Sometimes I Scare Myself

Part 1 - Chapters 1 to 6

Erica plans her thirtieth birthday dinner with exacting control, choosing the guest list, the menu, and the seating to prove a single night can pass without loss. The precision is the point, a ritual of safety she can manage. But before anyone arrives, Chad keeps thumbing his phone under the table with a secrecy that reads as work yet feels like something else, and when Erica counts the glasses for her own table she finds an extra wineglass she does not remember setting out. The small wrongness unsettles her, and the controlled evening begins slipping before it has even started.

Chad dismisses the buzzing phone as work and promises her that nothing will interrupt the dinner. The reassurance lands on the surface, and Erica lets herself be eased because she wants to believe the night is safe. He avoids the truth sitting between them, and his promise buys him calm at the cost of honesty. She accepts it, and the gap between what she knows and what she admits widens quietly.

The guests arrive, and the room fills with the particular friction of old friends. Zach comes in with quiet, steady care and a wrapped gift, and something in Erica settles when he is near, a safety she does not have to perform. Beckie and Chad slide immediately into their familiar flirtation, the old rhythm clicking back into place as if the years have not passed. The arrivals restore the shape of the evening while introducing the tensions it will later expose.

Chad takes the head of the table without being asked and raises a flattering toast. It lands unevenly, the compliments catching on something underneath, and the table reacts in small ways that reveal the tensions running through the group. The six of them sit together, and the careful architecture of Erica's evening holds, barely. Chad's bid for center stage shifts the dinner's gravity toward him and away from Erica's design.

A third knock cuts through the dinner because no one is expected. Erica has planned for six, and the sound forces her to confront an unplanned arrival she cannot fold into her architecture. She goes to the door with the evening still intact behind her and the certainty draining out of it. The knock marks the moment her controlled night becomes something she did not author.

Erica opens the door to Elias, a medium she did not hire, and learns Zach hired him as a birthday surprise to contact her dead sister. The explanation lands like a stone, recasting Zach's quiet care as a decision made without her consent. She stands in the doorway with the gift she wanted and the violation she did not, and the two cannot be separated. The surprise turns her grief into a spectacle she never agreed to host.

Erica reluctantly lets Elias inside, sacrificing control of her carefully planned evening. She does it because refusing would mean rejecting Zach's intent in front of everyone, and because the door is already open. The controlled dinner is gone, replaced by a stranger in her home and a purpose she never chose. With that single decision she surrenders the evening she built.

Elias asks for wine and waits in the living room, making Erica feel watched and uneasy. He does not wait to be directed, settling into her space with an ease that makes her feel exposed in her own house. She cannot decide if his calm is professional or something more unnerving. His presence converts her living room into a stage she did not build.

Zach defends the surprise to the table, insisting it was meant as a gift. Chad mocks it openly, calling the whole thing ridiculous, and Liv steps in to smooth the moment over. The table splits along lines that were already there, and the medium becomes the wedge that widens them. Erica watches her guests choose sides over something that was supposed to be hers.

Erica notices Chad and Beckie drinking faster than the others, gathering silent evidence of their discomfort or detachment. Their glasses empty at a pace that says they are elsewhere, or want to be. She files it away without meaning to, another small wrongness in a night that keeps producing them. The observation joins the extra glass and the hidden phone as proof she cannot yet name.

Erica checks on Elias and finds him arranging his duffel bag, pulling out his things with the unhurried confidence of someone settling in for a long stay. He drains half his wine in a single motion, and the calm of it unsettles her more than any theatrics would. He is not nervous and not performing, simply there, and that is the problem. His sense of belonging in her home makes her feel like the visitor.

Chad calls Elias a hack and a con artist, escalating the table's conflict over whether the session is meaningful or absurd. The argument stops being about the session and becomes about whether any of this matters at all. No one can agree, and the question hangs over the dinner. Chad's attack forces everyone to declare a position they did not choose.

Liv reveals she once saw a medium after her mother died and insists the medium knew specific things. Her confession deepens the argument instead of settling it, because now the table is debating a friend's experience rather than a stranger's credibility. She offers her grief as evidence and refuses to let it be dismissed. The dinner's center shifts from Elias to Liv, and the stakes become personal.

Beckie dismisses Liv's experience as cold reading and oversharing, sharpening the confrontation. The dismissal lands hard, cutting off the possibility that Liv might be right and reducing her grief to a trick. Liv's face changes, and the table feels the cut. Beckie's certainty closes a door that Liv had just opened.

