Chapter 9: The Man on the Lawn

Chapter 9: The Man on the Lawn

The dial tone was a dead, monotonous hum in his ear, a sound of absolute finality. Stephen was gone. The connection was severed, leaving Silas adrift in a silence that was now filled with the screaming implications of his brother’s panicked words.

Do not look at its eyes. Do not let it know that you’re afraid.

The rules. A thing that had rules was not a random hallucination. It was a known entity, a familiar nightmare whispered about in the shadowed corners of his family’s history. The confirmation was a frigid anchor, dragging him down into a reality far colder and more terrifying than madness.

He let the phone slip from his numb fingers, its clatter on the floor shockingly loud. His gaze was fixed on the sketchbook, open on the coffee table. The charcoal figure stood on the paper lawn, a two-dimensional prophet of doom. The drawing was no longer a mystery; it was an itinerary. An appointment.

And now, he had to see if the guest had arrived.

The dread was a physical thing, a crushing weight on his chest that made each breath a conscious, painful effort. He had to follow Stephen’s rules. Pretend it’s a statue, a garden gnome, a fucking mailbox. The advice was insane, impossible. How do you pretend a hurricane is just a summer breeze? How do you stare into the face of the abyss and project an attitude of casual indifference?

He moved toward the living room window, his feet shuffling across the floor. He didn’t dare to pull back the curtains fully. Instead, he found a tiny gap between the fabric and the window frame, a sliver of sight just wide enough to see a slice of the front yard. Pressing his face against the cool glass, he held his breath and peered out.

Just as the drawing foretold, it was there.

It stood in the center of Rob’s neatly trimmed lawn, a pillar of absolute black against the vibrant, sunlit green. Closer than it had ever been. It had crossed the final boundary, leaving the public anonymity of the street to claim a piece of his borrowed sanctuary. It stood with that unnatural, rigid stillness, its form seeming to drink the cheerful morning light, creating a small, personal eclipse on the grass.

It was no longer an observer. It was an occupier.

Silas jerked back from the window as if the glass had burned him, a strangled gasp escaping his lips. He clamped his hand over his mouth, stumbling backward until he hit the opposite wall. Don’t show fear. Don’t show fear. The command was a frantic, useless mantra. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. His skin was slick with cold sweat. Fear wasn’t an emotion he could control; it was the very air he was breathing.

He spent the rest of the day as a prisoner. The house, his only refuge, had become a cage, and the bars were made of his own terror. He couldn’t go near the front windows. He retreated to the back of the house, to the small kitchen that only looked out onto a fenced-in, empty backyard. But it was no comfort. He knew what stood on the other side. Its presence radiated through the walls, a cold, silent pressure that permeated every room.

He tried to act normal, to follow Stephen’s desperate instructions. He took a box of cereal from the cupboard and poured it into a bowl, his hands shaking so much that half of it spilled onto the counter. He stared at the dry flakes, the thought of eating an absurd impossibility. He turned on the small kitchen TV, the cheerful, mindless chatter of a game show host filling the room with a grotesque mockery of normalcy. But his eyes kept flicking toward the hallway that led to the living room, to the front of the house, as if he could feel that silent, unseen gaze penetrating the plaster and wood.

Hours crawled by with agonizing slowness. The sun shifted, and the patterns of light moving across the kitchen floor were his only clock. Each passing minute was a victory and a new wave of terror. Was it still there? Had it moved? Had it gotten closer to the house itself? He had to know, but he was too terrified to look. Stephen’s warning about its eyes was a brand on his mind.

As dusk began to bleed across the sky, tinting the world outside in shades of orange and purple, the shadows in the house grew long and menacing. Every familiar object—a coat hanging on a chair, a floor lamp in the corner—took on a sinister, vaguely man-shaped silhouette in the fading light.

He was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at nothing, when the lights flickered.

Once. Twice.

His head snapped up. The cheerful game show host on the television dissolved into a shower of static, his amplified voice distorting into a demonic garble before the screen went black. The ceiling light above him flickered a third time, buzzed angrily for a moment, and then died.

Click.

The house was plunged into a sudden, profound darkness. The abrupt silence was even more shocking. The low hum of the refrigerator, the buzz of the television, the faint whisper of the air conditioning—all the subtle, ambient noises of a living home were gone. All that was left was the frantic, panicked thumping of his own heart and the sound of his own ragged breathing in the oppressive, ink-black quiet.

He was frozen in his chair, his senses straining, every nerve ending alight. The darkness was absolute, a thick, suffocating blanket. He couldn’t see the table in front of him. He couldn’t see his own hands. His world had been reduced to the space his body occupied.

He sat there for what felt like an hour, every muscle tensed, waiting for a sound, a footstep, the creak of a floorboard. But there was nothing. Only the immense, crushing weight of the silence. Maybe it was just a blackout. A transformer blowing somewhere in the neighborhood. A perfectly normal, rational explanation.

And then he heard it.

tap…

It was soft. So soft, he thought he might have imagined it, a phantom echo from his memory. It came from the front of the house. From the living room.

He held his breath, listening, his entire being focused on that one sound. The house was silent. He began to relax, to tell himself it was just the house settling, a branch brushing against the siding…

tap… tap…

There it was again. Unmistakable this time. It was a gentle but deliberate sound. Rhythmic. Patient. It was the exact same sound he’d heard on his window that very first night, the night his life had unraveled. The sound that had traded his despair for a new and infinitely deeper kind of dread.

But this time, it wasn’t three stories up on a grimy apartment window.

It was downstairs. It was on the living room window, just a room away. It was the sound of a single, patient finger, tapping against the glass in the suffocating dark. It was a knock at the door from a thing that didn't need one.

It knew he was inside. It knew he was alone. And it was calling him.