Chapter 10: The Longest Night

Chapter 10: The Longest Night

The silence began the moment the taillights of Sarah’s SUV disappeared around the corner. It wasn't a peaceful silence. It was a vacuum, a hollow space carved out of the world where the sounds of his family used to be. The echo of David’s angry shout—"You’re kicking us out?"—and the profound, wounded stillness of Sarah’s final look were louder now than the actual sounds had been. The front door clicked shut, and Thomas was left alone in the tomb he had built.

He walked through the empty rooms, a ghost in his own life. On the floor of the hallway lay a small plastic dinosaur David had dropped in his hasty, resentful packing. Thomas picked it up, the cheap plastic cool in his hand, and was hit by a wave of grief so powerful it almost buckled his knees. He was tearing his world apart to save it. It was the Jaeger’s paradox, a truth that was nowhere in Baumann’s journal but was now etched onto his soul. To protect them, he had to become the monster that haunted their home.

As dusk began to bleed across the sky, painting the suburban landscape in bruised shades of orange and purple, the house began to change. Familiar shadows stretched into menacing, unfamiliar shapes. The friendly oak tree in the front yard became a skeletal sentinel. The ordinary creaks and groans of the house settling were no longer comforting domestic sounds; they were the whispers of an intruder, the testing of a predator.

His fear, a cold and constant companion, began to sharpen into a state of hyper-awareness. He was no longer the sales manager, the husband, the father. He was a sentry on a watchtower, and the world was the enemy.

He began his final patrol, a ritual to steel his nerves. He started in the garage, his hand hovering over the main tank of the sprinkler system. The holy water sat within, a silent, invisible shield beneath the manicured lawn. He moved to the front door, his fingers brushing against the welcome mat. He could almost feel the fine silver shavings worked into the fibers, a glittering, irritating dust waiting for an unholy tread.

He checked every window, running his thumb along the sealed sills. Beneath the paint and wood, the consecrated salt formed an unbroken, perfect line. A prison wall. He pictured Ulrich’s ghostly form, recoiling from the invisible barriers, his inhuman rage building. The image gave him a grim, fleeting satisfaction. He was no longer a terrified boy in an attic. He was a craftsman of a different sort, and this house was his masterpiece of defiance.

With his fortress secure, he gathered his weapons. He laid them out on the kitchen island, a pathetic arsenal against a century of evil. The crude, ugly oak stake he had carved from a memory of home. A new, simple silver crucifix, its polished surface reflecting the dim light. And the Jaeger’s journal, open to the page on Ulrich von Strauss, its spidery German script a silent, guiding voice from the grave.

He sat in a low armchair in the living room, a position that gave him a clear view of both the front door and the large picture window. He placed the stake on the floor beside him, his hand resting on the rough, splintery wood. He clutched the silver crucifix in his other hand, its edges digging into his palm. The cold metal was a focal point, an anchor in the rising tide of his terror.

Night fell completely. The streetlights buzzed to life, casting long, distorted shadows through the blinds. The house was utterly silent now, the refrigerator’s hum the only sound. Time slowed to a crawl. Every minute was an hour. Every second, a lifetime of suspense. He listened. He listened until his ears rang with the effort.

The rustle of leaves in the wind was the scrape of claws on the roof. The groan of a floorboard upstairs was a footstep in his son’s empty bedroom. The distant bark of a dog was a herald of the approaching beast.

He fought to control his breathing, remembering a line from the journal: “The beast will smell your fear. It is a sweet perfume to them. Master it, or it will be the death of you.” He tried to think of Baumann, of the old man’s calm, unwavering resolve in the face of absolute horror. But he was not Baumann. He was Thomas Price, a fraud in a Jaeger’s shoes, a man whose courage was nothing more than weaponized panic. The lie he’d told his wife—that he needed space to “figure things out”—was a bitter, ironic truth. He was trying to figure out how to be the man Klaus Baumann had mistakenly believed him to be.

An hour passed. Then two. The digital clock on the cable box glowed: 11:17 PM. The crushing weight of the anticlimax began to press down on him. Had he been wrong? Had the burnt offering been the end of it, a final, cruel joke? Was he just a madman sitting in an empty, booby-trapped house, having driven his family away for nothing? The doubt was a poison, more debilitating than fear.

He was starting to drift, his exhausted mind blurring the edges of the shadows, when a sound cut through the absolute stillness.

It wasn't a crash. It wasn't a roar. It wasn't the splintering of wood or the shattering of glass.

It was a knock.

Knock. Knock.

Two distinct, measured, perfectly polite raps on the solid wood of the front door.

Thomas froze, every muscle in his body turning to ice. The sound was so profoundly, terrifyingly wrong. Monsters didn’t knock. They smashed. They tore. They flowed through keyholes like smoke. They did not stand on the welcome mat laced with silver and politely request entry.

The sheer, arrogant humanity of the sound was the most monstrous thing he had ever heard. It was a sound that said, I am not a beast. I am your superior. I am here to be let in. It was a sound that mocked his preparations, his pathetic walls of salt and silver. It was the sound of a predator so confident in its power that it could afford to play by the rules of its prey, knowing it could break them at any moment.

He didn't breathe. He didn't move. He sat in his armchair, his knuckles white around the crucifix, his eyes locked on the front door. The silence that followed the knock was heavier, more charged, more full of violent promise than the silence that had preceded it.

The longest night of Thomas Price’s life had just begun. And the monster was at the door.