The fire had eaten everything, or so they thought.
The shell of the Harrington estate was a ruin, blackened ribs of a once-majestic home clawing toward the sky, coughing smoke and silence. But amid the ashes, something moved.
A hand, burnt, trembling, flesh bubbling like candle wax, pushed itself from the basement trapdoor beneath what was left of the floorboards. Michael Harrington emerged, not as a man, but as something reborn. His body was twisted, his face melted at the edges, yet behind his blistered eyes burned purpose.
The blaze hadn't destroyed him. It had refined him. He vanished for weeks.
But the nightmares never stopped for the survivors. Officer Lance, a man who had seen far too much and still felt powerless, stood at the site days later. Rain slicked the soot-smeared debris. His boots sank slightly into the mud, heavy with the weight of confusion and guilt.
He remembered the reports. A massacre. Eyewitnesses ranting about monsters. A woman is floating. Children with stitched eyes. He'd heard Kevin and Missy's desperate retellings. Every word they said made his skin crawl—but he couldn't file away monsters and grief as an official cause.
Yet… something inside him stirred. A whisper beneath logic. Maybe not all of it was madness. And somewhere far from the charred skeleton of the house, Michael Harrington was already at work.
He returned as a man who blended into crowds. The face he wore was stretched skin—stitched and shaped to seem human. It was enough. He rented a small lot at the corner of Gallagher Street. The windows were dark. The store's sign read:
"NEW LIFE: Restoration & Repair"
The city passed by, unaware of the irony.
He hired help. People who wouldn't ask questions. The lonely. The desperate. The invisible.
One of them was a young man named Markie. Seventeen. He'd run from foster homes, spent nights beneath bridges, eating from dumpsters. Michael found him coughing in the alley behind the store. He offered food. Warmth. A job. He didn't ask questions.
"Can you keep secrets?" he asked, his voice soft as silk wrapping a blade.
He nodded. He was used to secrets.
In the house behind the store—small, ordinary from the street—he built his sanctum. The walls were soundproofed. The floor was tiled in steel. Beneath the house, a basement extended far more profoundly than regulations allow.
There, the work began.
The first room held metal tables, harnesses, and chambers filled with black fluid that writhed like it was alive. A red light always pulsed like a heart in the ceiling.
Michael kept notebooks—hundreds of pages filled with designs, anatomy drawings, and scrawled philosophies.
He wasn't just recreating his wife or avenging his son.
He was building the future.
Each entity began with a body.
He used the failed—those who had vanished from the streets. Workers no one would miss. Wanderers. The discarded.
He injected them with memory. Not theirs. Lukas's.
Markie never saw the basement. She only delivered boxes to the back. He heard strange noises, guttural things. Once, he swore he heard a child crying beneath the floor.
He asked once. Michael only smiled. "We're building something that matters. You'll see."
In the basement, the fluid whispered. The first successful creation came from a boy named Terrance. The experiment fused his skin with strands of burnt paper and melted crayons, memories of Lukas's broken journals and childhood scribbles.
The boy no longer had eyes. Only black, dripping sockets that cried melted wax.
Michael called him Scribble.
The next was made from an old woman who died three days after being taken. Her body couldn't handle the injections, but her vocal cords were preserved. Michael implanted them into a synthetic frame of wire and preserved hair.
She sang lullabies, even in her sleep.
She was Hush-Mama.
More followed. Each entity was more refined. More intelligent. But more unstable.
Some screamed until their faces tore. Some bit through their own hands. Some looked in the mirror and whispered, "Lukas," as if remembering being him. Only a few survived past the first week. But the ones who did… were learning.
Meanwhile, Officer Lance paid a visit to Missy and Kevin again.
They were quieter now. Distant. Missy barely spoke. Kevin only answered in fragments.
"You don't believe us," Missy finally said, her voice dry.
"I believe something happened," Lance admitted. "But monsters? Ghost women? Experiments? It doesn't hold up in court."
"Maybe court's not where the truth belongs," Kevin muttered.
Lance looked at them for a long time.
"What do you think happened to him?" he asked.
"To Michael?"
They were silent.
