Chapter 6: The Inheritance

Chapter 6: The Inheritance

The night air was cold, sharp enough to cut through the cheap, scratchy wool of the police-issued blanket. Liam sat on the curb of the apartment building’s small, manicured lawn, a refugee in his own courtyard. The emergency was over, but the aftermath was a slow, pulsing bleed of red and blue light washing over the brick facade, painting the windows in rhythmic, silent flashes. The paramedics were gone. The coroner was gone. Most of the cops were gone. Only one cruiser remained, a silent sentinel guarding the entrance to his desecrated life.

He was numb. The events of the last few hours played on a relentless, silent loop in his mind. The shriek of the drill. The wet crunch of bone. Frank Elbert’s milky, vacant eyes staring into his as he died. The small, grimy hole worn smooth beneath his desk, a hidden eye that had watched him for months, transforming his private sanctuary into a public stage. Every frustrated sigh, every mumbled curse at a video game, every stolen glance through his peephole at Chloe—it had all been observed, catalogued, consumed.

A policewoman had given him a pamphlet for victim services and the number for a 24-hour motel the city sometimes used. He couldn't go back in. The apartment was a biohazard, a crime scene, a tomb. He was homeless.

But even through the thick fog of trauma, a sharper, more immediate anxiety pricked at him. Chloe.

What was she thinking? Could she hear the commotion from her apartment across the hall? Did she see the body bag being wheeled out? Did she connect the sirens and the flashing lights to the strange, unstable neighbor who had screamed in an arcade and then forced a clumsy, unwanted kiss on her? The thought sent a fresh wave of shame washing over him, so potent it was almost a physical sickness. He had desperately wanted to be seen by her, and now he was. He was the building’s ghoul, the main character in a grisly piece of local gossip.

His hand, still marked by a faint, persistent tremor, slipped into his hoodie pocket and retrieved his phone. The screen glowed to life, a familiar comfort in the alien landscape of his life. 22% battery. A lifeline on a timer.

He scrolled through his notifications, his heart a dull, aching drum in his chest. A news alert about a city council vote. An email from his remote IT job about a scheduled server maintenance. Nothing from her.

He opened their text chain. The last messages were from that afternoon, a lifetime ago.

Chloe: See you at 7! :)

Liam: Can’t wait.

He stared at the words, at the cheerful little smiley face that now seemed like a cruel joke. He had destroyed that. In the space of a few hours, he had taken this fragile, nascent thing and smashed it into a thousand pieces. Maybe it was for the best. What could he possibly say to her now? ‘Hey, sorry about the public breakdown and the creepy kiss. By the way, the previous tenant was living in my walls and just drilled himself to death in my living room. How was your night?’

He was about to lock the screen, to surrender to the cold and the silence, when a new banner slid down from the top of the display.

The logo was a simple, stylized gamepad, the icon for his streaming app.

A private message.

Liam’s blood turned to ice. It couldn’t be. It was impossible. He’d told Detective Miller everything about wallflower_75, about the messages, the eerie prescience. Miller had nodded, scribbled in his notepad, and assured him it was all part of the profile they were building on the deceased, Frank Elbert. The account belonged to a dead man. It should be as silent as its owner.

Yet there it was. A notification, alive and pulsing on his screen.

His thumb hovered over it, a millimeter from the glass. Every instinct screamed at him to throw the phone, to hurl it into the street and let it be crushed by a passing car. To erase the message, unread, from existence. But he couldn’t. It was the same terrible compulsion that had made him open the security footage, the same need to look into the abyss even as it stared back. He had to know.

He tapped the banner.

The app opened, loading his private message inbox. The screen was stark white, with a single new message at the top, a black bubble against the sterile background.

From wallflower_75.

He read the words, and the world tilted on its axis.

You’re the man of the house now. Act like it.

The phrase was nonsensical. A glitch. A cruel, posthumous automated message. It had to be. Frank Elbert was a bag of meat and bone in a city morgue. He couldn't be sending messages.

Then, Frank’s last words echoed in his memory, no longer a rasping whisper but a deafening shout.

“Don’t trust the Wallflowers.”

Plural. Not Wallflower. Wallflowers.

The truth crashed down on Liam with the force of a physical blow, a soul-crushing certainty that left him breathless. wallflower_75 wasn't just Frank. It couldn't have been. It was an account, a handle, a mantle to be passed down. Frank Elbert wasn't the monster. He was just the monster’s most recent vessel, a lonely, obsessed man who had burrowed into the walls and been consumed by something far older and hungrier. He was grooming a successor. He had delivered his final message and then, his purpose served, he had vacated the premises.

The inheritance wasn't the blood-soaked apartment. It was the role.

The gaunt, skeletal figure he’d seen in his living room, in the arcade… that wasn't just Frank Elbert. It was the thing Frank had become. The thing he was now expected to be. The man of the house. The watcher in the walls.

A cold, deep dread, unlike anything he had ever felt, settled in his bones. This wasn’t over. The nightmare hadn’t ended with the shriek of the drill. It had just been passed on to him.

Liam slowly lifted his head, his gaze drawn inexorably up from the glowing screen to the dark, silent window of Apartment 4A. His window. It stared back at him like a single, dead eye.

The last police cruiser started its engine, its job done. As it pulled away from the curb, its flashing lights swept across Liam’s face one last time—red, then blue, then red again—before plunging him into the cold, waiting darkness.