PART 2

The morning sun always feels like a liar when you’re grieving.

When the pale Oregon daylight finally broke through the living room blinds, it hit the dusty hardwood floors, and for a fleeting, desperate second, everything was perfectly normal. I was still sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, my knees pulled to my chest, a cold cup of coffee shaking in my hands.

Dakota was asleep on the rug.

He wasn’t sitting upright anymore. He was curled into a ball, his nose tucked under his bushy tail, snoring softly. His paws twitched like he was chasing rabbits in his dreams. He was just a dog. A tired, dirty dog who had gotten lost in the woods and found his way home.

You’re losing your mind, Sarah, I whispered to myself, rubbing my eyes until colors burst behind my eyelids. Mark died. You haven’t slept in four days. You’re hallucinating. The dog is fine.

I clung to that false safety like a life raft. I needed it to be true. I needed my brain to just be broken, because the alternative—that what I saw at 3:00 AM was real—was something my mind simply couldn’t process without shattering.

I walked into the kitchen, the linoleum cold against my bare feet, and popped two Eggo waffles into the toaster for Chloe. When I turned around, Dakota was standing by his metal water bowl, lapping it up noisily. Water dripped from his jowls. He looked at me, gave a soft, pathetic whine, and thumped his tail twice against the cabinets.

I fell to my knees and threw my arms around his thick neck, sobbing into his fur. He smelled like wet dog and old leaves, but the sickly sweet copper scent from the night before was gone. He licked the salt off my cheek. He was my dog. He was Mark’s dog. Everything was going to be okay.

When Chloe came downstairs, she didn’t say a word. She hadn’t said much since her father’s funeral. She just grabbed her waffles, gave Dakota a mindless pat on the head, and retreated to her room to do homework. The house settled into that heavy, suffocating suburban quiet that only exists in homes where someone recently died.

I spent the afternoon doing laundry, desperate for routine. The rhythmic tumbling of the dryer was a comfort. I managed to eat half a sandwich. I even laughed at a stupid joke on a daytime talk show.

Then, at 4:30 PM, the house went completely silent.

The dryer had stopped. The refrigerator compressor clicked off. The only sound left was a low, staticky hiss coming from the living room.

My blood instantly turned to ice water.

I dropped the folded towels basket. I crept down the hallway, the floorboards groaning under my weight. The living room was bathed in the harsh, flickering grey light of the old CRT television. I hadn’t turned it on. The remote was still sitting perfectly parallel to the coasters on the coffee table.

Sitting on the floor, directly in front of the blinding static, was Chloe. She was sitting cross-legged, perfectly still.

Right beside her, shoulder-to-shoulder, was Dakota.

He was sitting upright on his hind legs again. His back was entirely straight, his front paws resting on his thighs. From behind, they looked like two people watching a movie.

I couldn’t breathe. My lungs forgot how to expand.

“Chloe?” I choked out, my voice trembling so violently it barely made a sound.

Neither of them moved. The static hissed, loud and aggressive, like a swarm of angry locusts trapped behind the thick glass of the screen.

“Chloe, honey, turn the TV off,” I said, taking a slow step forward.

My fourteen-year-old daughter slowly turned her head. Her face was entirely blank. Her eyes were glazed over, reflecting the chaotic snow of the television screen. She didn’t look at me. She looked through me.

“He says it’s dark in the box, Mom,” Chloe whispered. Her voice lacked any inflection. It was flat, mechanical. “Dad says he’s cold.”

A wave of pure, paralyzing nausea hit me.

“Chloe, stop it!” I yelled, lunging forward and grabbing her by the shoulders. I yanked her away from the TV, pulling her into my chest. Dakota didn’t flinch. He remained sitting upright like a grown man, staring dead into the static.

Chloe blinked, and suddenly the glaze in her eyes vanished. She looked around, confused, like she had just woken up from a deep sleep.

“Mom? What are you doing? You’re hurting my arm,” she complained, pulling away from me.

