Chapter 8
Chapter 8: The Tapping in the Dark
I didn't wait to find out if Mark was telling the truth. I grabbed Sophie from the hospital the moment she was cleared, threw our lives into a rental car, and drove six hours north. We fled to a secluded, off-grid cabin owned by my late father in the dense woods of upstate New York. I threw away our cell phones, bought burners, cut off all internet access, and lived in a state of absolute, suffocating paranoia.
For the first forty-eight hours, it felt like we could breathe. Sophie seemed to be returning to normal. She laughed at the squirrels outside, ate her pancakes, and drew pictures of bright yellow butterflies at the wooden kitchen table. I began to convince myself that the drug was washing out of her system, that love and safety would heal her.
Then, on the fourth night, the silence of the woods was shattered.
I woke up abruptly at 3:14 AM to a strange, hyper-rhythmic tapping sound echoing from the darkness of the living room. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
I grabbed a heavy iron flashlight from the nightstand, my heart hammering against my ribs, and crept out of the bedroom. The cabin was freezing, the moonlight throwing long, skeletal shadows across the floorboards.
Sophie was sitting cross-legged in the exact center of the room. She wasn't holding her bunny. She was staring blankly at the blank, dark wall.
Her small fingers were moving across the floorboards with terrifying, unnatural speed, tapping out a highly complex, mathematical sequence. Tap-tap-tap. Pause. Tap.
"Sophie?" I whispered, my voice trembling as I knelt beside her, lowering the flashlight so I wouldn't blind her.
She didn't blink. Her eyes were completely wide, her pupils so dilated that the blue of her irises had nearly vanished. When she spoke, the voice that came out of her mouth didn't sound like my sweet, shy five-year-old girl. It was completely flat, perfectly metered, and devoid of cadence.
"The sequence is incomplete," she murmured to the dark wall. "The chemical timer didn't beep. We have to go back into the water, Mommy. The water keeps the walls up."
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"What walls, baby? Tell Mommy," I wept, gently touching her trembling shoulder.
She turned her head toward me with a slow, mechanical precision. A single, silent tear rolled down her pale cheek. "The walls that keep the bad men from waking up inside my head. If the water stays gone... the walls come down."