Liv pushes back that her experience was specific, turning the dinner into a dispute over belief, grief, and proof. She will not let her mother's memory be reduced to a parlor trick, and she says so. The argument has no middle ground left for anyone to stand on. What began as a birthday dinner becomes a trial of everyone's private certainties.

Erica remains caught between her guests and Elias, her planned proof of safety now overtaken by the medium's presence. The evening she designed to show that a night could pass without loss has been taken over by the very thing she was trying to hold at bay. The wine is draining, the table is arguing, and the medium sits in her living room like he belongs. The proof she wanted has slipped entirely out of her hands.

Erica agrees to stay for the séance despite Zach offering her an out. He gives her a quiet chance to walk away before any of this begins, but she does not take it. Something in her has already decided, and she can feel the weight of it settling over her, the sense that she is committing to something she cannot undo.

Elias lays out his medium's tools and asks each guest for a personal item to ground the circle. He arranges the instruments of his trade with the care of someone who has done this many times before, then asks everyone to contribute something that anchors whatever comes through to the living people seated around the table. The request turns the room solemn, because everyone understands this is no longer a game.

Erica hesitates over her dead sister's ring, then surrenders it to Elias, exposing her grief to the group. Handing it over means handing over a piece of her loss, letting strangers see what she has kept private. She holds back for a moment, feeling the weight of it, and then gives it to him anyway. The act costs her something visible, and the group sees it.

Elias chooses Beckie to go first, and she agrees eagerly to be the center of attention. She steps into the spotlight without hesitation, pleased to be chosen. She recites her full name three times, her voice carrying through the room, and then a flame ignites on the board beside her bracelet. The fire is sudden and wrong, appearing where nothing should burn.

Elias, briefly possessed, calls Beckie a liar and "Bad Girl Beckie," terrifying the room. Something moves through him, and when he speaks it is not entirely his own voice. The words land like a slap, and the room goes cold with fear. Whatever is happening knows things, and it is not friendly.

Beckie grabs for her bracelet and is burned by the surging flame, ending her turn in tears. She reaches out desperately to pull it back, and the fire surges against her hand. She snatches her arm away, crying, her turn finished in pain and humiliation. The séance has drawn blood, or close enough.

Elias claims he cannot always control what comes through, unsettling everyone further. The admission does nothing to calm the table. If the medium himself is not in charge of what speaks, then no one seated here is safe.

Erica volunteers to go next, driven by watching being worse than participating. Sitting still while the unknown presses against the edges of the room has become unbearable. She would rather step into it than wait for it to come to her.

Erica says her name three times, tightening the ritual around herself. The repetition draws the circle close, and she feels the attention of the room bend toward her. Elias names a female presence who looks like Erica, pulling her toward belief. The description lands with terrible precision, and she feels herself being drawn in against her own resistance.

Elias spells out "J-O-S," and Erica whispers her sister Joslyn's name, breaking open her grief. The letters hang in the air until she finishes them, speaking her sister aloud in this room for the first time. Everything she has been holding together comes apart.

Elias confirms Joslyn is nodding, making the impossible feel real to Erica. The impossible becomes real, or real enough that she can no longer tell the difference. She sits in tears, feeling her sister close enough to touch for the first time since she lost her. Whatever this night is, whatever Elias is, Erica has gotten what she came for, and it has wrecked her.

Part 2 - Chapters 7 to 11

Erica asks Elias whether Joslyn forgives her. The question hangs there, raw and exposed, stripped of any cushioning or pretense, and for a moment it seems as though the entire room has stopped breathing around it. Elias answers no. The word lands like a blow. It is not a gentle answer or a hedged one. It is a single syllable that carries the full weight of everything Erica has been carrying since Joslyn died, and it strikes her with the force of a verdict she has been dreading and expecting in equal measure. Then he corrects himself. Joslyn says there is nothing to forgive. The distinction matters, and it breaks Erica open. It is not absolution she is being handed but something stranger, the refusal of the debt altogether, and the force of it undoes her. Forgiveness would have been something she could hold, something she could turn over in her hands and examine and eventually accept. This is different. This is the claim that there was never a debt to begin with, that the ledger she has been keeping in her own heart was always a fiction, and the ground shifts beneath her because if there is nothing to forgive then the guilt she has organized her life around has no foundation, and she does not know who she is without it.

