Chapter 2: The Long Road to Decay

Chapter 2: The Long Road to Decay

The world outside Samantha’s compact SUV had dissolved into an inky, suffocating blackness. The boisterous energy of the party felt a lifetime away, replaced by the hypnotic hum of tires on cracked asphalt and the claustrophobic glow of the dashboard. Sam was driving, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, her intense focus a stark contrast to the nervous energy filling the car. James sat shotgun, his earlier enthusiasm deflating with every passing mile marker into a wary silence.

In the back, Leo was sandwiched between Sam’s friend, Chloe—a last-minute addition who seemed to be regretting her life choices—and the window, which reflected his own pale, drawn face.

“Are you sure this is the right way, Leo?” Sam’s voice cut through the quiet. “The GPS gave up ten miles ago. It thinks we’re driving through a field.”

“The GPS didn’t exist in this part of the state back then,” Leo mumbled, peering into the darkness. “It’s memory. Take the next left. I think.”

“You think?” Chloe whispered, her voice tight with anxiety. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. There aren’t even any streetlights.”

“That’s how you know you’re getting close,” Leo said, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. He was trying for sarcasm, for the easy-going humor he used as a shield, but it came out brittle and thin.

The truth was, the landscape felt wrong. Utterly and deeply wrong. The story he’d told at the party—the quirky squatter’s nest, the funny anecdote—belonged to a different place. The place in his memory was sun-drenched and hazy, the derelict manor a childhood playground of imagined dangers. This road, however, was a tunnel through a nightmare. The trees, heavy with kudzu vines, leaned over the asphalt, their leafy arms seeming to claw at the car as it passed. The air, thick with the smell of damp earth and night-blooming jasmine, felt heavy and ancient.

“It should be a dirt road,” Leo said, more to himself than anyone else. “Potholes the size of craters. My dad used to curse every time we drove up it.”

“Well, this is paved,” Sam stated flatly, swerving to avoid a particularly nasty crack in the road. “Maybe they fixed it.”

But Leo knew they hadn’t. No one had cared about this place for twenty years. The smooth, unbroken asphalt felt more unnatural than a monster in the woods. Every landmark he thought he remembered was gone, replaced by this strange, generic country road that seemed to lead to nowhere. An unsettling thought crept into his mind: what if he was leading them to the wrong place entirely? A part of him prayed for it.

He rubbed his right palm, the crescent-shaped scar there beginning to tingle, an old, familiar warning. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to conjure a clear image, a solid memory to guide them.

Instead, a flash of something else seared behind his eyelids.

It wasn't the funny story. It was sharp, visceral, and terrifyingly real. He was small, his hand lost in the grip of a larger, calloused one—his grandfather’s. They were walking towards the house, but the sun was gone. It was twilight, and the shadows were long and distorted. The air was cold. The sweet, rotten smell he’d mentioned at the party was suddenly vivid in his memory, a cloying scent of decay and metal and something sickly sweet, like canned fruit gone bad.

In the memory-flash, his grandfather stopped. He pointed a trembling finger towards the grand porch of the manor. And there, standing in the deepening gloom of the doorway, was a figure. Tall. Impossibly thin. A silhouette of a man made of sticks and wrong angles.

Then, a sharp sting in his palm. He looked down and saw a trickle of blood welling up from a fresh cut. He didn’t remember how it happened, only the coppery taste of fear in his mouth and his grandfather’s voice, a harsh whisper that was more of a prayer than a warning. “Never look it in the face. It feeds on fear.”

Leo’s eyes snapped open. The car was silent, the only sound his own ragged breathing.

“You okay back there, man?” James asked, twisting in his seat. His face, illuminated by the green glow of the dash, was etched with concern. The drunken bravado was gone, replaced by the familiar look of a friend who knew something was deeply wrong. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Leo swallowed, his throat feeling like sandpaper. “Just… car sick,” he lied, pressing his face against the cool glass of the window.

Sam glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Her expression wasn’t one of concern, but of vindication. “He’s not car sick,” she said, a thrill in her voice. “He’s remembering. This is it. I can feel it.”

As if summoned by her words, the headlights caught the glint of rusted metal half-swallowed by a curtain of ivy. Sam slammed on the brakes, the tires screeching on the asphalt.

She reversed slowly, the beams cutting a swath through the darkness, finally resting on an old, weathered sign. Most of the letters were gone, but the ghost of the painted words was still visible.

ELDERWOOD LN. PVT. ROAD. NO TRESSPASSING.

A collective breath was held in the car. It was real. This forgotten place, this half-remembered story, was real.

“Well,” James said, his voice strained. “There it is.”

“The road’s blocked,” Chloe pointed out. A heavy, rusted chain was slung between two crumbling brick pillars that marked the entrance to the lane. An ancient, moss-covered gate sagged behind it.

“Not a problem,” Sam said, killing the engine. The sudden silence was absolute and deafening. She popped her door open, the interior light flooding the oppressive dark. “We walk from here.”

Leo didn’t move. He stared past the gate, down the dirt path—this was the potholed road he remembered—that disappeared into a monstrous tunnel of overgrown trees. He could feel it now, a palpable wave of dread rolling out from the darkness ahead. It was a physical presence, a weight on his chest that made it hard to breathe. The house was waiting. It remembered him.

James opened his door. “Come on, Leo. Let’s go see the bean castle and get out of here. The sooner we go in, the sooner we can leave.”

But Leo knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that it wasn’t that simple. The story he had told was a lie, a carefully constructed piece of armor to hide the terrified ten-year-old boy inside. Now the armor was gone, and he was leading his friends, lambs to the slaughter, right back to the source of a nightmare he had never truly escaped.

This was a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake.