Chapter 4: The Town's Silent Secret

Chapter 4: The Town's Silent Secret

The hunger was a constant, low thrum beneath the surface of his thoughts. It wasn't his own hunger for food or sleep, but a cold, alien craving that emanated from the passenger in his soul. Yours is not enough. The entity’s silent declaration had become a verdict. Alex was no longer just a victim; he was failing at being a suitable host.

Panic, sharp and acidic, gave him a clarity he hadn't felt in years. He couldn't fight what he didn't understand. A hallucination could be medicated. A ghost could be ignored. But a parasite with an appetite needed to be understood, if only to know how to starve it.

His desperate search for answers led him to the one place in Blackwood Creek where the past was allowed to rot in peace: the town library. The building smelled of dust, decaying paper, and lemon polish, a scent of orderly neglect. The silence inside was thick and heavy, a stark contrast to the predatory monologue that now filled his head.

He bypassed the meager fiction section and headed for the town’s historical archives, a cramped, poorly lit annex managed by a woman with glasses perched on the end of her nose who looked as though she hadn't been surprised by anything since the Carter administration.

"Looking for something specific?" she asked, her voice a dry rustle of pages.

"Local history," Alex mumbled, avoiding her gaze. "Folklore. Unexplained events."

She gave him a look that hovered somewhere between pity and suspicion before gesturing vaguely toward a set of metal shelves sagging under the weight of leather-bound ledgers and cardboard boxes. "Knock yourself out. Just don't disturb the dust too much. It's structural."

For hours, Alex sifted through brittle records of lumber mill disputes and founding family genealogies. The mundane history was almost comforting. But the entity in his head was bored. It kept tugging his attention away, making him notice the quiet tremor of anxiety radiating from a student studying for exams two tables over, a dull but persistent flavor of dread. He had to force his focus back to the page, his own will a muscle he was having to exercise for the first time in a long while.

He finally found it, tucked away in a self-published booklet from the 1950s titled Whispers from the Creek. The paper was cheap, the ink faded. Most of it was rambling nonsense about river spirits and phantom loggers. But one chapter, titled "The Eater of Sorrows," made the blood in his veins turn to ice.

The anonymous author described a creature of the deep woods, one that took the shape of a deer or a shadow. It was not a creature of flesh and blood in the normal sense, but a psychic predator. It was drawn, the text claimed, not to the living, but to the dying-within. To those consumed by grief, guilt, or despair. It answered the silent invitation of a soul that wished for its own end.

Not you. Me.

The words on the page blurred. Alex gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles white. The book described how the creature didn't kill its host, not at first. It formed a bond, a parasitic link, feeding on the host's misery until it was no longer enough. Then, it would use the host as a vessel, a sensory tool to hunt for richer, deeper wells of pain in others. The host would become a passenger in their own body, their consciousness slowly eroded until nothing was left but the creature's insatiable hunger.

The final line of the chapter was underlined in shaky pencil by a long-dead hand: They do not take your life. They take your self.

This wasn't a one-time horror. This was a known entity. A local legend. A folktale that perfectly described the nightmare currently renting space in his mind.

Driven by a new, terrifying energy, he moved to the microfilm reader. He began cross-referencing the folklore with old issues of the Blackwood Creek Ledger. He searched for articles on missing persons, suicides, and accidents dating back decades. A pattern began to emerge, faint but undeniable. The official reports were bland: "disappeared while hiking," "left town without a word," "succumbed to a sudden illness."

But the context was chilling. A man who vanished a month after his wife died in a fire. A teenage girl who walked into the woods and was never seen again, weeks after being publicly shamed in a town scandal. Person after person, all united by a preceding, well-known tragedy.

Then he found the other articles, the stranger ones. Reports of "sudden personality shifts." A once-gregarious farmer in 1968 who, overnight, became a recluse, his eyes "as empty as a winter sky." A beloved schoolteacher in 1982 who abruptly quit her job and was occasionally seen wandering the edge of town, silent and hollow, her family describing her as "gone, even though she's right there."

He was staring at his own potential future, cataloged in faded newsprint.

"Finding our town's sordid history to your liking?"

The voice, soft and amiable, made Alex jump. An old man stood beside the microfilm reader, his frame thin and wiry, his face a pleasant roadmap of wrinkles. He wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and smiled a grandfatherly smile. Alex recognized him from town: Mr. Abernathy, the volunteer town historian.

"Just... curious," Alex stammered, trying to shield the screen with his body.

Abernathy's eyes, a pale, watery blue, twinkled with an unnerving light. "Ah, the old Sorrow Eater folktale, I presume? Always popular with a certain type of visitor. Tragic, isn't it? The stories people tell to explain away the simple, sad fact that sometimes, people just break."

His tone was dismissive, but his eyes lingered on Alex's face, a keen intelligence behind the folksy facade. He saw the sunken cheeks, the dark circles, the frantic energy. He saw a man who wasn't just reading a story, but living one.

"It feels... more than that," Alex said, his voice barely a whisper. The words were a risk, an admission, but he was desperate.

Mr. Abernathy’s smile didn't falter, but it lost all its warmth. He leaned closer, his voice dropping. "Blackwood Creek is an old town, Mr. Miller. It has survived because it understands the woods. It understands the... balance."

He said the word 'balance' as if it were a sacred, terrible thing. "Some trees need fire to release their seeds. Some fields need to lie fallow. And some sorrows," he paused, his gaze boring into Alex, "are so loud, they attract attention."

The implication hit Alex like a physical blow. Abernathy knew. He wasn't just aware of the folklore; he was aware of the reality.

"The woods provide for the town," Abernathy continued, his voice now cold and hard as river stone. "And the town, in turn, respects the woods' appetites. It is an arrangement that has kept this place quiet and safe for a very long time. It is a secret we are all, in our own way, willing to protect."

He straightened up, his kindly historian mask slipping back into place. "You should be careful, son. Digging up old stories can unsettle things. Some invitations are best left unanswered. And once answered, it's very poor form to fight the inevitable."

Mr. Abernathy gave him a final, thin smile and walked away, leaving Alex sitting in the humming silence of the archive. The horror was no longer just inside him. It was all around him. He hadn’t stumbled upon a monster. He had stumbled into a cage, and the bars were the silent, knowing smiles of the entire town. The secret wasn't just that the Sorrow Eaters existed.

The secret was that they were being fed.