Chapter 3: The Devil's Bargain

Chapter 3: The Devil's Bargain

Pure, animal terror propelled him. Trey didn't think, didn't plan. He just ran. He spun on his heel, his bare feet slapping against the dusty floorboards, and launched himself toward the staircase. The sound that escaped the creature in the living room was no longer his mother’s voice; it was a low, guttural hiss of frustration, a sound that scraped at the base of his skull and promised unimaginable violence.

He scrambled up the stairs on all fours like a panicked animal, the splintery wood digging into his palms. Behind him, he heard a heavy, deliberate tread begin to follow. It wasn’t running. It was hunting. It knew it had him trapped.

He reached the landing and threw himself into his old bedroom, slamming the flimsy door shut and fumbling with the lock. The brass knob was loose, the mechanism ancient. For one heart-stopping second, it wouldn't turn. He could hear the slow, rhythmic footsteps ascending the stairs. Thud. Thud. Thud. With a final, desperate twist of his wrist, the bolt slid home with a pathetic click.

He leaned against the door, his breath coming in ragged, burning gasps, his heart a wild drum against his ribs. Silence. The footsteps had stopped just outside. He imagined it standing there, its head cocked, listening. Wearing his mother’s stolen face.

His room offered no comfort. It was a time capsule of a boy he no longer was—faded band posters, dusty science fair trophies, a prison of nostalgia. He was cornered. His immediate desire was simple: survive until sunrise. But a deeper need, a more powerful one, burned through the fear. He had to understand. The journal, Neil’s cryptic warning, the monster downstairs—they were all pieces of a puzzle he had to solve, or die trying. There was only one place left to look.

His father's bedroom.

The thought was a transgression in itself. Growing up, that door had been a sacred, intimidating boundary. "Don't you ever go in my room," his father would slur, his breath thick with whiskey. It was the one rule that was never, ever broken.

Now, it was his only option.

He crept across his room to the adjoining wall and pressed his ear against it, listening. Nothing. No footsteps, no breathing. Just the oppressive silence of the house waiting. It was a risk, a terrible one, but staying here was a death sentence.

He unlocked his door with excruciating slowness, wincing at the soft click. He slipped into the hallway, a narrow, shadowed gauntlet. His father's door was at the far end, closed tight. He tiptoed toward it, every creak of the floorboards an amplified scream in the silence.

The knob was cold and stiff. He turned it. Locked. Of course.

Panic flared in his chest, hot and sharp. He was trapped in the hallway. Then he remembered his father’s paranoid habits. He’d lost his keys so many times he’d started hiding a spare. Trey dropped to his knees, fingers scrambling along the top of the doorframe, through a thick layer of cobwebs and dust. Nothing. He tried the bottom, running his hand along the grimy baseboard. His fingers brushed against a loose nailhead. He pried at it, and a tiny sliver of wood came away, revealing a small, tarnished brass key.

With trembling hands, he inserted it into the lock. It turned with a grating shriek that seemed loud enough to wake the dead. He pushed the door open and slipped inside, shutting it quietly behind him and turning the key again. He was in.

The smell hit him first. It was the scent of sickness, not the clean, antiseptic smell of a hospital, but the rank odor of a body actively decaying. It was layered with the stale fumes of alcohol and a coppery, metallic tang that made his stomach heave.

The room was a hoarder’s nest, a testament to a mind in complete collapse. Piles of yellowed newspapers and greasy fast-food bags covered every surface. Dozens of family photos were strewn across a cluttered desk, but they were arranged in bizarre, ritualistic patterns around empty liquor bottles. In one, his mother’s face had been obsessively circled in red ink.

Then he saw them. On the nightstand, next to a half-empty glass of murky water, lay a scatter of used syringes and a scorched spoon. The official story of cancer had been a lie to cover a deeper, dirtier truth. His father hadn't just been sick; he'd been desperately self-medicating, chasing a different kind of oblivion. This was the source of the drunken slur he’d heard in the creature’s glitched voice. This was the despair that had driven him to make a bargain.

Frantic now, Trey began to search. He tore through drawers filled with stained clothes and useless trinkets. He was no longer just looking for answers; he was looking for a weapon, an explanation, anything. He pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table, the one with the syringes. It was mostly empty, save for a few loose coins and a pocketknife. He was about to slam it shut in frustration when he noticed the false bottom. A thin piece of plywood, cut crudely to size.

He wedged his fingers under it and pulled. Beneath it, lying on the bare wood of the drawer, was a single sheet of folded parchment.

It was old, the color of bruised skin, and stained with dark, irregular blotches that looked horribly like dried blood. The paper felt strangely stiff, almost brittle, as he unfolded it. The text was written in an elegant, spidery script, a stark contrast to his father’s messy scrawl. It wasn’t a letter. It was a contract. A ritual.

The Invocation of the Echo, the title read.

His eyes devoured the words, his mind struggling to comprehend the archaic, terrifying language. It spoke of calling back a "shade," a "memory given flesh," from the "silent void." It described how to prepare a vessel, how to offer a focus—an object of intense emotional connection. He saw his mother's name mentioned. The focus had been her locket. The ritual promised to return the lost loved one, whole and loving. But the warnings were stark, written in the margins in what was unmistakably his father's panicked script. Not her. Something else came through.

At the bottom of the parchment were two signatures. The first was his father’s, shaky and thin. The second was a confident, looping signature that sent a jolt of small-town dread through him: Eliza Thorne. A name whispered in his hometown with a mixture of fear and derision. The old woman who lived out by the swamp, who people said could cure livestock, find lost things, and talk to the dead. A practitioner of black magic.

Trey’s gaze fell to the final, terrifying line of the pact, written in Eliza’s elegant hand, a clause at the very bottom, stark and absolute.

It will demand a living sacrifice.

The words seemed to lift off the page and brand themselves onto his brain. A living sacrifice. His father had made the bargain. He’d offered the creature a way in. But the payment was still due. Neil was gone. His father was dead. He, Trey, was the only one left. He was the sacrifice.

A floorboard creaked in the doorway behind him.

Trey froze, the parchment still clutched in his hand. The sound hadn't come from the hallway. It came from inside the room's entrance. He hadn't locked the door from the inside. He'd locked it from the outside and pulled the key in. A cold dread, heavier and more profound than anything he had ever felt, washed over him. He wasn't locked in. Something else was locked in with him.

Slowly, mechanically, he turned.

Standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the dim light of the hall, was the figure of his father.

But it was not his father. It was a thing that wore his father's corpse. The skin was a mottled, waxy gray, stretched tight over his bones. One eye socket was empty and dark, the other held an eye that stared with a milky, vacant wrongness. Part of his jaw hung slack, revealing broken teeth and dark, desiccated gums. His body was twisted at an unnatural angle, as if it had been broken and crudely reassembled. It was the mutilated, reanimated shell of the man from the morgue.

The corpse took a shambling, dragging step into the room, its head lolling to one side. A low, wet rattle issued from its throat, a sound that was not breath, but the dry friction of dead things moving. The bargain hadn't just summoned the creature wearing his mother's face; it had reanimated the vessel of the man who had summoned it. And it was blocking his only way out.