Chapter 5: What Simba Saw

What Simba Saw

We didn't run. Running felt useless, a child’s response to a monster that owned the dark. We backed away from the edge of the woods, slow and deliberate, our feet crunching on the dead leaves. Every nerve in my body was screaming. My combat instincts were a wildfire in my gut, but there was no target, no tangible threat to engage—just a suffocating presence and the deafening echo of those three, final knocks. My hand was clamped around the spiral stone in my pocket, its unnatural cold a useless anchor in a sea of terror.

The drive back to the trailer park was silent and fast. Chloe sat rigid in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, her face pale in the intermittent glow of the dashboard lights. The sharp, analytical woman who had mapped out the town's history was gone, replaced by someone who had just heard the oldest story in the world and realized it was true.

“Lock the door,” she said the moment I killed the engine, her voice a strained whisper.

I didn't need to be told twice. We hurried inside, and I threw the deadbolt and slid the chain into place. The flimsy metal door felt like paper against the memory of that sound. Chloe went through the small trailer, checking the locks on the rattling windows, drawing the thin curtains closed, creating a fragile bubble of light and supposed safety against the vast, listening darkness of Hogeye.

“It wasn't a ghost,” I said, the words feeling heavy and inadequate in my mouth. I placed the spiral stone on her table, where it sat looking alien and menacing amidst her neat stacks of paper. “That sound… it was physical. Too solid.”

“It was… territorial,” Chloe breathed, wrapping her arms around herself. She was staring at the front door as if she expected it to splinter inward at any second. “Like something was telling us to get out of its hunting ground.” She finally looked at me, her eyes wide with a terrifying new understanding. “The graves… they’re at the edge of its territory.”

My mind raced, tumbling over the memories, trying to fit the pieces together. The knocks in the trailer. The creature in the woods. The missing records. My mother’s fear. And the graves. It was all connected. But something was still missing. A core piece of the puzzle.

“You said people left offerings,” Chloe said, her voice pulling me from my thoughts. She was looking at me, her researcher’s instincts beginning to battle back against her fear. “In the Esther house. You mentioned it when you first told me the story. Toys.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding slowly. “Part of the legend. You leave something for the spirits of the kids.” The image of the grimy pile of stuffed animals in the corner of the trailer flashed in my mind. A faded teddy bear. A floppy-eared dog. And… something else. Something personal.

“But what if they aren’t for spirits?” she pressed, her mind working, connecting the dots. “What if they aren’t for the dead kids at all? That sound we heard wasn’t a child, Jordan.”

Her words hit a tripwire in my memory. The pile of toys. My ten-year-old self standing frozen on the warped linoleum. Derrick disappearing into the dark hallway. There was a detail I’d been suppressing, a moment I’d buried deeper than any other.

Dr. Evans’ voice: Give the ghosts a shape on a page.

I closed my eyes, forcing myself back into that rotting, mustard-colored trailer. The smell of mildew and old pennies. The oppressive, waiting silence. Derrick’s taunt of “scaredy cat” echoing from the darkness.

“I had a toy with me,” I whispered, my eyes still shut tight. “I took it everywhere back then. A little stuffed lion. His name was Simba.”

I had been clutching it in my hand, my knuckles white, a pathetic talisman against the encroaching dread of that place. As Derrick went to explore the back rooms, I stayed rooted to the spot, my gaze fixed on the stained, grimy floorboards. I was so scared, my hands were slick with sweat.

And I dropped him.

Simba, my brave little lion, slipped from my grasp. He didn’t just land on the floor. He landed with a soft, muffled thud right over a dark gap where two floorboards had warped and pulled apart. A black, narrow slit leading to the darkness below.

I remember reaching down for him. My fingers were trembling. I just wanted to grab him and get out, to forget the dare and the five bucks and the trading cards. But before my hand could get there, I saw it.

The memory, once a blur of panic, sharpened into crystalline, stop-motion horror.

From the blackness of the gap, something emerged. It wasn’t fast. It was slow. Inquisitive. A finger. Long, pale, and multi-jointed, like a bleached spider’s leg. The color of something that had never seen the sun, a sickly, grub-white. It uncurled from the darkness, bending at a place a human finger shouldn't bend. There was no hand attached, just this single, exploratory digit. It gently, almost tenderly, touched the plush fabric of the lion. It paused for a second, as if tasting it, sensing it.

Then, with that same slow, deliberate calm, it curled around the lion’s body and pulled.

There was no sound. No struggle. Simba just… disappeared. Dragged down into the suffocating, silent darkness under the floor.

My eyes snapped open. The air in Chloe’s trailer felt thick, unbreathable. She was staring at me, seeing the absolute horror on my face.

“Jordan? What is it? What did you see?”

“It wasn’t a ghost,” I choked out, the realization a physical blow that knocked the wind from my lungs. I looked at her, my mind reeling, the entire story of the Esther house rearranging itself into a new and infinitely more monstrous shape. “The knocks weren’t the sound of kids trying to get out. It was the sound of something under the floor, something living under there, telling us it knew we were standing on its ceiling.”

The blood drained from Chloe’s face as the implication hit her. “The offerings…”

“They weren’t for ghosts,” I said, my voice dropping to a raw, ragged whisper. “They were for it. To feed it. Or to appease it. We stumbled into its nest. Its larder.”

The smell she’d complained about—copper and rot—wasn’t a phantom. It was the smell of its den, seeping up through the floorboards of the trailer she now called home. For three years, she’d been living on top of it.

The lights in the trailer flickered once, twice, and then died.

We were plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness. The hum of the refrigerator, the rattle of the air conditioner, every comforting, mundane sound ceased. The only thing I could hear was Chloe’s sharp intake of breath and the frantic hammering of my own heart. The oppressive, waiting silence from the Esther house was here, in this room, with us.

And then came the sound.

It wasn't a knock. It was too loud, too violent. It was the sound of a battering ram.

BANG.

The entire trailer shook. A coffee cup rattled off the counter and shattered on the floor. The sound was pure, physical force, a primal rage directed at the thin aluminum door. The creature wasn’t under the floor anymore. It wasn't in the woods. It wasn’t a memory.

It was outside. And it wanted in.