Chapter 19: Scott's Side
The car idled at the curb, the engine’s low rumble the only sound for a full minute after Dale put it in park. Rain had given way to a damp, bone-chilling mist that clung to the windows, blurring the world outside Scott’s townhouse.
“She didn’t leave a note,” Michelle said from the backseat, her voice hollow. “Not a text, not a letter on the laptop. Nothing.”
Dale rubbed his temples, his suit jacket wrinkled from the day. “James said she’d just booked a viewing for a house in Vermont. She was sending him listings for bunk beds. For Savannah and the baby they were trying for.”
Scott stared at his own front door, twenty feet away. It felt like a mile. “She was planning. You don’t plan a nursery and your own funeral in the same week.”
“So, what?” Michelle leaned forward, her breath fogging the headrest. “It’s a coincidence? Liv gets jumped, Nikki…”
“Isn’t here to talk about it,” Dale finished, his tone grim. They sat in the terrible, shared understanding. The unspoken word hung in the air: Again.
Scott’s hand trembled on the door handle. He didn’t pull it.
“You okay?” Michelle asked, her earlier brittleness softening with genuine concern.
“Yeah. Just… tired.”
“Is it Ethan?” she pressed. “Is he waiting in there, wanting to play his fucked-up little game? Hunter and fucking Rabbit? Pretending to be the serial killer who finally gets you?”
Scott’s jaw tightened. “Don’t, Michelle.”
“I’m just saying it’s sick. We’re burying one of our own and he wants to fetishize the very thing that made us… us. It’s grotesque.”
A hot bolt of anger shot through Scott’s fatigue. He turned in his seat, eyes flashing. “And monetizing it was better? Writing the book? You turned that trauma into content. So don’t you dare judge his fucking coping mechanism. At least he’s doesn’t pretend to care.”
Michelle recoiled as if slapped. Dale stared straight ahead, wisely silent.
Scott shoved the car door open, the interior light cutting a stark yellow path into the gloom. “Thanks for the ride.” He slammed the door shut, the sound final and sharp, and hurried up the walkway without looking back.
The townhouse was dark and still. Too still. “Ethan?” he called, his voice swallowed by the plush carpet and high ceilings. No answer. A thread of unease joined the exhaustion, but he shrugged it off. Ethan was often late, often distracted.
Upstairs in his bedroom, Scott moved on autopilot. The day’s weight demanded a feeling, any feeling, to override the numbness. He went to the back of his closet and pulled out the outfit from its garment bag. The uniform of the fantasy: a tight, grey college hoodie, a pair of impossibly short red athletic shorts that clung to his thighs, white socks. It was cheap, slutty, and purposefully vulnerable. It screamed prey.
He changed quickly, avoiding his own eyes in the mirror. When he turned, he froze.
A dark figure filled the doorway to the hall.
Scott’s heart leapt, then settled into a rapid, knowing rhythm. The game had started. Ethan was committing.
The man was dressed head-to-toe in black: a form-fitting hoodie and leather jacket, gloves, dark jeans, a animal skull mask that obscured everything but the faint glint of eyes. The silhouette was powerfully built, broad-shouldered, utterly silent. He held a large, rubber-bladed hunting knife, pantomime violence that looked chillingly real in the low light.
“Jesus,” Scott breathed, a forced laugh escaping him. “Okay. The outfit’s scary. You win. Can we just… get started?”
The figure gave a single, slow nod.
The rules were unspoken. Scott was the Rabbit. He took two shaky steps back toward the bed. The Hunter stepped into the room, closing the door with a soft, definitive click.
Scott’s breath hitched. Performance, he told himself. It’s all performance.
The Hunter moved fast. A gloved hand clamped over Scott’s mouth from behind, another snaking around his waist, yanking him flush against a body that was solid as an oak. Scott gasped into the glove, a real tremor of fear sparking down his spine. Ethan was strong, but this was different. This was a containment of pure, effortless force.
He struggled, as the Rabbit was supposed to. He kicked back, his heel connecting with a shin, but the man didn’t flinch. He was lifted, thrown face-down onto the mattress with a force that drove the air from his lungs. The weight came down on top of him, pinning him. A hot mouth found the side of his neck, biting through the fabric of the hoodie, not hard enough to break skin but with a possessiveness that made Scott whimper.
The gloved hands were everywhere, rough, claiming. One shoved up the back of the hoodie, scraping over his spine. The other pawed at the shorts, yanking the thin material down to his thighs. Scott felt the cool air on his exposed skin, then the hotter, denim-clad bulge of the Hunter’s erection grinding against his ass.
It was wrong.
