Chapter 10: The Changeling's Debt

Chapter 10: The Changeling's Debt

The ghost of lavender faded, leaving the kitchen air stale and heavy with the scent of dust and decay. The profound cold receded from Trey’s bones, but a deeper, more permanent chill had taken its place. He remained on the floor, his back pressed against the peeling kitchen cabinets, staring at the leather-bound journal. It lay open where it had fallen, a silent accusation in the harsh, steady beam of the flashlight.

His mother’s spectral form, a condensation of sorrow and warning, had pointed him here. To these last pages. This was the final piece of the puzzle, the secret she had been dragged into the black waters of Harrow Creek to protect, and then to reveal.

He crawled forward, his movements stiff and robotic. Every instinct screamed at him to leave the book closed, to burn the house to the ground and run until his legs gave out. But he knew, with the leaden certainty of a condemned man, that there was nowhere left to run. The whispers from Wajeski’s store, the predatory smile of Mr. Smith, the very ground of this town—it was all part of the same trap. His only way out was through the truth, no matter how monstrous.

With a trembling hand, he picked up the journal. The final entries were a nightmare of ink. The script was barely legible, a frantic scrawl that veered and crashed across the page, dug so deep it felt sharp to the touch. It was the writing of a man who had stared into the abyss and had seen it stare back with his own son’s eyes.

He forced himself to read.

October 3rd. It has been five years since Eleanor… since the creek. Five years of this lie. I watch him play in the yard. He looks like Neil. He has Neil’s laugh. But when he thinks no one is looking, he goes still. That awful, listening stillness. He talks to the woods. He hums a tune with no melody. The thing I brought back is a hollow shell, an echo. And I am its keeper.

The next page contained a single, shaky paragraph, dated a year later.

He fell today. From the old oak tree. The same one. I ran to him, my heart in my throat, but the fear was not for his life. It was a selfish, terrible fear that the vessel would be broken, that the illusion would shatter. He had a deep gash on his temple. He didn't cry. He just looked at the blood on his fingers with a placid curiosity, as if it belonged to someone else. I cleaned the wound. It will leave a scar. A reminder of the first one. The real one.

Trey’s blood turned to ice. Neil’s silvery scar. It wasn't from the beating he’d seen on that horrifying security tape. It was older. Much older. He turned the page, his breath catching in his throat. This was it. The genesis of the entire nightmare. The script was surprisingly neat here, the calm, deliberate confession of a man recounting the end of his world.

My son died on a Tuesday. He was eight years old. He climbed the old oak tree in the front yard, the one with the tire swing. A branch snapped. He fell. It was a simple, stupid, senseless tragedy. His head… he hit the roots. There was so much blood. I held him. He was gone before the thought of calling a doctor even crossed my mind. The light in him was just… extinguished.

I buried him myself. Out past the creek, where no one would ever look. I told Eleanor he was missing. The search parties, the town’s pity, the sheriff’s questions—it was all a fog. My grief was a howling madness. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn't live in a world where that light was gone. The old stories, the whispers I’d heard from my own father about the power in this land, the entity in the creek… I went to it. I didn’t have a ritual. I didn’t have a circle. I just had my pain. I knelt at the water's edge, at the place where the gnarled roots drink deep, and I begged. I offered it anything. Everything.

And it answered.

It didn't speak in words. It spoke in my mind. A cold, ancient understanding. It showed me a bargain. It could give me back a son. A facsimile. An echo made of mud and memory and creek water, animated by a sliver of its own power. All it asked for in return was a pact. A binding of my bloodline to its own eternal life. I agreed. I would have sold my soul ten times over just to see my boy smile again. That night, he walked out of the woods. Whole. Unbroken. He had the scar on his temple, and he couldn't quite remember what happened, but he was home. Eleanor wept with joy. But I knew. I knew the moment I looked into his eyes. It was Neil, but it wasn’t. The boy who died was gone forever. The thing that came back was a changeling.

Trey dropped the journal. The truth crashed over him with the force of a physical blow, rearranging his entire life into a landscape of horror. Neil. His brother was dead. Had been dead for sixteen years. The boy he grew up with, the fragile young man he fled to protect himself from, the person he came back to save… was a monster. A supernatural construct.

The father who had terrorized his childhood, the man whose rage seemed so senseless, was a man trapped in a prison of his own making, forced to live with the soulless copy of his dead son. The abuse, the violence—it hadn't just been drunken rage. It had been his father’s desperate, insane attempt to beat the monster out, to find a flicker of his real son inside the changeling's eyes. It was the fury of a man screaming at his own monstrous mistake. You're not my son! The words from the tape echoed in Trey’s skull, no longer a mystery, but a tragic, horrifying confession.

But the final page held the final truth. The part his mother’s ghost had died to warn him about.

The pact was a lie, his father’s last entry read, the words nearly illegible. I see that now. It was not a gift. It was not a trade. It was a loan. And the debt for this unnatural life is now due. The entity does not forget. It has awakened my body, wearing my flesh like a coat, and sent it to collect. But it is not just the changeling it wants. The terms of the pact were written in blood, and the entity claims all that the bloodline produces. By binding my life to it, I staked not just the borrowed son, but the true one as well. It has come to collect its property—the boy it loaned me—and to claim its inheritance—the true heir of the Blackburn line. It’s coming for Neil. And it's coming for Trey.

The room spun. The lock of hair. The town’s watchful eyes. They weren't just helping the creature. They were honoring the pact. They were delivering the offering. He, Trey Blackburn, was the final payment on a supernatural debt signed sixteen years ago. He wasn't just a bystander or a protector. He was the prize.

A floorboard creaked upstairs.

The sound was sharp, loud, and directly overhead. Trey froze, every muscle tensed. It wasn't the sound of an old house settling. It was the deliberate sound of weight being placed on wood.

CRACK.

A louder sound, this time from outside. It was the unmistakable splintering of wood, coming from the back porch. The thing wearing his father's corpse was no longer just patrolling the woods. It was testing the house.

The siege was over. The assault was beginning.

Trey scrambled to his feet, his mind racing. He looked at Neil, who was still huddled on the floor. But something had changed. His gentle, rocking motion had stopped. His head was cocked, that same unnatural, listening stillness from the creek returning to his posture.

Slowly, Neil lifted his head and turned to look at Trey. The fear and confusion were gone from his eyes. They were wide, placid, and held a deep, unsettling stillness that was not human. He looked at Trey, then his gaze drifted towards the back door, from where the cracking sound had come.

A faint, serene smile touched his lips.

"It's time," Neil whispered, his voice perfectly clear, the stutter completely gone. "It's come for us."