Chapter 9: The Thing in the Backseat
Chapter 9: The Thing in the Backseat
The walk back to the car was a journey through a nightmare. The world had lost its sharp edges, blurring into a smear of indistinct shapes and muted colors. The only thing clear, the only thing real, was the image seared onto the back of her retinas: a small, polished granite headstone catching the afternoon sun.
SOPHIA GRACE BROWN Beloved Daughter Two years ago. Two years ago. Two years ago.
The dates carved into the stone were a death sentence for her delusion. Every rationalization, every desperate hope that this was all a traumatic fugue state, crumbled to dust. Connor kneeling at that grave wasn't an act of a cruel man trying to gaslight her; it was the quiet, lonely ritual of a grieving father. He knew their daughter was gone. He had buried her.
Which meant the thing she had left sitting in her car was not a ghost. It wasn't a spirit. It was a lie.
She reached the dark blue sedan, parked under the shade of a skeletal oak tree at the edge of the cemetery's access road. It looked like any other car. A family car. But as she approached, she could feel it—the familiar, unnatural pocket of cold radiating from within, a dead zone in the warm afternoon air.
Her hand trembled as she pulled the handle. The door opened with a soft click, releasing a wave of that bone-deep chill. She slid into the driver's seat, the fabric cold against her skin despite the sun. Her eyes locked on the rearview mirror.
It was waiting for her. The thing wearing Sophia’s face sat perfectly still in the booster seat, its expression unreadable. For a moment, there was only silence, thick and suffocating. The air crackled with unspoken tension. It knew. It sensed the shift in her, the crumbling of the reality it had so carefully cultivated. The food source was tainted. The feast was over.
It made one last attempt to reclaim its power, to draw her back into the warm, comforting lie. The sweet, lilting voice of her daughter filled the car, a perfect, heartbreaking imitation.
"Mommy? I was scared. You were gone so long."
A week ago, those words would have shattered her. Now, they were just noise. The sound of a lure being dangled over an empty hook. The image of the headstone was a shield, protecting her heart from the insidious poison of that voice.
Samantha said nothing. She didn't turn around. She just stared at the monstrous forgery in the mirror, her face a mask of hollowed-out shock. Her silence was an answer. It was a verdict.
The atmosphere in the car changed instantly. The pleading, childish tone vanished. The manufactured warmth evaporated, sucked into a vacuum of pure malevolence. The cold intensified, no longer a passive presence but an active, crushing force. Frost, stark white and feathery, began to crawl across the inside of the windshield, starting from the corners and creeping inward, sealing them in.
"You saw it," a new voice stated. It was the voice from the motel, the one she had heard for only a single, terrifying word. Flat. Ancient. Devoid of all emotion save for a possessive, predatory intelligence.
Samantha’s breath hitched. She watched, mesmerized with horror, as the reflection in the mirror began to change.
The glitch was back, but this was no fleeting flicker. This was a deliberate, furious unraveling. The childish illusion melted away like wax held to a flame. The pale, smooth skin of 'Sophia's' face seemed to pull taut, tightening over an impossible bone structure beneath. The color drained away, leaving a translucent, grayish pallor. The soft, rounded cheeks sank, hollowing into sharp, angular planes. The rosebud lips thinned and stretched into a lipless slit, a cruel gash in the grotesque new face.
But the eyes were the worst part. The large, dark, empty eyes she had found so unnerving now ignited from within. They became two burning, hateful pinpricks of light, glowing with a cold, hungry fire. This was the creature from the rearview mirror glitch, the monster from her nightmares, now fully revealed in the frosted, claustrophobic theater of the car. It was not a child. It was not human.
"You went to see him," the thing hissed, its voice a rasp of dry leaves and static. The mouth didn't move in a human way. The sound simply emanated from it. "You went to see the stone."
It leaned forward in the booster seat, the straps straining against its shifting form. The childish clothes looked absurd on the monstrous thing now wearing them. "You were so much better when you believed. So much warmer. Your grief was a feast. Your guilt? The sweetest wine."
The words struck Samantha with the force of a physical blow. Sad juice. The creature had not just been using her memories; it had been drinking her pain. The night of the crash… it hadn't just been a tragedy. It had been a summons. Her guilt hadn't been a burden; it had been a beacon, a lighthouse of despair that called this thing out of whatever darkness it inhabited.
"What… are you?" Samantha finally choked out, the words tearing at her raw throat.
The thing's head tilted, an unnatural, bird-like motion that stretched the skin at its neck. The burning eyes narrowed. "I am not your daughter's ghost," it snarled, the words dripping with contempt for the very idea. "Ghosts are echoes. They fade. I am a hunger. I am the shadow that waits for a door to be opened. And you," it leaned closer, its voice dropping to a terrifying, possessive whisper, "you tore the door right off its hinges the night you chose the stars over the road."
It knew. It knew everything. It had been there, a silent passenger, from the very beginning. Not from the minor fender-bender her mind had invented, but from the real crash. The twisting metal, the shattering glass, the black hole of guilt that had opened up inside her soul. That was its birthplace. That was its feeding ground.
"You created me," the monster continued, its voice a venomous caress. "You built me from your memories of her. You dressed me in her face. And you fed me with your refusal to let her go. Every time you whispered her name to an empty room, you were calling to me. Every time you wept with guilt, you were setting my table."
The full, soul-crushing weight of the truth descended upon Samantha. This creature wasn't an invader. It was an invitation. Her grief, which she thought was her last connection to her daughter, had been nothing but a tether to this parasite. She had nurtured it, protected it, and fled across the country with it, all while it drained her dry.
The monstrous face in the mirror contorted into an expression of furious, absolute ownership. "You are mine, Samantha," it hissed, the name a brand on her skin. "Your guilt is the chain, and I hold the end of it. You will not starve me. You will not abandon me."
The thing in the backseat settled back, the illusion of Sophia returning just enough to make its features seem merely distorted instead of overtly monstrous. But the mask was off. The truth was out. Samantha was no longer a grieving mother clinging to a delusion. She was a host, trapped in a cage of her own making, face to face with the parasite she had fattened on her own heart. And it was still hungry.
Characters

Connor Brown

Samantha Brown
