Chapter 7: A Tea Party for Two

Chapter 7: A Tea Party for Two

The hours after the silent gathering in the yard bled into one another, a smear of grey dread and sleepless vigilance. David didn't bother trying to sleep. He sat in the dark of his living room, listening to the house breathe around him. Every creak of the floorboards, every groan of the pipes, was a potential threat. He was an exhausted soldier on endless watch, his home transformed into an alien trench. The memory of the seven children turning in perfect, robotic unison was seared onto the back of his eyelids. He kept seeing their faces, blank and hollow, a gallery of stolen souls.

His desire had been whittled down to its rawest, most primal form: survival. Not just for himself, but for whatever small part of his daughter might still be trapped behind those cold, knowing eyes. He had to find a way to sever the connection, to pry her from the monster’s grasp, but every possible action felt like struggling in a spider's web—each movement only entangling him further. He felt the phantom prick of needles in his heel, the memory of the tack in his toast, a constant, physical reminder of the entity’s power. The house was no longer a refuge; it was the monster’s domain.

It was sometime after 2 AM, when the night was at its deepest and most still, that he heard it.

A sound so incongruous, so out of place in the suffocating silence, that it felt like a hallucination. The faint, delicate clink of plastic on ceramic. It was followed by a soft, cheerful murmur. A one-sided conversation, punctuated by little bursts of giggling.

It was coming from the kitchen.

A cold dread, sharp and familiar, cut through his exhaustion. He rose from the armchair, his joints protesting, and moved toward the sound. He crept through the dark, his bare feet silent on the hardwood floor, every sense screaming. He was moving toward the sound of his daughter’s voice, but he was stalking it like a predator.

He paused at the kitchen doorway, hiding in the deep shadows of the hall. The small lamp over the sink cast a weak, yellow glow over the room, creating long, distorted shadows. What he saw stole the air from his lungs.

Maisyn was sitting at the small kitchen table. She had changed out of her play clothes and was now wearing her favorite party dress, a frilly blue thing she usually saved for birthdays. Her hair was brushed, and she sat primly on her chair, her back straight. On the table before her was her small plastic tea set. Two pink cups sat on two yellow saucers. Two plates held imaginary slices of cake. It was a perfectly staged children’s tea party.

She was talking animatedly, her face alive with expression, her hands gesturing to illustrate her story.

"And then the squirrel ran all the way up the tree, but he dropped his acorn!" she chirped, her voice a bright, happy melody. She ended the sentence with a soft giggle.

But the chair across from her was empty.

David watched, frozen, a voyeur at a nightmare. His heart thudded a slow, heavy rhythm against his ribs. He watched as Maisyn picked up the small plastic teapot, her movements full of childish ceremony. She held it over the second cup, the one belonging to her invisible guest, and tilted it.

"You have to be careful, Mr. Pins," she said, her voice full of mock seriousness. "It's very, very hot."

She set the teapot down. As she did, David heard it. It was not a sound his mind could dismiss or rationalize. It was the distinct, undeniable creak of the wooden kitchen chair, the sound of it groaning under a sudden and significant weight, as if someone had just leaned forward to accept the offered cup.

Ice flooded David’s veins. It was here. Not just a presence, not just a whisper in Maisyn's mind, but a physical weight in the room. It was sitting at his kitchen table, three feet from his daughter. He fought the urge to be sick. He could almost see the outline of it, the tall, impossibly thin shape of the drawings pressing itself into reality, indenting the very air in the room.

Maisyn paused, her teacup halfway to her lips. She didn't turn to the doorway where he was hiding. Her head rotated slowly, unnaturally, to look directly at him through the shadows. The cheerful, innocent expression on her face dissolved like sugar in water, replaced by that placid, ancient stillness. Her eyes, gleaming in the dim light, were not the eyes of a seven-year-old. They were old and patient and powerful.

A small, polite smile touched her lips. It didn't reach her eyes.

"Daddy," she said. Her voice was a horrifying fusion—the sweet, high pitch of his daughter, layered over the cold, flat resonance of the entity. "You're awake. We didn't want to wake you."

She gestured with one small, graceful hand toward the empty chair at the head of the table.

"Would you like to join us?" she asked, the question a perfect mimicry of a polite hostess. "There's plenty of tea."

David couldn't move, couldn't breathe. The monster that had stalked his wife, that was collecting the lonely children of his neighborhood, was inviting him for tea. It was no longer a phantom hiding in the dark corners. It had completely domesticated the horror, turning the heart of his family home into its personal parlor, and it was using his daughter as its mouthpiece.

Maisyn’s smile widened slightly, a knowing, chilling expression. "Mr. Pins has been very patient with you," she said, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. "He says you've been looking so tired lately. He says he can help with that."

That was it. That was the final straw. The line between psychological torment and physical threat had been obliterated. This wasn't a haunting he could endure. This was an occupation. The house was lost. His home was a cage, and the monster was sitting at the table, patiently waiting to add him to its collection.

A single, frantic thought burned through the fog of his terror, clear and absolute as a bolt of lightning: Run.

It wasn't a strategy. It was a primal instinct. A desperate, panicked flight for survival. He couldn't fight it here, not in its stronghold. He had to get Maisyn away, had to break the connection, had to believe that distance could starve the creature of its power. It was a fragile, irrational hope, but it was the only thing he had left.

He looked at the thing wearing his daughter’s face, at the empty chair that creaked with an unseen weight, and made a decision.

He backed away slowly from the doorway, melting back into the darkness of the hall. He had to play along. He couldn’t let it know he was about to flee. He would go upstairs, pretend to go back to bed. And then he would pack a bag. He would grab Maisyn, get her in the car, and drive. He would drive until the sun came up. He would go to his brother Jake’s house, two hundred miles away. A new location. A safe place.

It had to work. He clung to the thought, a prayer in the face of the abyss. It simply had to work.