The dark in Emily's room was viscous, like something that could be cupped in both hands. She lay awake, eyes wide and dry, listening to the house breathe—too aware of every creak, every sigh. The night had teeth; she felt them in the hollowness behind her ribs.
Under the bed: a faint scratching. At first she thought it was a mouse, then the noise congealed into something deliberate, patient. Nails on wood. Slow, searching.
Pale fingers slipped out of the black like fish from a net, curling at the edge of the mattress. Emily didn't move. A cold spread from her feet up her spine. The hands found her ankles and tried to drag. She kicked. They tightened.
A shadow detached itself from the corner and stepped closer. He was there—no face, only the hood and the suggestion of a head turned just enough to observe. The Watcher.
Then the room dissolved.
Candles flooded the air. Stone rose on all sides. Hooded figures moved in a ring, their whispering a wave of sound that pushed breath from her lungs. At the center, chained to an altar, lay a book bound in cracked black leather and iron. Blood dripped, clean and slow, from a split palm onto the cover. Each drop sizzled when it touched the leather, and the chains shuddered.
A voice—many voices—hummed the same hollow rhythm as a name. A hand pressed its wound to the page; the skin went pale where it touched. The chains came apart like rusted promises, one by one. The book inhaled as if it had lungs.
Emily screamed. The stone world torn away. She sat bolting in her bed with the taste of iron in her mouth and the diary open on her desk, the pen balanced on its spine like a resting insect. It looked patient and pleased.
By eight-thirty the next morning, police tape braided around the perimeter of Crestwood High like a new scar.
Detectives clustered near the flagpole, shoes clicking on wet asphalt. Two uniformed officers moved through the halls carrying clipboards and an air of something final—official business that made rumors legitimate.
"They reopened the cases." A boy whispered it like a rumor with teeth. "Something about new footage, and—get this—autopsy findings."
Emily tried to fold herself into her jacket and disappear. The hallway felt narrower now, as though the building itself leaned in to listen.
Lily grabbed her wrist. "We don't have to go near them," she hissed, but their path crossed a patrol officer and a clipboard. Students peered around corners, eyes wide. Phones were out, faces illuminated by other people's news.
The investigation wasn't brand-new—it had been a bruise under the town's skin, half-healed and then torn again. Officer Reynolds, gentle but exhausted, had been called back to Jake Harper's fall after someone had reviewed a distant CCTV and noticed a shadow near the rooftop minutes before he fell. That shadow wasn't supposed to be there. For Mrs. Carter, the files had been closed under the tentative label of "accidental," but new forensic analysis flagged compression trauma inconsistent with a simple impact—ribs shattered inward, bone fragments pressed as if something heavy had crushed her torso; bruising underneath like the pattern of a tire tread.
Emily heard the words and felt sick. Lily's hand went over her mouth. "Oh God," she breathed. "They're saying—"
"Crushed," a girl behind them whispered. "They say her whole body was crushed; they couldn't—" She stopped, hand over her face. No one wanted to finish the image out loud.
The rumors sped: "truck," "hit-and-run," "face unrecognizable," words bent themselves into something grotesque. Students traded details like contraband.
Emily's stomach turned. She could smell the metallic tang in the air again, the same odor from the vision—the same scent that clung to her skin. She remembered the news photograph of Ms. Carter shoved under the tarp in the courtyard, but the picture on the reporter's site had been pixelated, a ruin of a face, not whole enough to grieve for properly. Now the possibility of a truck with bruises like a tread pattern made her feel unmoored. It wasn't just falling—someone, something, had been violent enough to bend a body into nothing like a toy.
At her locker, three boys leaned too close. The same boy—Jason—stepped in, eyes glassy with bravado. "So, Emily, you gonna write his name next?" he taunted, loud enough for half the corridor to hear.
Emily dropped her books. Her hands were trembling; the diary's whisper braided through her head with a warmth that felt like rot.
Write them. Pay the debt.
Her mouth tasted of iron. She wanted to scream that she didn't do this, that she hadn't asked for anything, that the book wasn't hers to control. But the boys shoved her, grinned, called her "possessed" like a joke.
Lily moved like a live thing—swift, furious. She shoved the nearest bully into a locker and planted a fist on Jason's chest so hard his breath hitched. "Back off him," she snapped. Her voice was too loud, small sparks going off in the hush. Students turned; whispers became a roar.
When the crowd finally dispersed, Lily tugged Emily down a quiet side corridor and into an empty music room. She locked the door, then guided Emily into a chair.
"Listen to me," Lily said firmly, crouching so they were eye level. "You don't have to carry this on your face. People love rumors, but they move on just as fast. A week from now they'll be gossiping about someone else. You just have to hold on until then."
Emily's blank stare didn't change. Her lips pressed together, eyes wide and hollow, as if none of Lily's words could reach her.
