Chapter 5: The Devil on the Nightstand

Chapter 5: The Devil on the Nightstand

The silence in her apartment was a physical presence. It was heavier than it had been before, weighted down by the ghost of a second death. In the old timeline—the one that felt like a distant, sepia-toned photograph—the silence was punctuated by her mother’s nightly check-in calls, her voice a thin thread of shared sorrow. Now, the phone remained mute. Her mother was gone, and this new, profound emptiness was a monument to Sara’s own failure.

She moved through the small rooms like a sleepwalker, haunted by two distinct sets of memories that clashed and warred for dominance in her mind. She would reach for the kettle to make tea, her muscle memory anticipating the floral scent of the Earl Grey her mother loved, only to be sucker-punched by a phantom memory—sharp and intrusive as a shard of glass—of a grim-faced detective asking her to identify her mother's favorite tea for his report. She’d see a flash of her father laughing in the sunlit garden, and the image would instantly curdle, overlaid with the memory of the static creature and the impossible spray of red.

Her own body was a foreign country, a testament to a history she hadn’t lived but had somehow earned. In the harsh light of the bathroom mirror, the scars were undeniable. Three pale, dead-white lines, arcing across her stomach like claw marks from a nightmare. The skin was numb, alien. Touching them sent no signal to her brain, but the ghost of the pain still lingered, a cold echo deep in her bones. They were the brand of her transgression, the physical receipt for her deal with the devil. Every time she caught sight of them, the low, buzzing crackle of the Chronovore would echo in her ears, a sound that lived in her head now.

For three days, she tried to resist. She tried to accept this crueler timeline as a punishment she deserved. She threw the metallic pebble into a drawer, buried beneath old socks and forgotten trinkets, determined to leave it there. She would live with what she had done. She would carry the weight of both her parents’ deaths. It was her penance.

But the phantom memories were relentless. They were more potent than the ones she had actually lived, their edges sharper, their pain more acute. The memory of her mother in the weeks after her father's new, horrific death was the worst. She remembered her mother’s face, not just sad, but hollowed out, her eyes vacant and staring. She remembered the way she’d stopped eating, the way her already-thin frame seemed to shrink day by day. She remembered the smell of stale air and despair in her parents’ house, a place that had once been filled with warmth and laughter.

These memories weren't hers, but they felt true. They felt earned. And they were unbearable.

The fourth night, she woke up from a nightmare, drenched in sweat, her heart battering against her ribs. In the dream, she was standing in her mother’s bedroom in this new timeline. The room was cold, sterile. A note was on the bedside table, but the words were blurred, written in a language of pure, liquid grief she couldn't decipher. The dream-logic of it was suffocating. Her mother hadn't just died; she had despaired. She had given up. And it was all Sara’s fault.

She stumbled out of bed, her legs weak. The apartment was dark, but her eyes were drawn to the chest of drawers. It was as if the pebble inside was emitting a faint, dark light, a gravity that pulled her towards it. The thing wasn't just an object. It was a promise. A temptation. A constant, mocking whisper in the suffocating silence.

Her hands trembled as she opened the drawer, the scrape of wood on wood sounding unnaturally loud in the quiet room. There it sat, nestled in a tangle of grey wool socks. The devil on the nightstand, moved from its prison. It seemed to drink the weak moonlight filtering through the window, its surface a perfect, lightless void. It was cold to the touch, heavy with the weight of possibility and damnation.

She picked it up.

The arguments in her head were a frantic, terrified screaming match.

It’s a trap, one voice shrieked. Milton is a monster. He knew this would happen. He wanted it to happen. That static thing, the auditor, it will come again. It will be worse this time.

But another voice, a deeper, more insidious one fueled by guilt and a crushing sense of duty, whispered back.

Your mother is dead because of you. You broke the world, and she paid the price. You can’t live in this reality. You can’t leave her in that cold, empty house to wither away in grief. This isn't about bringing Dad back anymore. This isn't about easing your own pain. This is about saving her.

The thought solidified, hardening from a desperate wish into a concrete plan. It wasn't about erasing her grief anymore. It was about righting a wrong. She wouldn't go back to the barbecue. She wouldn’t try to save her father again; that event was a nexus of horror, a magnet for the creature. No, this time, she would go somewhere else. Somewhere safe. A few weeks after his death, in the original timeline. She would go to her mother. She would pull her from the despair that, in this new world, had consumed her. She would be the anchor her mother needed, and she would drag her back to the surface, whatever it took.

It was a reckless, insane plan, born of trauma and a complete misunderstanding of the forces she was meddling with. She knew it was a fool's errand. She knew the price of the ticket. But the memory of her mother’s empty eyes was a debt she had to try and repay. The terror of the Chronovore was immense, but the guilt of her mother's suicide was heavier.

Torn between the terror of the past and the agony of the present, she made her choice. She would go back one last time. Not for herself. Not for her father. But to save her mother from the fate he—from the fate she—had orchestrated.

Her fingers tightened around the cold, smooth metal. The world outside her window, with its silent streets and lonely streetlamps, felt thin and unreal. The only real things in the universe were her crushing guilt and the impossible, terrible weight in her hand. She took a deep breath, the air tasting of dust and regret, and prepared to break the world again.