Chapter 5: The Unanswered Prayers

Chapter 5: The Unanswered Prayers

Five years later

The wedding ring on Leo's finger caught the lamplight as he sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the empty prescription bottle in his palm. Three years of marriage to Sarah, three years of building something that felt almost like a normal life, and it all came down to thirty small white pills that were supposed to help him sleep without dreams.

The apartment he shared with Sarah was a step up from the projects—two bedrooms in a complex that actually had working air conditioning and neighbors who didn't sell drugs in the stairwells. Sarah had decorated it with cheerful yellow curtains and photographs of their wedding day, creating the kind of home Leo had never thought he'd be lucky enough to have.

But even Sarah's presence couldn't chase away the darkness that had been creeping back into his life.

"Another headache?" she asked from the bathroom doorway, toweling her dark hair dry. At twenty-five, Sarah had grown from the sweet high school girl who'd smiled at him in hallways into a woman with laugh lines around her eyes and the kind of quiet strength that came from loving someone with invisible wounds.

"Something like that," Leo lied, slipping the empty bottle into his nightstand drawer. The Ambien had been prescribed by Dr. Martinez after Leo had finally broken down and told him about the insomnia, the nightmares, the way sleep felt like stepping into a battlefield every night. He'd left out the supernatural elements, of course—just focused on the symptoms, the exhaustion, the way his marriage was suffering because he couldn't get a decent night's rest.

The pills had worked for a while. Not as well as the marijuana, but enough to keep the brown-eyed boy at bay. Enough to let Leo function, to be a husband, to hold down his job at the auto shop and pretend he was just another guy with ordinary problems.

But prescriptions ran out. Insurance companies asked questions. And Dr. Martinez had started giving him concerned looks during their appointments, the kind that suggested he was considering words like "dependency" and "addiction."

"I made an appointment with Dr. Martinez for next week," Sarah said, settling beside him on the bed. Her hand found his shoulder, warm and solid and real. "Maybe he can try a different medication. Something stronger."

Leo nodded, not trusting his voice. The truth was, he'd already called Dr. Martinez's office that afternoon. The receptionist had been polite but firm—no early refills without an emergency consultation, and the earliest available appointment was three weeks away. Leo had hung up feeling like a man who'd just been told his execution date.

"You've been having the dreams again," Sarah continued. It wasn't a question. After three years of marriage, she'd learned to read the signs—the way he jolted awake in the early hours, the sheets soaked with sweat that smelled faintly of pond water, the haunted look in his green eyes that took hours to fade.

"Just stress from work," Leo said, the lie tasting bitter on his tongue. "Johnson's been riding everyone pretty hard since we got that big contract."

Sarah studied his face with the kind of careful attention that made Leo's chest tighten with guilt. She deserved better than this—better than a husband who couldn't explain why he sometimes woke up choking on water that wasn't there, why certain mirrors made him flinch, why he'd never taken her to visit the creek where he'd nearly drowned as a child.

"Leo," she said softly, "whatever it is, you can tell me. You know that, right?"

For a moment, Leo almost did. The words crowded against his teeth—There's something that looks like me but isn't me, and it wants to kill me. It follows me in my sleep and tries to drown me with spectral creek water, and the only thing that's kept me sane all these years is whatever pharmaceutical barrier I can build between us.

But how do you explain something like that to someone you love? How do you tell your wife that you're not even sure you belong in this reality, that somewhere in the dark water of your childhood nightmares, your real self might be drowning while an imposter wears your life like an ill-fitting suit?

"I'm fine," he said instead. "Just tired."

Sarah's expression flickered with something that might have been disappointment, but she kissed his forehead and retreated to her side of the bed without pressing further. Within minutes, her breathing deepened into the easy rhythm of someone who'd never had to fight for the right to unconsciousness.

Leo lay awake until nearly dawn, listening to the sounds of their neighbors through the thin walls, trying to delay the inevitable moment when exhaustion would drag him down into sleep's hunting grounds. When he finally succumbed, it was to dreams filled with the sound of dripping water and a child's voice whispering his name.

The next three nights followed the same pattern. Leo would lie awake as long as possible, then drift into fitful sleep that felt more like drowning than rest. The brown-eyed boy hadn't appeared yet, but Leo could feel him circling like a shark scenting blood in the water. The chemical barriers that had protected him were crumbling, and they both knew it.

On the fourth night, Leo knelt beside his bed for the first time in years.

The rosary felt foreign in his hands, the beads no longer worn smooth by nightly use. The words of the Hail Mary came slowly, rusty from disuse, but he forced them out with the desperate intensity of a man trying to rebuild a dam with his bare hands.

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee..."

The familiar rhythm brought back memories of his teenage years, of kneeling on hardwood floors while something inhuman stalked the edges of his peripheral vision. But those prayers had worked, at least for a while. They'd given him protection when nothing else could.

"Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus..."

