Chapter 8: Speaking the Old Tongue

Chapter 8: Speaking the Old Tongue

[ENTITY DETECTED. PROXIMITY: 3 METERS.]

The green text burned in Leo’s vision, a digital tombstone for his sanity. The smell of rot and cold earth was no longer a memory; it was a thick, cloying presence in the small bedroom. The whisper, “…left him…”, was a physical vibration in the air, a sound that made the fine hairs on his arms stand up and his teeth ache.

He didn't scream. The sound was trapped in his throat, a knot of pure, primal terror. His eyes were locked on the corner of the room, on the space beside the wardrobe where he’d seen the ripple in reality. He could still see it, not with his eyes, but with a deeper, horrifying sense of perception granted by the System. It was a void in the shape of a man, a patch of darkness that drank the dim light.

[HEART RATE: 148 BPM. RECOMMENDATION: EVADE.]

For once, Leo agreed with the parasitic code in his head.

He moved, not with a conscious thought, but with a singular, animal instinct. He scrambled backward, his hands slapping against the floor, kicking the bed in his haste. He crab-walked out of the bedroom, his eyes never leaving the empty space where the thing stood. He didn't turn his back on it. Not for a second.

He stumbled to his feet in the hallway and ran. He fled his grandmother’s house, not even bothering to grab his keys or shoes. He slammed the flimsy screen door behind him and didn't stop running until his lungs were on fire and his broken ribs felt like they were trying to punch their way out of his chest. He collapsed onto the dusty shoulder of the main road, gasping under the cold, indifferent light of the moon.

The days that followed were a descent into a private, walking hell. He couldn't go back to the house. He slept in his car, a cramped, cold prison, parked near the 24-hour gas station on the edge of the reservation, where the constant hum of the fluorescent lights and the occasional passing truck felt like a fragile shield.

The torment was no longer confined to the shadows of an old house. It was everywhere. The System was fully awake, and it had turned his world into its own augmented reality game. He’d see a flicker of movement behind a dumpster and a message would flash: [ENTITY OBSERVING.]. A child's laughter from a nearby playground would be twisted by a whisper only he could hear, and the System would note: [AUDITORY HALLUCINATION OR MIMICRY? DATA INSUFFICIENT.]. He saw a gaunt, distorted face with too many eyes staring back at him from the reflection in a darkened storefront window, only to vanish when he looked again.

[CIVILIAN POPULATION: UNAWARE.] the System would mockingly inform him, as people walked past, smiling, talking on their phones, utterly oblivious to the monstrous layer of reality that now suffocated him. He was a ghost, haunted by things only he could see, a madman in a sane world.

The doctors had been wrong. The police had been wrong. His own desperate hope had been wrong. This wasn't trauma. It was an infestation. The things from the cave hadn't been left behind; they had latched onto him, followed him out like a contagion.

Desperation became his only fuel. His scientific mind, the very tool he had once revered, was utterly useless. How do you analyze a creature that is a glitch in reality? How do you record data on a whisper that bypasses the ears and crawls directly into the brain? When your paradigm fails, you find a new one.

He found it in the one place he had always scorned: the small tribal library, housed in a wing of the community center. The place smelled of old paper and floor polish. He sat at a dusty carrel in the back, surrounded by books he would have dismissed as quaint collections of folk tales just a few weeks ago.

Legends of the Star People. The Wisdom of the Trickster. Earth-Speakers: Oral Histories of the Elders.

He devoured them, his academic skills now bent to a new, terrifying purpose. He wasn't looking for literary motifs or cultural anthropology; he was looking for a bestiary. A user manual. He skimmed past the creation myths and morality tales, searching for any mention of the Little People, the Deep Dwellers, the names they were given before his people had learned to fear them too much to speak their true name aloud.

He found fragments, veiled warnings disguised as children’s stories. They were territorial. They despised the light and the "loud noise of the new men." They were drawn to disbelief, to arrogance, like moths to a flame that would consume them. They could mimic sounds, voices, to lure the lost. Every line was a confirmation of his horror, a piece of a puzzle he wished he’d never found.

But the books were just stories. They offered warnings, but no solutions. They described the monster, but not how to fight it. They were the "what," not the "how." For that, he needed a person.

One name appeared again and again in the footnotes and acknowledgments of the more academic texts: Mary Blackwood. She was cited as a primary source for the old stories, a keeper of the oral tradition. The librarian, a young woman who watched him with a mixture of pity and suspicion, confirmed it when he asked.

"Mary Blackwood? She lives up on the west ridge. Keeps to herself mostly." The librarian lowered her voice. "She's... one of the old ones. The real old ones. Knows things. Things most of us are happy to have forgotten."

That was it. That was the path.

He drove his car up the winding dirt road to the west ridge, the engine complaining at the incline. Mary Blackwood’s house was small and tidy, with a well-tended garden of herbs out front and strings of dried chilies hanging from the porch roof. Woodsmoke curled from a stone chimney, a thin grey ribbon against the vast blue sky. Unlike his grandmother’s house, which felt like a place of ghosts and memories, this place felt alive, ancient, and rooted to the earth itself.

An old woman with a face like a beautiful, weathered map and long, silver-grey hair braided down her back was sitting on the porch, weaving a complex pattern into a sweetgrass basket. She didn't look up as he approached, but he knew she was aware of his every step.

“Mary Blackwood?” he asked, his voice hoarse. He was a wreck. He hadn’t properly slept or eaten in days. His clothes were rumpled, his face was gaunt, and a frantic, hunted look was carved into his features.

She continued her weaving, her gnarled, graceful fingers moving with practiced ease. "I know who you are, Leo Vance. The scientist from the university. Thomas’s brother." She finally looked up, and her eyes were as dark and sharp as chips of obsidian. There was no pity in them. Only a deep, unyielding judgment.

He flinched at the sound of his brother's name. "I need your help," he blurted out, the words tumbling over each other in his desperation. "The stories… the legends about the caves. They’re real. I saw them. Something followed me out. It's…" He trailed off, gesturing vaguely, knowing how insane he sounded.

Mary’s fingers stilled. She placed the half-finished basket beside her and fixed him with a stare that stripped him bare. "You come here now, to this house, to speak of the old ways? You, who came back to our home only to spit on those ways? To dig up our sacred places and call our traditions superstition for your little school paper?"

Her voice was quiet, but each word was a sharp stone. She was throwing his own arrogance back in his face.

"I was wrong," Leo said, the admission tearing at his pride, but it was the truest thing he had ever said. "I was a fool. I'm sorry. But my brother… what happened to him… it wasn’t an accident. Please, you have to help me."

Mary stood up, her small frame radiating an authority that belied her age. "You walk in the white man’s world and mock the spirits. You break the old laws out of pride. You lead your own brother to his death because you think your books are more powerful than the earth itself. And now, when the consequences come crawling out of the dark for you, you come to me for a cure?"

She walked to her front door, her back ramrod straight.

"The spirits have a long memory, Leo Vance. A lesson is being taught to you. It is not my place to interfere."

"No, wait!" he pleaded, taking a step toward the porch.

"Grieve for your brother," she said, her hand on the doorknob, her voice cold as a stone at the bottom of a well. "Perhaps in your grief, you will find the humility you lost. Go home."

The door clicked shut in his face, leaving him alone on the dusty path. The silence that followed was absolute. He was a pariah to his community, a madman to the outside world, and now, the one person who might have the answers had rejected him completely.

In the crushing emptiness, a final, cruel message flickered to life in his vision, a simple, two-word summary of his utter failure.

[REQUEST DENIED.]