Chapter 16: The Dog From The Window

The borrowed peace lasted until Jasper went upstairs.

Apricot stayed on the couch a few minutes longer, listening to the house settle. Their mother was somewhere over the ocean by now, halfway through her long-haul to Castor. Their father had left that morning for a two-week engineering contract in Seto Province. The schedule had overlapped by accident, Winifred apologizing over the phone while Apricot assured her it was fine, she could handle things.

She climbed the stairs and shut herself in her room. The monitor’s glow washed everything pale blue. Her homework waited on screen, half-finished: a report on state media’s role in civil society. She’d been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes.

The role of media in civil society is to control the collective narrative and to propel people in a positive direction. The advancement of—

Everything she typed sounded like sanitized propaganda. That was, of course, the point. Obedience dressed as scholarship. She added another hollow sentence and sat back, rubbing her eyes.

Behind her, the bedroom door creaked open.

She didn’t look. Jasper never slept well when their parents were gone.

He crossed the room and dropped onto her bed hard enough to make the springs groan. “Jasper.” She twisted halfway around in her chair. “Don’t break my bed.”

He was already burrowed under her covers, only his eyes showing above the comforter. “I’m not doing anything.”

Apricot turned back to the screen. She murmured the textbook passage under her breath, trying to force the words to stick. In modern society, state journalists must maintain the stability of the nation by—

“Apricot?”

He only used that voice when something was actually bothering him. She stopped and turned. In the lamplight, worry pulled tight across his face, his fingers twisting the bedsheet into knots.

“Is it likely there’ll be more terrorist attacks?”

Her stomach tightened. So that was it. The attack she’d lived through, the one that bore no resemblance to the official story, had left its mark on both of them. The news only made it worse. Endless coverage of similar “attacks,” each more bizarre and catastrophic than the last. Apricot saw the pattern: paranormal disasters, clumsily repackaged by a State scrambling for control.

“I hope not,” she said. “You never know, though.”

Silence held the room. Then, quieter: “Was it scary? The attack, I mean.”

Darkness. Black fluid. Hollow eyes too close, shrieking as if the world were tearing. She locked the image away before it could spread.

“Very,” she said. She picked up her textbook. “I don’t have time to talk now, Jazz. I have to finish this paper.” Half wanting to protect him from the subject. Half needing to protect herself.

“Can’t you do it later?”

“No. I played games with you earlier, now I have to finish.” She raised the book to eye level.

Jasper sighed, the sound heavy and theatrical. Apricot let thirty seconds pass.

“Jasper. Go to your room.”

“Can’t I stay here?”

She groaned. “Yeah. But you have to be quiet.”

“Ok,” he chirped.

She found her place in the text and started reading again. She’d gotten through exactly one sentence before she felt him lean over her shoulder, peering at the page with restless curiosity.

“Jasper.”

“I was just wondering what it was about!”

She pointed at the door. “Out.”

“I was just—”

“Out. It’s past your bedtime.”

He slid off the bed and bolted for the hallway. At the door he spun. “You’re such a jerk!” he yelled, loud enough to rattle the frame, and disappeared.

The echo stung. Apricot winced, then sighed and closed her door. She walked back to her desk and sat down.

The house settled into stillness. She stared at the textbook without absorbing it. A faint ticking drifted up from the living-room clock.

Silly kid, she thought. Thought he was going to make a fool out of me.

She managed one more dry paragraph before a soft knock broke the quiet.

She opened the door. Jasper stood in the dim hallway, arms wrapped around himself. He looked smaller than he had minutes ago, hair rumpled, eyes wide and glassy.

“There’s a dog in my room,” he said. His voice was thin.

Apricot stared. “You’ve been bringing home stray dogs again.”

Jasper shook his head, the words tumbling fast. “The window was open. I didn’t even realize it was open. I think it came through the window.”

“On a two-story house,” Apricot said flatly. “Of course.” She folded her arms. “Are you really expecting me to believe that? I don’t have time for this, Jazz.”

“I’m not lying.” His voice cracked. “There is a dog in my room.” He swallowed. “It has a lot of teeth. And red eyes.”

Something in those two words sent a thin blade of unease down her spine. She stamped it out.

“Then go downstairs.”

“Apricot!” His shout rang down the dark hallway. Raw. Desperate.

