Chapter 4: A Pin for Mommy

Chapter 4: A Pin for Mommy

The crayon drawings felt like venomous things in David’s hands. He gathered them from the living room floor, his movements stiff with a cold, methodical fury. The spiky, black silhouettes of Mr. Pins, marching across page after page, some holding the hands of smaller, child-like figures, were a declaration of war. He couldn't fight the entity in the shadows, but he could damn well remove its propaganda from his house.

Maisyn watched him, her legs crossed on the rug, her expression unreadable. She didn't cry or protest as he stacked the papers into a neat, horrifying pile. The lack of a normal childish reaction was more frightening than any tantrum could have been.

"You can't throw them away," she said, her voice flat. It wasn't a plea, but a statement of fact. "He won't like that."

"I don't care what he likes," David snapped, his voice a low growl. He marched into the kitchen and stuffed the drawings deep into the trash can, ramming them down beneath coffee grounds and empty milk cartons. He felt a pathetic surge of victory, an action against the inaction that had been consuming him.

When he returned, Maisyn hadn't moved. She was looking at the empty space on the rug where her drawings had been, then her gaze lifted to meet his. Her eyes, those dark pools that so resembled Savannah’s, held a chillingly adult disappointment.

"You don't understand, Daddy," she said.

"Oh, I think I'm finally starting to," he shot back, his fear curdling into a bitter anger. "This thing, this… Mr. Pins… is hurting people. He's scaring children. He scared Liam and Chloe. It has to stop."

He knelt in front of her, grabbing her small shoulders, desperate to feel the little girl he knew beneath the cold veneer. "Maisyn, please. Sweet pea. This isn't you. This is something else. You have to fight it."

She looked at his hands on her shoulders, then back to his face. There was no fear in her eyes. Only a profound, misplaced compassion that made his skin crawl.

"He's not hurting them," she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "He's helping. He helps everyone who's lonely. He was going to help Mommy, too."

The world tilted on its axis. David felt the air leave his lungs, as if punched. He must have misheard. A child’s garbled logic, twisting things around. "What… what did you say?"

"Mr. Pins," she repeated patiently, as if explaining something simple to a slow-witted classmate. "He knew Mommy. They were friends."

David’s hands fell from her shoulders. He felt suddenly weak, dizzy. "That's not possible, Maisyn. Mommy… Mommy went away a long time before you made up Mr. Pins."

"I didn't make him up," she insisted, a flicker of irritation crossing her face. "He was here then. He was trying to talk to her. He told me."

"He told you?" David whispered, his throat dry.

"Yes. He said Mommy had a lot of grey days. When the world felt too heavy for her shoulders."

The phrase struck David with the force of a physical blow. Too heavy. It was a phrase Savannah had used exactly once, late one night a month before the crash. He’d come home from a long day at the office to find her sitting in the dark, the television off. When he’d asked what was wrong, she had just shaken her head, a sad, distant smile on her face. “I don’t know, Davy,” she’d said, her voice thick. “Sometimes everything just feels… too heavy.” He had held her, told her it would be okay, dismissed it as a passing mood. He had never told anyone. Not his brother, not his parents, not a single soul. It was a secret they had shared in the dark. A secret this thing, this entity, was now reciting to him from his seven-year-old daughter’s mouth.

The foundation of his reality crumbled to dust. The car crash had been the defining tragedy of his life, a brutal, random act of fate. But this… this implied something else. Something infinitely more sinister. It implied a predator had been circling his family long before he ever knew it. It had been watching his wife, drawn to the silent, invisible pain she hid so well.

"He said her sadness was a nice, quiet place to sit," Maisyn continued, her voice a detached, dreamy monotone. It didn't sound like her anymore. The cadence was wrong, the vocabulary too precise, too poetic. It was as if he were listening to a recording. "He said he was getting ready to help her properly. To make it so she would never be lonely again."

David stared at her, a monstrous understanding dawning in his mind. He saw it all in a sickening, instantaneous flash: the entity’s whispers seeping into Savannah's hidden depression, feeding on her loneliness, grooming her. He remembered her last few weeks—the headaches she’d complained of, the way she’d sometimes stare at nothing, lost in thought. He’d chalked it up to stress. But was it? Or was she fighting a battle he hadn't even known existed?

The horror was a physical thing, rising in his throat as bile. He felt an urge to check his frayed bracelet again, imagining a thousand tiny needles burrowing into the threads, poisoning his memory of her.

"Maisyn," he choked out, his voice a ragged gasp. "What did he want to do? How was he going to help her?"

His daughter looked at him, her face a mask of serene innocence. The words she spoke next shattered what was left of his world, grinding the pieces into sharp, unrecognizable fragments.

"He tried to help her," Maisyn said, her voice once again her own, filled with a simple, tragic finality. "But she went away before he could give her a pin."

Give her a pin.

The implication was an abyss that opened up at his feet. A pin wasn't just a calling card. It was an initiation. A mark of collection. The entity hadn't just been present. It had been on the verge of claiming her, of making Savannah another one of its silent, soulless 'friends'. The car crash hadn't been the start of the tragedy. It had been an interruption. An escape she never even knew she was making.

Or was it? The entity that knew about Gary's fall, that knew Savannah's secret words—was a simple car crash beyond its power? The question was a venomous serpent coiling in his gut.

He scrambled backward, away from his daughter, crab-walking across the rug until his back hit the wall. He was breathing in ragged, shallow gasps. He was looking at Maisyn, but he wasn't seeing his child. He was seeing a vessel, an oracle for the thing that had stalked his wife and was now living in his house, playing with his daughter's dolls.

Maisyn tilted her head, watching his terror with a look of clinical curiosity.

"Don't be sad, Daddy," she said, her voice soft and soothing. "You look lonely now, too. But it's okay."

A beatific, knowing smile spread across her face.

"He's here for you now. He can help you, too."