“What did you just say?” I demanded, tears streaming down my face. “What did you just say about your father?”

Chloe frowned, deeply annoyed. “Nothing? I didn’t say anything. I was just petting Dakota. Why are you acting so crazy?”

She shoved past me and stomped up the stairs, slamming her bedroom door.

I stood alone in the living room. I reached over with trembling fingers and yanked the television’s power cord straight out of the wall socket. The screen went black with a sharp pop.

Dakota slowly dropped down onto all fours. He didn’t look at me. He just walked out of the room, his nails clicking methodically against the hardwood, and went to his dog bed in the corner of the kitchen.

I couldn’t stay in that room anymore. I needed to do something. I needed to clean. I marched into the kitchen, grabbed the thick, fleece-lined dog bed, intending to throw it in the washing machine to get the smell of the woods out of it.

As I lifted the bed, it felt unnaturally heavy on one side.

There was a tear in the fabric near the zipper. I shoved my hand inside the thick cotton stuffing, searching for whatever Dakota had dragged in from the yard. A bone, a rock, a dead bird.

My fingers brushed against something hard and metallic. It was caked in damp, freezing cold earth.

I pulled it out.

The breath violently left my body. I collapsed back against the kitchen island, clutching my chest as the world began to spin.

In my palm, smeared with heavy red Oregon clay, was a gold Seiko watch.

The glass face was completely shattered. The leather band was rotting and smelled of pungent, decayed soil. The metal was tarnished and rusted, but I recognized the engraving on the back through the dirt: To Mark. Forever. 1998.

It was my husband’s watch.

The exact watch the funeral director had clasped around Mark’s pale, embalmed wrist right before they closed the casket. Six months ago. Six feet under the frozen ground in Saint Jude’s Cemetery, twelve miles away.

I violently threw up in the kitchen sink.

Whatever had come out of the woods… it hadn’t just been wandering. It had been digging.

By 8:00 PM, paranoia had entirely consumed me.

I locked every door. I checked every window deadbolt twice. I forced Chloe to eat dinner in her room and told her to lock her door from the inside. She yelled at me, calling me insane, but the terror in my eyes must have scared her enough to comply. I heard the lock click.

I refused to be in the same room as the dog. I couldn’t look at him. Every time I glanced at the kitchen, he was just standing there in the shadows, staring at the wall. Not sleeping. Not panting. Just standing rigidly still.

I tore through the plastic storage bins in the garage until I found it: an old Motorola baby monitor with a night-vision camera. I hadn’t used it in a decade.

My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the camera twice while setting it up on the kitchen counter. I angled the lens so it had a full, wide view of the living room, specifically the couch and the unplugged television.

I took the receiver monitor, locked myself in my master bedroom, and shoved a heavy oak dresser in front of the door.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark, clutching Mark’s muddy watch in one hand and the baby monitor in the other. The tiny, backlit screen glowed with a grainy, black-and-white feed of my empty living room.

The house was dead silent. The rain had started outside, a heavy, freezing Oregon downpour drumming against the roof.

11:00 PM. Nothing. 1:00 AM. Nothing. 2:30 AM. My eyes were burning, heavy with the weight of sleep deprivation.

Then, at exactly 3:11 AM, the small screen flickered.

A jagged line of static rolled down the monitor.

I sat up straight, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

On the grainy black-and-white screen, the living room was no longer empty.

Dakota was on the couch.

He was sitting upright again. Back straight. Paws on his knees. The posture was so violently unnatural, so deeply human, that my stomach heaved.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

The unplugged television was glowing.

It was emitting a pale, pulsing light that washed out the night-vision camera. The harsh, hissing sound of static bled through the tiny speaker of the baby monitor, filling my dark bedroom.

God, please, I whimpered, pulling my knees to my chest. Please make it stop.

I pressed the zoom button on the monitor. The pixels blocky and distorted, I focused on the dog. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to see what he was looking at.

