Chapter 7: A Story from Mother

Chapter 7: A Story from Mother

The phone was cold and heavy in Alex’s hand, a stark contrast to the burning rage that had propelled her to dial. The grief for Max was a raw, open wound, but beneath it, a new and terrible clarity was taking hold. She listened to the rings, each one a hammer blow of impatience. When her mother finally answered, her voice was laced with a weary apprehension, as if she knew exactly why Alex was calling.

“Alexandra?”

“It killed him,” Alex said, her voice flat, devoid of tears. The emotion was too deep for that now. “It killed my cat. I found his favorite toy under the bed. It was shredded, Mom. Torn to pieces. You knew. You knew something like this could happen, and you didn't tell me.”

The accusation hung in the air between them, heavy and suffocating. On the other end of the line, there was no denial, no shocked gasp. There was only a long, shuddering sigh, the sound of a woman surrendering a secret she had carried for a lifetime.

“Yes,” Elara said, her voice barely a whisper. “I knew it was a possibility. I was hoping… I was hoping it would be satisfied with just your fear.”

“Satisfied?” Alex’s laugh was a harsh, ugly sound. “This isn’t some stray dog, Mom. What is it? You called it a ‘hungry thought.’ You talked about rules. You need to tell me everything. Now. No more riddles.”

The silence stretched. Alex could picture her mother in her cluttered, herb-scented house, her face etched with a sadness that went bone-deep. When Elara spoke again, her voice was distant, as if she were narrating a half-forgotten film.

“I had a sister,” she began. “Your Aunt Caroline. You never met her. She was older than me by two years. When I was ten, she was twelve, and she was the loneliest girl in the world.”

Alex leaned against the kitchen counter, the cold stone seeping into her skin. A sister? Her mother had never once mentioned a sister.

“Our house was old,” Elara continued, her voice gaining a storyteller’s rhythm, “full of drafts and strange noises. Caroline spent all her time in her room. And one day, she told me she’d made a friend. A new friend who lived in the corner, by the wardrobe. She called him ‘Mr. Shadow.’”

A chill, entirely separate from the one emanating from the countertop, traced its way down Alex’s spine.

“At first, it was harmless. She’d talk to him, leave out a cookie for him. It was the kind of thing lonely children do. My parents thought it was a phase. But then… things started to happen. Small things. A book she was reading would appear on the other side of the room. A window would be open when we knew we’d locked it. Caroline would just smile and say, ‘Mr. Shadow is playing.’”

The parallels were so sharp they cut. The misplaced keys, the open bathroom door. It wasn’t random. It was a pattern.

“But the games got meaner,” Elara’s voice grew tighter, strained. “She started having nightmares. She’d wake up with scratches on her arms. She’d tell our parents that Mr. Shadow was angry, that he didn’t want her to play with anyone else. They thought she was doing it to herself for attention. They didn’t believe her. But I did. Because one night… I saw him.”

Alex held her breath.

“I woke up thirsty and went to the kitchen. Her bedroom door was ajar. I peeked in. She was sitting up in bed, whispering into the corner. And in the corner… Alexandra, there was a patch of darkness that was darker than the rest of the room. It was long and thin, like a man’s shadow, but there was no man there to cast it. And it was moving. It bent and swayed like it was listening to her. I never felt cold like that in my life.”

Elara paused, and Alex heard her take a shaky breath. “That was the last week she was home. She had a breakdown. Screaming that he wouldn’t leave her alone, that he was trying to get inside her head. They sent her to a hospital. A special one, for children. She never came home. She’s still there. An old woman in a white room who still sometimes whispers to the corners.”

The story landed on Alex with the force of a physical blow. This wasn’t just a ghost story her mother had read in a book; it was a family tragedy. A wound that had never healed, explaining Elara’s deep, instinctual terror, her cryptic caution. Knowledge wasn’t just power; it was a poison that had destroyed her sister’s mind.

“My mother—your grandmother—she was from the old country,” Elara said, her voice ragged with the effort of the telling. “It took years for her to explain it to me. They aren’t ghosts of the dead. They’re thought-forms. Tulpas. Hungry Thoughts. Echoes that you give life to with your own mind. They have no shape, no personality of their own. They can only become what you make them.”

She paused, letting the weight of the words sink in. “And that, Alexandra, is Rule Number Two: They mirror what you give them. Give it fear, it becomes a thing to be feared. Give it sadness, and it becomes a phantom of your grief.”

Elara’s voice dropped to a pained, pointed question. “Caroline gave her loneliness a shape, and it became a jealous, possessive monster that wanted her all to itself. You, Alexandra… standing in your living room, laughing with your friends… what did you give it?”

The memory of the party, once a hazy, drunken blur, snapped into crystalline focus. The wine in her hand. Liam’s stupid, goading dare. The laughter. She had stood in the center of the room, a performer on a stage, and she had projected her voice into the darkness of her bedroom.

We see you. You can stop now.

It wasn’t a terrified plea. It was a taunt. A challenge. She hadn't been scared; she had been amused, flippant. She had treated the entire thing as a performance, a joke.

A game.

The realization was a punch to the gut. The misplaced keys, the open door, the reflection in the screen… they weren't just random acts of terror. They were moves. Playful, malicious moves in the game she had started. The scuttling under the bed wasn’t the slow approach of a monster; it was a child playing an obscene version of hide-and-seek. The shredded cat toy wasn’t just a threat; it was the cruel, final move of a cheater, a spoiled child breaking a toy it couldn't have.

She hadn’t just invited a monster into her home. She had written its script. With her careless words and drunken laughter, she had shaped a formless, hungry thing into a malicious, cruel trickster. It wasn’t just haunting her; it was playing with her, mirroring the exact energy she had first thrown at it.

The fear was still there, a cold, hard knot in her stomach. But now, it was joined by something else. A flicker of cold, analytical understanding. This thing wasn’t an all-powerful demon. It was a mirror. A parasite with a rulebook. And for the first time since that night, she felt a sliver of power return to her.

Her goal was no longer to just survive. It was to outwit.

“Okay, Mom,” Alex said, her voice steady and eerily calm. “Okay. I understand.”

She ended the call, the silence of the apartment flooding back in. But it was different now. It was no longer the silence of an empty cage. She looked around the room—at the sofa, the kitchen, the dark staircase—and saw it not as a hunting ground, but as a game board.

The entity had been playing its game. Now, it was her turn to change the rules.