Chapter 4: The Old Man's Name

Chapter 4: The Old Man's Name

My phone lay dead on my kitchen counter, its battery deliberately drained. I hadn't slept, but I had achieved a state of wired, hollow-eyed exhaustion that felt like a flimsy shield against the world. Every time I felt my left eyelid start its sickening, delayed flutter, I would press the heel of my palm against it, a futile attempt to force my own body back into sync.

The messages had stopped when the phone died, but their echo remained, etched into the silence of my apartment. let me in. whats his name. It wasn't a random prank. It wasn't a boardwalk ghost story. It was a predator, and it was circling me, testing the locks. The question was the key. I was sure of it. Why that question? Why the old man? It was the only thread I had to pull.

When I got to the Manor, the morning sun felt unnaturally bright, making the faded paint on the ghouls outside look cheap and harmless. It was a lie. The real monster wasn't the one made of plaster and latex.

I found Liam and Maya in the security office, huddled over the console, re-watching the footage of the mimic waving at the camera. They both looked as ragged as I felt.

"Any sleep?" I asked, my voice a dry rasp.

"I kept hearing static in my dreams," Liam muttered without looking up. "And every time I closed my eyes, I saw that… that glitchy face."

"I'm never making fun of your ghost stories again, Alex," Maya said, her arms wrapped tight around her torso. "This is real. What are we going to do?"

"We're going to answer its question," I said, a new, desperate resolve hardening in my voice. "It wants to know the old man's name. So we're going to find it. It's the only move we have."

Liam looked up from the screen, his eyes bloodshot. "How? We don't have records like that. He died in '98. The company's been sold twice since then."

"There has to be an incident report," I insisted. "An insurance claim, something. Where would they keep the old, old files? The paper ones?"

He thought for a moment, chewing on his lip. "The archives. In the sub-basement. Abernathy calls it the 'fire-hazard room'. It's where old props and paperwork go to die."

Our manager, Mr. Abernathy, was a man whose entire personality was a long, weary sigh. Getting the key from him was an ordeal of passive-aggressive questions about overtime and union rules, but in the end, seeing the three of us standing there—pale, determined, and clearly not interested in a paycheck—he relented, tossing a single, rust-pitted key onto his desk. "Just don't get lost. Or bit by rats. And lock up when you're done."

The sub-basement was not on the official tour. The air grew cold and damp as we descended the creaking wooden stairs, the festive sounds of the boardwalk fading above us until only the drip-drip-drip of a leaky pipe remained. Liam found a pull-cord, and a single, long fluorescent tube flickered to life with an electrical buzz, casting a sterile, humming light over a catacomb of forgotten things.

Towering metal shelves reached up into the darkness, crammed with dusty, unlabeled cardboard boxes. Decapitated mannequin heads stared out with dead plastic eyes. A retired animatronic clown, half its face paint peeled away to reveal the metal skull beneath, sat slumped in a corner. The air smelled of mildew, decaying paper, and something faintly sweet, like old candy.

"Well," Maya said, her voice a nervous whisper that was swallowed by the oppressive silence. "This is a circle of hell Dante forgot to mention."

"The files should be against the back wall," Liam directed, his voice equally hushed. "Let's just… be quick."

We moved through the maze of shelves, the dust motes dancing in the beams of our phone flashlights. I couldn't shake the feeling that we were being watched. Every creak of the floorboards above, every drip of water, sounded like a footstep, like a whispered "hee-hee" just at the edge of hearing. My eyelid twitched, the lag more pronounced in the dim light. Right. Left. Open. Open. A nervous tic that felt like an invitation.

We found them: a dozen filing cabinets, rust-eaten and grim, shoved against a damp brick wall. The labels were handwritten and faded, but we could just make out dates.

"Here," I breathed, pulling on a stuck drawer labeled '95-'99. It screeched open with a sound like a tortured scream, revealing rows of tightly packed manila folders, all warped and softened by the damp.

We worked in silence, pulling out folders, our fingers quickly becoming coated in a fine layer of gray dust. Personnel files. Supply orders. Tax documents. It was a mundane history of a haunted house, a monument to the business of fear.

"Got something," Maya finally said. She held up a thin folder, its tab reading simply: Incident Report - 6/12/98.

We huddled together under the buzzing fluorescent light, the single source of clarity in the oppressive gloom. I took the folder. The paper inside was yellowed and brittle at the edges. The report was typed, the ink faded, written by the manager at the time.

It laid out the facts in cold, corporate language. Date: June 12th, 1998. Location: Hall of Mirrors attraction. Incident: Guest collapsed on premises. Cause of Death: Acute Myocardial Infarction. Cardiac Arrest.

My eyes scanned the page, my heart hammering against my ribs. There it was. A single typed line. Victim's Name: Miller, Arthur.

"Arthur Miller," Liam read over my shoulder. "That's it? Just a normal name?"

It felt… anticlimactic. I don't know what I was expecting. Michael, maybe. Something cosmically significant. But it was just a name. Arthur Miller. A random man who had died in a tacky hall of mirrors twenty-four years ago.

"Why?" Maya asked, voicing the question that hung in the air. "Why would that thing care about his name?"

"Maybe there's more," I said, my hope dwindling. I flipped to the second page. It was a witness statement, handwritten on a sheet of lined paper, the blue ink smeared in places. It was from the employee who found him, a seventeen-year-old kid named Kevin.

The kid's handwriting was a frantic scrawl, full of crossed-out words and shaky letters. He described finding Mr. Miller standing in front of one of the warped mirrors, staring intently. At first, Kevin wrote, he thought the old man was just enjoying the attraction. But something was off.

I read the crucial sentence aloud, my voice trembling.

"'He wasn't looking at himself in the mirror,' I read. 'He was looking past his own reflection, like he was looking at me, standing behind him. He wasn't moving. He just… smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was too big for his face. Then he spoke to me. He asked me a question right before he grabbed his chest and fell.'"

A suffocating pressure filled my chest. Liam and Maya leaned in closer, their faces pale masks in the harsh light. I looked down at the last line of the teenage employee's terrified statement, a single sentence circled by the long-dead manager with a question mark in the margin.

My blood turned to ice. It wasn't just a connection. It was an echo.

I took a shaky breath and read the final words.

"He asked me, 'Do you know my name?'"

The mimic. The creature in the sequined glove. It hadn't been asking me a question to get an answer. It wasn't trying to learn the old man's name.

It was a mimic. It was repeating Arthur Miller's last, desperate, terrified words.

The question wasn't a key. It was a performance. A re-enactment of the last sliver of genuine horror this house had ever known. It was feeding on the memory of that fear, that final, identity-shattering moment of a dying man. And I, the gatekeeper, was its new audience. It wasn't a ghost it was after. It was the terror itself.