Chapter 8: What Liam Left Behind

Chapter 8: What Liam Left Behind

The slam of a truck door shattered the fragile quiet of Leo’s suburban street, followed by the heavy, furious thud of work boots on the porch steps. Leo, Chloe, and Maya, who were huddled in the controlled chaos of Leo’s bedroom, all froze. They knew who it was. The anger radiating from the front door was as palpable as a physical force.

A moment later, the bedroom door was flung open with enough force to make the posters on the wall tremble. Liam stood there, his face a thunderous mask of betrayal and rage. He was still in his work clothes from the construction site—a paint-splattered t-shirt and heavy, steel-toed boots. His athletic frame filled the doorway, blocking their only exit.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he snarled, his eyes sweeping over the three of them, over the maps and printouts that papered the room. “Maya called me. Said you went back. After everything I said, you went back to that goddamn place without me?”

His anger wasn't just about being excluded. It was the fury of a man whose control was slipping, whose carefully constructed reality was being threatened not by a ghost, but by the people he was trying to protect.

“We had to, Liam,” Leo said, standing up to face him. His voice was steadier than he felt. The image of the dark, open slit of the second door was burned into his mind. “We found something. Something important.”

“Oh, you found something?” Liam scoffed, stepping into the room and kicking the door shut behind him. The sound was like a gunshot. “Let me guess. More spooky footprints? A cold spot? Did you hear a ghostly moan on the wind?”

“We found another door,” Maya cut in, her voice sharp and defensive. “In the bunker. It leads deeper underground, and Liam… it was open.”

Liam stopped, his cynical smirk faltering for a fraction of a second before he reassembled it, stronger than before. “A door. Wow. Groundbreaking. You know what happens to old buildings? They fall apart. Doors rust, hinges break. A rat probably leaned on it too hard and it popped open. And you three went running back here to your little ghost-hunting club to talk about it?”

“It wasn't rusted open,” Leo insisted, his frustration boiling over. “The wheel to open it was frozen solid. It was pushed open from the other side. Something came out.”

“Something came out,” Liam repeated, his voice dripping with condescending pity. “Right. And now you’re all convinced, aren’t you? You’ve got your proof. You’ve let this… this campfire story completely take over your lives! It’s making you paranoid, it’s making Chloe a wreck, and it’s making you do stupid, dangerous things!” He gestured wildly around the room. “Look at this! This isn’t healthy! It’s an obsession!”

Chloe, who had been silent and curled into herself on the edge of Leo’s bed, finally looked up. Her expression wasn’t fearful anymore. It was something else, something eerily calm and focused. Her gaze wasn't on Liam’s angry face, but lower down.

“You’re right,” Liam pressed on, his voice rising. “It’s mass hysteria. I looked it up. A shared delusion. And you three are feeding it, making it worse! You have to snap out of it before someone gets hurt!”

He took a step forward, his boot scuffing on Leo’s hardwood floor. He was about to say more, but Chloe’s voice, soft and quiet, cut through his tirade like a shard of glass.

“Liam… your boots.”

Liam stopped, annoyed by the interruption. “What about my boots? They’re dirty. I was at work all day. It’s called a job, you should try it.”

“No,” Chloe said, her voice gaining a strange, chilling strength. She slowly uncurled herself and stood up, her eyes never leaving his feet. “Not that dirt. Not the paint and the drywall dust. The other stuff.”

Now everyone was looking. Leo and Maya followed her gaze down to Liam’s heavy, laced-up work boots. They were scuffed and splattered with the expected debris of a construction site—flecks of white paint, pale grey dust, and clumps of reddish-brown clay from the surface soil of the work site. But there was something else.

Caked deep in the treads, packed into the crevices around the thick rubber soles, was a different kind of earth.

It was a fine, dark soil, almost black. It wasn’t gritty like sand or clumpy like clay. It was a rich, peaty loam, flecked with what looked like tiny black particles of coal dust and something else—minuscule, silvery specks that caught the light of Leo’s desk lamp like flecks of mica. Leo felt a cold knot form in the pit of his stomach. He recognized it. He’d seen that same unique, mineral-rich soil on his own boots after they’d come out of the bunker, clinging to the edges where he’d scraped against the damp floor. It was the soil of the deep earth, the kind of soil you only found underground.

“Where did you get that mud, Liam?” Leo asked, his voice barely a whisper.

Liam looked down, a frown of confusion on his face. He lifted his foot, twisting it to see the sole. He saw the dark soil, the strange, glittering flecks. For the first time since he’d burst into the room, he was speechless.

“That’s impossible,” he finally said, shaking his head. “I was at the Miller building site all day. It’s all red clay out there. You know that.”

“That soil isn’t from the Miller site,” Maya said, her voice hollow with dawning horror. “It’s from the park. It’s from the bunker.”

Liam let out a short, sharp laugh, but there was no humor in it. It was a brittle, cracking sound. “That’s ridiculous. I haven’t been back there. I was at work until five, I went to the gym, I grabbed a burger, and I came straight here when you called me, Maya. I haven’t been anywhere near Ashworth.”

He was reciting his alibi, his voice desperate, trying to reassure himself as much as them. He was retracing his steps, accounting for his time, shoring up the walls of his rational world. But the evidence was right there, clinging to his feet.

He stared at his boots, his mind frantically working, searching for an explanation. A logical reason. Had he walked through something at the gym? In the parking lot? Had one of them tracked it into his truck? No. None of it made sense. The soil was packed in deep, as if he’d been walking in it, pressing his full weight down into it, over and over.

“Liam,” Chloe said, her voice gentle now, laced with a terrifying pity. “When was the last time you looked at your boots?”

He couldn’t answer. He stared down at the black, tell-tale earth, and a new kind of fear—a fear far worse than ghosts or whispers—began to bloom on his face. It was the fear of the unknown within his own mind. He had been so certain of his movements, of his own actions, of his own unwavering disbelief. Yet here was physical proof that his body had been somewhere his mind refused to admit.

He hadn't gone back to the park. He knew he hadn't.

But his feet had.

The angry, confident skeptic vanished, replaced by a pale, terrified stranger. He looked from his boots to the horrified faces of his friends, the unspoken question hanging in the air between them, thick and suffocating. If he wasn't in control of where he walked, what else wasn't he in control of? The entity was no longer just a sound or a footprint. It was an insidious puppeteer, and Liam, its most ardent denier, had just discovered he was its marionette.