Chapter 7: Unlocking the Past

Chapter 7: Unlocking the Past

The tapping on the rear window had stopped the moment Jake’s tires hit the familiar, cracked asphalt of Havenwood’s main road. But its absence was a phantom limb, a deafening silence where the ghost of his brother’s impatience had been. He drove through the sleeping town, the streetlights casting long, lonely shadows that seemed to writhe and reach for him. Beside him, Maya was an effigy of the vibrant woman he had brought on this cursed joyride. Her skin was waxy in the dim light, her eyes wide, staring, fixed on a point somewhere beyond the dashboard, beyond the windshield, beyond the world itself.

He couldn't take her home. He couldn't leave her alone in her empty apartment, not when the ghost of her deepest fear had been made flesh before her very eyes. There was only one option. He pulled up to the curb outside the small, tidy house of her closest friend, Sarah.

Leaving the engine running, a desperate, irrational need to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice, he carried Maya to the door. She was a dead weight in his arms, her head lolling against his shoulder. When a bleary-eyed, terrified Sarah opened the door, Jake’s carefully constructed lie felt like ash in his mouth.

“There was an… an incident,” he stammered, the words hollow and pathetic. “A panic attack. A bad one. I think… I think she saw a stray dog that reminded her of one from her childhood. It just… it broke her.”

Sarah’s eyes, wide with sleep and confusion, narrowed with suspicion as she looked from Jake’s haunted face to Maya’s vacant stare. But concern won out. She helped him get Maya inside, onto the couch, her expression a mixture of pity for her friend and a dawning distrust for him.

“What did you do, Jake?” she asked, her voice low and sharp as she covered Maya with a blanket. “Where did you take her?”

“Just for a drive,” he lied, backing away toward the door. The warmth and light of Sarah’s home felt like a foreign country. He was an exile, stained by the darkness he’d brought back with him. “I have to go. Just… call me if she… if anything changes.”

He fled before she could ask another question, shutting the door on the wreckage he had caused.

Back in the car, the aloneness was absolute. The space Maya had occupied now felt like a gaping wound. His hand fumbled on the seat beside him, his fingers closing around the prize. The key. It was cold, the rust flaking against his skin. He held it tight in his fist as he drove, the sharp edges digging into his palm, a focal point for the storm of guilt and terror raging inside him. He didn’t drive to his own apartment. He drove to the one place that felt like the beginning and the end of everything: his childhood home.

His father was out of town, a long-haul trucker who was rarely home anymore, leaving the house a silent, dusty monument to a family that had died ten years ago. Jake let himself in through the back, the air inside stale with old memories. He didn't turn on the lights. He didn't need them to navigate the path to the garage.

The garage was a mausoleum. Dust motes danced like ghosts in the single beam of his phone’s flashlight. Noah’s old ten-speed bicycle was a skeletal shape under a yellowed tarp. The workbench was still covered in the half-finished model airplane they’d been building together, the glue dried and cracked. The air smelled of gasoline, sawdust, and a decade of settled grief.

He walked to the far corner, to a battered, army-green footlocker that had served as Noah’s treasure chest, a repository for his most prized possessions. A heavy padlock, seized with rust, hung from the latch. Jake’s hand, slick with sweat, opened. He looked down at the key.

He knew this key.

A jolt of ice-cold recognition shot through him. He’d seen it a thousand times on the lanyard Noah always wore around his neck. It was the key to this very lock. This wasn't some random, mystical artifact from the road. This was personal. This was a direct message.

His hand trembled as he slid the key into the lock. It was stiff, grating as rust fought against the mechanism. He put all his weight into the turn, and with a final, protesting shriek of metal, the lock clicked open. He pulled it free and lifted the heavy lid of the footlocker.

The smell that hit him was the first confirmation. It was the smell of damp earth, of river mud and decay. The scent of Noah’s final moments, broadcast over the radio, now a physical presence. Lying right on top of a pile of old comics and yearbooks was a single, mud-caked sneaker. The dark water stain ran halfway up its side, and a single strand of dried, brown river weed was tangled in the frayed laces. It was real. The water, the cold, the current—it was all horribly, tangibly real.

Beneath the shoe was a small, black, spiral-bound journal. Its cover was warped from dampness. With a sense of terminal dread, Jake picked it up and opened it to the first page. The handwriting was a terrified, spidery scrawl.

Entry 1: Player #? Name: Thomas. It showed me my father. He stood in the road. His face was just like it was in the coffin, all waxy and sunken. He didn’t say anything. He just pointed at the passenger seat. I don’t know who this man is, but he knows everything. The prize was a pocket watch, stopped at the exact time of my father’s death.

Jake frantically flipped the page. A new handwriting, this one neat and clinical before devolving into jagged panic.

Entry 2: Player #? Name: Dr. Alistair Finch. The entity is a psychic parasite. It manifests sensory hallucinations based on trauma. The prize is a lure, a variable construct designed to give the game a sense of purpose. But the purpose is a lie. The game doesn't end. The prize isn’t what you win. It just changes your role in the game. I think… I think it wants a replacement…

His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He flipped through pages and pages of terrified entries, stories of different roads, different fears, different useless prizes. Spiders crawling from the vents, lost children crying in the woods, the faces of bullies and abusers appearing in the dark. It was a logbook of nightmares, a legacy of souls torn apart on Highway X-17.

And then he reached the last entry. The handwriting was messy, rushed, but he knew it as well as his own. It was Noah’s.

Entry 17: Player #142? My name is Noah Miller. I shouldn’t have come here. Jake was right. I just wanted to prove he was wrong, that I wasn’t scared. He told me to disappear. I guess I got my wish. It… it showed me the crash. I saw the car fill with water. I felt it. The cold. I couldn’t breathe. And then… I saw Jake on the riverbank, just watching. He wasn’t trying to help. He was just watching me drown. It wasn’t real, I know it wasn’t real, but God, it felt real.

A choked sob escaped Jake’s lips. The Passenger had shown Noah a twisted version of Jake’s own worst fear—his own inaction, his own hatred, made manifest.

He’s getting out of the car now. He left a key. My key. He told me not to look back. But I think I have to. I think that’s how you win. You face it. You look back and you take the prize. I’m sorry, Jake.

That was the end of Noah’s entry. The end of his brother’s life as he knew it. He had looked back. He had accepted the prize. He had become the Passenger.

Jake was about to close the journal, his body trembling, when he noticed it. There was one more page. The paper was different—crisp and clean, not yellowed or water-damaged like the rest. And the writing on it was not Noah’s panicked scrawl. It was a neat, precise, and chillingly elegant script, written in ink that looked impossibly fresh. It was the handwriting of something patient, ancient, and utterly inhuman.

Two short sentences. A message not from the past, but for the present. For him.

The prize isn't what you win. It's what you become.

Your turn.