Chapter 9: A Mother's Ghost

Chapter 9: A Mother's Ghost

The house was a tomb. Trey had slammed the bolts on every door, wedged rickety chairs under the knobs, and pulled the filthy curtains across every window. But it was a pointless charade. The prison wasn't the walls of the house; it was the entire suffocating perimeter of Harrow Creek. The knowledge he’d gained from Wajeski and Smith had transformed the familiar structure from a cursed inheritance into a besieged foxhole.

He paced the dusty living room, the bag from Wajeski's General Store sitting untouched on the kitchen counter. The fresh batteries for the flashlight felt like a pathetic defense against the encroaching dark. Across the room, Neil remained huddled in his blanket, rocking almost imperceptibly, his eyes fixed on a point on the floor only he could see. He was a constant, terrifying reminder of the stakes.

Fear was a useless emotion now. It was too vast, too all-encompassing. It had been replaced by a cold, simmering rage—at his father, at the town, at the silent, watching woods. Rage was a fuel. He needed a weapon.

The crumpled ward page from the creek lay on the table, a testament to his one small victory. But it was a single bullet in a war that required an arsenal. He needed more. He needed a way to break the siege, a way to end this.

With a grim sense of purpose, Trey sat down at the kitchen table and pulled the leather-bound journal towards him once more. He had a working flashlight now, its beam steady and strong, illuminating the frantic script without flickering. He ignored the early sections detailing his father's descent into paranoia and the later pages filled with failed rituals. He started from the beginning, methodically, searching for a foundation, a core truth he might have missed in his panicked reading. He was no longer just a terrified son; he was a researcher, a soldier studying the enemy's playbook.

He poured over diagrams of containment circles, lists of herbs and their supposed properties, and mad, rambling theories on the nature of pacts and bloodlines. For hours, the only sounds were the rustle of brittle pages and the soft, maddening creak of the house settling around him.

He was deep into the journal's midsection, his eyes gritty with exhaustion, when he found it. Tucked between a detailed drawing of a binding rune and a rant about the town's founding families, was a section written in a different hand. It was still his father’s script, but it was from an earlier time. The letters were neater, more rounded, filled not with frantic rage, but with a chilling, clinical desperation. It was the writing of a man convincing himself to do the unthinkable.

And he saw his mother’s name. Eleanor.

Trey’s breath hitched. He had only vague, sun-drenched memories of his mother: the scent of lavender, a soft singing voice, the warmth of her hand in his. Then, one day, she was just gone. His father had said she’d run off, unable to handle the isolation, unable to handle him. Trey had believed it, had cultivated a core of resentment for the woman who had abandoned them.

The journal told a different story. A far more horrific one.

June 10th, the entry began. The corruption in the boy grows. He no longer responds to affection. He only watches the trees. The old texts speak of a cleansing. A willing sacrifice of the purest love to appease the entity, to wash the stain from the bloodline. A life for a life. She loves the boy. She would do anything for him. For us. Eleanor has agreed. It must be done at the creek, at the new moon.

Trey felt the air leave his lungs. It was a cold, hollow feeling, as if his ribs had been cracked open and his organs scooped out. A willing sacrifice. He read the words again, but they wouldn't make sense. His mother, the gentle woman of his faded memories, agreeing to be sacrificed to a monster in the woods? It was impossible. It was a lie.

He turned the page, his hands trembling violently. The next entry was dated two days later. The handwriting was shattered, the ink splattered across the page as if the pen had been wielded by a shaking, broken hand.

June 12th. I did it. I took her to the water's edge. She was so brave. She thought she was saving her son. But the pact was a lie. A trick. The entity… it laughed. I heard it laugh in the rushing water and the wind. It took her. It dragged her down into the black water. And the boy… the boy is unchanged. The corruption is deeper now. I can feel it in the house, in the walls. It didn't want a sacrifice to cleanse the line. It wanted an invitation. Her blood, my wife’s blood, willingly spilt on its altar, didn’t pay a debt. It opened the door wider.

The journal slipped from Trey's numb fingers and fell to the floor with a soft thud. The world tilted on its axis.

She didn't leave.

She didn't abandon him.

His father, the man whose reanimated corpse was currently hunting him, had led his mother to her death. He had fed her to the monster in the woods in a desperate, failed attempt to save the changeling that was wearing his son’s face. The full, crushing weight of his family’s tragedy descended upon Trey. His father wasn't just a monster who fought a monster; he was a man who had sacrificed his wife on a foolish hope and had been utterly destroyed by the consequences, left with nothing but guilt, booze, and the soulless copy of his dead son.

A wave of grief, so powerful it was physically painful, washed over Trey. It was a grief for the mother he never knew, and in a strange, twisted way, for the father he had only ever known as a tyrant.

That’s when the room grew cold.

It was not the drafty chill of an old house. It was a deep, penetrating cold that felt like it was emanating from inside his own bones, the same unnatural cold he’d felt at Harrow Creek. The air grew heavy, thick with a sudden, impossible scent.

Lavender.

Trey’s head snapped up. His eyes darted around the dim kitchen, searching the shadows. The light from his flashlight seemed to dim, the beam growing weaker as the cold intensified. A faint whisper slithered through the silence, a sound so soft he thought he was imagining it, a single, sorrowful sigh.

He scrambled backward, his chair scraping loudly against the linoleum. His gaze fell upon the tall, dust-streaked pantry door. For a moment, the grime on its surface seemed to shift, to coalesce. It was like watching breath fog a cold pane of glass. An outline began to form in the dust—a shape, slender and ethereal. The faint silhouette of a woman.

It wasn’t a clear image, more a suggestion, a condensation of sorrow and cold energy. But Trey knew. He knew who he was looking at.

"Mom?" The word was a choked, broken whisper.

The shape did not speak, but he felt a wave of immense sadness wash over him, a grief that was not his own. The ghostly form lifted a translucent arm, her finger pointing not at him, not at Neil, but at the journal lying open on the floor. Her gesture was insistent, desperate. She was trying to show him something.

Then, she whispered again, her voice like the rustle of dry leaves, a sound that seemed to come from all around him and from inside his own head.

The debt… the voice sighed, laced with an eternity of pain. Not the child… the blood…

The shape wavered, the cold began to recede, and the scent of lavender faded. The ghostly image dissolved back into a random pattern of dust on an old pantry door.

Trey was left alone in the silence, his heart hammering against his ribs. He was trembling, but not from fear. It was something else—awe, grief, and a dawning, terrifying clarity. His mother's ghost was here. She was trapped, a sorrowful spirit bound to the place of her murder, but she was protective. She was trying to help him.

He looked down at where she had pointed. The journal lay open, not to the pages about her death, but near the very back. The final pages. The ones he hadn't reached yet.

His mother’s ghost had just given him his next move. She had shown him where to find the final, terrible truth.