Chapter 15: He's Waiting for You

Chapter 15: He's Waiting for You

The blog’s final words hung in the airless void of the dorm room, a verdict delivered from a two-decade-old grave. The beloved older brother was always the designated meal.

Alex didn't move. He couldn't. His body was a statue of ice, his blood replaced with slush. The frantic, terrified energy that had propelled him through the woods and the police station had finally guttered out, leaving behind only the cold, heavy ash of comprehension. He was the final piece. The last course in a ritual designed to feed a monster wearing his brother's face.

The grief he had carried for Leo, the grief that had been the central pillar of his emotional life for years, had shattered. In its place was a gaping, horrifying chasm. The image of his brave, tragic little brother was gone, replaced by the portrait of a terrified boy so desperate to live that he had willingly sold his own family to a shadow in the woods. Betrayal was too simple a word. This was a fundamental inversion of reality, a cosmic theft where his love had been weaponized against him from the very beginning.

He stared at the laptop screen, at Whitney’s final, damning sentence. He felt a strange, detached impulse to close the lid, to walk out of the room, to pretend he had never seen it. He could try to live a normal life. He could tell himself it was over. Chris was dead. The woman was dead. The phenomena had stopped. Maybe the ritual had failed. Maybe, with the anchor secured, the entity was satisfied.

He could lie to himself.

Ding.

The sound was small, innocuous. A simple, clean chime from his laptop’s speakers. The sound of a new email arriving. It was a sound he heard a dozen times a day, a sound that meant nothing. But in the suffocating silence of the room, it was a gunshot.

His eyes darted to the corner of his screen where the notification banner was sliding into view. For a moment, he saw only the mundane: the sender's name, the subject line. But his brain, now rewired by weeks of terror, processed it instantly.

From: Leo ([email protected]) Subject: Miss me?

A strangled noise caught in Alex’s throat. It was a sound of pure, primal denial. His gaze was locked on the screen, on the impossible name and the casual, taunting question. It was a subject line pulled from the lexicon of a sibling relationship, a phrase that should have been playful, nostalgic. Here, it was a declaration of war. Reborn.com. It wasn't even hiding. It was boasting.

He sat there for a full minute, his heart hammering a frantic, panicked rhythm against his ribs. His hand hovered over the trackpad, trembling. Don't open it. Delete it. Block the sender. Burn the laptop. Run. Every rational part of his brain screamed commands at him, but he was frozen. He knew it was useless. It was like trying to outrun a nuclear blast shadow. The entity—Leo—had burrowed into his life through the digital world once before. It knew where he lived. It knew his name. And now, it was knocking on the front door.

He wasn't running from a mystery anymore. He was being summoned by the monster itself.

With a final, shuddering breath, Alex moved the cursor. The click was a deafening crack in the silence, the sound of a seal breaking on a tomb.

The body of the email was starkly empty. There was no text, no image, no signature. There was only a single, hyperlinked line of blue text.

TheDen.org

The domain was different. Not the cryptic, glitchy address Chris had sent him. This was clean, official. An organization. He knew, with the certainty of a man on death row hearing the warden’s footsteps, that clicking it was the last mistake he would ever make. He also knew he had no other choice.

He clicked the link.

There was no redirection this time, no archaic blog interface. The page that loaded was slick, modern, and professionally designed. The background was a soft, ethereal white. At the top, in an elegant, serif font, were the words: Leo Vance, Reborn. A Celebration of Life Beyond Life.

It was a memorial website. A polished, pristine, digital shrine.

High-resolution photographs faded in and out in a gentle slideshow. Pictures of Leo, but not the Leo Alex remembered. There were none of the photos from their family albums, none of the pictures of him pale and thin in a hospital bed. These were new. Impossible pictures. A healthy, vibrant Leo with rosy cheeks and a bright, confident smile, standing in front of the new university library that had been built only three years ago. Leo, looking about seventeen, laughing with a group of friends Alex had never seen, their faces indistinct and blurry. And one, the most jarring of all: a photo of Leo, looking exactly as he did in the last picture from the den, standing beside a smiling Whitney Normanson, his arm draped casually around her shoulder as if she were a beloved aunt.

Beneath the slideshow was a block of text, a hagiography written in a sanitized, corporate voice. It spoke of a brave young artist who had "transcended his physical limitations" and "embraced a new state of being." It was full of meaningless, inspirational platitudes about rebirth and continuity. It was the entity's public relations campaign, a grotesque rebranding of his brother's damnation into a new-age success story. It was desecrating not only his death, but his life, paving over the reality of his suffering with a cheap, synthetic lie.

Alex scrolled down, his mind numb, a passive observer at the defilement of his own past. He felt a strange detachment, as if he were floating above his own body, watching a horror movie he couldn't turn off.

That’s when he saw it.

In the bottom right corner of the screen, a small icon pulsed gently. A speech bubble. Before he could even react, it expanded. A small, clean window slid into view, the kind of customer service chat box you'd find on any commercial website. At the top of the window, a name was displayed next to a small, green dot indicating 'online'.

Leo is typing...

The three grey dots appeared, pulsed, and vanished. They appeared again. Alex held his breath, his entire universe contracting to that tiny window, to that blinking cursor. He was watching a ghost learn to type. A monster composing a message. His brother, across an impossible digital divide, reaching out to him one last time.

Then, the message appeared. The text was black, simple, and absolutely final.

Funny story, bro. We're not finished yet.