Chapter 10 - The Echoes in the Dark
Ricardo pressed his back firmly against the solid wooden wall where the door had been moments before, his breath coming in shallow, frantic gasps. The air inside the nursery tasted of copper and stagnant water, heavy enough to choke him. He stared at the small figure standing near the splintered crib, the cracked porcelain mask catching the flickering, yellow candlelight in a grotesque, shimmering dance.
"Leo? Is that really you?" Ricardo choked out, his voice trembling violently as he took a cautious step forward across the floor of shattered doll parts. Every crunch of porcelain beneath his shoes sounded like breaking bone.
The masked figure did not answer right away. It slowly raised its hands, its small fingers peeling back the edges of the cracked porcelain mask. Ricardo braced himself, expecting to see his son's familiar face, but when the mask fell away and clattered onto the floor, the space beneath it was entirely smooth, blank, and featureless—like a blank sheet of white paper where a face was supposed to be.
A muffled, weeping sound echoed from the dark corner of the room, coming from inside the walk-in closet whose door hung slightly ajar, secured by a heavy iron chain and a numerical padlock.
Ricardo’s blood ran cold. He abandoned the featureless entity and rushed toward the closet, dropping to his knees before the heavy iron chain.
"Leo!" Ricardo cried out, grabbing the links and rattling them with all his strength.
"Dad! Help me! She's coming back!" a terrified, real human voice screamed from inside the pitch-black closet, accompanied by frantic, small fists pounding against the wood from the other side.
Ricardo searched wildly around the floor, his hands sweeping through the broken porcelain until his fingers brushed against a heavy, cold metal object. He pulled it up into the candlelight—it was a heavy brass paperweight shaped like an antique key, left behind on a small nightstand. Without hesitation, he jammed the heavy metal corner of the key into the mechanism of the padlock and struck it against the floorboards again and again until the metal housing cracked open.
He ripped the chain away and wrenched the closet door wide open.
Inside, huddled in the pitch blackness, was an eight-year-old boy in a ruined navy blue suit jacket, clutching his arms tightly. But as the boy looked up into the light, his eyes weren't just wide with fear—they were entirely solid black, reflecting no light at all.
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"Thank you for opening the door, Father," the boy whispered with a terrifying, grown-up smirk. "Now we can never leave."
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