Interlude: The Ones Who Stayed, Greg I

  Nathaniel came in around evening, slung over with gear like a soldier off deployment—rifles, bags, the quiet weight of unspoken things. He smelled of metal, oil, and that strange copper tang the smell that meant blood. Greg recognized it instantly. That scent clung to Nathaniel like a shadow now.

  Friend.

  It felt like a foreign word. Strange in his mouth. Once a comfort, now a sore tooth he couldn’t stop tonguing. Their group used to throw that word around without thought. Friend. Like it meant something unbreakable. But now it felt tainted—like something ruined by rust and regret.

  They barely talked anymore. When they did, it was surface-level, brittle. The air between them crackled with something tense and unspoken. Something that used to be trust.

  It hadn’t always been this way.

  But trauma doesn’t treat everyone equally. Nathaniel shut down, went cold. Sarah left. And Greg—well, Greg retreated into himself. He buried things. Told jokes to mask his fear. Argued over stupid shit just to keep things normal. But deep down, he knew the truth: he’d failed Nathaniel.

  His friend had picked him up from the airport that night in Virginia, after his girlfriend dumped him and left him sobbing on the sidewalk with one duffel bag and a cracked iPhone. Nathaniel was the one who drove three hours through rain and construction just to get him. When Greg’s parents threw him out, Nathaniel gave him a room without asking for anything in return.

  Nathaniel had always shown up.

  And when the time came for Greg to do the same… he was nowhere to be found.

  The memories hit like an old bruise: long walks to that distant grocery store, shirts soaked in sweat, blisters forming on their heels. None of it mattered. All he remembered was the laughter. The nights the whole group would huddle on the couch like scared schoolgirls, watching horror movies with their knees pulled to their chests. The way they’d shriek at every bump and shadow, then laugh until their sides hurt.

  He remembered one night in particular—Nathaniel, blackout drunk, hunched over a bowl of cereal at 3 a.m., sobbing like a child. Over what, no one even knew. The cereal? The world? Maybe both. Back then, it was easy to laugh. It was easy to love.

  Now it all felt like old pictures burned at the edges—familiar, but painful to hold.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  He didn’t call out to Nathaniel that night of their argument in the laundry room. Didn’t speak up or offer a beer or a joke. He did what he always did when life got hard—he ran. His escape sat waiting for him: a bottle of Jim Beam next to his Xbox and a crushed pack of Marlboros. Routine. Reliable.

  He lit a cigarette. Inhaled.

  The fumes burned on the way in, coating his throat with the kind of poison that made everything else easier to swallow. The burn of the whiskey came next, slithering down his chest like courage. Fake courage, but enough to keep going. He heard the shower turn on,a five minute shower he was guessing then Nate would be off to bed. Before then, he thought, before he went to lay down.

  It helped. For a moment. For a flicker of a second, the buzzing in his head quieted. The memory of that thing—the one they all refused to talk about—faded just enough to keep him upright.

  But it was still there.

  He’d seen it, same as the others. Standing in the middle of the road like a statue, unmoving as their car sped toward it. A thing in black. A silhouette wrapped in funeral cloth. No reaction. No flinch. Just presence. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t human.

  Nathaniel was always the superstitious one. The one who chased ghosts and whispered theories about angels and demons. Not Greg. Greg was logical. Greg was a mix of sarcastic with hard facts. But every time he remembered that thing, his stomach turned.

  Tonight, though… Tonight he felt something. A buzz. A pulse. A pull.

  He could do something about it. For once, he could be there.

  Maybe he and Nathaniel could sit at the dining room table, pass a beer across the wood like old times. Maybe they could talk. Maybe the figure wouldn’t seem so powerful in the light of shared truth.

  He heard the front door open. Then shut. A few seconds later, the rumble of Nathaniel’s engine outside. He was gone again.

  “Whatever,” Greg muttered.

  He almost left it at that.

  But something tugged at him.

  A need.

  He stood, hesitantly, and looked out the window—straight into the driveway.

  Nathaniel’s car sat parked beneath the flickering street lamp.

  And Nathaniel… was staring directly at the front of the house. Not moving. Not blinking. Just standing there like a man entranced.

  Greg swallowed. He followed Nathaniel’s line of sight, dread creeping like ice water up his spine.

  The figure was there.

  In the reflection of the glass. Like a photograph of something the world had forgotten. Draped in black. Skinless. Timeless. Its head tilted just slightly, like it was listening.

  Greg backed away.

  He turned from the window and slid down the hallway wall, knees folding beneath him as he crept to his bedroom door. He locked it. Sat there on the floor, clutching the bottle like a lifeline.

  His breath came in shallow pulls.

  He didn’t cry out loud. He never did.

  He just sat there, head against the door, sobbing into the crook of his arm while the bottle pressed hard against his ribs.

  It always comes back, he thought.

  And Nathaniel always sees it.

  Like some unholy communion they could never walk away from.

  Then came the static.

  His Bluetooth speaker—powered off, long since drained—crackled to life. Wires inside groaned like they were being dragged through water. Greg didn’t need to listen. He didn’t want to. He covered his ears and curled into a ball.

  The voice came anyway.

  Same as it always did.

  A whisper across frequencies no one should hear.

  “There’s no help in Whittaker.”