Elias relays Joslyn's warning to leave. The instruction is plain, and it carries the weight of someone who knows more than she is saying. He does not elaborate. He does not explain what the danger is or where it comes from or why now. He simply passes the message along, and the plainness of it is what makes it frightening, because it suggests that the knowledge behind it is too large or too terrible to be unpacked in a living room full of people who are already fraying at the edges. Before the moment can settle, the ring bursts into flame. Fire springs up where there should be none, no match, no candle, no source of any kind, just sudden heat and light erupting from a piece of metal that has no business burning. Elias has to put it out. The effort costs him. He extinguishes the flame and then has to stop, forced to take a break, the channeling having drained something out of him. He sits down heavily, and the exhaustion on his face is not the ordinary tiredness of a long evening. It is the depletion of someone who has spent something essential, and the warning sits unfinished in the room, and no one moves to act on it. The fire is out. The message has been delivered. And still no one gets up to leave.

Chad demands to go next. He wants his turn, and he wants it now. There is no patience in him, no acknowledgment of what just happened to Elias or what Elias just said. He simply wants what he wants, and he wants it immediately. Erica refuses to pour his wine. The refusal is small but deliberate, a line drawn in a room where lines have been dissolving all night. She will not participate in this. She will not serve him. It is a tiny act of resistance, almost invisible against the larger chaos of the evening, but it is hers, and she holds it. Chad does not accept it. He pours the wine himself and mocks the spirits, daring them, treating the whole thing as a performance he can control. His contempt is loud and careless, and it changes the temperature of the room. Where there had been fear and grief and exhaustion, now there is something sharper and more dangerous, a man daring the unseen to do something about it, and the dare hangs in the air like a challenge that no one wants answered.

Elias explains that group sessions attract spirits with different appetites. The warning is technical, almost clinical, but it lands as a threat. He speaks about it the way someone might explain the behavior of predators in the wild, not to frighten but simply to inform, and the information itself is the frightening part. Different spirits want different things, and a group gathered like this is an invitation. The more people, the more emotions, the more unresolved conflicts and hidden desires and unspoken resentments, the more there is to draw, and the more there is to draw, the more there is that comes. Despite that, Elias agrees to channel for Chad. He consents, knowing what he knows, and the decision sets everything that follows into motion. He knows the risk. He has just been drained by a single burst of flame, and he has just warned everyone that a group like this attracts things with appetites, and still he agrees. Whether it is obligation or stubbornness or something else entirely, he says yes, and the yes is the hinge on which the rest of the night turns.

Elias channels a woman's voice. The voice is not his own, and what it says humiliates Chad and Beckie by exposing their affair. The secret is dragged into the open in front of everyone, named and laid bare. There is no ambiguity in the words, no room for interpretation or denial. The voice speaks with the clarity of someone who has been waiting to say this, and it says it to a room full of witnesses. Chad does not absorb it. He does not go pale or quiet or still. He attacks. He lunges at Elias, and the violence is immediate and total. There is no warning, no moment of decision that anyone can see. There is only the sudden movement of a man who has been exposed and who cannot tolerate it, and the movement is aimed at the person who exposed him.

Chad shoves Elias. Elias falls. His head strikes the coffee table, and the blow kills him. The room goes silent in the way rooms do when something irreversible has happened. There is no gasp, no cry, no immediate reaction of any kind. There is only the silence of people who have just watched a line be crossed that cannot be uncrossed. Elias is dead, and it happened in a single motion, a shove and a fall and a corner of furniture. The simplicity of it is obscene. A man is alive and then he is not, and the distance between those two states is the length of a shove and the height of a coffee table, and nothing about the evening's elaborate supernatural machinery prepared anyone for something so ordinary and so final.

Derek confirms Elias is dead. He checks, he knows, and he says it. He is the one who kneels down and does the thing that everyone else is avoiding, and when he stands up he says the words that no one wants to hear. Chad insists Elias is only unconscious. He repeats it, tries to make it true by saying it, and he works to control the story even as the body lies there. He says it again and again, as though repetition might rewrite what everyone just saw, as though the words might reach back into the last minute and change the outcome. The gap between what Derek knows and what Chad is saying becomes the new center of the room. It is not a debate. It is a chasm, and everyone standing near it has to decide which side they are on.

The group argues over calling the police. The argument is frantic and overlapping, everyone talking at once, no one agreeing. Some want to call immediately. Some want to wait. Some want to leave. Some want to stay. The words pile on top of each other, and no decision emerges from the noise. Chad pressures everyone to stay and agree on a cover story. He does not want the police. He wants consensus, a shared account, a version of events they can all tell. He pushes for it, and the pressure is relentless. He moves from person to person, making eye contact, making arguments, making promises, and the force of his will is enormous, and it is aimed entirely at keeping everyone in the room and keeping the story under his control.

