Chapter 6: The Contagious Truth

Chapter 6: The Contagious Truth

Three months.

Three months of the world pretending to be normal while Jennifer’s reality had been permanently shattered. The physical wounds had scarred over, leaving a latticework of slick, puckered skin on her left leg. The burn had healed into a permanent limp, a constant, pulling reminder of her escape. But the other wounds, the ones no doctor could see or bandage, continued to fester.

Her desire was a fantasy, a desperate, aching need to be the girl she was before the fire. The girl who worried about midterms and paying rent, not about the sound of hooves in her memory. The obstacle was her own mind. She lived in a new, cheap apartment in the city, but the four walls were a prison of trauma. Every night was a replay. The guttural bleat from the woods, the shattered glass, the voice on the phone wearing her mother’s warmth like a mask. And always, the dream ended the same way: with the silent, masked figures watching her from the treeline, their featureless faces passing a silent judgment.

She was a ghost haunting her own life, sustained by a cocktail of prescribed medications that were supposed to keep the nightmares at bay. They didn't. They just wrapped the terror in a thick, dull cotton, making it harder to scream.

The official story was a closed book. "Tragic Accident," the final report had said. James Foster was still a missing person, his case gone cold, presumed to be another troubled kid who had run away or succumbed to the elements. The Ellisons had collected their insurance money and were rebuilding. To the world, the story was over. But for Jennifer, the unanswered questions were a relentless poison. Why her? What was that thing? And why, in his final moments, had Jimmy looked at her with such profound, soul-crushing guilt? I'm so, so sorry, Jen. He'd said it like a confession.

The need to understand became an obsession, the only thing that could cut through the medicated fog. If she couldn't escape the memory, she would dissect it. Her action began not with a grand plan, but with a single search term typed into her laptop late one night, the blue light a familiar shield against the dark.

Clark's Creek local legends.

The initial results were banal. Ghost stories about Civil War soldiers, rumors of buried treasure. But she dug deeper, past the tourist-friendly folklore, into the digital archives of old county newspapers, scanned historical society pamphlets, and the murky, forgotten corners of local paranormal forums from the early 2000s.

Days bled into nights. Her apartment became a nest of printed articles and half-empty coffee cups. And slowly, she began to find them. Fragments. Whispers. A story from the 1950s about a farmer who went mad, claiming a "Whispering Goat" had called his wife's name from the woods, luring her to her death. He was institutionalized. An article from 1922 about a group of loggers who abandoned their camp near the creek, telling a wild tale of a "Man with No Eyes" who haunted the forest, a tall shadow that drove men to violence if they looked upon it. They were dismissed as drunks.

The details were always slightly different, the names changed by time and retelling, but the core elements were always, terrifyingly, the same. A creature in the woods near Clark’s Creek. A thing that mimicked voices. A presence that inspired a specific, maddening terror. And in every story, the same warning, passed down like a holy commandment: Don't look at it.

The result of her search was a cold, creeping validation. She wasn't crazy. It was real. It had been there for a very, very long time, and she was just the latest in a long line of victims. But this knowledge brought no comfort, only a deeper, more profound dread. This wasn't just a monster. It was a local god, a fixture of the landscape.

The turning point came from the unlikeliest of sources. A post on a defunct conspiracy theory forum, dated 2004. The user, "CreekWalker76," had been compiling local legends. Most of it was the same stories she had already found, but one post contained an interview with his great-grandmother, a woman who had lived in the area her whole life.

He wrote: My nana told me the old folks didn't call it a ghost or a demon. They called it a 'story that walks.' She said it couldn't see you unless you were told about it. Knowing it existed was like lighting a lantern in the dark so it could find you. She said the only way to save yourself once it had your scent was to tell the story to someone else. To give them the lantern. She said it was a terrible sin, to pass the burden to another soul, but sometimes it was the only way to survive.

Jennifer stared at the screen, the words blurring through a sudden film of tears. A story that walks. Knowing it existed was like lighting a lantern in the dark.

It wasn't a monster that haunted a place. It was a predator that hunted people. It was a curse. A memetic virus, spreading not through blood or a bite, but through information. The knowledge of its existence was the infection.

The final, devastating piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

Jimmy.

He hadn't come to her for help. He hadn't come to warn her out of friendship. He had come to her because he was its target, and he was desperate to be free. He had hammered on her door, bleeding and terrified, and he had told her everything. He had described the creature. He had given her the rule.

He hadn't just handed her a warning. He had handed her the lantern.

The surprise was a punch to the gut that stole all the air from her lungs. A wave of nausea and a grief so profound it felt like a physical weight crashed down on her. His face swam in her memory—not the haunted, terrified boy from that night, but the quiet, awkward kid from high school who she'd shared a cigarette with behind the bleachers once, the only person who had been kind to him all week.

I'm so, so sorry, Jen.

His apology wasn't for leaving her to face the monster alone. It was the desperate, guilty plea of a man condemning his only friend to save himself. He had known exactly what he was doing. He had looked her in the eyes and passed his death sentence on to her.

And the creature, its hunt for Jimmy now concluded, had turned its attention to the new lantern burning brightly in the dark.

To her.