As the camera zoomed in, the angle shifted just enough to catch the glare of the old glass TV screen.

Dakota wasn’t staring at the static.

His head was tilted. He was staring at the reflection in the glass.

I traced his line of sight on the small screen. He was looking at the reflection of the kitchen. Specifically, the corner of the kitchen where I had placed the camera.

Standing directly beside the camera, barely visible in the dark reflection of the TV screen, was a silhouette.

It was a man. But he was far too tall. His arms hung down past his knees, ending in long, blurred shadows. His neck was tilted at a sharp, broken 90-degree angle. He was perfectly, impossibly still.

The thing wasn’t in the living room with the dog. It was standing right next to the camera in the kitchen.

And then, a horrible, paralyzing realization washed over me.

If the entity was standing in the kitchen… the microphone on the baby monitor shouldn’t be picking up the breathing.

But I heard it.

Haaaaaaa…. huuuuuuu…

Wet. Heavy. Rhythmic.

The sound wasn’t coming from the baby monitor speaker in my hands.

The sound was coming from the dark, empty corner of my own locked bedroom.

I didn’t scream.

Screaming requires air, and my lungs had collapsed into cold, heavy stones.

I bolted. I scrambled off the bed, throwing my shoulder against the heavy oak dresser, tearing my fingernails on the wood as I shoved it aside. I unlocked the door and threw myself into the upstairs hallway.

“CHLOE!” I shrieked, the sound tearing my vocal cords. “CHLOE, RUN!”

I slammed my fists against her bedroom door. It was locked.

“Chloe, open the door! OPEN THE DOOR!”

I kicked the door, the wood splintering around the doorknob. I threw my entire body weight against it until the frame cracked and the door burst open.

The room was freezing.

The window was wide open, the rain blowing in and soaking the carpet. The screen had been violently pushed out, hanging by a single plastic thread.

Chloe’s bed was empty. The blankets were dragged onto the floor.

“CHLOE!” I screamed out into the pouring rain, leaning out the window into the pitch-black night. Nothing but the roaring wind and the rustle of the massive pine trees answered me.

I ran downstairs, ignoring the kitchen, ignoring the living room, ignoring the TV that was now dead and silent again. I grabbed the landline off the wall and dialed 911.

Within twenty minutes, my street was drowned in flashing red and blue lights.

The invasive, sterile reality of the police shattered the nightmare atmosphere of my home, but it brought no comfort. Uniformed officers stomped through my hallway with muddy boots. Flashlights cut through the darkness of my backyard.

I sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in a foil thermal blanket a paramedic had thrown over my shoulders. I was shaking uncontrollably, hyperventilating, clutching a mug of tea I couldn’t drink.

Detective Miller sat across from me. He was a tired-looking man in his fifties with deep bags under his eyes.

“Mrs. Davis,” he said, his voice gentle but laced with professional skepticism. “We’ve put out an Amber Alert. We have units checking the neighborhood. But I need you to be honest with me. Did you and Chloe have a fight tonight?”

“I told you,” I gasped, staring at the grain of the wooden table. “She didn’t run away. The dog. The thing in the house. It took her. He took her. Mark took her.”

Miller sighed, exchanging a long, weighted look with the uniformed officer by the door. The look that said, The mother is having a psychotic break.

“Your husband passed away six months ago, ma’am,” Miller said softly. “And your dog… ma’am, there is no dog in this house. We searched the entire property.”

“He was right there!” I screamed, pointing violently at the empty dog bed in the corner. “He brought Mark’s watch! Look at the watch!”

I pointed to the muddy gold watch sitting in an evidence bag on the table. Miller nodded slowly, but he wasn’t looking at the watch. He was looking at me with pity.

“We are sending a team to Saint Jude’s to check the gravesite,” Miller said. “But right now, we need to focus on finding your daughter. We’ve called in the K9 units to track her scent from her bedroom window.”

