Chapter 2: The Unwelcome Guest

Chapter 2: The Unwelcome Guest

Getting Peter home was like transporting a mannequin. Alex had to half-carry, half-drag his brother’s limp body from the derelict house to his car, Peter’s feet scuffing listlessly on the pavement. The entire two-hour drive back to Baton Rouge was conducted in a suffocating silence, broken only by the hum of the engine and the frantic thumping of Alex’s own heart. Peter just sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window at the blur of swamp and darkness, his eyes as blank and reflective as black glass. Not a word. Not a flicker of recognition.

Alex clung to rational explanations like a drowning man to a life raft. A new, potent strain of hallucinogen. A psychotic break triggered by stress and whatever occult nonsense he’d gotten into. He’d get Peter home, lock the doors, and call a doctor in the morning. A psychiatrist. This was a medical problem. It had to be.

He settled Peter onto the pull-out sofa in his small home office, the room that was supposed to be a guest room but had mostly become a storage space for old tech and broken promises. He covered his brother with a blanket, an old habit from their childhood. For a moment, under the dim light, Peter just looked like himself, only thinner, sicker. Alex’s anger from the past few months evaporated, replaced by a familiar, aching sense of responsibility.

“Get some sleep, Pete,” he murmured, though he knew the words were meaningless.

The first day was a vigil of unsettling quiet. Peter didn’t sleep. He just sat on the sofa, still and silent, for hours on end. His gaze would fixate on a corner of the ceiling or a blank spot on the wall, completely unresponsive. Alex’s attempts to get him to eat were met with a terrifying stillness. He’d prepared a bowl of soup—the same kind their mom used to make when they were sick—and held a spoonful to Peter’s lips. Peter didn’t refuse. He didn’t do anything. He just stared through Alex, his mouth remaining a firm, pale line, until Alex finally gave up, the soup growing cold on the coffee table. The body he was trying to nourish seemed to reject the very concept of sustenance.

The horror began in earnest that night.

Alex was jolted awake by a sound from the office. It wasn’t loud, but it was persistent, a low, rhythmic murmur that slid under his bedroom door and coiled in the darkness. He crept out of bed, his every nerve ending alight with dread. He pressed his ear to the office door.

It was whispering. Peter was whispering. But the sounds were wrong. They weren't words in any language Alex knew. They were a cascade of sibilant, guttural clicks and dry, rustling hisses, punctuated by long, unnerving pauses. It sounded less like a conversation and more like a recitation, a one-sided dialogue with the shadows in the room. He was whispering to something unseen, something Alex couldn't hear but could feel, a palpable drop in temperature on his side of the door. Alex backed away slowly, the hair on his arms standing on end. He didn’t try to open the door. He locked his own and spent the rest of the night with a baseball bat clutched in his shaking hands, listening to the alien monologue of the thing in his office.

The next morning, the whispering had stopped. But when Alex opened his front door to get the paper, he found the first offering. On his welcome mat lay a dead sparrow. Its neck was twisted at an impossible angle, and its delicate wings were pinned open, stretched back in a grotesque parody of flight. Alex’s stomach churned. It was a cat, he told himself. A neighborhood stray leaving a gift. But he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that no cat had done this. The placement was too deliberate, too perfect. He scooped it up with a shovel and threw it in the trash, trying to ignore the feeling that he was being watched.

The days that followed were a descent into a waking nightmare. Peter continued his silent, seated vigil, growing more gaunt with each passing hour. The only change was the whispering, which now happened sporadically during the day, a low, constant hum that became the house’s new, monstrous heartbeat. Alex stopped trying to get him to eat. He just left bottles of water nearby, which remained untouched. His house, once his sanctuary of order and logic, began to feel alien. It was no longer his. It had been contaminated.

Three days after the sparrow, a second, more gruesome tribute appeared. This time it was a cat, the ginger tabby from next door. It lay disemboweled on the porch steps, its entrails carefully arranged in a tight, nauseating spiral. Bile rose in Alex’s throat. This was not the work of an animal. This was a ritual. A sign. A warning.

The flimsy walls of his denial came crashing down. This wasn't drugs. This wasn't madness. The cryptic call, the blood symbol, Peter’s vacant eyes—it all clicked into place with the horrifying finality of a coffin lid slamming shut. The thing the man on the phone had warned him about wasn't coming for Peter. It was already here.

That was the breaking point. Fear gave way to a desperate, ragged fury. He stormed into the office where Peter sat, a hollowed-out statue of his former self.

“What the hell is going on?” Alex yelled, his voice cracking with terror and rage. He gestured wildly toward the front of the house. “That… that thing on the porch! You won’t eat, you won’t sleep, you just sit here whispering to the goddamn walls! Talk to me, Peter! Dammit, talk to me!”

He grabbed his brother by the shoulders, shaking him hard. “What did you do in that house? That symbol, the blood… what did you do?”

For the first time in nearly a week, something shifted behind Peter’s eyes. The vacancy receded, and a flicker of light returned. It was the same look Alex had seen in that New Orleans house—the look of a man trapped behind unbreakable glass. Peter’s face crumpled, and his eyes, clear and lucid for the first time, filled with tears. It was his brother. He was in there.

“You… you have to get away from me, Alex,” Peter rasped, his voice raw from disuse, weak and terrified.

“I’m not leaving you,” Alex said, his own voice softening, hope warring with his fear. “Just tell me what happened. I can help you.”

Peter shook his head, a single tear tracing a path through the grime on his cheek. “You can’t. It’s too late. I made a deal… I wanted to see… to know more.” His words came out in ragged, desperate sobs. “I called out, and something… something answered. It’s… it’s riding me, Alex.”

The words hit Alex like a physical blow, stealing the air from his lungs. The rider has found his horse. The whisper from that filthy room wasn’t a hallucination. It was a declaration.

Before Alex could respond, a terrifying transformation took place. The fear in Peter’s eyes was extinguished as if a switch had been flipped. The sorrow on his face melted away, replaced by a cold, ancient, and utterly alien intelligence. His spine straightened, and his head tilted with an unnerving, predatory curiosity. A slow, cruel smile stretched his lips, a smile that didn't belong on his brother’s face. It was the triumphant smirk of a parasite that had just been acknowledged by its host’s last remaining loved one.

The voice that spoke next was not Peter’s. It was a low, resonant whisper that seemed to come from deep within his brother’s chest cavity, the same chilling tone Alex had heard in New Orleans.

“Such a noisy little horse,” the entity observed, Peter’s eyes—no, its eyes—locked directly onto Alex’s. “Always screaming on the inside.”

Alex stumbled back, his blood turning to ice. The sanctuary of his home had become a cage, the locks on his doors suddenly feeling useless. He wasn’t there to keep the world out. He was locked inside with the unwelcome guest. And it knew his name.