Chapter 6: Echoes from the Well

Chapter 6: Echoes from the Well

The train pulled away, its red taillights shrinking into the oppressive darkness until they were nothing but a memory. Leo was left standing in the buzzing, jaundiced light of the Blackwood Creek station, the cold rain soaking through his thin jacket. He was stranded, surrounded by silent, smiling figures whose very geometry was an affront to nature. The man with the long arms, the youth with the bird-like knees—they didn't move. They simply watched, their purpose not to attack, but to witness his despair. To remind him there was no escape.

Running was useless. The Collector had made that terrifyingly clear. It wasn't a chase; it was a countdown. A ritual. And in her inhuman monologue, she had given him his only weapon: a word. The Well.

The Patron will rise from the Well.

Not here. Not in this house, Father Renwick had shrieked in his final moments.

The two phrases collided in Leo’s mind, forging a desperate, chilling connection. St. Jude’s Cathedral. The priest hadn’t just been afraid of what was with Leo; he was afraid of where it had come from. The source was there. The heart of the darkness was in the house of God.

A cold, grim purpose began to solidify from the morass of his terror. He couldn't outrun it. But maybe, just maybe, he could understand it. And to understand it, he had to go back.

He never knew how he got away from the station. At some point, the smiling figures simply weren't there anymore, melting back into the shadows they had emerged from. He walked for what felt like hours along the dark, wet road until the headlights of a pre-dawn delivery truck offered a ride back toward the city's glow. The driver, a gruff man with a normal neck and elbows that bent the right way, said nothing, and Leo huddled in the passenger seat, clutching the cold silver rosary in his pocket, a relic from a man who had been unmade.

He didn't dare return to his apartment. He didn’t dare go near St. Jude’s. Not yet. Instead, he went to the one place where the city’s entire history was entombed: the Public Library’s main branch.

The archives were in the sub-basement, a place of profound silence, low ceilings, and the dry, sweet scent of decaying paper. It was a tomb of forgotten facts. He felt safer here, insulated from the world of water and rain by layers of concrete and millions of pages of dry, brittle text. He requested everything they had on the plot of land where St. Jude’s now stood. Pre-city records, parish histories, architectural blueprints.

He spent hours hunched over a flickering microfiche reader, his eyes burning as he scrolled through centuries of faded newsprint. The first few hours yielded nothing but a tedious history of land grants and fundraising committees. The cathedral had been built in the late 1800s, a monument of civic pride. He was about to give up, to dismiss the idea as a desperate fantasy, when he found it.

It was a small article from a local gazette dated 1888, tucked away in the society pages. The headline was innocuous: Foundations Laid for St. Jude’s Grand Spire. But a single paragraph, written in the flowery, verbose style of the era, made his blood run cold.

…Construction was briefly halted this Tuesday past, owing to a curious dispute with the last of the Blackwood family, who hold the original claim to the land. The family patriarch, a Mr. Elias Blackwood, lodged a frantic and somewhat incoherent protest regarding the main altar’s placement, citing an old family superstition about ‘sealing the well.’ The surveyors, of course, found no such well, and the work, blessed by Bishop Abernathy himself, continues apace…

The well. It wasn't just a turn of phrase. It was real.

With trembling hands, he changed his search parameters, abandoning the church’s history and focusing on the land itself, on the years before the cathedral was a blueprint. He cross-referenced property maps with old town records, his search growing more frantic. The name Blackwood kept appearing. And with it, a string of tragedies.

He found the first one in a newspaper from 1852. TRAGIC DROWNING CLAIMS FARMHAND. A young man named Thomas Miller, working on the Blackwood farm, was found dead in a shallow stream. The paper noted the baffling circumstances: the water was barely ankle-deep. The cause of death was listed as drowning, but the town marshal was quoted as being “deeply perplexed by the victim’s posture.”

The next was a decade later. BLACKWOOD DAUGHTER LOST IN FREAK ACCIDENT. Elspeth Blackwood, age 12, found drowned in a rain barrel. The water was foul, the article mentioned, as if drawn from a deep and stagnant source. The account ended with a chillingly brief sentence: “The girl’s parents were too distraught to comment on the unnatural position in which her body was discovered.”

There were more. A traveler in 1870. A pair of siblings in 1875. All on or near the Blackwood property. All dead by drowning in impossibly small amounts of water. All found in a state that the reporters of the time, constrained by Victorian sensibilities, could only describe as “unnatural,” “baffling,” or “grotesque.”

The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place when he found a bootlegged copy of the county coroner’s ledger from that period, digitized by a local historical society. He scrolled to the entry for Thomas Miller, the first victim. The coroner, a man with methodical, spidery handwriting, had been more clinical in his description.

Cause of Death: Asphyxiation via submersion in water. Lungs filled with brackish, non-potable water containing high levels of subterranean sediment. Not consistent with the creek water in which the body was found. Significant contusions are present on the crown of the head and both heels. The most remarkable feature is the state of the cadaver itself. The spinal column is hyperextended to a degree I would have previously thought impossible without shattering every vertebra. The man’s body was discovered bent entirely backward, such that his cranium was pressed firmly against the soles of his feet.

Leo dropped the mouse and recoiled from the screen as if it had burned him.

It was Father Renwick. The exact same horrific, impossible posture. The bow of flesh and bone. The spine snapped backward.

It wasn't a random act of violence. It was a signature. A calling card that had been left for centuries. The Patron hadn’t just appeared. It had been here all along, sleeping, collecting. The bodies of its victims were the signs. Father Renwick was just the latest verse in a very, very old song.

His heart hammering, Leo went back to the architectural plans for St. Jude’s. He found an early geological survey map of the grounds, one commissioned before the foundation was laid. There, right in the center of the plot, precisely where the nave and the main altar would be built, was a small, hand-drawn circle. Next to it, a single, spidery annotation from a forgotten surveyor.

Subterranean Spring. Bedrock anomaly. Advise deep foundation. Local legend calls it ‘The Thirsty Well.’

They hadn't just built a church on top of it. They had entombed it. They had sealed the profane source of a century of death directly beneath the altar, the most sacred spot in the entire cathedral. And now, something was stirring in the deep, dark, stagnant water below the holy stone.

The Collector’s voice echoed in his memory. On the morning of the third day, the Patron will rise from the Well.

He glanced at his phone. The date had changed. It was the end of the first day. He had less than thirty-six hours. He now knew where the monster lived. And he knew, with a certainty that felt like a layer of ice forming over his soul, that the place he had to return to was not just a church, but a cage built around the very thing that was coming to collect him.