Zach reveals he hired the medium to expose Chad and Beckie's affair. The confession reframes everything. This was not chance, not a haunted evening that went wrong. Zach set it up. He wanted the affair exposed, and he used Elias to do it. The revelation lands like a second death, because it means that everything that has happened was set in motion by someone in the room, that the supernatural was a tool in a human plan, and that the plan has gone catastrophically wrong. Beckie admits it happened six times. The number is specific and damning, and it confirms what the voice said. The affair is no longer a secret. It is a fact with a count attached. Six times. She says it out loud, and the specificity of it makes it real in a way that the voice alone could not, because a number is something you can hold, something you can count, something that cannot be explained away as a trick or a delusion.

Chad pulls a gun. The escalation is total. He forces everyone to stay until they dispose of the body. The gun changes the arithmetic of the room. No one leaves. No one calls anyone. They are now participants, and Chad is the one holding the weapon. The argument about the police is over. The debate about what to do is over. There is a gun, and there is a man holding it, and he has made his decision, and everyone else has to live inside it.

Chad directs the group to wrap Elias's body in plastic. The instruction is practical and obscene, and they follow it. They wrap a man they knew, a man who was alive an hour ago, in sheets of plastic, and the act of it is so mundane and so terrible that it seems to belong to a different world than the one they woke up in. Erica tries to scrub out the blood. She works at the stain, and she fails. The blood does not come out. Her effort is useless, and the failure is its own kind of horror, the evidence refusing to disappear no matter how hard she tries. She scrubs and scrubs, and the stain remains, and the permanence of it is a message she cannot ignore.

Liv gets sick. The body, the blood, the gun, all of it overwhelms her, and she is forced to leave her phone behind. The phone stays in the room, a small piece of her left behind with the others. Beckie slips away for wine. In the middle of a death and a cleanup, she goes for a drink, and the smallness of the act against the size of what is happening is its own kind of indictment. She does not help. She does not grieve. She pours herself a glass, and the gesture says something about her that no one has time to name.

Erica realizes the betrayal and the warning to leave may have meant for good, not just tonight. The thought arrives with terrible clarity. Joslyn's warning was not about the evening's danger. It was about something larger, something that extends past this room and this night. The realization reframes the entire evening, and it comes too late to act on. She sees it now, the shape of it, the way the warning was not a single alarm but a door that was being held open for her, and she did not walk through it, and now the door is closed.

Chad seizes Beckie's wine. He takes it from her and orders her to help Erica with the stain. The order is contemptuous, and it puts Beckie where he wants her, on her knees with the blood. Beckie apologizes to Erica while dabbing uselessly at the blood. The apology is small and inadequate, and it does nothing. Erica keeps scrubbing. She does not stop, and she does not answer, and the two of them stay there with the stain that will not come out.

The Scream in the Hallway

Beckie approaches Erica with an apology for her drunken behavior, wanting forgiveness and a way back to whatever they had before. She wants the slate wiped clean, wants the friendship restored, wants to be told that the things she said and did do not matter. Erica refuses to engage at all, and the refusal lands like a door closing. Beckie gets nothing, no absolution, no foothold, and the distance between them hardens into something permanent. Erica does not yell. She does not explain. She simply does not give Beckie what she is asking for, and the absence of a response is more final than any words could have been.

Chad pushes the group back to the task at hand. He forces them to keep wrapping Elias's body, driven by a single calculation: none of them can afford prison. Every pass of the plastic tightens not just the corpse but their collective guilt. They are all in it now, hands and all. The wrapping continues because stopping is no longer an option, and each layer of plastic is another layer of complicity, another thing they have done that cannot be undone.

Then a scream tears through the hallway. Derek and Chad snap toward the sound, and the group's focus lurches from hiding a body to Liv's safety. Concealment stops mattering.

Part 3 - Chapters 12 to 16

The Gun in Liv's Hands

Liv grabs Chad's gun and points it at the group. She wants only to feel safe, but the moment the weapon is aimed at them, everyone's fear redirects onto her. The room turns against Chad for having brought the gun in the first place, and the fragile trust holding the group together begins to splinter. What had been a shared terror of the unseen now has a visible focal point, and that focal point is Liv holding a weapon she never wanted to touch. The others look at her differently now, not as the grieving woman who lost her brother, but as someone who could hurt them. Chad's decision to bring the gun into the condo, made in the name of protection, has now made everyone less safe. The group's cohesion, already strained by the impossible events of the night, cracks further as accusations and suspicion replace whatever solidarity remained.