The realization was a cold splash in the gut. The body was too heavy, the shoulders too wide. The cock pressed against him was thicker, longer, a demanding pressure Ethan had never possessed. This wasn’t the familiar shape of his fucked-up comfort.
Panic, real and sour, flooded Scott’s throat. The roleplay cracked.
“Wait,” he mumbled into the comforter. The grinding didn’t stop. A hand fumbled with a fly. “Stop. Ethan, stop.”
The man above him went still. But he didn’t get off. He just waited, a beast of coiled tension.
“I need… I need to piss,” Scott stammered, the lie clumsy and desperate. “Let me up. Let me go to the bathroom. Then we can… then we can keep going.”
For a long, terrifying second, he wasn’t sure it would work. Then, the immense weight lifted. Scott scrambled off the bed, pulling his shorts up, not daring to look back. He practically ran into the connected bathroom, locking the door behind him with a click that sounded pitifully frail.
He braced his hands on the vanity, sucking in ragged gulps of air. His reflection was a wild-eyed ghost. It’s not him. It’s not Ethan.
His phone was on the counter. Hands shaking so violently he could barely tap the screen, he opened the group chat with Michelle and Dale.
Scott: don’t call just come get me now something’s really wrong he’s not ethan
He hit send, the whooshing sound absurdly loud in the silence.
That’s when he saw it.
A maroon smear, almost black against the white tile floor. A drop. Then another. A trail of them, leading from the crack under the bathroom door back out into the bedroom.
Blood.
It was fresh, glossy, tracked in by a boot.
Scott’s blood turned to ice. He stared at the red trail, his mind screaming, the scent of copper and bleach from the hallway six years ago crashing into the present. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe.
From the other side of the door, a floorboard creaked.
From the other side of the door, a floorboard creaked.
The sound was deliberate, a pressure applied to old wood. Scott’s eyes remained locked on the blood. It was a path. It led away from him, out of the bedroom and into the hall. The Hunter wasn’t waiting by the bathroom door. He was… elsewhere.
Silence pooled in the bathroom, thick and choking. Scott’s phone buzzed in his hand. A response from Michelle: Omw. 3 min.
Three minutes was a lifetime. He couldn’t stay in this white-tiled box. The blood trail pulled at him, a gruesome dare. He turned the lock, the click a gunshot in the quiet, and eased the door open.
The bedroom was empty. The black figure was gone. Only the imprint on the comforter and the lingering scent of leather and sweat remained. The drops led out into the dark hallway.
Scott moved, his socked feet silent on the hardwood. Each drop was a dark, perfect circle, reflecting the dim hall light. They led past the spare room, past the linen closet, to the door at the end of the hall. The storage closet. A cold, irrational certainty seized him.
He reached for the knob. His hand, pale and trembling, hovered. He turned it.
The door swung inward.
Ethan was inside, crammed between a vacuum cleaner and a stack of old boxes. Duct tape sealed his mouth into a ragged slit, his eyes bulging above it, wide with a terror Scott had never seen in them. More tape bound his wrists and ankles. His shirt was dark and sodden around a vicious, messy puncture in his lower abdomen. Blood had soaked through his jeans, dripping steadily onto the closet floor to form the trail.
A low, animal sound escaped Scott. He fell to his knees, fingers clawing at the tape on Ethan’s mouth. It came away with a sickening rip. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, Scott,” Ethan gasped, the words wet and bubbly. “He was here… waiting for me.”
“Who?” Scott whisper-shouted, working on the binds at his wrists. The tape was viciously tight, digging into flesh. “Who was it?”
“Didn’t see his face. Mask. Big. Fuck, it hurts, man, it really fucking hurts.” Ethan’s body shuddered, a full-body tremor of shock and pain. “Get me out. Please.”
The wrists came free, sticky with blood. Scott bent to his ankles. “Can you stand?”
“I have to.” As the last tape ripped free, Ethan slumped forward into Scott, almost knocking him over. The coppery stench of open wound and fear was overwhelming. They struggled upright, Ethan leaning heavily on him, one hand clamped over his belly.
They stumbled out of the closet, a four-legged creature of panic. The hallway stretched before them, the front door a distant mirage of safety at the end. They took three lurching steps.
The black figure stepped out from Scott’s bedroom doorway, blocking the path to the stairs. He stood perfectly still, the rubber knife now replaced by a real one, its blade a flat, dull grey in the shadows. The animal skull mask seemed to smile.
“Oh, Jesus,” Ethan whimpered.
Scott froze, his arm around Ethan’s waist locking up. The killer took one step forward. Then another. The pace was slow, inevitable.
Ethan’s breathing became frantic, shallow pants. His eyes darted from the killer to Scott, a calculation flashing in the pain. Survival, pure and ugly, overrode everything else.
