Chapter 4: The Family's Silence

The weight of secrets had been growing heavier with each passing day. Two months into his ritual with the casket, Liam had documented forty-three confirmed deaths, each vision matching perfectly with subsequent obituaries. The notebook he kept hidden in his office desk had grown thick with sketches and details, a morbid catalog of humanity's final moments.

But the questions multiplied faster than the answers. Why had his family possessed this cursed object for generations? How long had it been revealing its visions to Carter men? And most importantly—what was the true cost of this knowledge?

Saturday morning found Liam sitting in his car outside his father's modest ranch house, working up the courage to knock on the door. Frank Carter had been avoiding his calls for weeks, claiming illness or work whenever Liam suggested they meet. But some conversations couldn't be postponed indefinitely.

The front yard looked neglected—overgrown grass, unpruned bushes, newspapers piling up on the front step. Through the windows, Liam could see closed curtains and no signs of life. For a moment, he wondered if his father was even home.

The doorbell echoed hollowly inside the house. Long minutes passed before he heard shuffling footsteps and the rattle of multiple locks being disengaged. When the door finally opened, Liam barely recognized the man standing before him.

Frank Carter had aged decades in the two months since delivering the casket. His hair had gone completely gray, his cheeks were hollow, and his clothes hung loose on his diminished frame. But it was his eyes that shocked Liam most—they held the haunted look of a man who hadn't slept peacefully in years.

"Liam." His father's voice was barely above a whisper. "What are you doing here?"

"I need to talk to you, Dad. About the casket."

Frank's face went white. He gripped the doorframe so tightly his knuckles turned bone-pale. "No. We're not talking about that thing."

"I have questions—"

"I don't care what questions you have." Frank started to close the door, but Liam caught it with his palm.

"Please, Dad. I need to understand what I've inherited."

Something in his son's voice must have conveyed the depth of his desperation, because Frank's resistance crumbled. He stepped aside, allowing Liam into the house, but his movements were those of a defeated man.

The interior was worse than the exterior. Dishes piled in the sink, empty bottles scattered across surfaces, curtains drawn tight against the daylight. The house felt like a tomb, airless and abandoned.

"You've been looking inside it, haven't you?" Frank asked without turning around. He walked to the kitchen and poured himself three fingers of bourbon despite the early hour.

"How did you know?"

"Because you have the same look I had. The same look your grandfather had." Frank downed half the bourbon in one gulp. "The look of a man who's seen too much."

They sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by the detritus of Frank's deteriorating life. Liam waited, sensing that pushing too hard would cause his father to retreat entirely.

"How long has our family had the casket?" Liam asked gently.

Frank laughed bitterly. "Generations. My great-great-grandfather acquired it sometime in the 1800s. Family legend says he won it in a poker game, but I think that's bullshit. Nobody wins something like that. It chooses its owners."

"What does it show you?"

"You know what it shows you." Frank's eyes were hollow. "Don't pretend you don't. I can see it in your face—that mixture of fascination and horror. You've been watching them die, haven't you? Cataloging their faces like some kind of sick collection."

The accuracy of the observation made Liam's stomach clench. "It's not sick. It's... profound. I'm witnessing something extraordinary."

"Extraordinary." Frank spat the word like a curse. "Is that what you call it when you see your own son in that damned box?"

The kitchen fell silent except for the hum of the refrigerator. Liam stared at his father, processing the implications.

"You saw me?"

"Three weeks after I gave you that cursed thing. Opened it up for one last look, and there you were. Peaceful as could be, hands folded, eyes closed forever." Frank finished his bourbon and immediately poured another. "Do you understand what that did to me? Seeing my boy's corpse?"

"But I'm alive. I'm sitting right here."

"Are you?" Frank's laugh was ragged. "Because I've been waiting for the phone call ever since. Every day, wondering if today's the day I lose my son to that abomination."

A chill ran down Liam's spine. In all his careful observations and documentation, he'd never considered that the casket might show him people from his own life. The visions had always been strangers—peaceful, anonymous faces that appeared in obituaries days later.

"Maybe it was wrong," he said weakly. "Maybe the vision didn't mean—"

"It's never wrong." Frank's voice was flat with certainty. "Never. Every face I saw in that thing ended up dead within days. Every single one."

