Chapter 4: The Sound of Terror

The corridor beyond the door stretched farther than the building's dimensions should have allowed, its walls disappearing into shadow that seemed to pulse with a life of its own. The sound—that awful mixture of sobbing and screaming—grew louder with each step, reverberating off surfaces Kael couldn't see.

"What exactly am I walking into?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Seraphina moved beside him like a ghost, her footsteps making no sound on the stone floor. "Three days ago, we received a... delivery. A young man, practically catatonic, found wandering the streets after some kind of supernatural encounter. My people brought him here thinking he was just another refugee from the magical world."

The corridor opened into a circular chamber lit by the same floating orbs as the main club, but these burned with a sickly white light that made everything look diseased. In the center of the room sat a figure that might once have been human.

The man was young—maybe early twenties—with sandy hair that hung in sweat-dampened strings around a face locked in an expression of absolute terror. His eyes were wide and unblinking, staring at something only he could see. His mouth moved constantly, forming words that came out as broken whispers.

"Please... no... I didn't... please don't..."

But what made Kael's stomach lurch wasn't the man himself—it was the air around him. Reality seemed to warp and twist in a three-foot radius, creating visual distortions that hurt to look at directly. And the sound... that horrific blend of sobbing and screaming was coming from the space itself, as if the air had learned to weep.

"Jesus Christ," Kael breathed.

"Close, but not quite." Seraphina stopped at the edge of the distortion field, her usual composure cracking slightly. "We've tried everything—exorcism, cleansing rituals, even brought in a priest with actual divine backing. Nothing works. Whatever happened to him, it's not just trauma. It's become part of the fabric of reality around him."

Kael extended his supernatural senses toward the man, trying to get a read on the emotional echoes surrounding him. What he felt made him stagger backward, bile rising in his throat.

Terror. Not the sharp fear of immediate danger, but the soul-crushing horror of someone who'd seen something that shattered their understanding of what was possible. It was pure, distilled nightmare given form, and it pressed against Kael's mind like acid.

"He's trapped," Kael said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Whatever he experienced, it's still happening to him. Over and over."

"Can you help him?"

Kael studied the writhing air around the man, trying to understand what he was seeing. This wasn't like the emotional echoes he usually dealt with—those were memories, imprints left on objects by strong feelings. This was something else entirely. A living memory that had taken root in reality itself.

"I think so," he said slowly. "But I'm going to have to go in there with him. Experience whatever he experienced."

Seraphina's eyes narrowed. "That's suicide. Three of my people tried to get close enough to help him. One is still in therapy, one quit and moved to another continent, and the third..." She gestured toward a corner of the room where Kael noticed scratch marks in the stone wall, as if someone had clawed at it with inhuman desperation. "The third had to be sedated before he could hurt himself."

"Then they weren't doing it right." Kael pulled the white lighter from his pocket, feeling its familiar weight. "Echo Weaving isn't just about reading emotions—it's about finding the connections between them. Every nightmare has a source, and every source has a weakness."

"And if you're wrong?"

Kael thought about Elara, trapped somewhere in a sterile laboratory while corporate monsters dissected her abilities. "Then I'm wrong. But I'm not leaving without trying."

He approached the edge of the distortion field, his skin already crawling from proximity to whatever hell was playing out in the space around the man. The sobbing-screaming sound grew louder, and he could hear individual voices now—dozens of them, all crying out in languages he didn't recognize.

One step at a time, he told himself. Just like diving into any other echo.

Kael closed his eyes and stepped forward.

The world exploded into chaos.

He was no longer Kael Ballard standing in the Penumbra Club's basement. He was James Morrison, twenty-three years old, walking home from his night shift at a downtown restaurant. The city around him was wrong—too dark, too quiet, as if all the light and sound had been drained away.

The alley he'd taken a thousand times before stretched endlessly ahead, its walls seeming to lean inward with each step. Behind him, he could hear something following—not footsteps, but a sound like wet meat being dragged across concrete.

Don't look back, James thought desperately. Don't look back, don't look back, don't—

But he did look back, because in nightmares you always do the thing that will destroy you. And what he saw...

Kael screamed.

The thing behind James wasn't one creature but dozens, all pressed together into a writhing mass of limbs and faces and mouths that opened onto infinite darkness. It moved like liquid horror, flowing across the ground and up the walls, reaching toward James with appendages that weren't quite arms and weren't quite tentacles.