Erica speaks up, admitting she saw something in the bathroom mirror. She offers this to calm Liv, to show her she is not alone in witnessing the impossible, but the confession has the opposite effect. It confirms Liv's worst fear: what she saw was real. The dread in the room thickens, no longer deniable as one person's panic. Erica's attempt at solidarity becomes a confirmation of everything they have been trying to dismiss. The mirror was not a trick of the light, not a stress-induced hallucination, not a momentary lapse. It was real, and Erica saw it too. Now the group cannot pretend anymore. The supernatural is not something happening to one person; it is happening to all of them, and the weight of that realization presses down on everyone in the room.

Chad demands his gun back. He wants control, the one thing he has been clinging to since the power went out. Liv refuses. She accuses him of murder, throwing the word at him in front of everyone, and the accusation lands hard. Chad does not get his gun. The word hangs in the air, impossible to take back. Murder. Not accident, not self-defense, not a tragic mistake. Murder. Liv has named what she believes Chad did to Elias, and she has done it publicly, stripping away any chance of private resolution. Chad's authority, already fragile, crumbles further. He cannot command, he cannot threaten, and now he cannot even reclaim the weapon he brought. The group watches the confrontation, and whatever trust remained between them fractures along this new fault line.

Then the lights go out.

In the darkness, the gun fires. When the lights return, Derek is dead, shot in the head. No one is sure who is still standing, who pulled the trigger, or what happened in those seconds of blackness. Liv finds him. She wants it not to be true, wants the image to be something she can unsee, but it breaks her completely. In her grief, Chad seizes the gun back from her. The darkness took only seconds, but in those seconds everything changed. Derek, who moments ago was standing among them, is now on the floor with a bullet in his skull. The question of who fired the shot cannot be answered because no one saw. The gun was in Liv's hands when the lights went out, but Chad has it now, and the confusion of those dark seconds will never be fully resolved. Liv's grief is total. She has lost Derek the way she lost Elias, suddenly and violently, and the sight of his body breaks something inside her that may never be repaired. Chad takes advantage of her collapse to reclaim the gun, and no one stops him.

Zach checks Derek for signs of life. He wants to deny the death, to find a pulse, a breath, anything. There is nothing. Derek is gone, and the confirmation leaves the group in stunned silence. Zach's hands search for what cannot be found. He presses fingers to Derek's wrist, then his neck, then leans close to listen for breathing that will not come. The wound is unmistakable, the stillness absolute. When Zach finally speaks, his voice carries the weight of a truth no one wants to hear. Derek is dead. There is no ambiguity, no hope of revival, no chance that this is another trick of the condo. The group stands in silence, processing a loss that should be impossible but has become their reality.

Chad takes control again. He wants to hide the bodies, to contain the evidence of what has happened before anyone can find them. Liv is drowning in grief, but Chad's orders force the others to move. They follow, because doing something is better than sitting with what they have just seen. Chad's instinct for self-preservation kicks in, and he begins issuing instructions as if he has authority, as if the gun in his hand gives him the right to command. The others obey not because they believe in him but because motion is preferable to stillness, because any action is better than confronting the horror of Derek's body and Elias's body and the impossible situation they are trapped in. They move furniture, they discuss where to put the bodies, they try to think like people who can still control their circumstances. It is a fiction, but it is a fiction that keeps them from collapsing.

A knock at the door. Ron identifies himself as building management, there to investigate the gunshot. The group is trapped between two impossible choices: hide what they have done or answer the door and explain. Chad and Zach drag Elias's body behind the couch, trying to conceal it, but the effort is clumsy and incomplete. Blood remains. Parts of the body are still exposed. The concealment fails. Ron's voice comes through the door, calm and professional, asking if everything is all right. The group freezes. They cannot hide two bodies in seconds, cannot clean blood from the floor, cannot invent a story that explains a gunshot and a corpse. Chad and Zach shove Elias behind the couch, but the couch is not tall enough, not deep enough, and the blood on the floor tells its own story. Anyone who enters will see. The concealment is a gesture, not a solution, and everyone knows it.

Erica tries to open the door for Ron. She wants to defuse the situation, to talk their way out before it escalates. The door will not open. It does not budge, no matter what she does. Ron, receiving no answer and no explanation, says he is calling the police. Erica's hand grips the handle, turns it, pulls, and nothing happens. The door is locked in a way that has nothing to do with locks. She tries again, harder, and the door remains immovable. Ron's voice grows more concerned, then more official. He tells them he is calling the police, and his footsteps retreat down the hallway. The group is left with the knowledge that outside help is coming, but the condo will not let them leave to meet it. They are trapped between the threat of discovery and the impossibility of escape.

