Chapter 5: The Echo

Chapter 5: The Echo

The skull slipped from Jamie’s numb fingers, landing with a soft, sickening plop back into the mire. The stench of the pit was suffocating, a thick perfume of rot and time. He was kneeling in a grave, his hands slick with a slurry of mud and the dissolved remains of countless others who had taken this road. The brutal, savage victory he had just won felt hollow, a pointless burst of violence in a long-running play of slaughter. The monster wasn't an anomaly; it was the groundskeeper of this cemetery.

A new kind of terror, colder and deeper than the heat of the fight, seized him. He had to get out. He couldn't die here, not in this forgotten tomb with the nameless dead.

He scrambled, his feet finding no purchase in the sucking mud. Panic gave him a surge of strength. He clawed at the earthen wall of the pit, his fingers digging into the damp soil, searching for a handhold. A thick, gnarled root, exposed and ancient, offered a chance. He grabbed it, the rough bark digging into his palms, and hauled. His body, heavy with mud and exhaustion, scraped against the wall. The wound on his shoulder, the one left by the creature’s claw, screamed in protest, sending a bolt of fire down his arm. He ignored it, grit his teeth, and pulled harder.

His head cleared the lip of the pit. He flopped onto the solid ground, a beached fish gasping for air, his body shaking uncontrollably. He lay there for a long moment, the cool night air a balm on his feverish skin, his cheek pressed against the gravel of the road. He was out. He was alive.

Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself to his feet. His gaze was drawn irresistibly back to the scene in the headlights. The creature’s corpse was still there, a broken, pale heap of wrongness. His Corolla was still idling, one headlight flickering slightly, a faithful, mundane witness to an impossible horror. For a fleeting second, a sliver of hope cut through the dread. It was over. The monster was dead. He could get in his car, somehow maneuver it around the fallen oak, and get to Sydney. He could leave this nightmare behind.

He took a step towards the car, his legs unsteady.

And then he heard it.

It started not as a sound, but as a deep, resonant vibration that trembled up through the soles of his sneakers. His blood turned to ice. He knew that vibration. A horrifying sense of déjà vu washed over him. Then came the noise—a colossal, splintering CRACK that seemed to rip the fabric of the night in two.

It was the same sound. Exactly the same.

Before his mind could even begin to process the impossibility, the cataclysmic BOOM shook the ground again. The sound wasn't behind him, where the first oak lay. It was farther down the road, ahead of him, deeper in the forest.

Jamie stood frozen, his mind refusing to connect the dots. It was another tree. It had to be. A coincidence. The woods were old, the trees unstable. But the cut… the deliberate, clean cut… his rationalizations crumbled into dust. This wasn’t a coincidence.

A new set of headlights pierced the darkness, coming from the direction of the fallen tree. They were faint at first, filtered through the dense weave of the forest, but they were approaching. Who else would be insane enough to be on this road? Had someone followed him?

Driven by a terrible, dawning premonition, Jamie stumbled off the road, melting into the shadows of the trees. He moved parallel to the road, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. He crouched behind the thick trunk of a pine, peering through the branches.

A car came into view, its engine sputtering with a familiar, weary groan. It slowed to a stop before the newly fallen oak.

It was a Toyota Corolla. His Toyota Corolla.

The same faded blue paint, the same small dent in the passenger-side fender from a runaway shopping cart years ago. The same flickering headlight. Jamie’s breath caught in his throat. It couldn't be. His car was right there, fifty feet behind him, its engine still running, its lights illuminating the monster he had just killed. This was impossible. A trick of the light. A hallucination brought on by shock and trauma.

Then the driver's side door creaked open, and a figure stepped out.

The man wore a simple blue t-shirt, smeared with the day's grime. His shoulders had a familiar, weary slump. He took a few steps into the headlight beams, and Jamie saw his face, etched with shock and confusion. It was his own face. Haggard, thirty-eight, and desperate.

The final, soul-shattering detail clicked into place. Jammed onto the man's head, a beacon of impossible reality in the glare of the headlights, was a red and white baseball cap. Jason's cap.

Jamie clamped a hand over his own mouth to stifle the scream that was clawing its way up his throat. He was watching himself. He was watching the moment it had all begun, not twenty minutes ago.

The other Jamie—the first Jamie—stood there, staring at the clean cut on the massive oak trunk. His posture was rigid with dawning fear. He saw the flicker of movement at the edge of the woods, the same phantom shape that had lured him in. Jamie watched, a silent, horrified spectator, as his double’s face twisted with a rage born of grief.

"Hey!" the doppelgänger shouted, his voice raw and ragged, an exact echo of the cry Jamie had loosed himself. "I see you! Who the hell are you?"

No, Jamie thought, a silent plea. Don’t. Don’t do it. Get in the car. Just turn around.

But he knew it was useless. He knew what came next.

As if pulled by an invisible string, his double lunged off the road, past the splintered stump, and plunged into the blind, suffocating darkness of the forest. He was gone. Chasing a phantom into a trap.

Jamie stayed hidden behind the tree, his body trembling so violently he thought his bones might shake apart. He was trapped outside of his own horror story, forced to watch it begin again. The oppressive silence of the woods returned, waiting. He knew what was happening in that darkness. The disorientation. The fear. And he knew what was waiting for his other self back on the road. The pale, tall thing with the screaming mouth and the glowing eyes was out there, circling around, preparing for its ambush. The brutal fight, the makeshift club, the feel of bone and flesh giving way under his hands—it was all about to happen again.

And the pit. Dear God, the pit filled with bones was still there, waiting to be rediscovered.

The truth crashed down on him with the weight of a fallen oak. This wasn't a road. It was a loop. A perfectly preserved, endlessly repeating nightmare. He hadn't survived. He had just finished his turn. The monster he killed wasn't the true threat. The true monster was the forest itself, this cursed stretch of Sparrow Road that fed on his grief and terror, replaying it for its own amusement.

He was not the survivor. He was the echo.