"How many did you see?"

"Dozens. Maybe hundreds over the years. Started when I was about your age, just married your mother. Thought I was losing my mind at first, then thought I was blessed with some kind of gift." Frank's expression twisted with self-loathing. "Sound familiar?"

It sounded exactly familiar. The progression from terror to fascination to a sense of divine purpose—Liam had experienced every stage.

"What changed your mind?"

"I started recognizing faces. Neighbors, people from church, my boss at the factory. Bad enough when they were strangers, but when you start seeing people you know..." Frank shuddered. "Then I saw your mother."

The words hit Liam like a physical blow. His mother had died when he was twelve—cancer, the doctors had said. A brutal, wasting disease that had taken her slowly and painfully.

"She was peaceful in the casket," Frank continued. "More peaceful than she'd been in months of chemotherapy and hospital stays. I thought maybe it was a mercy, seeing her that way. Thought maybe the casket was showing me she'd be free from pain soon."

"And you never tried to warn her? Never tried to change what you'd seen?"

Frank's laugh was bitter. "Oh, I tried. Convinced her to see different doctors, dragged her to specialists in other cities, even looked into experimental treatments we couldn't afford. None of it mattered. The casket doesn't show possibilities—it shows certainties."

Silence stretched between them. Liam felt the foundations of his newfound purpose cracking. The power he'd felt, the sense of being chosen for something extraordinary—it was all built on a foundation of inevitable tragedy.

"Why didn't you destroy it?" he asked.

"You think I didn't try?" Frank stood abruptly and walked to a kitchen drawer. He pulled out a hammer, its head scarred and dented from use. "I beat that thing with everything I could find. Axes, sledgehammers, even tried to burn it. Nothing worked. It repairs itself overnight, good as new."

"That's impossible."

"So are visions of the dead, but here we are." Frank set the hammer on the table with a metallic clank. "The casket doesn't break, doesn't burn, doesn't age. It just waits for the next Carter to inherit it and start the cycle all over again."

"Then why did you give it to me?"

The question hung in the air like an accusation. Frank's shoulders sagged, and for the first time since Liam had arrived, his father looked directly at him.

"Because I'm a coward," he said simply. "Because living with that thing was killing me, and I couldn't bear the weight of it anymore. I told myself you were stronger, smarter, that maybe you could figure out what generations of Carter men couldn't."

"And now that you know I've been looking inside it?"

"Now I'm terrified." Frank's voice broke. "Because I know what comes next. The obsession, the isolation, the slow realization that you're not blessed—you're cursed. And eventually, you'll see someone you love in that box, and it'll destroy you just like it destroyed me."

Liam stood to leave, his mind reeling with revelations. The casket wasn't a gift or a calling—it was a generational curse that had been passed down through his family like a disease. His father's deterioration, his grandfather's early death, even his great-grandfather's mysterious acquisition of the object—it all made horrible sense now.

"There has to be a way to break the cycle," he said.

"There is." Frank's voice was steady for the first time since Liam had arrived. "Don't open it again. Don't look inside. Let it sit in your basement until you die, then make sure no Carter comes after you to inherit it."

"But the visions—"

"Are poison disguised as knowledge." Frank grabbed Liam's arm with surprising strength. "Promise me you'll stop. Promise me you won't let that thing consume you the way it consumed me."

Liam looked into his father's desperate eyes and felt the pull of competing loyalties. The rational part of him recognized the wisdom in Frank's words, the clear pattern of destruction that followed the casket through generations. But the other part—the part that had been intoxicated by impossible knowledge—whispered that his father was weak, that he'd given up too easily.

"I promise," he lied.

Frank's relief was palpable. He released Liam's arm and sank back into his chair, suddenly looking every one of his sixty-three years.

"Good. Good. Maybe you'll be the one to break the cycle."

But as Liam drove home, his father's warnings warring with his own dark curiosity, he knew he wouldn't keep that promise. The casket had shown him something his father had never understood—that death wasn't just an ending, but a transition to something greater. The visions were peaceful, beautiful even. They showed him truth in its purest form.

And now he needed to see if his father's claim was accurate. Had the casket really shown Frank his son's death? Or was the old man's memory distorted by guilt and alcohol?

There was only one way to find out.

The basement waited, and with it, answers that might change everything.