"You saw us," the thing whispered with a voice like breaking glass. "You saw us, and now you can never unsee."

James ran, but the alley stretched forever, and the thing was always just behind him, its whispers filling his head with images of what it would do when it caught him. What it had done to others. What it would keep doing, forever and ever, because that's what these things were—eternal, hungry, patient.

Kael felt himself being pulled deeper into the nightmare, his sense of self starting to dissolve. This was different from reading normal echoes. Those were memories, fixed and unchanging. This was alive, feeding on terror and growing stronger with each moment of fear it produced.

But memories—even living ones—had patterns. And patterns could be broken.

Fighting against the overwhelming tide of horror, Kael forced himself to focus. Not on the monster or the endless alley or James's terror, but on the spaces between. The moments when the fear cracked, revealing glimpses of something else underneath.

There—a flash of warmth as James thought about his girlfriend waiting at home.

There—a spark of defiance as some part of him refused to accept that this was how his story would end.

And there, barely visible beneath layers of accumulated nightmare—a single moment of genuine happiness. James laughing with friends, the memory so pure and bright it seemed to glow against the surrounding darkness.

Kael grabbed hold of that memory like a lifeline and pulled.

The monster's whispers turned to shrieks as light began to bleed into the endless alley. The walls started to crack, revealing glimpses of the real world beyond—streetlights and traffic sounds and all the normal, wonderful things that proved the nightmare wasn't everything.

"No!" the thing howled, its form beginning to unravel. "He belongs to us! He saw us!"

"He saw you," Kael said, his voice somehow carrying across the dissolving dreamscape. "But he also saw other things. Better things. And those matter more."

The nightmare fought back, sending wave after wave of fresh horrors. Kael saw things that would fuel his own nightmares for years to come—images of what the thing had done to its other victims, promises of what it would do to him for daring to interfere.

But he held onto that single moment of James's happiness, using it as an anchor while he searched for more. A birthday party. A successful job interview. The day he'd adopted a stray cat that had been hanging around his apartment building.

Small moments, but real ones. And reality, Kael was learning, was stronger than any nightmare—if you knew how to find it.

The monster's form began to collapse in on itself, its voices becoming distorted and faint. The endless alley started to shrink, walls sliding back to their proper positions. And through it all, James Morrison stood in the center of the chaos, his expression slowly changing from terror to confusion to something that might have been hope.

"It's over," Kael told him as the last echoes of the nightmare faded away. "Whatever that thing was, it's gone now."

James blinked, looking around the normal-sized alley with wonder. "I... I remember. It's been the same dream, over and over. I couldn't wake up."

"You weren't dreaming," Kael said gently. "But you're awake now."

The vision shattered like glass, and Kael found himself back in the circular chamber, gasping and shaking. The distortion field around the young man had vanished, and the awful sobbing-screaming sound had been replaced by blessed silence.

James Morrison sat on the floor, tears streaming down his face—but his eyes were clear and focused for the first time in days.

"How?" Seraphina asked, her voice barely audible.

Kael slumped against the wall, exhaustion hitting him like a physical blow. His nose was bleeding, and his hands shook with residual terror from the nightmare he'd just experienced. "The thing feeding on him—it wasn't just creating fear. It was erasing hope. Making him forget that anything good had ever happened to him."

"So you reminded him."

"I reminded him." Kael wiped blood from his nose with the back of his hand. "Fear is powerful, but it's not the only emotion people carry. Sometimes you just have to dig deeper to find the light."

James looked up at them with eyes that were still haunted but no longer empty. "Thank you," he whispered. "I thought... I thought it would never end."

"It's ended," Kael assured him. "That thing can't touch you anymore."

Seraphina moved to help James to his feet, her expression unreadable. "We'll get you proper medical attention," she told the young man. "And somewhere safe to recover."

As two club security guards—not the traitor, Kael noted—escorted James from the chamber, Seraphina turned back to Kael with something that might have been respect in her eyes.

"Impressive," she said. "And terrifying. If you can break a living nightmare like that, what else are you capable of?"

Kael thought about the corporate monsters hunting him, about his sister trapped somewhere in their sterile hell. "I guess we're about to find out."

Seraphina's smile was sharp as a blade. "Indeed we are. Now, let's discuss that information you've earned. Starting with what your sister's message really means—and why the Argent Consortium wants her so badly."