“Here, just take him!” Ethan hissed.
With a sudden, desperate burst of strength, he shoved Scott. Hard. Scott’s socks slipped on the polished floor. He flew forward, arms pinwheeling, directly into the killer’s path.
He collided with the man’s chest, expecting the bite of the blade. It didn’t come. The killer caught him by the hood of his sweatshirt, yanked him upright, and simply shoved him aside like a discarded toy. Scott hit the wall, the breath knocked out of him.
The killer walked past him. He walked straight to Ethan, who was trying to crab-crawl backward, a smear of blood painting the floor behind him.
The man grabbed a handful of Ethan’s hair and the collar of his jacket. He didn’t stab. He lifted, and with a terrible, effortless motion, hurled him down the hallway. Ethan crashed through the French doors leading to the small second-floor balcony in an explosion of glass and splintering wood.
Scott tried to scream, but only a dry heave emerged. The killer was on him again, gripping the back of his hoodie. He dragged him, stumbling and choking, through the wreckage of the doorframe and out into the biting night air.
Ethan lay on the balcony tiles, moaning, glittering with shards. The killer dropped Scott beside him, a spectator held in place by terror. Then he knelt, his leather gloves crunching on glass. He took Ethan by the throat, lifting his head off the ground.
Ethan’s eyes found Scott’s, pleading, beyond words.
The killer’s other hand drew back, fingers curling into a fist. It wasn’t a punch. It was a piston drive, straight down. The sound was a thick, wet crunch, like a boot stomping a rotten pumpkin. The fist plunged through Ethan’s abdomen, through the already-stabbed wound, burying itself deep.
Ethan’s body arched, a shuddering, silent scream contorting his face. The killer held him there for a second, impaled on his own arm, then wrenched it free in a slick, red rush. He stood, grabbed Ethan by the jacket and belt, and hoisted the convulsing body over the railing.
Scott watched him fall. The body turned once in the air, a limp doll, and hit the concrete walkway below with a final, awful thud.
Headlights swept the driveway. A car skidded to a halt. Dale’s car. Doors flew open. Michelle’s scream pierced the night, sharp and endless.
Scott’s own scream finally tore loose. He scrambled back into the shattered doorway, slipping in Ethan’s blood on the tiles. He ran, pure blind instinct, for the stairs. His white socks, slippery with blood and terror, betrayed him on the top step.
His feet shot out from under him. He pitched forward, tumbling down the full flight in a cacophony of impacts, his world fracturing into pain and darkness.
Consciousness returned in a nauseating wave. Something was pulling him. “Up! Get up, Scott, now!” Michelle’s voice, frantic and close. Her hands were under his arms, hauling him to his feet in the dark foyer. The front door was open, a rectangle of cold air.
Dale stood in the doorway, a small, black pistol held in a two-handed grip, pointed up the blood-smeared stairs. His face was corpse-pale. “Go! Get him out! I’ll check.”
Michelle dragged Scott across the threshold, his socks scraping on the welcome mat. They stumbled onto the damp lawn. She let him slump against the side of her car, fumbling with her phone, her voice barking numbers at a 911 dispatcher.
Dale emerged a minute later, gun lowered, his breath pluming in the air. “Nothing. It’s empty. He’s gone.”
Sirens wailed in the distance, converging. Red and blue lights strobed through the mist a moment before a familiar sedan pulled up, tires crunching on gravel. Officer Luke Allen was out of the car before it fully stopped, his uniform sharp, his face a mask of urgent concern. He went straight to Scott.
“I got the call,” Luke said, his voice low and steady, a rock in the chaos. “I raced over. What happened, Scott? Talk to me.”
Scott was shaking violently, his teeth chattering. The words tumbled out in broken fragments. “In my house… he was waiting… he had Ethan… he threw him… he put his fist right through him, Luke, right through his stomach and he threw him off…” He gagged, dry heaving onto the grass.
Luke’s hand came to rest on the back of his neck, a firm, grounding pressure. His thumb stroked the pounding artery there. “Okay. Breathe. You’re safe now.”
Michelle hung up, wrapping her arms around herself. “He can’t stay here.”
“He’ll stay with me tonight,” Luke said, the statement leaving no room for argument. His eyes met Dale’s. “Until we figure this out. It’s the safest place. If this… creature… comes back for him, he’ll have to go through me.”
Dale, clearly out of his depth, just nodded, holstering his pistol beneath his jacket. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. That… that makes sense.”
Luke helped Scott stand, guiding him toward the passenger seat of the squad car. Scott looked up at him, his eyes swimming with shock and a devastating gratitude. “Thank you,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “I don’t… I don’t know what I would do without you.”