Chapter 2: The Clicking Jaw

Chapter 2: The Clicking Jaw

Sleep didn't come. How could it? Every time Leo closed his eyes, the image was there, projected onto the dark screen of his eyelids: the impossible, concave ruin of her skull. He’d spent the day in a state of hyper-caffeinated paranoia, jumping at every creak of the old house. He’d scoured the local news websites, the county sheriff’s blotter, anything that might offer a rational explanation. Woman in distress found wandering near Blackwood Creek. Local amateur film production seeks extras. Nothing.

His rational mind, the part of him that had once built unshakeable cases from disparate facts, fought a desperate rearguard action. It was a hallucination. A waking nightmare. A textbook symptom of the PTSD he’d tried to bury under layers of routine and isolation. He’d had them before, in the bad months after the scandal broke—fleeting shadows in his peripheral vision, the mistaken belief he was being followed. This was just a more… vivid manifestation. His brain had taken his fear of losing control and given it a form: a broken woman on his sacred path.

The explanation felt thin, flimsy, a paper shield against a charging bull. But it was all he had. He clung to it throughout the long, sleepless night, the silence of the house pressing in on him.

When the alarm chimed at 5:45 AM, the sound was a verdict. A challenge.

Buster was already on his feet, whining softly by the door, but not with his usual morning excitement. His tail was low, his ears pinned back. He didn't want to go.

“It’s okay, boy,” Leo whispered, his voice hoarse. The words were for himself.

To not go was to surrender. To admit that what he saw was real. To cede his sanctuary, the one thing he had built in this new life, to a figment of his own broken mind. He couldn't. He wouldn't. He would walk the path, see nothing but mist and trees, and the phantom would be exorcised by the cold light of day. Control. It was all about control.

He laced his boots with trembling fingers, his stomach a tight knot of acid and dread. He clipped the leash to Buster’s collar, the click of the metal latch echoing like a gunshot in the silent kitchen. The dog whined again, pulling back towards his bed.

“Come on,” Leo urged, his voice firmer than he felt. “We’re going.”

The mist was just as thick as the day before, a damp, clinging presence that felt less like weather and more like a conscious entity. The air was heavy, still. Every step was an act of will. Buster walked with his belly low to the ground, sniffing the air with a nervous energy that vibrated up the leash to Leo’s hand. The familiar crunch of gravel under his boots now sounded like footsteps following him.

He reached the copse of silver birches, his heart a frantic, trapped bird against his ribs. The path ahead was empty, a grey ribbon disappearing into a grey void. A wave of relief, so potent it made him dizzy, washed over him.

It wasn't real. Just a hallucination. A bad dream.

He took a deep breath, the cold air burning his lungs, and then he saw it.

The shape. Coalescing out of the mist, in the exact same spot.

Denial screamed through him. No. It’s a memory. An afterimage. But it wasn’t. The figure was moving, shuffling toward him with that same dragging, unnatural limp. The pale blue dressing gown. The bare feet. The curtain of dark, wet hair.

But something was different. Something was worse.

Yesterday, she had seemed fragile, spectral. Today, she looked like she was actively coming apart. The pale blue fabric of her gown was darker in patches, stained with what looked like mud and something else, something slick and black. Her skin, which had been pale, was now a mottled, corpse-like grey, stretched too tightly over her bones. It was peeling near her visible collarbone, sloughing off in a way that defied biology.

His sanity began to fray at the edges. This wasn't a static hallucination. It was changing. It was decaying.

Buster saw her too. The dog stopped dead, planting his paws. A low, guttural growl rumbled in his chest, a sound Leo had never heard him make. It was not a warning bark; it was a sound of pure, visceral terror. The fur along his spine stood up in a stiff, sharp ridge.

And as the woman drew closer, Leo saw the most horrific change. Her head was still bowed, but from this angle, he could see the side of her face. Her jaw was slack, hanging hideously askew as if the joint had been shattered. It was unhinged on one side, leaving her mouth agape in a silent, skeletal grin.

Leo froze, every muscle in his body screaming to run, but he was rooted to the spot by a morbid, hypnotic horror. She was twenty feet away. Then ten. Buster was now openly trying to bolt, yanking on the leash with frantic whines.

She passed them.

She didn't look at him. She just kept shuffling, her broken body a testament to some unspeakable violence. But as she passed, a sound reached him, cutting through the misty silence.

It was quiet, but sickeningly clear.

Click. Tck-click. Click.

A wet, rhythmic clicking. It was the sound of her teeth, chattering loosely in her unhinged jaw. It was the sound of shattered bone grinding against bone, slick with saliva and something else. It was the most intimate, obscene sound of decay he had ever heard. It wasn't the roar of a monster; it was the quiet, internal percussion of a body that had been utterly destroyed and yet was forced to keep moving.

The sound drilled into his brain, bypassing reason and logic and lodging itself deep in his primal fear centers.

The woman shuffled on, the wet clicking fading as she was swallowed once more by the mist.

Leo stood there, gasping for air that wouldn’t come, his knuckles white where he gripped the leash. Buster was trembling violently against his leg. The visual horror of her caved-in skull had shattered his reality. But this sound… this sound defiled it. A hallucination doesn’t make a sound. A trick of the light doesn’t have a soundtrack.

He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the marrow of his bones, that this was no phantom of his mind.

She was real.

And she was getting worse.