Chapter 4: The Liar on the Tape

The attic ladder groaned under Liam's weight as he climbed into the suffocating darkness above. The beam from his flashlight carved a weak cone through air thick with dust and the accumulated silence of decades. Cobwebs draped from the rafters like funeral shrouds, and every step across the warped floorboards sent up small explosions of dust that made him want to sneeze.

He'd been putting this off since he found the stone box, but Smith's story had lit a fire under him that wouldn't be extinguished. Rewind the tape. His father's final message, carved into stone like a commandment. If there was a tape—and increasingly, Liam was certain there was—it would be up here among the forgotten detritus of their family's history.

The attic was a graveyard of abandoned dreams. Christmas decorations from the 1990s sat in moldering boxes next to his father's old fishing gear. A rocking horse that might have been his or Neil's gathered dust in the corner, its painted eyes reflecting his flashlight beam like something alive. And there, against the far wall, covered with a paint-stained tarp, was the old entertainment center his father had banished up here years ago.

Liam pulled away the tarp, revealing the ancient television and VCR player that had been the centerpiece of their living room when he was young. The wood veneer was warped with age and moisture, and the electronic components looked like relics from an archaeological dig. But when he plugged the unit into a nearby outlet, the display flickered to life with surprising clarity.

The VCR's digital clock blinked 12:00 in persistent green numerals. Liam pressed the eject button and heard the mechanical whir of gears engaging. The tray slid out with a soft pneumatic hiss, revealing what he'd somehow known he would find.

A single VHS tape, unmarked except for a strip of masking tape on which someone had written a date in his father's familiar scrawl: the night Hayley was born. The night their mother had vanished.

Liam's hands shook as he slid the tape back into the machine and pressed play. The screen filled with static for a moment, then resolved into the grainy, washed-out colors of home video footage. The timestamp in the corner read 2:47 AM.

His father appeared on screen, and Liam's breath caught in his throat. This wasn't the violent, broken man he remembered from his teenage years. This was someone younger, though still weathered by whatever storms had been building in his life. His hair was longer, unkempt, and his clothes were rumpled like he'd been sleeping in them. But it was his eyes that were truly shocking—wide, terrified, darting constantly toward something off-camera as if he expected to be interrupted at any moment.

"My name is Robert Thorne," his father began, his voice slurred with alcohol and exhaustion. "If something happens to me, I want there to be a record. I want someone to know the truth about what happened here tonight."

He took a long pull from a bottle of whiskey that sat just out of frame, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. When he looked back at the camera, his eyes were wet with tears.

"Amy's dead."

The words hit Liam like a physical blow. He'd expected many things from this tape, but not this stark, simple admission.

"Found her an hour ago," his father continued, his voice breaking. "Went to check on her because she'd been screaming, and when I got to the bedroom..." He shuddered, taking another drink. "Jesus Christ, there was so much blood. All over the sheets, the walls, even the ceiling. Like something had torn her apart from the inside."

Robert Thorne's face crumpled with grief and something else—something that looked like guilt. "The baby was there too. Little Hayley, crying and covered in... in what was left of her mother. But she was alive. Somehow, she was alive and perfect while Amy was..."

He couldn't finish the sentence. Instead, he drank again, the whiskey disappearing rapidly.

"I should have called the police. Should have called Doc Peterson, gotten help. But I couldn't. Not after what I saw. Not after what I realized." His eyes fixed on the camera with laser intensity. "It wasn't natural, what happened to Amy. Wasn't human. The way she was torn apart, the precision of it... like something had been eating her from the inside, saving the best parts for last."

Liam felt sick. The room seemed to spin around him as his father's words painted a picture that was somehow worse than anything he'd imagined.

"And the baby," Robert continued, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Sweet little Hayley, not a mark on her. Clean as the day she was born, which was about ten minutes before I found them. But her eyes..." He shuddered again. "Her eyes weren't right. Too old, too knowing. Like she understood exactly what had happened and was pleased by it."

The camera shook as Robert's hands trembled. He set down the bottle and leaned forward, his face filling the frame.

"I cleaned it up. Wrapped Amy in sheets and... and buried her deep in the woods where no one would ever find her. Told everyone she'd left, couldn't handle being a mother. It was easier than the truth. Easier than explaining what I really think happened."

A long pause, filled only by the sound of his ragged breathing.

"There's something wrong with that baby. Something that ain't human wearing my daughter's face. I can feel it watching me when I'm sleeping, can hear it moving around the house at night even though it can't walk yet. And it's hungry. Christ, it's always hungry."

Robert reached for something off-camera, and when his hand came back into view, it was holding a book that looked ancient, its leather binding cracked with age.

"Found this in Amy's things after she died. She'd been reading about... things. Creatures from the old stories, legends that go back centuries. Things that feed on human flesh and wear human faces. Things that can grow inside a woman like a cancer, killing her slowly from within until they're ready to be born."

