Chapter 3: The Bell and the Ghost

The bridge held Ethan's weight, barely. Each step sent tremors through the rotting planks, and twice he had to leap across gaps where the wood had collapsed entirely into the roaring darkness below. The leather bell in his grip pulsed with each movement, its rhythm matching his hammering heartbeat in a synchronicity that made his skin crawl.

By the time he reached the far side, his legs were shaking from more than just blood loss. The ticks covering his body had arranged themselves into perfect spirals around his arms and torso, their movements so coordinated it looked like living tattoos shifting beneath his pale skin.

Glass Harbor's shoreline was a jumble of wet rocks and skeletal driftwood, illuminated by the sickly phosphorescence of something that definitely wasn't moonlight. Ethan picked his way carefully down the slope, his boots slipping on stones made treacherous by a film of organic slime that smelled like rotting flowers.

He had to find Jackson's body. Had to confirm that the thing wearing the boy's face was really gone, and not waiting somewhere in the shadows to drag him back across the bridge. The fall had been at least fifty feet into churning water and jagged stone—nothing human could survive that impact.

But then again, Jackson hadn't been human anymore, had he?

Ethan played his hidden flashlight across the rocks, its beam cutting through the unnatural gloom in stuttering arcs. There—caught between two boulders near the water's edge—a flash of familiar fabric.

He scrambled down the slope, his weakened legs nearly giving out twice before he reached the shoreline. Jackson's clothes were there, all right—his faded green t-shirt and khaki shorts, even his sneakers, positioned as if their owner had simply stepped out of them and walked away.

But there was no body. No blood. No sign of impact or injury. Just empty clothes arranged with an almost deliberate precision, as if Jackson had dissolved and left only the hollow shells of his human disguise behind.

"What the hell?" Ethan whispered, lifting the shirt. It was completely dry, despite lying inches from the churning spray of the river. The fabric held no warmth, no scent of a living person—it might as well have been a discarded costume.

The implications crashed over him like ice water. Jackson hadn't been killed by the fall. He'd been... what? Recalled? Dissolved back into whatever collective consciousness had been controlling him? The thing that had spoken through the boy's mouth had mentioned other vessels, other children feeding something called Mother Piper.

A sound like tearing silk made him spin around, the flashlight beam swinging wildly across the rocks. Nothing there but shadows and the endless dance of phosphorescent foam. But the sound came again, louder this time, and he realized with growing horror that it was coming from the bell in his other hand.

The leather surface was moving. Not pulsing—actually moving, like something alive trying to push its way out from inside. Hairline cracks appeared along its surface, widening as he watched, and from each crack poured a thin stream of black liquid that moved with purpose rather than gravity.

"No, no, no..." Ethan tried to drop the bell, but his fingers wouldn't obey. His grip was locked around it as if his hand had fused with the organic leather, and the cracks were spreading faster now, the black liquid forming pools that reflected the phosphorescent light like oil.

The tearing sound reached a crescendo, and the bell simply came apart in his hand. Not breaking or shattering—dissolving. The leather surface peeled away in strips that immediately began to writhe and twist, revealing what had been hidden inside.

Ticks. Hundreds of them, far more than the bell's interior space should have been able to contain. They poured from the dissolving remnants like water from a burst dam, flowing up his arm in perfect formation to join their brothers already covering his skin.

But as they did, something impossible happened. The ticks that had been feeding on him for days, weakening him with their parasitic hunger, suddenly released their hold. He felt them withdrawing their tiny barbed mouthparts from his flesh, their bloated bodies deflating as they expelled the blood they'd stolen back into his system.

The effect was immediate and overwhelming. Strength flooded back into his limbs as his blood pressure normalized for the first time in weeks. The constant fog of anemia lifted from his mind, leaving his thoughts sharp and clear. Even his vision improved, the world snapping into crisp focus as his body reclaimed its stolen vitality.

But the relief lasted only seconds before the true horror of his situation became clear. The ticks weren't leaving—they were changing formation. Instead of the random feeding clusters he'd grown accustomed to, they were organizing themselves into intricate patterns across his skin, forming symbols and shapes that hurt to look at directly.

And they were moving with purpose now, streams of black bodies flowing toward specific points on his arms and chest, as if following invisible instructions from some distant command center. The bell hadn't been a summoning device at all—it had been a delivery system, a way to introduce new parasites that would override the town's crude preparation ritual with something far more sophisticated.

"The transplant," he whispered, remembering Jackson's words. This was how it started. How the children of Glass Harbor were prepared to become vessels for whatever waited in the abandoned town. The feeding phase had been just the beginning—now came the real transformation.

He tried to brush the ticks away, but they clung to his skin with supernatural tenacity, their tiny legs finding purchase in ways that defied physics. Panic rose in his throat as he realized he was watching his own corruption in real time, his body being prepared for some unthinkable purpose by creatures that existed beyond the normal laws of biology.

A soft sound made him look up from his tick-covered arms, and his heart stopped entirely.

She stood twenty feet away, translucent and shimmering like heat haze, but unmistakably real. Amelia. His sister, exactly as she'd looked the night before her final journey to Glass Harbor—seventeen years old, dark hair falling in waves around her shoulders, wearing the blue sundress that had been her favorite.

But her eyes were wrong. They held the same empty serenity he'd seen in Jackson, the same ancient intelligence wearing a familiar face like a mask. When she spoke, her voice carried harmonics that made the phosphorescent water ripple in response.

"Hello, Ethan."

He wanted to run to her, to embrace the ghost of the sister he'd loved more than life itself. Every rational part of his mind screamed that this was a trap, an illusion designed to lure him deeper into Glass Harbor's web. But seeing her face again, even distorted by whatever force had claimed her, made his heart clench with desperate hope.

"Amelia? Is it really you?"

Her smile was gentle and utterly empty. "I'm what remains. What was preserved when the transplant failed. Mother Piper keeps us all, Ethan. Every child who crosses the bridge becomes part of her collection, part of her growing consciousness."

"The car accident—"

"Was necessary. The vessel was flawed, unable to contain what I had become. But my essence, my memories, my love for you—all of that was saved. Mother Piper wastes nothing."

She began to walk toward him, her bare feet making no sound on the wet rocks, leaving no footprints in the organic slime. With each step, she became more solid, more real, until he could see individual droplets of mist clinging to her hair.

"She's waiting for you," Amelia continued, her voice taking on layers of meaning that bypassed his conscious mind and spoke directly to something deeper. "She's been so patient, so gentle. The others who came before you fought the gift, rejected the honor. But you're different, aren't you? You understand what it means to be chosen."

The ticks on his skin pulsed in rhythm with her words, their synchronized movement creating patterns that seemed to shift the very air around him. He could feel his resistance weakening, not from physical exhaustion but from something far more insidious—a growing sense that fighting this was pointless, that surrender would be easier, more natural.

"I saw what happened to you," he managed, clinging to his anger like an anchor. "The empty shell you became. That's not preservation, Amelia. That's murder."

"Murder?" Her laugh was silver bells and breaking glass. "Oh, Ethan. You still think in such small terms. Death, life, murder, salvation—these are human concepts. Mother Piper exists beyond such limitations. She offers transformation, elevation, the chance to become part of something eternal."

She was close enough to touch now, her phantom presence radiating a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature. The ticks covering his body had gone completely still, as if awaiting some signal from the ghostly figure before him.

"Come with me," she whispered, extending one translucent hand. "Let me show you what I've become. What we can become together."

Every instinct screamed at him to recoil, to run, to fight. But the voice was Amelia's, the face was Amelia's, and the love in her empty eyes was a perfect mimicry of everything he'd lost when she died. For a moment that stretched like eternity, Ethan Thorne wavered on the edge of surrender.

Then he remembered Jackson's clothes, empty and purposeless on the rocks. Whatever this thing was, however perfectly it wore his sister's face, Amelia was gone. Had been gone since the night she crossed this same bridge and never truly returned.

"No," he said quietly, his voice growing stronger with each word. "You're not my sister. You're just another puppet, another lie. Amelia would never have led me into a trap."

The thing wearing his sister's face tilted its head, considering his rejection with the same detached interest Jackson had shown. "Perhaps. But I am what she chose to become. What she embraced when the fear finally left her. And you will make the same choice, Ethan. Tonight. Before the tide turns and Mother Piper's patience runs out."

She turned and began walking away, her form growing more translucent with each step. "Follow the path through town. She's waiting in the old church, eager to meet the brother of her favorite vessel. Don't keep her waiting too long—she doesn't enjoy disappointment."

Ethan watched until the phantom vanished entirely, leaving him alone on the corrupted shoreline with only the sound of rushing water and his own ragged breathing. The ticks covering his body had resumed their purposeful movement, streams of black bodies flowing toward junction points that felt significant in ways he couldn't understand.

He was trapped now, caught between a bridge he couldn't cross alone and a town full of horrors he didn't understand. The burner phone in his boot remained stubbornly silent, its screen showing no signal bars. The compass spun uselessly, its needle unable to find true north in this place where normal physics seemed optional.

But he still had the knife. Still had his wits, sharpened by desperation and the terrible clarity that came from having nothing left to lose. And somewhere in the abandoned streets of Glass Harbor, something that called itself Mother Piper was waiting to complete a process that had begun the night his sister first crossed this bridge.

Ethan Thorne, his body crawling with living symbols of corruption, turned away from the river and walked toward the phosphorescent glow that marked the entrance to Glass Harbor. Behind him, empty clothes stirred in the organic breeze, and ahead, the ghost of his sister's voice whispered promises of transformation that would make death seem like mercy.

The real horror was just beginning.