Then the group's personal objects begin to ignite, one by one. The possessions they brought into the condo catch fire on their own, demanding attention, forcing them to react. Beckie is burned. The haunting is no longer something that happens in mirrors or in the dark. It is active, physical, and it is hurting them. A phone bursts into flame. A jacket smolders. A bag catches fire. The objects that belong to them, that they carried into this place, are turning against them. Beckie reaches for something, tries to save something, and the fire takes her skin. Her scream cuts through the room, and suddenly the threat is not just psychological, not just spiritual. It is burning them. The group scrambles to put out fires, to protect themselves, to understand what is happening. The condo is not content to haunt them. It wants to hurt them.

Erica realizes the condo will not let them leave. She wants to explain the locked door, to give the group a framework for what is happening, and the realization shifts them from panic into a colder understanding: they are trapped. The building itself is holding them. Erica speaks the words aloud, and they land with the weight of truth. The door did not fail to open. The door was prevented from opening. The condo is not a place they are staying. It is a place that is keeping them. The shift in understanding is subtle but profound. They are not dealing with a haunting that can be waited out or escaped. They are dealing with a force that has intent, that has power, and that has decided they will not leave. The panic does not disappear, but it changes. It becomes colder, more calculating, the panic of people who know they are in a trap.

Chad dismisses the supernatural explanation. He wants to regain control, to insist there is a rational answer, but his refusal isolates him. The others turn to Erica's theory because it is the only one that fits what they are living through. Chad insists there must be another explanation. The door jammed. The fires were electrical. The mirror was a trick. But no one believes him anymore. The evidence is too overwhelming, too consistent, too impossible to explain away. Chad's refusal to accept reality separates him from the group. They look to Erica now, because Erica is the one who is trying to understand, who is offering a framework that makes sense of the senseless. Chad is left alone with his denial, and the gun in his hand no longer gives him authority. It only marks him as the one who cannot see what everyone else has accepted.

Erica proposes repeating the séance in reverse. She wants to close what they opened, to undo the ritual that started all of this. It is a desperate plan, but it is a plan, and the group latches onto it. If the séance opened a door, perhaps the séance can close it. If the ritual invited something in, perhaps reversing the ritual can send it back. Erica does not know if it will work. She does not know if the logic holds. But it is the only idea anyone has, and the group needs something to hold onto. They agree to try. They will return their objects, say their names, reverse the steps that brought them to this nightmare. It is a thin hope, but it is hope, and in a situation with no good options, they take it.

They return their objects and say their names, trying to reverse the ritual. It fails. Nothing changes. They are no safer than before. The objects are placed, the names are spoken, and the room remains exactly as it was. The door does not open. The fires do not stop. The presence does not leave. The ritual that was supposed to undo the damage does nothing at all. The group stands in the aftermath of their failed attempt, and the hope that sustained them drains away. They tried the one thing that made sense, and it did not work. Now they are back where they started, except worse, because now they know that the simple solution is not a solution at all.

Chad grabs the gun and tries to shoot the lock. He wants to force an escape, to blast through the door and get out. The unseen force takes him. He is torn apart and killed, right in front of the others, and the group is left with nothing but the knowledge that the condo will not be escaped by force. Chad raises the gun, aims at the door, and fires. The bullet does not hit the lock. It does not hit the door. It does not hit anything, because before it can, Chad is no longer standing. The force that has been haunting them, that has been waiting in the shadows and the mirrors and the darkness, takes him. It takes him apart. It tears him, piece by piece, in front of everyone, and there is nothing anyone can do but watch. The gun falls to the floor. Chad is gone. The message is clear: the condo cannot be fought. It cannot be forced. It cannot be escaped by violence. The group is left with the body of the man who tried to control everything, and the knowledge that control is an illusion here.

Erica decides she has to search Elias's duffel bag for a way out, and the moment costs her. Confronting the Ouija board inside drags up memories of Joslyn, and dread settles over her before she can act. Then recognition cuts through the fear: the board is a means to contact her sister. Fear shifts into resolve. She will ask Joslyn for help. Erica opens the bag, and the board is there, waiting. The sight of it brings back everything she has tried to bury: the séances she and Joslyn performed as children, the games they played with forces they did not understand, the sister she lost and the guilt she has carried ever since. For a moment, the memories are too heavy, and she cannot move. But then she understands. The board is not just a reminder of what she lost. It is a way to reach Joslyn.

