Chapter 5: The Wrong House

Chapter 5: The Wrong House

The dead line hummed in Alex’s ear, a flat, monotonous tone that sounded like a final judgment. He tried calling Sarah back five, six, seven times. Each call went straight to a generic voicemail greeting, her cheerful, recorded voice a mocking echo of the sister he had just lost to a storm of static and an ancient, guttural language.

Panic, cold and absolute, seized him. He needed an anchor. Any anchor. On pure, desperate instinct, he dialed Chris. He didn't know what he would say—My dead brother’s teddy bear is talking to me and a ghost woman is stalking me and my sister has been possessed by a dial-up modem—but he just needed to hear his friend's voice, to hear him say something normal and stupid about a video game or a meme.

The phone rang once, then clicked. Voicemail.

“Hey, you’ve reached Chris. Probably screening your call or fighting a dragon. Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you. Maybe.”

A wave of dizziness washed over Alex. Chris never let his phone go to voicemail. He was surgically attached to the device. Alex was about to try again when his phone buzzed in his hand. A new text message. From Chris.

Relief, so powerful it was nauseating, flooded his system. He swiped the notification open.

They're making me remember. The bed wasn't mine.

The message was a shard of ice in his gut. It was nonsensical, cryptic, and utterly devoid of Chris’s usual slang-filled, emoji-laden style. It felt like a message from a hostage, or worse, a message from the thing that had taken the hostage. The bed wasn't mine. It was a fragment of a memory, but whose?

He was no longer safe on campus. The smiling woman was out there, a physical marker of the entity’s territory. His room was a contaminated zone, his own creations turned against him. Chris was gone. Sarah was… corrupted.

There was only one thing left to do. He had to go to her. He had to see with his own eyes. The phone call had to be a trick, a sophisticated audio deepfake sent by the entity. A technological hack. Sarah and Maya had to be okay. They had to be. His sanity depended on it.

He sprinted to the student parking lot, his backpack banging against his shoulders. Every shadow seemed to coalesce into the shape of the gaunt woman. He half-expected her to be waiting by his beat-up Honda Civic, her terrible smile illuminated by the parking lot lights. But the space was empty.

The hour-long drive to Sarah’s suburban home was a descent into a private hell. The dark ribbon of the interstate seemed to stretch into infinity, the rhythmic thump-thump of the tires on the pavement a countdown to some unknown horror. He kept his eyes glued to the rearview mirror, his heart seizing every time a pair of headlights grew closer. He saw her face in the distorted reflections of passing trucks, in the twisted shapes of trees on the roadside. He turned the radio on for a distraction, but it only cycled through stations of whispering static and fragments of old, cheerful jingles that sounded menacing in the dark.

He finally turned onto Sarah’s street, a quiet, cookie-cutter cul-de-sac that had always represented a comforting, boring safety. But tonight, the safety was gone. As his headlights swept across his sister’s two-story colonial, Alex slammed on the brakes.

The house was ablaze with light. Christmas lights.

Garish, multicolored icicle lights dripped from the gutters. A string of blinking candy canes lined the walkway. On the front lawn, an inflatable snowman, eight feet tall, wobbled in the autumn breeze, its fixed, plastic smile a grotesque parody. It was mid-October.

This was wrong. This was profoundly, fundamentally wrong. Alex felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in his chest. The entity wasn’t just haunting him anymore; it was redecorating.

He killed the engine and got out of the car, the festive blinking of the lights feeling like a frantic warning. The front door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open and stepped inside.

“Sarah?” he called out, his voice swallowed by the unnatural silence of the house.

The air inside was freezing, far colder than the autumn night outside. It smelled wrong, too. Not of the potpourri and scented candles Sarah loved, but of something metallic and vaguely organic, like a butcher’s shop. On the living room coffee table, a miniature ceramic Christmas village was set up, its tiny fake-snow-dusted houses arranged in a perfect, soulless circle.

He heard a low, rhythmic humming from the back of the house and followed it toward the kitchen. As he stepped through the doorway, the scene before him short-circuited his brain.

Sarah stood with her back to him, facing the kitchen island. Her body was rigid, her movements stilted and unnatural, like a poorly animated puppet. She was humming a Christmas carol—Silent Night—but it was off-key, the melody flat and dead. As she reached for a cupboard, her arm moved in a series of short, sharp jerks, and Alex saw it: her shadow, cast on the white cabinets by the overhead light, didn't move with her. It lagged a fraction of a second behind, a dark, syrupy silhouette that detached from her body before snapping back into place. It was a violation of the laws of physics, happening right in front of him.

Then he saw his niece. Five-year-old Maya was strapped into her high chair, her small face pale and puffy from crying. Tears streamed silently down her cheeks as she shook her head back and forth, her eyes wide with a terror so profound it made Alex’s own fear seem insignificant.

Sarah turned, and Alex saw what she was holding. It was a white plate, mounded with a pile of raw, red ground beef.

Her face was a blank mask. The warmth and life that had always been in her eyes were gone, replaced by a vacant, doll-like stare. She moved toward Maya, her steps jerky and uncoordinated.

“It’s time to eat, sweetie,” Sarah said, her voice a monotone, completely devoid of inflection. She scooped up a gob of the raw meat with her fingers. “The Saint is hungry.”

The Saint. The name hit Alex like a physical blow. A new piece of this nightmare’s lexicon.

Maya whimpered, turning her head away as Sarah brought the dripping meat toward her mouth. “No, Mommy,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Don’t like it. It’s yucky.”

“Open up,” Sarah commanded, her voice unchanged. She tried to force the meat into Maya’s mouth.

“Sarah, stop!” Alex yelled, the spell of paralysis finally breaking. He lunged forward, grabbing his sister’s arm. Her skin was ice-cold.

She didn't seem surprised to see him. Her head swiveled toward him with a series of audible clicks, like a ratchet turning. For a terrifying second, she didn’t seem to recognize him at all. Then, her face began to contort. Her lips stretched, pulling back from her teeth, her mouth widening into a horrifying, impossibly broad smile. It was the same smile as the woman on campus. A smile that showed nothing but pale, empty gums.

Her body convulsed, and a voice—not her voice, but the layered, distorted, static-filled voice from the phone—hissed from her throat, spewing the same alien phrase.

“…זֶה לא בשבילך…” (This is not for you.)

She shoved him, and her strength was inhuman. Alex stumbled backward, crashing into the kitchen table. He looked from the monstrous thing wearing his sister’s face to his terrified, weeping niece, and a cold, brutal clarity washed over him. He couldn’t save them. He couldn't fight this. He was a programmer, a college student. This was a battle on a cosmic scale, and he had just walked into the heart of the enemy's territory unarmed.

Survival. That was the only instinct left.

He scrambled to his feet and ran. He fled the kitchen, fled the house with its humming, off-key Christmas carols and its deranged holiday decor. Maya’s heartbroken sobs followed him out into the cold night air.

He threw himself into his car, his hands shaking too much to fit the key in the ignition on the first try. As he finally peeled away from the curb, he glanced back at the house. In the upstairs window, a small silhouette was standing, watching him go. And in the doorway below, his sister stood bathed in the frantic, blinking colors of the Christmas lights, her head tilted at an impossible angle, that terrible, gaping smile fixed on her face.

He had driven an hour seeking refuge. He had found none. The last safe harbor in his world had just been burned to the ground, and he was utterly, terrifyingly alone.