Chapter 9: The Last Hope

Chapter 9: The Last Hope

The laundromat was a sterile desert. The air was hot, thick with the scent of detergent and scorched cotton. The rhythmic thumping of dryers was a mechanical heartbeat, a sound so mundane it was almost comforting. But Leo couldn’t escape the image burned onto his retinas: his own reflection in a paper cup of water, winking at him with a horrifying, alien intelligence. He had kicked the cup over, but the small, dark puddle on the linoleum floor remained, a miniature abyss.

He was parched. His tongue was a dry, swollen thing in his mouth, and his lips were cracked and bleeding. Every cell in his body screamed for water, the very substance that had become his tormentor. He was a drowning man dying of thirst. The irony was a blade twisting in his gut.

Panic was a useless luxury. The Collector’s countdown was relentless. On the morning of the third day… He had less than twenty-four hours. Running was a fool’s game. Hiding was impossible when the enemy could peer out from any reflective surface. His only chance lay buried in the dry, dusty pages he’d read in the library archives.

A name. Blackwood. Elias Blackwood, the man who had tried to stop the church from being built over the well. The man whose family had been tormented by a series of "unnatural" drownings. Yet the article had referred to him as the patriarch. The line had continued, at least for a time. The curse had plagued them, but had it annihilated them? The archive records had shown the victims, but not the survivors.

He needed a computer.

The thought of facing another screen, another potential mirror for Father Renwick’s ghost, made his stomach clench. But the alternative was to sit here and wait for the third token to appear, for the final day to dawn.

He found a dingy 24-hour internet cafe a few blocks away, the windows so grimy they were nearly opaque, which was a small mercy. He paid a bleary-eyed clerk for an hour of time and sat at a sticky terminal in the darkest corner. He angled the monitor so it caught no overhead light, minimizing its reflective properties. He forced himself to focus, to look through the screen, not at it.

He plunged into the digital archives, a world of census records, property deeds, and digitized family trees. He traced the Blackwood line from Elias. He saw the death of his daughter, Elspeth, in the rain barrel. But Elias had other children. The family name vanished after a generation, absorbed through marriage into other, more common names—Smith, Jones, Carter. But the bloodline was there, a thin, tenacious thread woven through a century and a half of city history.

He followed it, his heart pounding with a mixture of hope and dread. He saw the line thin out, branches ending in childless marriages or early deaths. For a desperate hour, he thought he had lost it completely. Then, he found it. A single, living descendant.

The name glowed on the screen: Elara. No last name listed in this particular public record, but the lineage was unmistakable. And next to it, an address. Not a house, but a business. ‘The Gilded Page & Esoterica.’ A bookshop in the old quarter.

Leo printed the address, the thermal paper warm in his hand. It felt like the first solid thing he had held in two days.

The journey to the old quarter was a new kind of hell. The sun was up now, a weak, watery light that did little to burn off the morning mist. The city was waking up, and every surface gleamed with moisture. Shop windows reflected the distorted images of passing cars and pedestrians. Leo moved like a fugitive, his jacket hood pulled low, his eyes fixed on the cracked pavement in front of him, tracking a path that avoided puddles and manhole covers. He felt the cold, damp breath of a sewer grate on his ankle and flinched as if struck. A passing bus hit a puddle, sending a tidal wave of gray water onto the sidewalk, and he threw himself back against a wall, a raw cry escaping his lips. People stared. He didn't care. They were living in a world of solid matter. He was navigating an ocean.

He found the address on a narrow, cobblestone street tucked between a modern vape shop and a boarded-up theatre. The Gilded Page & Esoterica was a relic from another time. The shop front was made of dark, aged wood, the large display window so cluttered with stacks of books and strange, brass objects that it was impossible to see inside. A small, wrought-iron sign hung above the door, creaking softly in the breeze. The air here smelled different—not of wet concrete and exhaust fumes, but of dust, old paper, and something else… something dry and herbal, like lavender and sage.

Pushing the door open, he was met by the gentle chime of a small brass bell. The inside of the shop was a labyrinth of towering, crooked shelves groaning under the weight of countless books. The light was dim, supplied by low-wattage lamps with tasseled shades that cast a warm, golden glow. Dust motes danced in the shafts of light, and the silence was profound, broken only by the creak of the floorboards beneath his feet. There were no mirrors. No reflective surfaces of any kind. Even the glass on the framed prints lining the walls was dull and non-reflective. It was a sanctuary of dryness and opacity.

“Can I help you?”

The voice came from the back of the shop. A woman emerged from behind a bookshelf that reached the ceiling. She was perhaps in her early thirties, with sharp, intelligent eyes and dark hair tied back in a severe bun. She wore a simple black dress and held a leather-bound book in one hand, her finger marking her place. She wasn't smiling. She simply watched him, her gaze unnervingly direct.

Leo’s carefully rehearsed speech dissolved into a frantic, desperate tumble of words. “I… I was looking for Elara. My name is Leo Vance. I think you can help me. There’s a thing… a person… it follows me. A toothbrush… blue… and a priest at St. Jude’s, his back… it broke him backward and then he was just water…” He was babbling, a madman recounting a nightmare. He held up his trembling hand. “It’s the water, it’s in the water…”

The woman didn’t recoil. She didn't call for the police. Her sharp eyes just scanned him, from his disheveled clothes to the wild terror in his eyes. A flicker of something that looked like weary recognition passed over her features.

“The Drowned Mark,” she said. It wasn’t a question. It was a diagnosis.

Leo stared at her, his throat closing up. He could only nod.

“My name is Elara,” she said, her voice low and steady. It was the calmest sound he had heard in two days. “My full name is Elara Blackwood. I am the last of my line. For generations, my family has waited. We are the keepers of a story, a warning. We knew that one day, the Patron of the Well would awaken and begin a new collection.”

She stepped forward, her gaze softening with a hint of something that might have been pity. “I have been waiting for someone with your eyes to walk through that door. The eyes of the Marked.”

Relief, so potent and overwhelming it almost brought him to his knees, washed over Leo. He wasn’t crazy. It was real. This woman, this descendant of the original victims, she knew. She understood.

“Can you stop it?” he whispered, the question hanging in the dusty air like a prayer.

Elara’s expression became grim. She gestured for him to follow her to a small, cluttered desk in the back, upon which sat an ancient-looking wooden box. She opened it carefully. Inside, resting on a bed of faded velvet, was a small, tightly-rolled scroll of yellowed parchment tied with a brittle leather cord.

“My ancestor, Elias, was a scholar of things best left forgotten,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “After his daughter was taken, he devoted his life to finding a way to fight the Patron. He found this.” She gently lifted the scroll. “It is a fragment. Part of an old, pre-Christian ritual. It is not a weapon to destroy the god. Nothing can do that. It is a ritual of severance.”

“Severance?” Leo repeated, the word tasting strange and hopeful.

“To cut the Mark,” Elara explained, her eyes dark with the weight of her knowledge. “To sever the connection between the Patron and its chosen victim. It’s our only chance. Your only hope.”

Leo felt a surge of adrenaline, of desperate, reckless optimism. “Then let’s do it. Here. Now.”

Elara slowly shook her head, and the hope in Leo’s chest turned to ice. “It’s not that simple,” she said, her voice heavy with dread. “The ritual is incomplete. Dangerous. And its power is tied to the source. It can only be performed where the Mark is strongest, where the veil between our world and the Patron’s is at its thinnest.”

She looked up, and her sharp eyes met his.

“We have to go back to St. Jude’s. We have to perform the ritual at the altar. Directly above the Well.”