Chapter 12: A Cancerous Gift

Chapter 12: A Cancerous Gift

The world came back in bleached-out, fluorescent strokes. The humming of the lights above was a physical pressure against Alex’s skull. The air smelled of burnt coffee, industrial disinfectant, and the faint, dusty scent of old paper. He was sitting on a hard plastic chair in a small, windowless room, a cup of lukewarm water untouched on the metal table in front of him. The last twelve hours had been a blur of flashing lights, crackling radios, and the dispassionate, droning voices of police officers and paramedics.

He had told them a story. It was the truth, but a skeletal version, stripped of its impossible, supernatural flesh. He’d received a cryptic message from his friend, Chris. He’d gotten worried. He’d driven to Millfield, following a location Chris had hinted at before. He’d found the den in the woods. He’d found the body of a woman. He’d found Chris. He’d called 911.

He didn't mention the website that delivered childhood toys. He didn't mention the impossible memories of a racecar bed, or a sister with a shadow that didn't match. He didn't mention the woman eating his computer before beating herself to death in a ritualistic frenzy. He didn't mention the cancerous flipbook, or a teddy bear whispering his name. To speak of those things would be to trade this sterile interview room for a padded one. He was a witness to a bizarre murder-suicide. That was the story. That was the only version of reality the world would accept.

A tired-looking detective in a rumpled suit entered the room, closing the door softly behind him. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. He sat down opposite Alex, sliding a thin file onto the table.

“Alex,” he said, his voice gravelly with exhaustion. “I’m Detective Miller. First, I want to say I’m sorry for your loss. What you went through out there… no one should have to see that.”

Alex just stared at him, his own face a numb, expressionless mask. He felt hollowed out, a building gutted by fire.

“We’ve made some headway,” Miller continued, tapping a finger on the file. “The woman… we identified her. Her name was Whitney Normanson. She was reported missing from a neighboring county. Back in 1999.”

The date hit Alex like a physical blow. 1999. She had been out there, in those woods, for over two decades. A ghost haunting the edges of society long before she ever became his personal specter.

“She had a history of mental health issues,” Miller said, his tone careful, clinical. “Especially after she lost her son to SIDS a year before she vanished. The official cause of death is what you saw. Massive blunt force trauma to the head. Self-inflicted. The object she used was… well, it was the circuit board from some kind of small computer.”

The Watcher. His creation. The murder weapon in a suicide that was really a sacrifice. The detective’s rational explanation felt like a flimsy sheet thrown over an abyss.

“And your friend…” Miller sighed, flipping a page in the file. He looked up at Alex, his eyes full of a weary pity. “The M.E. just sent over the preliminary report. It’s… unusual.”

Alex braced himself. He expected to hear about the stitches, the grotesque fusion of flesh and fabric.

“We’re not listing a cause of death yet,” the detective said, leaning forward. “Because frankly, our medical examiner has never seen anything like it. Your friend… his body was riddled with tumors. A hyper-aggressive, unclassified form of carcinoma. They were everywhere. In his organs, his muscle tissue, his brain. The pathologist said it looked like a cancer that should have taken years to develop had instead grown to terminal velocity in a matter of hours. Maybe minutes. It caused total, catastrophic systemic failure. He said… he said it was like his own cells had been given a command to just… multiply. Uncontrollably.”

A cancerous gift. The words bloomed in Alex’s mind, cold and terrible. The entity hadn't just killed Chris. It had infested him. It had turned his own body into the weapon, a perfect, biological echo of Leo's disease, a mirror of the grotesque cell division in the flipbook. The coroner saw a medical anomaly; Alex saw a signature.

The world outside the police station was achingly, offensively normal. The sun was bright. Cars drove past. People walked down the sidewalk, talking on their phones, living in a reality that hadn't been fractured and rewritten. Alex felt like a man from another planet, an astronaut returned from a deep space mission where he’d witnessed cosmic horrors, now trying to pretend that buying a coffee was a sane and meaningful act.

His sister, Sarah, had been called. She’d arrived frantic, her face etched with a genuine concern that completely erased the memory of the disjointed puppet he’d seen in her house. She didn't remember the raw meat or the out-of-season Christmas decorations. She only remembered a panicked, nonsensical call from her little brother. To her, the nightmare had never happened. The entity had cleaned up after itself, snipping away the threads of its intrusion, leaving Alex as the sole keeper of the terrible truth.

He was back in his dorm room two days later. It felt like a museum exhibit dedicated to a dead person. The posters on the wall, the messy stack of textbooks, the hoodie slung over his desk chair—they were artifacts from a life that was no longer his. The silence was the worst part. It was absolute. No cryptic emails. No possessed electronics. No whispers from stuffed animals. The phenomena had ceased completely. The entity had gotten what it wanted, performed its gruesome play, and now the stage was empty.

It was over. He had survived.

The thought provided no comfort. He sat in the dark, the only light coming from the glow of his monitor. For the first time in days, he felt a flicker of his old self, the logical programmer, the problem-solver. He couldn't leave it alone. The human mind abhors a vacuum, and his was a black hole of unanswered questions.

He opened his web browser, his fingers moving on autopilot. He navigated to his history, scrolling back, back past the news articles about the "Millfield Woods Mystery," back past the frantic searches for his sister's address.

And there it was. A single, purple, visited link from a lifetime ago.

TheDen.███

His heart hammered against his ribs. He knew it would be a dead link, a 404 error. The website had served its purpose. It was a temporary door, and now it was closed. But he had to be sure. It was the only loose thread in the "official" version of events.

His finger trembled as he moved the cursor over the link. He clicked.

The page began to load. He expected an error, a blank screen. Instead, he was redirected. The URL in the address bar changed, morphing into a long, complex string of characters leading to a site hosted on some archaic, free web service. The page that materialized on his screen was a relic of a bygone internet. The background was a grainy, tiled image of a cloudy sky. The text was a simple, serif font in a somber grey. It was a blog. The design was straight out of 1999.

At the top of the page, in a slightly larger, darker font, was the blog’s title. The words seemed to leech the very warmth from the room.

Gospel of a Grieving Mother

And directly beneath it, the author’s name, followed by a date.

By Whitney Normanson. Last updated: November 12th, 1999.

It wasn’t over. It was a lie. The story hadn’t ended with a body in the woods. This was the beginning. This was the scripture. He was staring at the last will and testament of the rabid disciple, a digital confession left dormant for over two decades, waiting for him.