Chapter 5: The Second Target

Chapter 5: The Second Target

The ghost in his machine had a palate, and it was becoming increasingly refined.

Alex spent the day after his visit to the library in a state of self-imposed lockdown, trying to starve the beast. He ate dry toast, drank tap water, and focused on the peeling paint on his ceiling, attempting to generate a state of absolute, boring neutrality. If the creature fed on sorrow, he would give it nothing. He would become a barren field, a desert of the soul.

It was a fool's errand. The entity didn't need him to generate the misery; it just needed his senses to find it. The quiet desperation of his neighbors still seeped through the thin walls—the lonely widow in 2A, the couple in 3F whose arguments were quiet, vicious things. They were like the scent of baking bread to a starving man, and the thing inside him paced the cage of his skull, restless and demanding.

By late afternoon, the pressure was unbearable. It was a physical ache behind his eyes, a coiling tension in his gut. He had to get out. He thought a walk in the opposite direction of the woods, toward the slightly more populated town center, might dilute the signal, scramble its senses in a crowd.

He was wrong. It was like walking into a feast. The air was thick with the low-grade hum of a thousand mundane heartaches. But just as he passed the high school, a new sensation cut through the noise with the piercing clarity of a scream.

It wasn't a dull ache or a bitter fog. This was a sharp, crystalline note of pain, pure and incandescent. It tasted like ozone before a lightning strike and the salt of new tears. It was an agony so fresh and potent that it made the entity inside him jolt to rapt attention. For the first time, Alex felt a flicker of its own emotion: not hunger, but a connoisseur's delight.

‘There,’ the thought was not a word but a sharp, undeniable pull, an invisible hook lodged deep in his chest. ‘That one.’

He fought it. He planted his worn sneakers on the cracked sidewalk, trying to resist the psychic tide. But it was no use. His feet began to move, his body turning against his will toward the source. He wasn't walking; he was being reeled in.

The source was a teenage girl sitting on a low brick wall that bordered the school's front lawn. She couldn't have been more than sixteen. She wore a faded band t-shirt and ripped jeans, her posture a study in collapse. Her shoulders were hunched, her head bowed over a phone clutched in a white-knuckled grip. A cascade of dark hair hid her face, but Alex didn't need to see it. He could feel her world ending.

He saw it as a shimmering, violent aura of fractured light around her, a beacon of pure despair in the bland afternoon. The entity pulsed with excitement, and Alex felt a wave of nausea. He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that he was looking at a reflection. This was him, a few years ago, after the phone call from the hospital, when the world had ceased to hold meaning. He was looking at a soul standing on the edge of a cliff, composing its own silent invitation.

The girl’s shoulders began to shake with silent, wracking sobs. She was trying to stifle it, to hold the implosion inside, but the grief was too powerful.

‘Perfect,’ the entity whispered in his mind, the word laced with a terrible, possessive satisfaction. ‘Wounded. Isolated. Loud.’

Alex stopped twenty feet away, half-hidden behind a large oak tree. He watched as two other girls walked past, throwing a glance at the weeping girl on the wall before giggling and speeding up, their own petty concerns a solid wall against her pain. She was utterly alone. An ideal target.

The memory of Mr. Abernathy’s voice slithered into his mind, cold and reasonable. ‘Some sorrows are so loud, they attract attention... It is an arrangement that has kept this place quiet.’

He could walk away. It was the smart thing to do. The safe thing. This wasn't his problem. Getting involved meant talking to people, drawing attention, revealing the madness that had taken root in his head. He would sound like a lunatic. Hey, you should go home, there's a psychic deer monster that's going to eat your soul. They’d lock him up. Abernathy and the silent, watchful town would ensure it.

He took a half-step back, the instinct for self-preservation screaming at him to run, to hide, to let the town's horrific "balance" play out.

Then, the entity pushed.

It wasn't just a thought. It was a physical impulse. He felt his own leg muscles tense, a marionette's twitch, preparing to step toward her. A cold directive flooded his brain, a strategy session for a hunt he wanted no part of.

‘Approach. Offer comfort. A kind word. An open hand is an open door. She is ready to accept any relief. She will invite us in.’

The word us sent a jolt of pure revulsion through him. It was no longer his body. It was a tool, a lure. If he stood by and did nothing, the creature wouldn't just watch. It would act. It would use his mouth to speak comforting lies. It would use his hands to offer a steadying touch. It would use his face, his voice, his very presence to ensnare her, and he would be nothing but a prisoner behind his own eyes, forced to watch the horror unfold.

The girl on the wall let out a small, broken sound, a gasp of pain so profound it was almost silent. She wanted it to end. He could feel it. The same desperate wish for oblivion that had led him to that lonely, streetlit road.

And in that moment, the choice became terrifyingly simple. He could be a coward and become a monster's puppet, or he could be a madman and try to be a man.

He looked at the girl, seeing not just a target, but a life about to be consumed. He saw his own guilt, his own past, his own damnation about to be repeated and inflicted on someone else. The years of passive self-hatred, of accepting his miserable fate, suddenly curdled into something new. It wasn't hope. It wasn't courage. It was pure, undiluted spite.

No, he thought, the word a shield against the entity's influence. Not her. Not like this.

The entity recoiled at his defiance, a sudden spike of cold fury in his mind. But Alex held onto his spite, fanning the weak ember into a flame.

He pushed off from the tree, his heart pounding a frantic, terrified rhythm. His legs felt like lead. Every instinct for anonymity he had cultivated for years screamed in protest. He was choosing to be seen. He was choosing to interfere. He was breaking the town's silent, monstrous rules.

He didn't know what he would say. He had no plan. But as he took the first deliberate step toward the weeping girl, he knew one thing. The hunt was over. He was no longer the creature’s hunting dog. He was its keeper. And he was about to rattle the cage.