Chapter 5: A Hunger for Fear

Chapter 5: A Hunger for Fear

Time stretched into a thin, agonizing wire. Every second that passed without a reply from Nyx_Walker felt like a year. Leo sat frozen at his desk, pretending to read an article on server maintenance while his entire consciousness was fixed on the private message window. Behind him, the silence from the couch was somehow heavier and more menacing than any noise.

He risked a glance over his shoulder. The thing wearing Pam’s body had picked up a framed photo from his end table. It was a picture of him and the real Pam, taken last summer at the beach. She was laughing, her head thrown back, squinting in the sun. He was grinning awkwardly, his arm slung around her shoulder. The entity stared at the photo, its head tilted. Then, it slowly, deliberately, tried to replicate the laugh from the picture.

No sound came out. Its mouth opened, its lips pulled back from its teeth in a grotesque imitation of joy, but the only noise was a faint, dry clicking in its throat. It was an anatomical study of an emotion it could not comprehend. Seeing the shell of his best friend trying to mimic her own happiness was a new, exquisite form of torture. It lowered the photo, placing it back on the table with a soft, precise click, and went back to being perfectly still.

Ping.

The notification sound was so sudden and sharp it felt like an electric shock. Leo’s head snapped back to the monitor. A small banner had appeared at the bottom of the screen.

You have 1 new message from Nyx_Walker.

His breath caught in his lungs. He fumbled the mouse, his hand shaking so violently the cursor danced across the screen. He clicked, the page refreshed, and her words appeared, stark and black against the white background.

From: Nyx_Walker Subject: Re: The Lowell Mill (Crimson Lofts)

The second stage is integration. It’s learning you through her. It’s studying how to be a person. You need to be very careful. My name is Elara. We should talk somewhere more secure. Here is my encrypted chat handle. Add me. Now.

His fingers flew, clumsy but fast. He downloaded the secure chat client she’d linked, installed it, and sent a contact request. Seconds later, she accepted. A new chat window opened.

Elara (Nyx_Walker): Good. First, tell me everything. From the moment you heard the voice. Don’t leave anything out.

Leo typed, his words a torrent of fear and confusion. He told her about the whisper, the shadow in the corner, the sickening crack of Pam’s body contorting, the white eyes. He described the drive home, the tuneless humming, the flash of the shadow in the passenger-side mirror. He told her about its unnerving tidiness, its rejection of their favorite music, its horrifying attempt to mimic the laugh in the photograph.

He typed until his fingers ached, pouring all the terror of the last twenty-four hours into the small chat window. When he was done, he slumped back, exhausted. He waited. The three dots indicating she was typing appeared and disappeared several times before her message finally came through.

Elara (Nyx_Walker): I was afraid of this. What you’re dealing with isn’t a ghost. A ghost is an imprint, a memory. This is active. It's predatory. I call them Echoes.

LeoVance: An echo of what?

Elara (Nyx_Walker): An event. An echo of a moment of extreme, violent tragedy. Think of it like a psychic scar left on a location. The foreman’s office you read about? Something terrible happened there. So terrible it gouged itself into reality. The Echo is that gouge, endlessly replaying the emotions of its birth.

LeoVance: The cry for help…

Elara (Nyx_Walker): Is the hook. The first part of the original event, replayed over and over. It’s a lure. But it doesn’t want to kill you, not in the way you think. It doesn’t want your life or your soul. It wants what it was born from.

LeoVance: What does it want?

Elara (Nyx_Walker): Fear. Despair. Helplessness. The same emotions that saturated that room when the original tragedy happened. It feeds on them. It replays the lure, and when someone responds, it creates a new scenario to generate the emotions it needs to sustain itself. It’s a hunger for fear. By taking your friend, it has created the perfect, mobile feeding ground. Your terror is its food.

The words hit Leo with the force of a physical impact. He looked at the creature on his couch, its placid expression, its white eyes. It wasn’t just possessing her. It was using her as a tool to farm his emotions. Every horrified glance, every moment of gut-wrenching despair—he was feeding it.

Suddenly, a shudder wracked Pam’s body.

It was a small tremor at first, a faint trembling in her hands. Leo’s eyes widened. He sat up straighter, his conversation with Elara forgotten. The creature on the couch frowned, a flicker of something unknown crossing its features. It looked down at its own hands as if they were foreign objects.

The shudder intensified, running up its arms and into its shoulders. Its head began to twitch, small, jerky movements. The placid mask was cracking.

“L-Leo?”

The voice was thin, reedy, and full of a familiar crackle he hadn’t heard since before the concert. It was Pam’s voice. Her real voice.

His heart leaped into his throat. “Pam? Pam, are you there?”

The white eyes, which had been flat and opaque, seemed to gain a horrifying depth. It was like looking through a frosted window and seeing a prisoner battering it from the other side. A tear, thick and real, spilled from one of those white eyes and traced a path down her cheek.

“Leo, it hurts,” she whimpered, her real voice raw with agony. Her hands clenched into fists, the knuckles white. “It’s so c-cold. Inside me. Make it stop. Please… help me.”

Help me. The same words as the lure. But this time, it was her. It was his Pam, trapped inside her own body with that… thing.

Leo shoved his chair back, half-rising to his feet. Every instinct screamed at him to run to her, to hold her, to comfort her, to tell her he would save her.

But Elara’s words echoed in his mind, a cold, brutal warning: It feeds on your fear. Your despair.

His desperation to comfort her warred with the paralyzing fear that his very reaction would strengthen the parasite torturing her. He was frozen in a state of agonizing indecision, his heart breaking with every sob that tore from her throat.

“Get it out!” she shrieked, her body convulsing on the couch. “Get it out of me, Leo! Please!”

His own tears were blurring his vision. He couldn't bear it. He took a half-step towards her, his hand outstretched. “Pam, I—”

And then, it stopped.

As suddenly as it had begun, the shaking ceased. The raw agony on her face smoothed out, like a ripple disappearing from the surface of a still, deep pond. The tension in her body dissolved, and she relaxed back into her unnervingly perfect posture.

She slowly raised a hand and wiped the tear from her cheek with a delicate finger. She looked at the moisture on her fingertip with detached curiosity. Then, her white eyes lifted to meet Leo’s.

The empty, placid smile returned. But this time, it was different. It was wider. It held a hint of something new. Satisfaction.

In a voice that was a chilling, perfect mimicry of Pam’s earlier terrified whisper, it spoke, its tone light and mocking.

“Please… help me.”

It had fed. Leo stared, his hand still outstretched, his entire body trembling. He hadn't just been watching her pain. He had been its source. And the monster had enjoyed every second of it.