Chapter 5: A Life Built on Lies

Chapter 5: A Life Built on Lies

Twenty years.

Twenty years is long enough to build a life. Long enough for a terrified sixteen-year-old to become a forty-one-year-old sales manager named Thomas Price. Long enough for the ghosts of the past to fade into the hazy, unreliable texture of a nightmare.

Thomas’s life was a fortress built of the mundane. A two-story colonial in a manicured suburban cul-de-sac. A reliable Toyota Camry. A loving wife, Sarah, whose biggest complaint was his obsessive-compulsive need to check the locks. An eight-year-old son, David, who was the sun in his carefully ordered universe.

It was all a lie.

Every night, before sleep claimed him, Thomas performed his rituals. He walked the perimeter of the house, his hand brushing the faint, silvery scar on his forearm—a puckered crescent of tissue that had never fully faded. He checked the deadbolt on the front door, then the back. He activated the state-of-the-art security system, its soft electronic chime a prayer in the dark. He reviewed the footage from the exterior cameras, his eyes scanning the empty, sodium-lit street for shadows that moved wrong.

Sarah would watch him from the doorway of their bedroom, a familiar, weary patience in her eyes. “Everything locked up tight, honey?”

“Just being careful,” he’d reply, the same answer he’d given for fifteen years.

She didn’t know. She couldn’t. How could he tell the woman he loved that their entire life—the town they lived in, the house he’d insisted on with no large trees near the windows, his refusal to ever let David sleep with the blinds open—was dictated by a memory he himself had tried to bury?

He had almost succeeded. The fire. That was the key. He clung to the image of the mansion consumed by flames, a roaring, cleansing inferno. In the story he told himself, the monster named Ulrich von Strauss, a delusion brought on by the trauma of killing a man, had burned with the old Jaeger. The fire had cauterized the wound, sealed the memory away. The lingering paranoia was just a psychological scar, PTSD from a violent night that his teenage mind had twisted into a gothic horror story. He repeated this mantra to himself in the dark until it felt like the truth.

He had almost convinced himself.

The illusion shattered on a Tuesday evening in October. The air was crisp with the promise of autumn, and the scent of roasting chicken filled the house. David, his face smudged with crayon, came skidding into the kitchen, a piece of construction paper clutched in his hand.

“Daddy, look! I drew a picture for you!”

Thomas smiled, a genuine, unguarded smile that was reserved only for his son. He knelt, ruffling David’s sandy hair. “Let’s see it, champ.”

David proudly presented the drawing. It was typical for an eight-year-old. A boxy, lopsided house under a cheerful yellow sun. In one of the top windows, a stick figure with a shock of yellow crayon hair—David. The sky was a serene blue. But on the right side of the page, standing on the lawn and looking up at the window, was another figure.

Thomas’s smile froze, cracking like thin ice. The air hitched in his lungs.

The figure was tall. Impossibly tall and slender, drawn with a single, confident stroke of black crayon. It had long, spidery limbs and was dressed in what was clearly meant to be a suit. Its face was a white circle of paper left blank, but the artist had given it two bright blue dots for eyes. And beneath them, a wide, curving red smile. It wasn't a happy smile. It was a grin, and from it protruded two distinct, deliberately drawn points.

Big teeth.

A cold fist closed around Thomas’s heart and squeezed. He could almost hear it, the echo of aristocratic laughter carried on the smoke of a long-dead fire. The world tilted, the warm, safe kitchen dissolving around him, replaced by the memory of a cold, dusty attic.

He forced himself to breathe, his voice coming out as a strained, tight whisper. “Who… who is that, Davy?”

David beamed, oblivious to his father’s sudden terror. “That’s the smiling man! He comes to my window sometimes.”

The blood drained from Thomas’s face. He felt dizzy, nauseous. "What smiling man? When? When do you see him?"

“At night,” David said matter-of-factly, as if discussing the mailman. “He just stands on the lawn and looks up. He has big teeth. He wants to be my friend.”

Sarah chose that moment to walk in, a dish towel slung over her shoulder. “Dinner’s almost ready. What have you got there, sweetie?” She glanced at the drawing and chuckled. “Oh, the imaginary friend again. Mr. Smiley.”

Thomas looked at her, his eyes wide with a panic she couldn’t possibly comprehend. “Imaginary?” he choked out.

“He’s been talking about him for a week,” she said, her smile faltering as she took in her husband’s ashen face. “Nightmares, probably. Thomas? What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

The phrase landed like a punch to the gut. You have no idea.

He couldn’t speak. He grabbed the drawing, his fingers trembling, and stared at the childish rendition of a century-old monster. The long, silver hair. The tailored suit. The hypnotic, glowing eyes. The fanged, cruel smile. It was all there, filtered through a child’s innocent hand, but it was unmistakably, horrifyingly accurate. Ulrich.

That night, after putting a blissfully unaware David to bed (in a room where the blackout curtains were now pinned shut), Thomas’s ritual became a frantic obsession. He didn't just check the footage; he scrubbed through every second of the last week’s recordings. He watched the empty lawn, the silent street, the unmoving shadows under the oak tree across the road. Nothing. Not a flicker of movement, not a single frame out of place.

He went outside into the biting cold, the damp grass soaking his socks. He circled the house until he stood directly beneath David’s window. He scanned the ground with a powerful flashlight, his breath pluming in the beam. He was looking for footprints, for a broken twig, for any sign that someone had stood where his son’s drawing had placed the smiling man.

There was nothing. The lawn was pristine, covered in a thin layer of dew that had not been disturbed.

He stumbled back inside, his heart a cold, heavy stone in his chest. He was a fool. Of course there would be no evidence. A creature that could flow from the rafters like smoke wouldn't leave footprints in the grass. It wouldn’t be caught on a cheap security camera.

This wasn't a game of stealth. It was a message.

He slumped against the kitchen counter, the crayon drawing laid out before him like a death sentence. The lie he had so carefully constructed for twenty years had crumbled to dust in an instant. The fire hadn't killed the monster. All his running, his rules, his fortress of denial—it had all been for nothing. He hadn't escaped. He had only delayed the inevitable.

He had built a life, a family, a perfect, happy target. And he had led the monster right to it.

A new, more terrible thought wormed its way through his terror, cold and sharp as a shard of ice. Ulrich could have taken him at any time in the last twenty years. He could have finished it in a dark alley, on a lonely road, a thousand times over. But he hadn't.

He waited. He waited until Thomas had something to lose. Something more precious than his own life.

Thomas looked from the drawing to the darkened hallway that led to his son’s room. The game hadn’t ended in that burning mansion. This was the next level. And Ulrich wasn't hunting him anymore. He was hunting his son.