Chapter 1: The 5:45 Routine

Chapter 1: The 5:45 Routine

The alarm wasn’t a scream; it was a quiet, insistent chime. 5:45 AM. Leo Vance’s hand snaked out from under the duvet, silencing it before the second beep. He didn't need it. His body, a machine tuned by trauma and habit, was already awake. For the past eighteen months, 5:45 AM was the one unassailable fact in a life he had deliberately emptied of them.

He swung his legs out of bed, the floorboards cold against his bare feet. The routine was a liturgy, each step a prayer against the chaos he’d left behind. First, the coffee. A French press, coarse grounds, water just off the boil. The four-minute steep was timed to the second. While it brewed, he pulled on yesterday's jeans and a worn flannel shirt, the uniform of his new anonymity. In the reflection of the dark kitchen window, a man he barely recognized stared back. Lean, almost gaunt, with unkempt brown hair and dark circles under his eyes that had become permanent fixtures, like tattoos of exhaustion. He was 38, but some mornings, he felt ancient.

“Alright, boy.” The words were a low rumble, the first he’d spoken all day.

A thump of a tail against a worn dog bed was the only reply. Buster, a golden retriever whose optimism was a daily affront to Leo’s cynicism, stretched with a groan, his tags jingling softly.

Leash clipped. Boots laced. A final gulp of black coffee that was more about the ritual than the caffeine. Then, they were out the door, stepping into the pre-dawn chill of Blackwood Creek. The mist was thick, a shroud of grey that swallowed the world twenty feet from his front porch. It was perfect. The mist muffled sound, blurred the edges of reality, and, most importantly, kept people indoors.

This walk was his sanctuary. For ninety minutes every morning, he was just a man with a dog. Not Leo Vance, the journalist who’d flown too close to the sun, whose last big story had dismantled a city councilman but had gotten him death threats and a breakdown in return. Here, there were no ringing phones, no veiled warnings, no constant, gnawing paranoia that every shadow held a threat. There was only the crunch of his boots on the gravel path, the happy panting of his dog, and the cool, clean air of the countryside. Control. It was all about control.

The path cut a line between two sprawling fields, bordered by an old, crumbling dry-stone wall. Buster trotted ahead, his tail a metronome of pure joy, occasionally darting into the long, wet grass to investigate a scent Leo couldn’t fathom. The silence was profound, broken only by a distant crow and the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of his own footsteps. He breathed it in, letting it scour the lingering static from his mind. This was peace. This was what he had paid for with his career, his friends, his entire former life.

He was about a mile in, where the path curved gently around a copse of skeletal silver birches, when he first saw her.

A shape, coalescing out of the mist. His first reaction wasn't fear, but a sharp, biting annoyance. This was his time. His path. The unspoken rule of the early-morning recluses was that you gave each other a wide berth. But this figure was right in the middle of the track, moving slowly, unsteadily.

As he closed the distance, the annoyance curdled into confusion. It was a woman. That much was clear. But her clothes… she was wearing what looked like a dressing gown, a thin, pale blue thing utterly inadequate for the damp chill. It was stained with mud at the hem. Her feet were bare, pale against the dark, wet earth. She was limping, a strange, dragging gait that was both awkward and unnatural.

Leo’s journalistic instincts, buried but not dead, began cataloging the details, trying to assemble a narrative. Drunk? It was awfully early. A sleepwalker? Possible. A victim of something? His hand instinctively tightened on Buster’s leash. The dog, however, seemed unconcerned, giving the woman a wide, curious berth but showing no signs of aggression or fear.

“Morning,” Leo grunted as he drew level, the word a concession to social necessity. He didn't expect a reply, and he didn't get one.

The woman kept her head down, a curtain of lank, dark hair obscuring her face completely. She just kept shuffling forward, her bare feet making a soft, wet sound on the path. He could see the sharp, pale line of her collarbone above the gown's neckline. She was painfully thin. A deep, primal part of him screamed that something was profoundly wrong, but the rational, cynical part of his brain supplied a list of possibilities. A domestic dispute. A mental health crisis. Either way, not his business. Getting involved was what had broken him in the first place. Keep walking. Mind your own.

He picked up his pace, wanting to put distance between them, to reclaim the solitude she had shattered. Buster trotted along beside him, glancing back once before focusing on the path ahead. The air felt colder, heavier. Leo shrugged deeper into his jacket. The image of her bare feet, blue-tinged in the cold, lingered unpleasantly in his mind.

He’d gone about thirty feet past her when a morbid curiosity—the same professional reflex that had been both his gift and his curse—made him glance over his shoulder. It was a fractional turn, a fleeting look.

The wind chose that exact moment to stir, lifting the heavy sheet of her dark hair away from her head like a morbid veil.

And he saw.

He didn’t see her face. He saw the back of her head.

Or rather, what was left of it.

It wasn’t a wound. A wound is a clean, medical term for something that can be fixed. This was a violation. An absence. The back of her skull was a concave horror, a shattered crater of matted hair and something dark and wet that glistened even in the flat, grey light. It was a catastrophic, unsurvivable injury. The kind of impact that pulps bone and brain into a single, ruinous mess.

Leo’s breath hitched in his throat, a sharp, strangled gasp. The world tilted violently on its axis. The misty field, the stone wall, the rising sun—it all dissolved into a meaningless smear of colour. His analytical mind, his shield and sword, simply shattered. It tried to offer explanations—a trick of the light, a hallucination brought on by stress, a prosthetic for a movie—and failed. The image was too real, too visceral.

He stumbled to a stop, his boots skidding on the wet gravel. Buster whined, a low, nervous sound from deep in his chest, pressing against Leo’s leg. The dog could feel it. The wrongness.

The woman in blue didn’t stop. She just kept dragging her broken body down the path, one foot in front of the other, shuffling away into the mist that had produced her. She didn’t look back. She didn’t have to.

The image was seared onto the inside of Leo’s eyelids. The pale blue gown, the bare feet, and the impossible, caved-in ruin of her skull.

His heart hammered against his ribs, a wild drumbeat of pure, undiluted terror. His carefully constructed peace, his rigid routine, his entire reality had been annihilated in a single, silent glance. He was back in the city, back in the darkness, with the threats closing in. Only this was worse. This wasn’t a man with a grudge. This was… impossible.

He turned and ran, dragging a whimpering Buster behind him, his controlled footsteps now a frantic, panicked scramble. He didn’t look back. He didn’t dare. The sanctuary was gone. The path was no longer a place of peace. It was a place of ghosts. And he had just seen one.