Chapter 7: The Whispers Come Home

Chapter 7: The Whispers Come Home

The funeral was an exercise in quiet condemnation. Leo stood beside the open grave, a stranger in a suit that felt two sizes too small, his body a map of aches held together by prescription painkillers. The drugs wrapped the world in a hazy, surreal gauze, but they couldn't numb the looks.

No one spoke to him directly, but their silence was a roar. The averted eyes of his cousins, the stiff, unforgiving set of his aunt’s shoulders, the way old Mr. Akecheta, a tribal councilman, looked straight through him as if he were a ghost already. They didn't need to say the words. He could hear them in the rustle of the wind through the pines, in the mournful beat of the ceremonial drum. The arrogant one. The unbeliever. He led his brother to his death.

He watched them lower the simple wooden casket into the earth. The "official story" said Thomas was inside, recovered from the cave-in. A neat, closed-casket affair. But Leo knew better. He knew what was really in that box was mostly rock and filler, a hollow weight to satisfy a ritual. The truth of what happened to Thomas was scattered in the deep, dark places of the earth, a feast for chittering things. The thought was a shard of glass in his gut.

He remembered his condescending smirk as he’d watched Thomas tie the small medicine pouch around his neck before they left. A collection of herbs and stones. A useless superstition. Now, that memory was a brand of shame on his soul. Thomas had gone into that cave armed with his faith, and Leo had gone in armed with a smug sense of superiority. Only one of them had come back.

When the last of the mourners had drifted away, leaving him alone with the freshly turned soil, he finally allowed his legs to buckle. He sank to his knees, the polished dress shoes sinking into the soft dirt, and the carefully constructed dam of sedatives and denial finally broke. A raw, soundless scream of grief tore through him, for his brother, for his own shattered sanity, for the simple, logical world he had lost forever.

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He took refuge in his grandmother’s old house on the edge of the reservation. It was a small, clapboard home that smelled of dust, cedar, and a faint, lingering trace of woodsmoke. It had been empty since she’d passed, a museum of a life lived. It was supposed to be a sanctuary. Instead, every object was an accusation.

A faded photograph on the mantelpiece showed two boys, grinning gap-toothed at the camera. A younger Leo, already with a look of serious appraisal in his eyes, stood beside a beaming Thomas, who had his arm slung around his older brother’s shoulders. On the small wooden table beside his grandmother’s favorite armchair sat a half-finished carving of a hawk, a block of cedarwood Thomas had been working on. The small, precise knife cuts were frozen mid-stroke. An unfinished life.

Leo limped through the quiet rooms, his mind a battlefield. He replayed Dr. Evans’s calm, rational explanations. Hypoxia. Head trauma. Hallucinations. He clung to them like a drowning man to a splintered log. It was the only way to stay sane. The alternative, that the universe was home to ancient, malicious entities that fed on fear and could be thwarted by a leather pouch full of herbs, was an abyss of madness he couldn't bear to face.

He made a cup of instant coffee that tasted like ash and sat at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the encroaching twilight. He held his hand up, turning it in the fading light. He searched his own vision, probing the edges of his perception for any hint of a ghostly green flicker.

Nothing.

For three days since waking in the hospital, there had been nothing. The System was gone. The silence in his head was absolute. The relief was so profound it was sickening. He was healing. The concussion was getting better, the toxic gases were leaving his system. The nightmare was ending. It had all been a product of a broken brain. It had to be.

He stayed in the house, a self-imposed exile. He ignored the calls from his parents, the concerned texts from his academic advisor. He just needed to be alone, to let the logic of the mundane world seep back in and stitch his fractured mind together.

On the third night, sleep wouldn’t come. The painkillers had run out, and the pain in his ribs was a sharp, insistent reminder of his ordeal. He lay on the lumpy mattress in the spare room, listening to the old house settle and groan. A floorboard creaked in the hallway. The wind rattled a loose window frame. Every sound was normal. Every sound was explainable.

He got up, needing a distraction. He found himself in Thomas’s old room, barely changed since he’d left for college. A poster of a local basketball star was taped to the wall. A stack of books on animal tracking sat on the nightstand. On the dresser, nestled amongst some loose change and a pocketknife, was a spare medicine pouch, identical to the one Thomas had worn into the cave.

Without thinking, Leo reached out and picked it up. The worn leather was soft and cool in his hand. It smelled faintly of sage and earth. He held the symbol of his brother’s faith, the very thing he had come home to debunk, and felt a wave of grief so powerful it stole his breath. He sank onto the edge of the bed, his shoulders shaking.

And then, it happened.

A faint, familiar green glow bloomed at the edge of his vision. It was like a dead pixel on a screen, a single point of impossible light. Then it expanded, resolving into letters. Cold, clinical, and utterly terrifying.

[WELCOME BACK.]

Leo’s blood turned to ice. A choked gasp escaped his lips. No. It wasn’t over. It wasn't a hallucination. It was real. And it was here.

He shot to his feet, dropping the medicine pouch as if it were burning hot. He scanned the room, his heart hammering against his broken ribs. The room was empty. The shadows were just shadows. He was alone.

But he wasn't.

He caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, near the old wooden wardrobe. It wasn't a solid shape. It was a distortion, a heat-haze shimmer in the dim light, vaguely outlining a small, gaunt, humanoid form. It was there for a second, a man-shaped ripple in the fabric of reality, and then it was gone.

He froze, every muscle in his body screaming to run. His breath hitched in his throat. He strained his ears, listening past the frantic drumming of his own blood.

From the deep shadows of the empty, half-open closet, a sound slithered into the silence. It wasn't a creak of wood or a rustle of wind. It was a whisper, dry and brittle like autumn leaves skittering across pavement. It wasn't just in his head this time. It was in the room with him.

“…left him…”

The whisper was a physical thing, a needle of ice sliding into his ear.

And as he stood there, paralyzed by a terror far greater than any he had known in the cave, a new line of text appeared below the first, a calm, horrifying confirmation of the impossible.

[ENTITY DETECTED. PROXIMITY: 3 METERS.]

The cold, damp smell of decay and disturbed earth filled the small room. The game hadn't ended when he was pulled from the mountain. He hadn't escaped. He had only changed the location of the board. The cave wasn't the hunting ground.

It was just the beginning.