Lily sighed and wrapped her arms around her anyway. "I'm here, okay? No matter what they say, I'm here."
Emily let herself be held but said nothing. The silence between them was heavier than any rumor.
That night the diary hummed. It wasn't loud—more like a vibrating in the bones. Emily kept the lamp on and watched the page where she had once scribbled Jason's name. The letters crawled, darkening into something deeper, like a brand searing through paper. The ridge of the ink annoyed the skin of her palm when she touched it; the name felt hotter than it should have, as if someone had ironed it into existence.
She was yanked again—back into the stone, the candles, the ring of chanting. Hooded mouths shaped his name into the air until it became a thing that could be grabbed. Hands rose with knives that glinted in the firelight, and wood smoke stung Emily's eyes. When the vision collapsed, she found her phone lit with an alert: Teen injured in late-night bicycle crash; condition critical.
The blood didn't come to her in a cinematic, clean way. It came in the small cold fact of headlines and the garden-variety twinge of guilt that feels like someone else's shoe pressing on your chest: the boy had crashed because his handlebars slipped—he'd been struck in the chest with enough force to fracture ribs. Someone had called it a "freak accident" on social, then the same people meant "freak" as a rumor about a curse before the morning bell had rung.
She had written his name. The diary had done the rest. It wasn't metaphor anymore. The pact answered.
In a panic, hands shaking, she shoved the book into the fireplace. She struck a match like a confessional. The flames took the leather and blazed high—then the blaze choked as if someone had put a hand over the furnace. Embers curled and died. The diary sat unhurt, its pages black and patient. A sentence unfurled in jagged letters across the next page:
One written. One taken. The pact awakens. The debt is not yet paid.
Emily's breath became a ragged animal in her throat. The mirror over her dresser held only her pale face—that's what she forced herself to see. For a heartbeat, the mirror held more. A silhouette stood behind her in the glass: tall, hooded, the hollowness where a face should be. She spun—empty room. The reflection stayed for an extra second and then obediently resolved into her alone.
Her phone vibrated. The name on the display made her fingers sluggish to answer. Aunt Margaret.
"Emily," Margaret said immediately, no hello, no small talk—only the sound of something pulled tight. "You've seen him."
"How do you know?" Emily's voice cracked. "How do you—"
"I know because I felt it," Margaret said. Her voice was quieter now, a thin thread. "When your grandmother held that book, she would whisper names at the candle—as if she were coaxing sleep from the dead. I saw it. I thought I had nightmares after that for years."
Emily pictured the old woman's hands, remembered faded photographs—grandmother with sharp eyes that cut like wire. She thought of how family stories had always been hushed, a language of lowered voices at Christmas that no one would explain.
"Why me?" Emily whispered.
Margaret's answer was simple and terrible. "The pact does not choose. It returns to the bloodline. When it stirs you will feel it. I felt it when your father's sister—when the woman in the photo—vanished after the book. I felt it again today."
"And the Watcher?" Emily asked, dizzy.
"If you've seen the Watcher," Margaret said, each word like a struck match, "it's begun. It will not stop for you. It feeds."
The line went dead before Emily could demand more. She pressed the phone to her chest like a talisman and felt nothing but a hollow.
At midnight there were deliberate knocks on the window—three, heavy, and methodical, timed like a heartbeat. Emily crept toward the glass, the wood floor cold beneath her feet. Outside, the yard was black, the streetlamp puddles of orange. No figure. No footprints. No rustle.
Then something wet slid across the pane. A handprint, smeared, as if a palm had been pressed there and then dragged down. The red glistened briefly, then faded as if the glass itself rejected the stain.
The diary tore its pages open with a gust of wind that the window didn't feel. Ink spilled across the paper in strokes so fresh they still shone.
Blood for blood. You cannot run.
Her mouth opened around a sound that wanted to be a scream but came out thin and small. The room's shadow lengthened to where the Watcher's silhouette pooled across the floor, the suggestion of that hooded head tilting toward her like an observer at a show.
Emily pressed her back against the wall and felt the life being pressed out of her. The investigation, the reopened files, the harsh descriptions of broken bones and crushed ribs were no longer background noise. They had become a ledger. Names written and paid for, pages turning in a book that remembered ceremonies older than town records.
Outside, the town kept its ignorant pulse. Kids whooped in cars, a radio host joked about the reopening of cases, a mother argued on her phone about dinner. Inside her room, under the diary's unblinking leather, Emily understood with a cold and final clarity: the pact wanted payment, and it had marked her as its accountant.
She curled into herself on the floor, hugged her knees, and tried to picture a way out. Every possible escape felt absurd, childish—like someone wishing gravity away.
There was no way to wish this away.
Not now.
Not after the book had learned her name.