Chapter 8: The Final Lullaby

The psychic vision shattered, leaving Liam on his knees in the office, the nameplate cold in his palm. Lily. The scratching from the walls, once a sound of pure menace, was suddenly transformed. It was no longer the clawing of a monster trying to get in; it was the desperate scrape of a neglected child, alone in the dark, trying to get out. It was a cry for help that had been echoing for forty years.

He looked at the music box on his desk. It wasn't a cursed object. It was a gravestone. It was the only thing left in the world that remembered her name.

His goal, once so simple—survive, escape—had been rewritten. He couldn’t run from this. He couldn't sell the house and pass this agony on to another family. Running would be a betrayal, not just of the terrified spirit in his walls, but of the man he wanted to be. He looked at the healing scratches on his own face in the dark reflection of his computer monitor. They weren't attacks. They were a message, written in a language of shared pain.

He wasn't an exorcist. He was an IT technician who fixed broken things. And this—this suffering, this memory—was the most broken thing he had ever encountered. His purpose solidified, cold and clear as the ice in his veins: he would not banish Lily. He would remember her. He would give her the peace she had been scratching for.

With a newfound steadiness, he stood. The frantic scrabbling in the walls continued, a constant, agitating reminder of her torment. First things first. He took a soft cloth from his toolkit and gently, meticulously, began to clean the music box. He wiped away decades of tarnish and neglect, his movements slow and deliberate. As the grime gave way to the gleam of old silver, it felt less like cleaning and more like an act of penance. An apology. I’m sorry no one heard you. I hear you now.

The lid was still stuck fast. He carried the box to his workbench and, with the precision of a surgeon, began to work. He used a fine pry tool to gently work the hinge free, then a set of tweezers to peer into the delicate clockwork mechanism inside. He saw the problem immediately: a single, tiny gear had slipped from its track, jamming the delicate comb that played the notes. It was a simple, physical flaw that had silenced her only happy memory for decades. With a dental pick from his kit, he carefully nudged the gear back into place. It clicked home with a soft, satisfying sound.

He closed the box and, with a trembling finger, turned the small winding key on the side. This time, it turned smoothly, a series of quiet clicks echoing in the tense office. He stopped, not yet ready to release the sound. The lullaby had to be played in the right place.

He took the photograph of the smiling, gap-toothed girl and the small brass nameplate and placed them carefully in his shirt pocket, over his heart. Then, holding the primed music box like a lantern, he unlocked his office door and stepped back into the raging heart of the storm.

The house had gone from hostile to apoplectic. The cold was so intense his breath plumed in thick white clouds, and a delicate lacework of frost was creeping in from the edges of the windowpanes. The lights didn't just flicker; they strobed violently, plunging the hallway into split-seconds of absolute darkness before flaring back to life with an audible buzz. The scratching in the walls was no longer just a sound; it was a physical vibration that he could feel through the soles of his feet, a deep, groaning tremor as if the very studs and beams of the house were being torn apart from the inside.

He walked toward the nursery, each step an act of will. Shadows writhed in his peripheral vision, coalescing for a microsecond into a small, wounded shape before dissolving back into nothing. Through the cacophony, he could hear whispers, the "Night. Night." from the video, but now it was layered, multiplied, a chorus of pain echoing from every corner.

He reached the closed nursery door and pushed it open. The room was a whirlwind of spectral energy. The white sheet was ripped from the rocking chair and tossed into a corner. The flat-pack crib box slid across the floor with a screech of cardboard on wood. The oppressive sorrow in the room had curdled into a palpable rage. This was the place of her deepest pain, her final moments.

Liam walked to the center of the room, to the very spot where he had found the box. The house groaned around him, a single, sustained howl of fury and grief. He held the silver box up, his knuckles white. Every primal instinct screamed at him to drop it, to run, to save himself. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the chaos. He thought of Sarah’s terrified face, of the loneliness that had consumed him, and of the little girl in the photograph who had died with no one.

He held his nerve. He was her only hope. He was the only one who knew her name.

With a final, steadying breath, he released the catch on the music box.

The first note chimed out, clear and achingly pure. It was a simple, delicate melody, a child's lullaby cutting through the demonic noise like a single candle in a hurricane.

The house screamed.

The instant the melody began, the chaos intensified tenfold. The main overhead lightbulb exploded in a shower of sparks and glass, plunging the room into the strobing, uncertain light from the hallway. A deep, structural boom echoed from the foundations, and a spiderweb of cracks erupted across the plaster of the wall behind the changing table. The dry, scratching sound became a violent, tearing roar, the sound of the world being rent asunder.

Lily was fighting it. She was fighting the memory, fighting the peace, because the pain was all she had known. The lullaby was a foreign language from a life she barely remembered.

Liam staggered, his ears ringing, his body buffeted by the waves of raw, psychic energy. But he didn't run. He clutched the music box tighter, shielding it, protecting its fragile melody from the storm of her agony. He kept winding the key, his fingers numb with cold and fear, forcing the tune to continue. He wasn’t fighting her. He was holding onto her, refusing to let her go back into the darkness. He poured all his focus, all his empathy, into the simple, repeating notes, an anchor in the raging sea of her pain.

The melody continued, a fragile thread of sanity. The house shuddered around him, the walls groaning as if they might collapse at any moment. The lullaby was reaching its final refrain, each note a desperate prayer whispered into the heart of the tempest.