Chapter 1: The Sound of the Steps

The phantom footsteps always came at three-seventeen in the morning.

Ben Carter jolted awake, his heart hammering against his ribs as the familiar sound echoed through his bedroom—deliberate, measured clicks of dress shoes on hardwood floor. Click. Click. Click. Each step precise, purposeful, getting closer.

He lay frozen in his narrow bed, sweat beading on his forehead despite the October chill seeping through his bedroom window. The digital clock beside him glowed mockingly: 3:17 AM. Just like every night for the past week.

It's not real, he told himself, the same mantra he'd been repeating since the sounds started. You're just going crazy. Finally lost it, just like everyone said you would.

But the footsteps continued their relentless approach down the hallway outside his room. Ben's fingers found the spiral-shaped mark on his wrist—what he'd always assumed was just an odd birthmark—and traced its curves nervously. The scar tissue felt warm tonight, almost tingling.

Click. Click. Click.

The sound stopped directly outside his door.

Ben's breath caught in his throat. In the suffocating silence that followed, he could hear his own pulse thundering in his ears. Seconds stretched into an eternity before the footsteps resumed, moving away down the hall toward his younger brother Allen's room.

No. The word screamed silently in his mind. Not Allen. Anyone but Allen.

He forced himself to move, throwing off his covers and padding barefoot to his bedroom door. The old Victorian house his family rented in the middle-class section of Tourmaline Falls creaked and settled around him, but underneath those familiar sounds, he could still hear them—those measured, deliberate steps.

Ben pressed his ear against the door, straining to listen. Nothing. Just the whisper of wind through the maple trees outside and the distant hum of the ancient radiator downstairs.

He cracked open his door and peered into the hallway. Empty. The runner carpet showed no indentations, no signs that anyone—or anything—had walked down it. Even in the dim light filtering in from the street lamp outside, he could see clear to the end of the hall where Allen's door remained firmly closed.

You're losing your mind, Ben told himself again. Just like Dad said. Trauma does things to people. Makes them hear things that aren't there.

But even as he tried to rationalize it away, the memory of five years ago crashed over him like a cold wave.

Mikey Brennan had been his best friend since kindergarten. They'd done everything together—built tree houses, collected comic books, stayed up all night playing video games and sharing their deepest fears. Mikey had been the one person who understood what it was like growing up in Tourmaline Falls, where money flowed like water for some families while others scraped by, where the adults whispered about things that went bump in the night but never quite explained what they meant.

They'd been twelve when it happened. July first—the day every kid in Tourmaline Falls learned to dread.

Ben had been sleeping over at Mikey's house when the sound started. Not footsteps then, but something else. A soft scratching at the window, like fingernails on glass. Then Mikey had sat up in bed, his eyes wide and terrified.

"Do you hear that?" Mikey had whispered.

Ben had heard it. The clicking of dress shoes in the hallway outside Mikey's bedroom. Slow, deliberate, patient.

"It's probably just your dad," Ben had said, but even then he'd known it wasn't true. Mr. Brennan wore sneakers around the house, not dress shoes. And there had been something wrong about the sound—too precise, too measured, like a metronome counting down to something terrible.

The footsteps had stopped outside Mikey's door.

What happened next still haunted Ben's nightmares. The door hadn't opened—it had simply ceased to be closed. One moment it was shut tight, the next it stood wide open, revealing a figure that shouldn't have existed.

The Man in the Suit.

That's what the older kids called him, the boogeyman that parents whispered about when they thought their children weren't listening. Impossibly tall and thin, dressed in a perfectly tailored black suit that seemed to absorb light. His face had been a blur of shadows, indistinct except for a single point of cold, silver light where one eye should have been—a monocle that caught and held the moonlight streaming through the window.

"Michael Brennan," the thing had said in a voice like autumn leaves scraping across concrete. "You have been chosen."

Mikey had stood up then, moving like a sleepwalker, his eyes blank and glassy. Ben had tried to grab his friend's arm, to pull him back, but his muscles wouldn't obey. He could only watch in frozen horror as Mikey walked toward the impossible figure in the doorway.

"Ben," Mikey had said, turning back for just a moment. His voice had been his own then, frightened and young. "Tell my mom I'm sorry."

Then they were gone. Both of them. The Man in the Suit and Ben's best friend, vanished like smoke.

The official story was that Mikey had run away. The police found his bedroom window open and declared it an obvious case of a troubled child fleeing in the night. But Ben knew better. He'd tried to tell them about the Man in the Suit, about the impossible way the door had opened, about the voice like dying leaves.

No one believed him. His parents sent him to therapy. The police wrote him off as a traumatized child with an overactive imagination. Even Mikey's parents, lost in their own grief, couldn't bear to listen to his "fantasies."

After a while, Ben had learned to keep quiet about what he'd seen that night. It was easier to let people think he was getting better, that the nightmares were fading and the memories becoming less sharp. But he never forgot. He never stopped looking over his shoulder on July first, never stopped flinching at the sound of dress shoes on hard floors.

And now, five years later, the footsteps had returned.

Ben crept down the hallway to Allen's room and pressed his ear against the door. His ten-year-old brother's breathing was deep and even—the sound of peaceful sleep. Whatever Ben had heard, it hadn't disturbed Allen.

Yet.

The thought sent ice through his veins. In eleven days, it would be July first again. The anniversary. The day when children disappeared in Tourmaline Falls, though no one would admit it out loud.

Ben had spent the last five years researching, digging through old newspaper archives and public records whenever he could access them. The pattern was always the same: every few years, a child would go missing on July first. Always between the ages of ten and seventeen. Always declared a runaway by the authorities. Always forgotten by everyone except their families.

And now the footsteps were back, echoing through his house in the dead of night.

He made it back to his room just as the clock flipped to 3:18 AM. The phantom sounds had stopped, but Ben knew they'd return tomorrow night. And the night after that. They would continue until July first, counting down like some cosmic timer to an appointment he couldn't avoid.

Ben climbed back into bed but didn't even try to sleep. Instead, he stared at the ceiling and traced the spiral mark on his wrist, feeling its strange warmth pulse in rhythm with his heartbeat.

Somewhere in the distance, he could hear the real sounds of Tourmaline Falls at night—the whisper of wind through the mountains, the distant rumble of delivery trucks on the highway, the soft murmur of Tourmaline Creek as it wound its way through the town's heart. Normal sounds. Human sounds.

But underneath it all, barely audible, he could swear he heard something else. The faint echo of dress shoes on marble, as if somewhere in the darkness, something patient and implacable was walking the halls of a place that existed just beyond the edge of reality.

Click. Click. Click.

Ben pulled his covers up to his chin and began counting the days until July first.

Eleven days left.

The sound of the steps had found him again, and this time, he knew with cold certainty that they weren't going to stop.

Not until they led him to the same place they'd taken Mikey Brennan.

Not until the Man in the Suit came to collect what he was owed.