the homing beacon for its greatest horror within his own veins.

James drove with a grim, focused intensity, his hands clamped on the steering wheel. He didn’t offer false reassurances or formulate half-baked plans. He knew, just as Leo knew, that they were no longer fleeing from a threat. They were driving headlong into a confrontation they could not win. They were returning to the nest.

They parked in the near-empty student lot, the familiar orange glow of the campus streetlights feeling alien and mocking. The world of midterms, parties, and deadlines was a flimsy facade they could no longer believe in. As soon as they stepped out of the car, they knew.

The smell.

It was no longer a phantom, a trick of the memory. It was a physical assault. A thick, cloying miasma of rot and the sickly-sweet scent of old beans hung in the air of their entire floor. It poured from beneath their door, a foul, invisible fog that made their eyes water and their stomachs churn. Students walking down the hall wrinkled their noses, muttering about backed-up plumbing or something dead in the vents, oblivious to the fact that they were walking past the threshold of a charnel house.

Leo’s hand trembled as he slid the key into the lock. He hesitated, a cold, primal instinct screaming at him not to open the door.

James gently pushed him aside and turned the key himself. “Together,” he said, his voice a low rumble.

They pushed the door open. The room was dark, but the stench that rolled out was a tangible entity. It was the smell of a damp cellar, of spoiled meat, of rust and time and a sorrow so profound it had become putrescent. James flicked on the light switch, and the scene that greeted them was one of quiet, creeping violation. Nothing was overtly disturbed, yet everything felt wrong. A thin layer of dust, coarser than normal, coated every surface. A small, dead beetle lay on its back on Leo’s sketchbook. The air was cold, dead, and utterly owned by the thing that now lived within the walls.

Without a word, they began to move. There was no discussion of a plan; their shared terror created a frantic, unspoken synergy. James, his athletic frame coiled with desperate energy, shoved his heavy oak desk against the door, the wood groaning in protest. Leo grabbed his own desk chair and wedged it under the doorknob. They piled textbooks, James’s mini-fridge, anything with weight and substance against the door, creating a crude, pathetic barricade. It was the last stand of two cornered animals.

They finished, their chests heaving, and retreated to the far side of the room, near the window. The barricade looked absurd, a child’s fort against a hurricane. Outside, the night was quiet. The normal sounds of campus life—a distant siren, laughter from a floor below—seemed to come from another planet.

And then, it began.

Scrape… scrape…

The sound was no longer confined to the wall behind Leo’s bed. It came from all around them. From the floor beneath their feet. From the ceiling above their heads. A slow, rhythmic scratching that seemed to be methodically outlining the dimensions of their tomb. It was the sound of long, pale fingers dragging through plaster and insulation, testing the boundaries of its new domain. It was the sound of the nest being finished, the final touches being put on the lair that had been built just for Leo.

Leo sank to the floor, wrapping his arms around his knees, his eyes fixed on the barricaded door. He thought of his grandfather, sitting alone in his trailer, clutching his rusty offering. He thought of his father and uncle, trapped in their conspiracy of silence, their lies having brought this doom upon him. This was his inheritance. A debt of grief passed down through the blood, and the Can Man had finally come to collect.

The scratching continued for an impossibly long time, an agonizing symphony of slow-motion destruction that shredded their nerves raw. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

The silence that followed was worse. It was a living thing, a coiled predator gathering itself in the dark. Leo held his breath, his ears straining, every nerve ending alight with anticipation. James stood half-crouched, his body tensed like a spring, his eyes locked on the door.

BOOM.

The sound was not a knock. It was a physical impact, a solid, concussive blow that shook the entire room. The mini-fridge rattled on the desk. A book tumbled from the top of the barricade. It was the sound of something impossibly heavy and dense striking the center of the door.

BOOM.

Again. Rhythmic. Patient. Inhuman. The door shuddered in its frame, a fine powder of dust and paint shaking loose from the edges.

BOOM.

A spiderweb of cracks appeared in the center of the door, radiating out from a single point of impact. This wasn't a creature trying to pick a lock or find a way in. This was a force of nature that intended to simply walk through the wall.

James grabbed the only thing in the room that resembled a weapon: a heavy metal floor lamp. He held it like a baseball bat, his knuckles white. He was the protector, the loyal friend, ready to go down fighting against an enemy he couldn't possibly comprehend.

CRACK.

A long, vertical split appeared in the door, running from top to bottom. The sickly-sweet smell of rot intensified, pouring through the new fissure like a poison gas. Leo could see a sliver of the dimly lit hallway through the crack.

The door groaned, the wood splintering, the frame beginning to buckle inward. The desk scraped against the floor as the immense pressure pushed their barricade back, inch by agonizing inch.

Leo looked at James. His friend stood ready, a doomed gladiator preparing to face the lion, his expression a mask of grim determination. All of this, for him. Because of his blood. Because of a story he told at a party. The weight of his guilt was heavier than the terror.

He felt a strange, cold calm wash over him. The frantic fear was gone, burned away, leaving only a hollow, grim acceptance. This was not a random attack. This was destiny. This was a debt coming due.

The doorknob, twisted at an unnatural angle, began to tear free from the splintering wood. The barricade slid another few inches. The end was not coming in minutes. It was coming in seconds.

Leo’s eyes met James’s across the shrinking space of the room. He could no longer find the words to apologize. He could only offer a look, a final, silent acknowledgment of his friend’s loyalty and his own cursed fate. The Can Man hadn't just followed him.

It was here for him. And it was coming in.