Out There - He-s

But Sam had been forgetting things for eight years. His father’s voice. The way the lake smelled in July. The combination to the lock on his high school gym locker. He couldn’t afford to forget this.

You don’t have to do this, the reasonable part of his brain whispered. Turn around. Drive back to Nashville. Forget he ever existed.

Sam took a step toward the door. Then another.

“You can fix it,” the thing said softly. “You can go out there and find him. Bring him home. Bury him proper. And then you can stop running.” He-s Out There

He grabbed the flashlight and got out.

Sam’s chest constricted. “I didn’t run.”

“Out where?”

“How?” Sam whispered.

The flashlight flickered once, twice, and died.

It wasn’t his father.

They wouldn’t find Sam.

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.

“Found nothing.” The thing’s face rippled, and for a moment—just a moment—Sam saw his father underneath that gray skin. Saw the panic in his father’s eyes the last time he’d seen him alive. Saw the way his father’s mouth had opened to scream his name, but no sound came out. “They looked for three weeks. Dogs. Divers. Men on horseback. And all that time, he was walking. Walking and calling your name. He never stopped. He’s still walking.” But Sam had been forgetting things for eight years

Sam Whitaker killed the headlights a quarter mile before the gravel drive. The old Packer house rose out of the dark like a skull—two windows boarded, one shattered, the porch sagging under the weight of years and rot. He sat there for a long minute, the truck’s engine ticking as it cooled.

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.