Chapter 4: Whispers of the Echo-Fae

Chapter 4: Whispers of the Echo-Fae

The Ford Bronco was no longer a symbol of teenage freedom; it was a mobile bunker. Jax had it parked in the shadowy recesses of the Havenwood High student lot, the engine off, the world outside muted by glass and steel. In the back, Chloe was wrapped in Jax’s letterman jacket, shivering despite the mild autumn air. The psychic residue of her mother’s—of the creature’s—focused malice clung to her like a shroud, a cold, oily feeling that soap and water couldn’t wash away.

“We can’t go to the police,” Maya stated for the third time, her voice a flat line of logic cutting through their shared panic. “My father, the mayor, the sheriff… they’re all… listening to the song.”

“They’re all puppets,” Leo corrected her, his voice hoarse. He couldn’t stop seeing the glitch, the momentary reveal of the insect-like thing wearing Elizabeth Williams’s skin. Now, every time he saw an adult, he was looking for the seams, the tells. He kept glancing at their reflections in the Bronco’s windows, his heart in his throat.

Jax slammed a fist against the steering wheel, the impact making them all jump. “So what do we do? We can’t just drive around all night. And what was that thing with Chloe’s mom? Why did she pull away from me like that?” He looked at his own hands, a mixture of fear and fury in his eyes. He was a quarterback, used to solving problems with force and momentum. But he’d barely touched her, and she had reacted like he’d doused her in acid.

They were adrift in a sea of questions. The song was the water, the adults were the mindless fish, and they were four survivors in a leaking raft. They needed a map. They needed a history. They needed an adult they could trust.

“There aren’t any,” Jax said, his voice grim.

“Maybe one,” Chloe whispered, her voice barely audible. She pulled the jacket tighter. “Someone my dad calls ‘the town historian and resident lunatic.’ Mr. Abernathy.”

The name hung in the air. Everyone knew of Alistair Abernathy. He was a stooped, wild-haired old man who lived in the crumbling Victorian house on the edge of the old mill district. The one who wrote rambling letters to the editor about ley lines and forgotten town history. The one kids whispered was crazy.

“The guy who thinks a meteor strike in the 1800s gave the town its psychic energy?” Jax scoffed, the skepticism a reflex.

“Psychic energy might be exactly what we need right now,” Maya countered, her pragmatism shifting to accommodate their new reality. “He’s spent fifty years researching the weird history of this town. If anyone has seen a pattern like this before, it’s him. He’s the only adult who was already looking for something that wasn’t there.”

It was a desperate, flimsy hope, but it was the only one they had.

Abernathy’s house was a hoarder’s paradise and a firefighter’s nightmare. It didn’t smell of lemon polish; it smelled of old paper, dust, and ozone. Books were stacked in precarious towers that reached the ceiling. Old maps, yellowed and brittle, were pinned to every available inch of wall space, crisscrossed with lines of red string. The air was still, silent. There was no radio playing, no television humming. It was the first place they had been all day that felt free of the song.

Alistair Abernathy himself was exactly as advertised: a scarecrow of a man with eyes that burned with a fierce, unsettling intelligence. He listened to their frantic, overlapping story without a word of interruption, his gaze moving from one teenager to the next.

Leo, his hands shaking, was the first to offer proof. He opened his sketchbook to the drawing of the spindly, insect-like creature. “I see this. In their reflections. And… I saw it for real. In Chloe’s mom.”

Abernathy leaned in, his eyes narrowing. He didn’t recoil. He didn’t laugh. He simply nodded, a slow, grim motion. “The true face. You have the Sight.”

Next, Maya explained what she’d heard, pulling out the napkin with her phonetic scribbles of the commands hidden within the song. “It’s a language. It’s telling them what to do. What to feel. It tells them to… forget.”

“The Song of Unmaking,” Abernathy whispered, the name itself seeming to suck the warmth from the room. “An old, dark lullaby. It doesn’t just control, my dear. It hollows. It scoops out the soul, note by note, and leaves a perfect, resonant vessel.”

Chloe spoke then, her voice trembling as she described the feeling she’d gotten from the crack in the sky, and later, from her mother. “It was a hunger. A cold, predatory focus. Like we were just… specimens. Food.”

“Because you are,” Abernathy said, his gaze softening with a pity that was somehow more terrifying than scorn. “They don’t just control for the sake of power. They feed. On devotion, on love, on strong, pure emotions. They drain the color from the world to paint their own.”

Finally, Jax told his part, describing how Chloe’s mother had flinched away from him in pain. “I don’t get it. I barely touched her.”

Abernathy’s eyes lit up with a spark of something that wasn’t quite hope, but was close. “Interesting. The glamour, their great illusion, is woven from the song. It’s a psychic projection. But you… your physical presence is like a competing frequency. You are an Anchor. A patch of solid ground in their sea of lies. You don’t just resist the song; you actively disrupt it.”

He straightened up, pacing in the small, clear space in the center of the room. “For years, I’ve read the legends. The scraps of folklore this town tried so hard to forget. They aren’t aliens in the way your movies imagine. They are older. They are the Echo-Fae.”

He gestured to a large, leather-bound book on a nearby lectern. “The old stories say they were banished from this world long ago, cast into a place of cold, silent geometry. But they left an echo, a resonance, waiting for a crack in the veil to return. The storm the other night wasn’t a storm. It was a key turning in an ancient lock.”

He turned to face them, his expression deadly serious. “They can’t build their own bodies here. So they wear ours. Like masks. The song primes the host, makes them receptive, and then… the echo moves in.”

The pieces slammed together in their minds, forming a picture of unimaginable horror. The crack in the sky. The song. The vacant adults. Leo’s Sight. Maya’s hearing. Chloe’s empathy. Jax’s null-aura. They weren’t random occurrences. They were a reaction. Their world was being invaded, and for some reason, the four of them had become the antibodies.

“So… what do we do?” Jax asked, his voice low. “How do we fight them?”

Abernathy’s brief flash of excitement died, replaced by a deep weariness. “Knowing is the first and most dangerous step. Before, you were anomalies, static they could ignore. Now, you have a name for them. You understand. That makes you threats.” He walked to the dusty window, peering through the grime at the quiet, tree-lined street.

“You see, the song has a secondary purpose,” he said, his back to them. “It creates a network. A hive mind. What one host learns, the others can be made to know.”

A cold dread settled over them. Down the street, a man walking his dog paused. He stopped humming and tilted his head, his vacant gaze slowly turning towards Abernathy’s house. A few houses down, the curtains in a window twitched. A woman who had been watering her roses turned off the hose, her movements suddenly stiff and deliberate as she, too, looked in their direction.

Chloe felt it first—a shift in the emotional landscape of the neighborhood. The ambient, placid contentment was being replaced by a focused, unified curiosity. The same cold, sharp focus she had felt from her mother.

It was the feeling of a predator that had just caught the scent of its prey.

“They know we’re here,” she whispered.

Abernathy didn’t turn around. “Yes,” he said, his voice grim. “The whispers have begun. And they know your names.”