Chapter 4 - THE INVITATIONThe police car carrying Emily peeled out of our driveway, its red taillights cutting a bloody streak through the misty midnight air.
Inside the house, chaos reigned. Social services had been called. Lily was wrapped in a thermal blanket, clutching a stuffed animal, being gently questioned by a female child-welfare officer. Meanwhile, the little girl from the wall—whose medical chart identified her temporarily as "Jane Doe," though I now knew her real name was Chloe, my forgotten flesh and blood—was being rushed to the county hospital in an ambulance.
I refused to go in the ambulance with her. Not because I didn't care—my heart was shattered into a million jagged pieces for my little girl—but because Emily’s final words echoed in my skull like a death knell.
“Mara isn't a ghost, Ryan. Mara is waiting for you there right now.”
I stood alone in the center of our expensive, hollow living room. The drywall hole was still gaping open, revealing the dark, suffocating space where my daughter had lived for years.
My phone buzzed violently in my pocket.
I pulled it out with shaking fingers. It was an incoming text message from an unknown number.
I swiped and opened it.
Attached was a photograph, taken timestamped just two minutes ago. It showed the inside of a rustic, decaying wooden cabin—Claire’s old property out by Blackwood Lake, thirty miles north of the city.
In the center of the cabin's dusty living room stood a crib.
Above the crib, scrawled in what looked unmistakably like fresh dark red paint across the peeling wallpaper, were three words:
SHE IS COMING BACK.
And beneath the photo, a text message read:
“You thought Emily was the only one who knew about the triplets, Ryan? Check the basement crawlspace of Claire's cabin. You left a third one behind.”
Triplets?
My breath caught in my throat. My knees buckled slightly, and I had to grab the back of the sofa to keep from collapsing.
Triplets. Not twins. Three of them.
Lily. Chloe. And a third child.
Without thinking, without waiting for Detective Vance to finish his initial sweep of our house, I bolted out the front door, jumped into my SUV, and slammed my foot hard on the accelerator. The tires squealed on the asphalt as I tore down the suburban street, heading straight into the dark, winding highway toward Blackwood Lake.
The night was pitch black, a thick, suffocating fog rolling in off the lake, swallowing the road ahead. My speedometer climbed—70, 80, 90 miles per hour.
My mind was a hurricane of terrifying questions.
Who was Mara? Why had Claire’s journal mentioned only Emily’s betrayal, while this mysterious text message claimed there was a third child? And what was waiting for me at that rotting cabin in the woods?
May you like
As I crested the final hill before the Blackwood trail, my headlights swept across a sight that made my blood run instantly cold.
Parked blocking the narrow dirt road was an empty, idling black sedan with its hazard lights flashing. And standing right in the middle of the road, staring directly into my blinding high beams, was a young girl wearing a pale yellow dress, holding a butcher knife dripping with fresh, dark liquid.
Related Stories
