Chapter 6: Harrow Creek

Chapter 6: Harrow Creek

The woods swallowed him whole. One moment he was in his overgrown yard, the next he was in a suffocating, primeval world of black bark and grasping roots. The beam of his flashlight cut a frantic, bouncing tunnel through the oppressive dark, illuminating a chaotic mess of damp leaves, twisted thorns, and rotting logs. Every snap of a twig under his boots sounded like a gunshot. Every whisper of wind through the skeletal branches sounded like a name being called—his or Neil’s, he couldn't tell.

He ran, clumsy and desperate, the leather-bound journal clutched tight in his hand. The words he’d read burned behind his eyes, a terrible new gospel guiding his terror. The entity of the Creek is the hand that turns it. The creek. That had to be where Neil was going. Where the thing wearing his father’s skin was going.

His mind replayed the chilling passage about being marked, about the lock of hair Mr. Smith had so carefully snipped and saved. Trey felt naked, exposed. He imagined his scent wafting through the cold night air like a trail of breadcrumbs, leading the hunter not just to Neil, but to him. A two-for-one deal for the ancient evil that held this town in its grip.

He stumbled over a root, falling hard to one knee. The impact jarred his teeth, and the flashlight skittered away, its beam spinning wildly across the forest floor. For a terrifying second, he was plunged into near-total darkness, the journal the only solid thing in his grasp. He scrambled for the light, his fingers closing around the cool metal just as he heard it.

It wasn't the wind. It was the low, rhythmic murmur of running water.

He got to his feet, ignoring the pain in his knee, and pushed forward, the sound growing from a whisper to a steady, somber drone. He was getting close. His father’s journal had spoken of this place with a unique brand of fear, reserving a special horror for it separate from the entity itself. Harrow Creek is not just a place, he’d scrawled, the letters digging into the page. It is the heart. The mouth. The place where the pact was sealed in blood and water. Do not go there. The very ground is hungry.

The trees began to thin, their forms growing stranger, more contorted. The air grew still and frigid, the kind of deep, wet cold that seeps right into your bones. He broke through a final screen of thorny bushes and stopped dead.

He was there.

Harrow Creek wasn't a bubbling, lively stream. It was a scar of black, sluggish water that cut through the forest floor, its surface as still and reflective as obsidian. Along its banks grew ancient, gnarled trees, their roots like the arthritic knuckles of buried giants, twisted and exposed. They leaned over the water, their branches forming a skeletal canopy that blocked out the sky, creating a natural, silent cathedral of dread. The place felt wrong, ancient, and profoundly aware.

And standing at the water’s edge was Neil.

Trey’s desperate, panicked hunt came to a screeching halt. The relief he expected to feel at finding his brother was instantly choked by a wave of deep, alien dread. Neil was not in danger. He was not hiding or running. He was perfectly, unnaturally still, his back to Trey, one hand resting gently on a thick, serpentine root that coiled out of the creek bank.

His posture was rigid, his head tilted slightly, as if he were listening intently to a conversation carried on the cold air, a conversation only he could hear. It was the same unsettling stillness Trey had seen in the house, but amplified a hundred times in this malevolent place. Neil wasn't a victim here. He was an acolyte at an altar.

“Neil?” Trey called out, his voice a ragged whisper that sounded sacrilegious in the crushing silence.

Neil turned, not with a start, but with a slow, fluid motion that was deeply wrong. His face, illuminated by the trembling beam of Trey's flashlight, was devoid of fear. His wide, innocent eyes were unfocused, glazed over. A faint, placid smile touched his lips—the same smile his father had tried to beat from his face. He looked at Trey not as a brother, but as a stranger who had interrupted a sacred rite.

“You shouldn’t be here, Trey,” he said, his voice soft, melodic, and utterly devoid of his usual stutter. It wasn’t Neil’s voice. It was something wearing his brother like a comfortable suit.

At that moment, the temperature plummeted. The cold went from uncomfortable to agonizing, a physical pressure that stole the breath from Trey's lungs. The faint murmur of the creek ceased. The woods fell completely, utterly silent.

A sharp snap echoed from the darkness to his right.

Trey jerked his flashlight in that direction, his heart seizing in his chest. And from the deepest shadows between two of the gnarled trees, it emerged.

It was gaunt, a skeleton draped in rotting clothes and grey, taut skin that was mottled with patches of dark decay. It moved with a jerky, impossible speed, its limbs bending at angles that were not human. But it was the head, the face, that made Trey’s soul scream. It was Jason Blackburn’s face, emaciated and skull-like, but it was him.

And the eyes. Sunken deep into dark, hollow sockets, they were not the dull, dead eyes of a corpse. They burned. They burned with a faint, cold, intelligent green light. A light that fixed on Neil, then shifted, locking onto Trey with an ancient, predatory hunger that promised not just death, but consumption. This wasn't the shambling corpse of a B-movie. This was a hunter, and its prey was finally cornered.