Part 4 - Chapters 17 to 21

The Rolex

Erica stares at Chad's severed arm and understands what has to be done. The Rolex is still on his wrist, and the ritual requires it. She has to retrieve it. The horror of touching his severed limb nearly overwhelms her, but she forces herself forward. She reaches for the arm, unclasps the watch from Chad's wrist, and pulls it free. In that moment, something shifts inside her. She is no longer a bystander watching events unfold. She is an active participant, her hands now as complicit as anyone else's in the room. The watch is the final component the ritual demands. Without it, the entire night would have been pointless. With it, everything becomes possible, and everything becomes dangerous. Erica does not allow herself to think about what she is doing. She does not allow herself to look at Chad's face or to consider what he was before he became this. She simply takes what is needed and steps back, her heart pounding, her hands trembling, the Rolex heavy in her palm.

With the Rolex in hand, Erica rings the bell. The sound cuts through the room, and she instructs everyone to touch the slab. One by one, they comply, placing their hands on the stone surface. The act commits them all to the ritual. Whatever is about to happen, they have all chosen to be part of it. Each hand that joins the circle is a silent agreement that they will see this through to whatever end awaits them. The bell's echo fades, and in its place a silence settles over the room, thick and expectant, as though the air itself is holding its breath. They stand together around the slab, their fingers pressed to the cold stone, and they wait.

The Ritual Ignites

The objects on and around the slab ignite with controlled flames. The fire does not spread wildly. It burns with purpose, each flame holding its shape as if guided by an unseen hand. Erica watches and feels something she has not felt in a long time: hope. The ritual is working. The flames are proof that the forces they are invoking are responding. For a brief moment, it seems as though they might actually succeed. The fire dances across the objects without consuming them, licking at the edges of things in a way that defies everything she knows about how fire behaves. It is beautiful and terrible at once, and she cannot look away. She thinks of everything they have sacrificed to reach this point, everything they have lost, and she allows herself to believe that it might have been worth it.

Then the room revolts. Objects begin flying through the air, torn from their places by an invisible force. The flames still burn, but the chaos around them reveals the truth: the ritual is not going as planned. Whatever they have awakened is not simply obeying their commands. It is reacting, lashing out, and the room has become a storm of uncontrolled energy. Furniture scrapes across the floor. Glass shatters against walls. The air fills with the sound of things breaking and the smell of something burning that should not be burning. The survivors duck and cover, shielding their faces from debris, trying to stay close to the slab even as the world around them comes apart. The hope Erica felt only moments ago curdles into something closer to dread.

Elias's body jerks violently and then drops. The sight of it makes clear that the forces at work are far beyond their control. Whatever is moving through the room has power they cannot direct or contain. The ritual has taken on a life of its own. Elias was part of this, perhaps the one who understood it best, and now he lies still on the floor while the energy he helped summon rages around him. No one moves to help him. No one can. The storm is too strong, the forces too wild, and all they can do is hold on and wait for it to end.

The Flames Go Out

One by one, the flames extinguish. Each dying fire signals that the ritual is nearing its completion. The room grows darker and quieter with every flame that vanishes. The end is approaching, but what that end will bring remains uncertain. The survivors watch the last fires flicker and fade, and in the growing darkness they can feel something building, something gathering at the edges of perception, as though the room itself is being reshaped around them. The silence that follows each extinguished flame is deeper than the one before, until at last there is no light at all and no sound except their own breathing.

Outside, police pound on the door. Their voices carry through the walls, announcing themselves and demanding entry. They threaten to break in if the door is not opened. The survivors inside are trapped between the ritual reaching its conclusion and the authorities about to force their way in. There is no time to explain, no time to hide what they have done, no time to do anything but stand frozen in the dark and listen to the fists hammering against the wood. The police have no idea what they are walking into. They have no idea what is waiting on the other side of that door.

The power cuts out. The door splinters inward, and darkness swallows the room. In that same moment, the final flame goes out. The threshold has been sealed. Whatever the ritual was meant to accomplish, it is done. The timing is exact, almost as though the two events were connected, as though the breaking of the door and the dying of the last flame were always meant to happen together. The room is black and silent, and then the flashlights come.

The Police Storm In

Police storm through the broken door with guns drawn, shouting orders for everyone to freeze. Flashlights cut through the darkness, finding the survivors and turning them instantly into suspects. The officers take in the scene: the slab, the scattered objects, the people standing over it. Everything about the tableau screams guilt. The broken furniture, the strange markings, the smell of smoke and something else, something older and harder to name. The survivors raise their hands, blink in the sudden light, try to explain, but the officers are not listening. They are securing a scene, not conducting a conversation.