He opened the book, revealing pages covered with symbols that looked disturbingly familiar. Liam had seen similar markings on the stone box, burned into the lid like brands.

"There's a way to contain it," Robert said, his voice growing stronger. "Rituals, protections, ways to keep it weak and manageable. But it requires sacrifice. Constant vigilance. And if the protections ever fail..."

He trailed off, staring at something beyond the camera. In the distance, Liam could hear the faint sound of a baby crying.

"She's waking up," Robert whispered. "She always knows when I'm talking about her. Like she can sense it somehow."

The crying grew louder, more insistent. Robert's face went pale, and he began speaking faster, the words tumbling over each other in his haste.

"If you're watching this, if something's happened to me, then you need to know the truth. Hayley isn't my daughter. She's something else, something that killed Amy to bring itself into this world. The protections I put in place will hold for a while, but they won't last forever. And when they fail..."

The baby's cries had become something else—not the helpless wailing of an infant, but something deeper, more demanding. Almost like the roar of a predator calling for its prey.

"God help us all," Robert breathed. "God help us all when that thing gets hungry enough to—"

A sound from downstairs cut him off—footsteps, fast and heavy. His eyes went wide with terror.

"Neil," he whispered. "He's seen it feeding. He knows what it is, and he's going to tell someone. I can't let that happen. I can't let anyone know."

Robert stood up abruptly, the camera tilting wildly as he moved. For a moment, all Liam could see was the ceiling, but he could hear his father's voice, distant now but filled with desperate resolve.

"I'm sorry, son. I'm so goddamn sorry, but I can't let you destroy us all."

Heavy footsteps on stairs. The sound of a door slamming. And then, clear as day despite the poor audio quality, Neil's voice—young and terrified and heartbreakingly familiar.

"Dad, please! I won't tell anyone, I promise! I won't—"

The rest was lost in the sound of violence—flesh striking flesh, something heavy hitting the floor, and underneath it all, that inhuman crying that seemed to go on forever.

Then silence.

The camera had fallen over during the struggle, and all Liam could see was the floor and part of a window. But after a few minutes, his father's face appeared again, bloody and haunted.

"It's done," he said simply. "Neil won't be talking to anyone. But I can't... I can't keep doing this. Can't keep feeding it, can't keep covering up what it does. The protections will hold for a while, maybe until the boys are grown. Maybe until someone stronger than me can figure out how to stop it."

He looked directly into the camera one last time, his eyes burning with intensity.

"If you're watching this, Liam, then I'm probably dead and the seals are breaking. Find the box in the garage. Use what's inside. And whatever you do, don't let that thing get loose. Don't let it feed freely. Because if you do..."

A sound from off-camera made him freeze—not the baby this time, but something else. Something that sounded like claws scraping against wood.

"Jesus," Robert whispered. "It's getting stronger. The feeding tonight, it's made it..."

The tape cut to static with the sharp crack of a gunshot.

Liam sat in the suffocating darkness of the attic, his mind reeling. The official story he'd grown up with—his father as a violent drunk who'd finally snapped and beaten Neil nearly to death—was a lie. Or at least, only part of the truth. His father had attacked Neil, yes, but not out of drunken rage. He'd done it to silence him, to prevent him from revealing a secret so terrible that it had driven a man to murder his own son to keep it hidden.

And Hayley...

Sweet, innocent Hayley, who'd been staying with friends while he dealt with their father's affairs. Who'd been born on the night their mother died, emerging from a scene of carnage that defied explanation. Who'd been watched over by a man who believed she wasn't human at all, but something that wore his daughter's face while slowly consuming everything around her.

The tape had answered some questions, but raised so many others. If his father truly believed Hayley was some kind of monster, why hadn't he killed her as a baby? What were these protections he'd spoken of, and how long would they last? And Neil...

Neil, who'd supposedly been the victim of their father's violence, but who'd actually been attacked to keep him from revealing what he'd seen. Neil, who'd been living alone in the house with whatever their father believed Hayley really was. Neil, who'd been acting strange and secretive since Liam's return.

Neil, who'd been feeding something.

The sound of footsteps on the ladder below made Liam's blood freeze. Slow, deliberate steps that seemed to echo with unnatural weight.

"Liam?" Neil's voice drifted up from the darkness below. "What are you doing up there?"

"Just... looking through some old stuff." Liam's voice came out as a croak. He ejected the tape and slipped it into his jacket pocket, then shut off the VCR and flashlight.

"Find anything interesting?"

The question hung in the air like smoke. In the darkness, Liam could hear Neil breathing, slow and steady and somehow wrong.

"Nothing important," Liam lied. "Just old Christmas decorations and junk."

A long pause. Then: "Well, come on down. I made dinner."

But Neil didn't move away from the ladder. Liam could sense him there in the darkness below, waiting with the patience of a predator. And somewhere in the distance, barely audible over the sound of his own racing heartbeat, he could swear he heard the echo of inhuman crying, just like on the tape.

Just like the night their mother died and something else was born in her place.