Chapter 3 - The Echo of the Garage
The forest began to thin, not into a clearing, but into a jagged, impossible architectural wound. We emerged into a space that made my inner ear scream with vertigo. Before us stood a skeletal replica of our garage, floating in the absolute void of the Between. There were no walls, no roof, just the bare-bones frame constructed from rusted iron and rotting timber, suspended over an abyss of swirling, bruised-purple nebulas.
"He uses what we love to bait the trap," Maya whispered, her grip tightening until I felt the bones of my hand shift.
Inside the frame, the workbench remained—a perfect, maddening imitation. My husband’s tools were laid out with surgical precision, each one glowing with a faint, sickly bioluminescence. A screwdriver, a hammer, a roll of duct tape. They looked like altar offerings. And there, resting in the center of the workbench, was his phone.
I was pulled toward it by a magnetism that defied physics. My feet moved against my will, stepping onto the warped concrete floor of the memory-garage. As I approached the workbench, the air grew frigid, turning my breath into thick, ghost-like plumes.
I reached out, my fingers trembling violently as they brushed against the cold metal of the phone. The screen flickered to life. It wasn't the interface I knew. Instead, it was a live, panoramic feed of our living room back home. But it wasn't empty. The room was submerged in a thick, oily black smoke that swirled with intent, coalescing into the silhouette of a man. It had no face, only a vertical slit that widened, rippling like dark water.
The entity turned its head in the video, its "gaze" locking onto the camera lens—locking onto me.
Thump-thump-thump.
The sound returned, massive and earth-shaking, vibrating through the floating structure. The iron beams groaned, the metal screeching as if being squeezed by an invisible, gargantuan hand.
"He’s using the connection," Maya said, her voice dropping into a register that felt ancient. She wasn't looking at the entity; she was looking at the ground beneath us, which was beginning to liquefy. "He’s trying to drag the house into the Between. If the house crosses over, we lose the tether. We’ll be ghosts in his collection."
I dropped the phone, but it didn't hit the ground. It hung in mid-air, spinning slowly, emitting a high-pitched, harmonic whine that pierced my brain. The garage frame began to tilt, the horizon line in the distance bending like a warped mirror.
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"Maya, how do we stop him?" I screamed, the sound swallowed by the oppressive silence of the void.
"We don't stop him," she replied, stepping toward the center of the shaking platform. She held out her hand, and the light from the tools began to bleed into her skin, turning her veins into glowing conduits of pure, starlight-white energy. "We break the link. We burn the memory of this place until he can’t find the scent of it anymore."
