And somewhere in the shadows between the trees, the thing in the plaid shirt sits in a chair that doesn’t exist, humming a song that never ends, waiting for the next one to come home.
You don’t have to do this, the reasonable part of his brain whispered. Turn around. Drive back to Nashville. Forget he ever existed. He-s Out There
The air was thick with honeysuckle and something else—something metallic, like old blood on a butcher block. Crickets sawed their legs in a frenzy, then stopped all at once. Sam’s boots crunched on the gravel, and the sound seemed too loud, too final. And somewhere in the shadows between the trees,
The thing pointed through the shattered window, toward the tree line. The woods were blacker than the sky, blacker than anything Sam had ever seen. They pulsed like a heartbeat. Drive back to Nashville