I watched through the sliding glass door as a handler led a massive German Shepherd into my backyard.

The dog reached the edge of my patio and instantly stopped.

The Shepherd whined, a high, panicked sound. It tucked its tail between its legs and began pulling violently backwards on the leash, refusing to step onto the wet grass. The handler yanked the collar, commanding the dog, but the animal began to bark aggressively into the pitch-black treeline, the hair on its spine standing straight up.

“The dogs won’t go near the woods,” an officer reported, walking into the kitchen, drenched in rain. “They’re spooked. Really spooked.”

Miller stood up, his jaw tight. “Get the flashlights. We’re doing a grid search on foot.”

I sat in that kitchen for three hours.

Three agonizing, silent hours. The rain stopped. The sky began to turn a bruised, sickly purple as dawn approached. I stared at the blank screen of the old TV in the living room, praying to a God I hadn’t spoken to since Mark died.

At 6:15 AM, Detective Miller walked back through the sliding glass door.

He was pale. All the professional skepticism was gone from his face. He looked sick. His hands were covered in dark, wet dirt.

“Did you find her?” I shot up from the chair, the foil blanket falling to the floor. “Did you find Chloe?”

Miller didn’t look me in the eye. He looked at the floor.

“We didn’t find your daughter, Mrs. Davis,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But we found a disturbed patch of earth about two hundred yards deep into the treeline. Under an old dead pine.”

“What?” I breathed, my heart stopping. “What was it?”

“It was a shallow grave,” Miller said, finally looking up at me. His eyes were wide with a deeply human terror. “Ma’am… we pulled a garbage bag out of the dirt.”

I couldn’t speak. I just shook my head.

“Inside the bag,” Miller swallowed hard, “was the decomposing body of a Husky. He was wearing a blue collar with the name ‘Dakota’ on the tag. The vet tech on the scene said the dog has been dead for at least two weeks.”

The kitchen started to spin.

The floor dropped out from underneath me.

Two weeks.

Dakota had been missing for six days.

If my dog had been rotting in a shallow grave in the woods for two weeks…

What had come to my sliding glass door on Thursday night? What had I been feeding? What had I been burying my face into? What had Chloe been sitting next to on the floor?

I collapsed. My knees hit the linoleum hard, but I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t hear the police officers shouting. I couldn’t hear the static. I could only hear the devastating, crushing weight of my own blindness.

My grief had been so heavy, my desperation to have a piece of my old life back so blinding, that I had unlocked the back door and invited a monster into my home. I had let it sleep down the hall from my only child.

Later that afternoon, I was sitting in the sterile, fluorescent-lit interrogation room at the police station.

I hadn’t spoken a word in hours. I was entirely numb. My brain had shut down, a defense mechanism against a reality that was entirely broken.

My cell phone, sitting on the metal table, buzzed.

It was a text notification. A voicemail.

The Caller ID on the screen read: CHLOE (MOBILE).

My breath hitched. I lunged across the table with trembling, desperate hands and snatched the phone. I pressed the phone so hard against my ear that the plastic dug into my skin. I hit play.

There were no tears. There were no sirens.

At first, there was only a loud, aggressive hissing sound.

Tssssssssssssssss.

The exact, deafening sound of an old television tuned to a dead channel.

Then, underneath the static, I heard it.

Heavy, wet, rhythmic breathing.

Haaaaaaa…. huuuuuuu…

And finally, a voice whispered through the speaker. It was distorted, gargled, like it was speaking through a mouthful of cold earth and rainwater.

It was Mark’s voice.

“She’s warm now, Sarah.”

The line went dead.

The police are still searching the woods. They have dug up three miles of forest. They have found nothing.

I sleep on the living room floor now, right in front of the unplugged television. I sit cross-legged in the dark, staring at the black glass screen, waiting for the reflection to change. Waiting for the static to start.

Because I know they are in the box. And I know it’s dark in there.

But I am too terrified to plug it back in.

END.