The temperature in the room remained steady. No frost on the windows, no smell of stagnant water. Leo allowed himself a small hope as he climbed into bed, rosary still clutched in his sweating palms. Maybe faith could fill the gap where chemistry had failed. Maybe God would remember their old bargain and extend his protection once more.

Sleep came eventually, and with it, the paralysis.

Leo's body locked up like a rusted machine, his limbs becoming dead weight against the mattress. But this time was different. This time, he could sense the brown-eyed boy's presence before he appeared—a cold weight settling over the room like a blanket made of winter air.

The boy materialized at the foot of the bed, no longer the eleven-year-old child from Leo's memories but something that had grown and changed during the years of chemical exile. He looked like Leo might have looked at eighteen or nineteen, tall and lean with that same unruly dark hair. But his eyes—those burning brown eyes—held depths of rage that seemed to have fermented into something far more dangerous than simple hatred.

"Did you miss me?" the boy asked, his voice Leo's voice but wrong, layered with harmonics that hurt to hear. "Because I missed you. I missed our little talks, our nightly visits. Five years is a long time to spend alone in the dark places."

Leo tried to speak, tried to move, tried to reach for the rosary that had fallen from his numb fingers. Nothing responded. He was trapped in his own body while his doppelganger circled the bed like a predator savoring its prey.

"I spent those years learning," the boy continued, trailing one finger along the edge of the mattress. Where he touched, water began to seep through the fabric, dark and cold and smelling of decay. "Learning about pain, about fear, about all the ways a soul can be broken down and remade. Would you like me to show you?"

The paralysis held Leo fast as his older, stranger self leaned close enough that he could see his own reflection in those alien brown eyes. This wasn't the fumbling child who'd poured creek water down his throat years ago. This was something that had spent half a decade in cosmic exile, growing stronger and more sophisticated in its methods of torture.

"Your little prayers won't work this time," the boy whispered, his breath cold against Leo's ear. "God abandoned you the moment you chose chemicals over faith. He doesn't hear your voice anymore. He doesn't care about your suffering."

Leo wanted to deny it, wanted to believe that divine protection was still available to him. But even as he tried to form the words of the Hail Mary in his mind, they felt hollow, empty of the desperate faith that had once given them power.

"You want to know the truth?" the boy asked, settling onto the bed beside Leo's paralyzed form. "You were never supposed to survive that day at the creek. You were supposed to drown, supposed to let me live the life that was rightfully mine. But you clawed your way back to the surface, stole my breath, took my place in a world where you don't belong."

Water began to pool on the sheets around them, seeping up from somewhere beneath the mattress. It was cold enough to make Leo's skin ache where it touched, and it smelled like the bottom of a stagnant pond.

"I am you," the boy continued, his voice dropping to a whisper that seemed to echo from inside Leo's own skull. "The real you, the one who should have lived and laughed and loved that pretty wife sleeping beside you. You're the echo, the shadow, the thing that crawled out of the water wearing my face."

The paralysis began to crack around the edges, fear finally overriding whatever supernatural force held Leo immobile. He managed to twitch his fingers, to draw a shallow breath that tasted of pond scum and rotting leaves.

"That's right," the boy said, noticing the movement. "Fight back. Struggle. It makes the drowning so much sweeter when you finally give up."

He pressed his palms against Leo's chest, and water began to pour from his hands—not the slow trickle of previous encounters, but a torrent that filled Leo's mouth and nose with shocking speed. Leo's body convulsed against the paralysis, his lungs burning as they filled with spectral creek water that was somehow more real than the bed beneath him.

This wasn't just a nightmare or a psychic attack. This was execution, carried out with the methodical precision of something that had spent years planning exactly how to reclaim what it believed was stolen from it.

Leo's vision began to gray at the edges, consciousness slipping away like sand through his fingers. In his fading awareness, he heard Sarah's voice calling his name from what seemed like a great distance, felt her hands shaking his shoulders. But even her love couldn't reach him in the deep places where his doppelganger had dragged him.

The last thing he saw before the darkness took him was his own face wearing an expression of pure, triumphant hatred, brown eyes blazing with the fire of someone who was finally, after years of exile, coming home.

Leo jerked awake to Sarah's terrified face hovering over him, her hands pressed against his chest as she tried to perform CPR. His lungs burned as he coughed up what felt like gallons of foul water, his entire body shaking with the aftermath of near-drowning.

"Jesus, Leo! I thought—I couldn't wake you up, you weren't breathing—"

The sheets were soaked through to the mattress, water dripping onto the floor in a spreading puddle that reflected the bedroom lights like a dark mirror. In that reflection, for just a moment, Leo caught a glimpse of brown eyes watching him with patient, terrible hunger.

The message was clear. His doppelganger had grown strong enough to kill him, and the only thing that had saved him was Sarah's intervention. Next time—and there would definitely be a next time—Leo might not be so lucky.

The war for his soul had entered its final phase, and Leo Morrison was no longer sure which one of them was real.

Characters

James

James

Leo

Leo

The Brown-Eyed Boy / The Echo

The Brown-Eyed Boy / The Echo