Her temper, already worn paper-thin, tore. “Downstairs, Jasper. Don’t bother me again or I will ground you when our parents get home.”

“But Apricot—” He clutched his fists to his chest, eyes bright with tears.

“No. I’ve heard enough. Go downstairs and let me study.”

She stomped her foot. Jasper flinched as though struck, then fled down the stairs. His footsteps shook the quiet house.

Apricot shut her door and leaned her forehead against the wood. Guilt pressed in, but she pushed it aside and returned to her desk.

She reached for the book. Opened it to the marked page. Stared at the words.

A few minutes passed. Then she heard a stirring from Jasper’s room. She smiled faintly. Still at it.

The crash came a second later.

Not a bump. Not a knock. A heavy, splintering impact, like a shelf driven into the floor.

Apricot was on her feet before the sound finished. She tore into the hallway.

“Jasper! What are you doing?”

His door stood open. The room beyond was black.

She slapped the light switch. Nothing. The hall behind her glowed warm and steady, but Jasper’s room stayed swallowed in dark.

The air hit her first. Cold. Not the draft from an open window. A wet, bone-deep cold that had no business inside a heated house. Her breath came out white.

She stepped inside. Her foot struck something. Jasper’s prized model shelf lay splintered across the floor, figurines and paint bottles scattered like shrapnel. It looked as though something had plowed through it.

“Jasper?”

No answer. A draft ghosted past her ankles. Across the room, the window gaped wide, curtains stirring in the night air.

The room didn’t feel empty. It felt vacated. As if something had rearranged itself the moment she entered.

Her hand found a familiar weight leaning against the doorframe. Jasper’s baseball bat. She lifted it, and the polished wood felt solid and blessedly ordinary in her grip.

Then she saw the eyes.

Red. Multiple. Low to the ground, clustered in the far corner where the shadows pooled deepest. They blinked awake out of sync, like embers shifting in a dying fire, and settled on her.

Her breath stopped.

She knew what this was. She’d seen things like it before, things that didn’t belong in the world of the living. Shapes in the dark she had barely survived.

Phantom.

And Jasper had tried to tell her. She’d sent him downstairs alone.

“Jasper!” she called, her voice cracking. “Jasper, answer me!”

Only the creature’s rough breathing answered. And the whisper of curtains in the cold.

She couldn’t tell if Jasper was hiding somewhere in the room or if he’d already fled. Either way, the thing crouched between her and the window, and she stood between it and the rest of the house.

Apricot raised the bat. Her hands shook. She remembered softball drills, the muscle memory buried under years of disuse. Feet set. Shoulders loose.

Just like softball.

The thing growled. Low, wet, resonant enough to vibrate in her ribs. When it opened its jaws, she saw too many teeth, jagged, layered, catching the faint streetlight like broken glass.

Then it lunged.

She didn’t think. She swung.

The bat connected with its open mouth and the jolt shot through her shoulders. Something cracked. The creature’s charge knocked sideways, it skidded past her and slammed into the doorframe hard enough to splinter wood. Wet fragments scattered across the hallway light.

Teeth. She’d knocked teeth out of it.

It recovered fast. Before she could set her feet, it was on her again, a streak of shadow closing low. Jaws clamped around her left forearm. Needles of pain punched through her sleeve and into flesh.

She screamed. The force threw her backward into the wall. A poster ripped free and fluttered past her face. The creature’s weight bore down, trying to drag her to the floor, and the cold rolling off its body was so intense her fingers went numb around the bat.

She swung one-handed. The bat cracked against its skull. Once. The lights flickered. Twice. Its jaw loosened just enough. She wrenched her arm free, sleeve tearing away in its teeth.

The phantom shook itself. Drew back. Its eyes burned hotter.

Apricot didn’t wait. She couldn’t afford another exchange. Her arm was bleeding and her grip was failing and the thing was already gathering itself for another charge.

It sprang.

She stepped into it. Not brave. Desperate. The bat came down in a wild overhead arc and caught the creature mid-leap. The impact buckled her knees. The phantom hit the floor and its body rippled, solid mass stuttering into smoke.

She hit it again. And again. Each blow shuddered through the bat and her arms ached and her vision narrowed to nothing but the dark shape writhing on the floorboards. The air burned sharp with ozone. The lights strobed.