Then they find the bodies. Officers discover Elias and Derek under blankets. What began as a response to a disturbance is now a multiple homicide investigation. The stakes escalate with every passing second. The blankets are pulled back, and the officers see what has been done, and their faces change. This is no longer a noise complaint or a welfare check. This is something else entirely, something that will require evidence bags and crime scene tape and phone calls to people higher up the chain. The survivors watch the officers' expressions harden, and they understand that nothing they say now will make any difference.

An officer locates Chad's gun among his remains and secures it. The survivors are no longer just witnesses to a strange scene. They are armed threats in the eyes of the police. The red-faced officer, his voice tight with authority, orders all four of them cuffed and taken to the station. They are now official suspects in a murder investigation. The handcuffs click shut around their wrists, cold and final, and they are led out of the house one by one, past the broken door, past the flashing lights, past the neighbors who have gathered to watch. The night air is cold on their faces, and the world outside the house looks different now, larger and more dangerous, as though they have crossed some invisible line and can never go back.

The Interrogation Room

At the station, the four of them are placed in an interrogation room. The pressure to protect themselves is immense. They could lie, could craft a story that distances them from what happened. But Erica insists they tell the truth. She chooses honesty over self-protection, even knowing that the truth sounds like madness. She knows what the truth will cost them. She knows that no one will believe them, that the story they have to tell is the kind of story that ends with locked doors and quiet rooms and people who never see the sun again. But she also knows that lies have a way of unraveling, and that the only thing worse than being thought insane is being caught in a lie that makes you look guilty. So she tells them to tell the truth, and they listen, because she has led them this far and they have no one else to follow.

Then Beckie speaks. She reveals that she was the last to touch the slab. The weight of that admission lands on everyone in the room. Beckie was the final point of contact, the last hand on the stone before the ritual completed. She is the entity's host. The thing they invited into the world is inside her. The words hang in the air, and no one knows what to say. They look at Beckie, really look at her, searching for some sign of what she has become, some visible mark of the thing that now shares her body. But she looks the same as she always has. She sounds the same. She is still Beckie, and yet she is not, and the contradiction is impossible to hold in their minds.

The revelation is cut short by screams from outside the interrogation room. Officers are being torn apart. The sounds of violence and chaos filter through the walls, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. The entity was invited to stay, and now it is proving that no locked door, no police force, and no interrogation room can contain it. Beckie sits among them, and the thing that came through the ritual is with her still. The screams rise and fall and then stop, and in the silence that follows, the survivors sit in their chairs and wait, because there is nothing else to do. The door is locked. The room is small. And whatever is outside is coming closer.

The Old House

Miles away, Kristin and Patrick drive their family toward their new home. As they pass two neighbors, the women stop laughing and stare. Kristin feels the chill of being watched. Patrick waves and tells everyone to keep waving, determined to seem normal even when no one waves back. Kristin remembers the city house, the front door found standing open, the certainty that someone had been inside, the fear that drove them to sell and run. Hailey complains about the neighbors, and Patrick brushes it off as small-town curiosity, nothing more. The road stretches ahead of them, lined with trees and fields and houses that seem to watch as they pass.

They arrive at the old house and find a station wagon parked in the driveway. Patrick hesitates at the front door, but Kristin insists this is their house and opens it. Inside, they hear the Realtor talking as if to someone else, though no one is there. Lanie introduces herself and launches into selling the house, while Hailey slips away to pick her room. Lanie reveals the garage door motor is broken and the house is sold as is, forcing Patrick to swallow an expensive fix he did not plan for. Kristin notices a black goose on the pond and feels it is out of place, a wrong note that mirrors her own unease. The house creaks and settles around them, and the sound is not comforting. It is the sound of something old and tired, something that has been waiting a long time for new occupants and is not yet sure what to make of them.

Patrick boasts that the house is too good to be true, while Kristin worries about her unfinished painting and her shaking hands. She asks why the house stayed on the market so long, and Lanie blames the location, the acreage, and the home's age. Then Hailey screams from her room, and Kristin and Patrick run in panic. Hailey reveals she screamed because there is no cell service, which enrages Patrick and upsets Henry. Lanie tells them they will need satellite internet and offers a manual gate lock for security. Patrick dismisses the gate lock, but Kristin feels a shiver as the house creaks around them. The shiver stays with her as they stand in the hallway, as Lanie talks about internet options and security features, as Patrick makes jokes about being off the grid. The house is theirs now, or it will be soon. Kristin looks out the window at the pond and the trees beyond it, and she wonders if they have made a terrible mistake.