Kevin finally said, "He's still out there. Somewhere."
Lance nodded.
"Do you think he's still doing it?"
Missy looked up, eyes red and cracked.
"I know he is."
Officer Lance never stopped looking. Even as the reports were buried, even as his captain rolled his eyes and the precinct laughed about "zombie dads and stitched-up moms," Lance kept the photos. The witness statements. The smell of ash still clung to his coat like a memory.
The Harrington file sat in a drawer he never locked. Each night, after the shift, he'd open it. Go over the names. Reread Missy's voice tremble on the transcript.
"He's still out there."
He traced it like scripture.
And when a series of disappearances sparked again—quiet ones, the kind that didn't make the news—he started walking Gallagher's Street.
At first, it was nothing—just dust and neon—cheap grocery stores, a vape shop, and a florist with a decaying awning.
Then he saw it.
NEW LIFE: Restoration & Repair.
A beige storefront that looked too... untouched. The paint is too clean. No graffiti. No foot scuffs. Its glass was tinted, its handle gleamed.
Lance watched it from his unmarked car for three days.
No customers ever walked in.
Just workers, heads down. Sometimes carrying boxes. And a boy named Markie—thin, quiet, about seventeen—who never looked up. Always wore the same gray hoodie. Always seemed half-elsewhere.
One night, long after the street had gone to sleep, Lance returned.
Rain washed the sidewalk like a soft warning. His breath fogged in front of him, and Gallagher's Street held a silence like a held breath.
He stepped out of the car and approached the store.
The door was unlocked.
His flashlight flicked across the floor—dustless. Sterile. Not even footprints. Shelves lined with broken radios, dismantled dolls, old clocks, all marked: "Repaired."
Lance stepped farther in.
There were no footsteps. Only echoes.
He reached the back hallway, the door slightly ajar. Something hummed behind it, deep, electric, like a heartbeat muffled under metal.
He pressed a hand to his holster and pushed the door open.
The hallway stretched longer than it should have.
Fluorescent lights flickered in sequence above him. Buzzing. Almost... breathing.
He felt it before he heard it.
Heat.
Like standing next to an oven. Like the breath of something massive and recently alive.
Then— A sound. A drag. A scrape. Lance turned, flashlight shaking. And there, at the far end of the hall, something stepped into the light.
Burned. Tall. Grinning. Wrath.
His body was slick with heat and muscle, sinews snapping as he moved. The right side of his face had melted like tar. One eye sagged, blind. His claws were blackened, tips scorched as though he had clawed through hellfire to return.
Lance stepped back. Pulled his gun.
Wrath laughed. It was a sound made of rust and animal joy.
"You never stopped," Wrath said, voice bubbling through cracked teeth. "That's what I like about you, officer."
Lance fired. The bullets disappeared into Wrath's chest like they were swallowed by ink. Wrath didn't flinch. Instead, he stepped forward, dragging one claw along the wall, leaving melted gashes in plaster and paint.
"You want to know what I am?" Wrath whispered.
Lance backed into the street, rain hissing against Wrath's burning skin. Steam rose from his body like incense.
"Stay back!" Lance shouted, aiming again. "I swear I'll—"
Wrath was already in front of him.
One claw wrapped around Lance's wrist.
With a flick, the hand detached from the bone. Fingers still clenching the pistol as it hit the pavement. Lance screamed. But Wrath wasn't finished. He lifted Lance by the jaw, holding him inches from his burned face.
"Michael died in that fire," Wrath said. "But I didn't."
He squeezed. Lance's jaw cracked audibly, skin pulling, bones straining. Blood poured like water down his neck.
And then— Wrath opened his mouth and screamed. The scream wasn't just sound. It was the memory.
Burning wood. Screaming children. Lukas is crying for help. Missy's voice begging. The sound of a machine turning flesh to revenge. Lance heard all of it in a second. His eyes rolled back. His nose bled. And Wrath smashed his head into the street, once, twice, until the asphalt cracked and Lance's skull split open like a dropped fruit.
His body twitched once. Then went still. Wrath dropped him like trash.
Stood in the rain. Looked at his burnt claw. And laughed.