Chapter 7: Return to Crimson Lofts

Chapter 7: Return to Crimson Lofts

The woman who called herself Elara looked nothing like Leo had imagined. He’d pictured a recluse, pale from late nights spent bathed in monitor glow. Instead, the person who met him in the desolate parking lot of a closed-down diner was sharp, alert, and radiated a tense, wiry energy. She was maybe a few years older than him, with dark hair pulled back in a severe ponytail and eyes that missed nothing. She wore practical boots, cargo pants, and a faded jacket, and carried a heavy-looking duffel bag that she swung into the back of Leo’s car without ceremony.

“She’s in the car?” Elara asked, her voice the same clipped, no-nonsense tone from the chat. She didn’t look at the passenger seat, but her focus was entirely on it.

Leo nodded, his throat tight. “It… she… hasn’t moved since I told her we were going out.”

The entity had watched him grab his keys, its white eyes following his every move. When he’d said, “We have to go back, Pam,” it had simply stood, walked to the door, and waited. The compliance was more terrifying than any resistance.

“Good. Rule number one,” Elara said, turning to face him fully. Her gaze was intense, analytical. “From this moment on, that is not Pam. It’s a vessel. It’s a thing. You call it ‘Pam,’ you think of it as ‘Pam,’ and you give it power over you. Understand?”

Leo swallowed hard. “I’ll try.”

“Don’t try. Do it,” she countered, her voice leaving no room for argument. “Rule number two: No matter what happens in that building—what you see, what you hear, what it does—you show nothing. Stone face. It’s trying to get a rise out of you. Don’t give it the satisfaction.”

The drive back to the Crimson Lofts was a masterclass in suffocating tension. The entity sat in the back seat at Elara’s direction, a silent figure in Leo’s rearview mirror. He could see its white eyes staring straight ahead, unblinking. After a few miles, it began to hum. That same eerie, tuneless melody from before. The sound filled the small space in the car, a low thrum of wrongness that made the hairs on Leo’s arms stand on end. Elara didn’t flinch, her eyes fixed on the road ahead as if she didn’t hear a thing.

When they pulled into the mostly-empty parking lot of the Crimson Lofts, the building loomed over them, its brick façade looking less like ‘historic character’ and more like a scab on the face of the city. The sun was beginning to set, casting long, skeletal shadows that clawed their way across the asphalt.

“Okay,” Elara said, killing the engine. “Showtime.”

She got out and opened the back door. “We’re here,” she said to the entity, her voice perfectly level, as if speaking to a normal person.

The humming stopped. The thing in the back seat turned its head slowly, fixing its white eyes on Elara. It didn’t move. It just stared, a silent, profound act of defiance. For a heart-stopping moment, Leo was sure it would refuse, that the plan would end right here.

“The air in here is getting stale,” Elara said calmly, holding her ground. “Let’s go.”

With a movement that was too smooth to be human, the entity unfolded itself from the car and stood on the asphalt. It looked up at the third-floor window of what had been their room, its head tilted in an expression of something that might have been nostalgia, if it were capable of such a thing.

Elara opened her duffel bag. Inside, Leo saw coils of rope, heavy flashlights, and two canisters that looked like salt shakers from a giant’s kitchen. She handed one to Leo. “Iron filings,” she explained quietly. “Pure iron. Creates a barrier most spectral entities can’t or won’t cross. It’s not a wall, but it’s a deterrent. If we get separated, make a circle.”

Armed with a desperate plan and a can of metal shavings, Leo followed Elara towards the front entrance. The entity trailed a few feet behind them, its footsteps making no sound on the gravel.

The lobby was as grim and silent as they’d left it. The air was cold, stagnant. As the heavy front door clicked shut behind them, plunging them into the building’s gloom, the first sound started.

Help…

It was a whisper, faint and distant, seeming to come from the floors above. Leo froze, his blood turning to ice. Elara grabbed his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. “Rule two,” she hissed. He nodded, forcing his muscles to unclench.

They started up the stairs, their footsteps echoing in the stairwell. As they reached the second-floor landing, the voice came again, closer this time, seeming to emanate from the hallway just ahead.

Help… me…

Then another voice joined it, from behind them, down the stairs. And another, from the floor above. They were all slightly different—one sounded like a young woman, another like an older man, another like a child. The chorus of the lost. The entity’s past victims, their final moments of terror now part of its predatory song.

By the time they reached the third floor, the hallway was a cacophony of phantom suffering. Cries for help echoed from every direction, overlapping, distorting, whispering from behind closed doors and screaming from the far end of the hall. The assault was disorienting, a psychic barrage designed to shred their nerves and scatter their focus.

Leo glanced at the thing that was once Pam. It had stopped walking and was standing in the middle of the hall, its head turning slowly, listening to the chorus. A faint, terrible smile touched its lips. It was home.

“Don’t listen,” Elara shouted over the noise, her voice tight. “It’s a trick. It’s trying to separate us. Focus on the door. Room 3B. That’s our anchor.”

Leo tore his eyes away from the entity and stared down the long, dim hallway. The peeling wallpaper seemed to writhe in the flickering light of the single exposed bulb overhead. Room 3B was at the very end. He took a step, then another, his heart hammering against his ribs.

Then the hallway changed.

It happened in the space of a blink. One moment, the door to Room 3B was thirty feet away. The next, it was a hundred. The hallway stretched, elongating like a nightmare, the peeling patterns on the wallpaper smearing into long, nauseating streaks. The cries for help intensified, swirling around them in a vortex of sound.

“It’s fighting us!” Leo yelled, stumbling to a halt. The floor felt like it was tilting beneath his feet.

“It’s an illusion!” Elara yelled back, her face pale but set with grim determination. “It’s bending our perception! It’s not real!”

But it felt real. The sheer wrongness of the space was pressing in on him, making his head spin. He saw the entity take a step away from them, drawn towards a whisper that only it could understand, threatening to peel off into the illusion and be lost.

Acting on pure instinct, Leo lunged. He grabbed its arm. The skin was cold, unnaturally smooth, like polished stone. He gritted his teeth, ignoring the revulsion, and pulled. “No. You’re coming with us.”

He fixed his eyes on the distant, shrinking rectangle of the door to Room 3B and started walking, dragging the unresisting but heavy vessel behind him. He ignored the screaming voices, the shifting walls, the nauseating lurch of the floor. He focused on the tarnished brass ‘3’ and ‘B’ on the door, making them his entire world.

With every step, the illusion fought him, but his refusal to acknowledge it seemed to rob it of its power. The hallway slowly, grudgingly, began to contract, snapping back to its normal proportions. The cacophony of voices faded, coalescing into one final, desperate whisper that seemed to come from the door itself.

They were there. Standing in the silent, oppressive hallway, directly in front of Room 3B. The air was thick with a palpable sense of dread.

Before Elara or Leo could move, the entity pulled its arm from Leo’s grasp. It stepped forward and placed its hand flat against the door, the pale flesh a stark contrast to the peeling, grimy paint. It was a gesture of quiet, absolute ownership. The monster was at its front door, and it had brought them right to it.