The office was a coffin of shadows. The only light came from a single desk lamp, its yellow glow pooling on the scattered files. The rest of the room lay swallowed in dark, corners stretching too deep, too quiet.
Reynolds sat hunched over the folder, his cigarette long dead in the tray. The smoke had vanished hours ago, but the smell lingered like a ghost.
On the desk: Nathan Hale. Missing. Presumed dead.
The photo stared up at him — a man in his thirties, jaw sharp, brow furrowed, eyes hard. Reynolds leaned closer, and the farther he stared, the more wrong it felt. He couldn't shake the gnawing itch of familiarity.
He whispered to himself. Where have I seen you?
He dragged the rooftop footage onto the screen again. Jake Carter's death replayed in grainy static. He had watched this over and over, every flicker, every frame — but tonight, something different clawed at him.
The rain streaked across the lens, blinding, but in the corner of the frame—there.
The shadow.
Reynolds froze the frame, heart thudding. The figure loomed, still as stone, almost erased by the storm. Then the lightning came. A jagged crack lit the world white for a breath.
And in that breath—
A jawline. Familiar.
He snapped his eyes back to Nathan's photo, then to the screen. Photo. Screen. Photo. Screen.
The match was too sharp. Too clean.
His lips moved without meaning to.
"It can't be… Nathan Hale?"
His pen scratched furiously:
Nathan Hale?
Survivor?
Hiding all these years?
Why always at Carter deaths?
But as his hand wrote, the room shifted. The silence grew heavy. The shadows along the wall seemed to ripple like water.
Reynolds stilled.
From the glass of the office window, a reflection stared back. A figure behind him — tall, grinning, eyes black as pitch.
He spun. The office was empty. The chair in the corner was bare. Only the hum of the computer filled the room.
His chest hammered.
The phone buzzed violently. He snatched it up. A message blinked across the screen.
YOU'RE TOO CLOSE.
Reynolds's throat tightened. Sender: his own number.
The phone glitched, buzzing again. And again. The same message flooding the display until the glass cracked under the strain.
He flung it onto the desk, breath ragged. His hands shook.
He didn't believe in ghosts. He didn't believe in curses. But the air itself felt wrong now, too thick to breathe, as if something was in the room with him, smiling.
Across town, Emily bolted upright in bed. The diary was shut on her desk, yet the whispers were alive, seeping into the marrow of her bones.
But they weren't speaking to her anymore.
Another listens.
Her skin crawled. Someone else was digging into the shadows. Someone the diary didn't want prying.
And through the dark, she felt it — a thread pulling her toward him. Reynolds.
The book's whispers hissed like snakes. He sees too much. He must be silenced.
Emily clasped her ears, but the voices only laughed.
Back in his office, Reynolds dragged the footage back one more time, eyes burning. He slowed it to half-speed. Then frame by frame.
The figure flickered into clarity.
For one frame, lightning caught its face. Nathan's jaw. Nathan's stance.
But the eyes.
Black. Hollow. Bottomless.
Reynolds's stomach dropped. He scrubbed back, froze it again. Another detail crawled into focus — the figure's shadow peeling a fraction of a second behind the body, lagging unnaturally, before snapping back into place like something stitched wrong.
The lamp flickered.
The monitor glitched.
From the corner of the room came the faintest sound — metal dragging, slow, deliberate. Chains against concrete.
Reynolds's pulse thundered. He slammed the laptop shut, breath shaking.
He didn't want to believe in monsters. He didn't want to believe in curses.
But Nathan Hale was not a man anymore.
And whatever he had become — it was watching him now.