The phantom’s form collapsed inward, then burst outward in a rush of black smoke that streamed past her and poured through the open window.

The lights snapped on. Steady. Ordinary.

Jasper’s room looked brutally normal. Wrecked, but normal. No shadow-creature. No red eyes. Just a broken shelf, scattered debris, and Apricot on her knees with a baseball bat and blood running down her arm.

She dropped the bat. It hit the floor with a dead thud.

Her hands were shaking. All of her was shaking.

A creak at the doorway.

Jasper stood half-hidden behind the frame, ghost-pale, eyes enormous. He looked at the room. The broken shelf. The debris. The streaks of blood. Then he looked at her, collapsed and trembling, sleeve torn open, arm punctured.

“I told you there was a dog,” he whispered.

Apricot nodded. Her eyes were as wide as his.

For several seconds neither of them moved.

“We can’t tell Mom or Dad,” she said.

Jasper was shaking. “Where did it go?”

“Out the window.” She pushed herself upright using the bedframe. Her legs nearly buckled. Jasper rushed forward and caught her elbow. His fingers were warm against her cold skin.

“Keep your window closed from now on,” she said. “I’ll keep mine closed too.”

Jasper looked around the room. It was destroyed. Model pieces littered the floor, the shelf was cracked, dark stains smeared the boards where the thing had been.

“What are we going to tell Mom and Dad?”

Apricot steadied herself. “We clean this up before they get home. They can’t know, Jazz. They wouldn’t believe us even if we told the truth. And you, mister, will get in trouble for bringing in a stray dog.”

“But I didn’t!” Jasper’s voice rose.

“I know. But they’ll think I’m covering for you if I tell them it came in through your window. Then we’re both in trouble.” She looked at the mess. “We clean up and we forget it happened.”

Jasper’s gaze dropped to her arm. Blood had soaked through her orange shirt, dark and spreading. “It bit you,” he said. “Are you all right?”

She glanced at the wound. The sleeve was shredded. Crescent punctures ringed her forearm, swollen and ugly, but when she flexed her fingers, everything moved. The pain was a dull, steady throb beneath the fading adrenaline.

“It got me when I was trying to shoo it away,” she said. “It’s not a big deal.”

The lie came easily. They all did, lately. She was building a second life out of lies, a clean version of events she could hand to anyone who asked. The guilt of it sat low in her chest, but the alternative was worse. Jasper didn’t need to carry what she carried.

“Come on,” she said, picking up a broken model piece. “Let’s get this done.”

“You have to study,” Jasper said. His voice quivered.

Apricot looked at him. His face was too solemn for a kid his age. She reached out and took his hand, rubbing his knuckles with her thumb.

“It doesn’t matter now.”

They worked in silence. Brother and sister moving through the wreckage in an exhausted rhythm, broken only by the soft clink of debris dropped into the trash bin. Apricot swept up the ruined models while Jasper righted the cracked shelf and pushed it against the wall, conveniently hiding a dark stain they couldn’t scrub out of the floorboards. They wiped down surfaces, rearranged books and toys to disguise the damage, latched the window with forceful finality.

After nearly an hour, the room looked passable. Not untouched. But it would survive a glance.

Apricot sat on Jasper’s bed. Exhaustion hit her all at once. She’d wrapped her arm in gauze from the bathroom, clumsy and tight, and dark blotches were already blooming through the white.

“We should get some sleep,” she murmured.

Jasper’s eyes flicked to the window, then back to her. “Can I stay in your room tonight?”

“Yeah. Of course you can.”

She offered her good hand. He took it. Together they stepped into the hallway and shut the door on the wreckage.

Jasper settled on the floor beside her bed with a pillow and a spare blanket, the same way he used to during thunderstorms when he was small. Apricot tucked the blanket around him and collapsed onto her mattress.

Every muscle ached. The wound pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Her mind, though, wouldn’t rest. It circled one thought, cold and precise beneath the exhaustion:

It came to the house.

Not to a street. Not to a public place where she’d stumbled into something she shouldn’t have seen. To her home. To Jasper’s room.

They knew where she lived.

She stared at the ceiling and listened to Jasper’s breathing slow as he fell asleep.

“Good night, Jazz,” she whispered.

The house was quiet. The window was locked. And the dark outside looked maddeningly, impossibly normal.