Chapter 20: Eastway Park

An hour later, Apricot stood before the padlocked gates of Eastway Park.

Earlier that night she had pored over an issue of Eerie Truths, fixating on a single article: “Paranormal Experiences of Eastway Park.” If Claw Fingers had been real, then maybe the rest of the magazine’s stories were not pure fiction either.

The accounts had lingered. People claimed the park’s trails twisted into an endless labyrinth after sunset, sending late visitors wandering for hours or forever. So many had vanished that the city locked the place down at night. Online forums described shifting geometry, paths rearranging themselves like living things. Others reported shadowy figures pacing through the trees, or a massive squid-like shape drifting soundlessly above the canopy.

The thread ended with a single warning: Whatever’s in Eastway Park, the authorities know more than they’re saying. Enter at your own risk.

Now she was here. Armed. Steady. The gun’s weight against her hip felt like the only honest thing in the city.

She slipped over a low maintenance barrier beside the locked gate and dropped onto the cracked asphalt path inside. Her boots thudded softly, the sound swallowed almost at once.

Silence pressed in.

Behind her, the NO TRESPASSING sign creaked on its hinges, rocking gently in the breeze.

Her breath fogged as she moved deeper. By daylight Eastway was a modest rectangle of green. Under a moonless sky it felt like another place entirely. Towering oaks stretched warped shadows across empty playgrounds and abandoned picnic tables. The path lamps were dead, shut off by the city to keep people out. Only a faint halo from distant streetlights brushed the perimeter, leaving the interior swallowed by darkness.

She followed the main loop, hand hovering near the pistol. An empty fountain rose from the gloom like a drowned monument, its basin choked with dead leaves. She circled it, eyes combing every pocket of shadow. Nothing stirred. The legends claimed the park revealed its tricks only when visitors tried to leave.

And, irritatingly, everything seemed normal. After ten minutes she found herself back at the entrance with no resistance at all. She stopped, let out a frosty huff, and rubbed her arms. Maybe the labyrinth stories were drunken nonsense.

Maybe I should call it a night.

The thought barely surfaced before the familiar tug tightened in her gut. A reporter’s instinct. If Claw Fingers had been real, so could anything else. Urban legends hid their truths in exaggeration.

She was not done.

Turning away from the paved path, Apricot pushed through a patch of overgrown shrubs toward a dense stand of trees at the park’s center. The manicured lawns ended abruptly, giving way to neglected undergrowth. Vines dragged along her sleeves. Briars scraped her jeans. She switched on her phone’s flashlight, its narrow beam slicing across gnarled trunks and mats of ivy.

With each step the city’s noise thinned, fading to a distant hum, as though the thicket were swallowing sound and sealing her off from the world beyond. Then the trees broke, and the flashlight caught concrete. A tunnel mouth gaped in the underbrush, half-choked with creepers. Strange markings surrounded the entrance: spirals, triangles, circles, painted in faded pigment over crumbling brick. They did not look like gang tags. They looked older than the tunnel itself.

If there was a labyrinth, this must be it.

A rancid smell rolled out of the darkness. Sour. Organic. Like meat left in still water. The beam of her phone barely penetrated the first few meters before the dark swallowed it whole.

She drew the pistol and held it with both hands, arms extended, grip tight enough to stop the tremor. It was clumsy. She knew it was clumsy. But it was all she had.

The tunnel swallowed her in three steps. Outside noise vanished as if a door had shut. Only her breathing and the soft scrape of her boots on wet concrete remained. The air was heavier here, dense with moisture and a mineral tang that coated the back of her throat.

The temperature dropped so sharply her breath turned to mist in the phone’s beam. Each cautious step pushed her deeper into suffocating cold. The tunnel walls closed in, slick with condensation and peeling like diseased skin. Strips of paint curled off in long ribbons, exposing brick the color of burned bone.

Graffiti writhed across the walls in the half-light. Crew tags. Obscene scribbles. Faded stencils she did not recognize, warped and stretched down here, as if reacting to the dark.

Her boot splashed.

Apricot froze. The floor was wet.

She angled the light down, and her stomach rolled. A puddle spread across the concrete, dark and reddish, catching the flashlight with a coppery glint. It looked like blood.

No body. No trail. No source.

A warm droplet landed on the back of her neck.

She flinched, choking back a sound, and snapped the light upward.

Thick ropes latticed the ceiling. Huge wet cords as wide as her wrist pulsed in slow waves, red and purple, pumping something through the tunnel itself. Blood glistened inside them, flowing in sluggish tides. Droplets gathered at swollen knots and fell to the floor with soft, obscene pats.

The entire corridor looked faintly alive.

Apricot staggered back. Her mind scrambled for a rational explanation and found none.

Her flashlight flickered.

Then died.

Darkness swallowed her, except for the sickly crimson glow seeping from the ceiling veins, casting the tunnel in a slow, heartbeat-like pulse.

Something moved at the edge of her vision.

Before she could react, something cold closed around her forearm.

She tore herself free, stumbling back. In the dim red pulse, a figure wavered beside her. She raised the pistol with shaking hands.

“Who’s there?”

A woman stepped forward into the murky light.

Ghost-pale and dripping wet, as though she had climbed out of a lake. Her hair hung in stringy clumps around a gaunt face. A tattered dress clung to her as if waterlogged. Her eyes were milky and unfocused. Empty.

Apricot’s finger hovered near the trigger. “Ma’am?” she managed, voice cracking.

The woman shuffled closer. Her bare feet made no sound on the concrete. Her movements were stiff and puppet-like, wrong in a way Apricot could not place. Homeless. Injured. Her mind reached for sanity, but everything about the woman radiated a terrible stillness.

“You scared me,” Apricot said, forcing a thin smile. Her voice vanished into the tunnel, swallowed by the pulsing walls.

The woman did not respond. She tilted her head, slowly, birdlike. Then her jaw sagged open.

The gums were gray. The tongue colorless.

Apricot backed up a step, heart hammering. “How long have you been down here?”

The woman’s lips peeled into a grotesque approximation of a smile.

Then the jaw dropped farther.

With a wet, cracking pop, it unhinged on one side. Flesh tore upward. Her mouth stretched into a macabre crescent as a dark, slick tongue uncoiled from the depths, longer than any human tongue should be, lolling toward Apricot’s face.

Apricot gagged and staggered back, nearly slipping in the puddle beneath her boots.

The tongue snapped back with a wet recoil. The blind white eyes never blinked or shifted, locked on Apricot with cold, predatory intent.

A series of horrible pops echoed through the tunnel as vertebrae stretched beneath thin skin. The woman’s neck elongated, inch by impossible inch. Her head rose higher until her face hovered eight, nine, ten feet above the ground. Her feet remained rooted, but the body stretched grotesquely upward, the dress sliding off her shoulders to reveal a leathery, desiccated torso beneath.

Then the face split.

Starting at the bridge of the nose, pallid flesh parted with a wet tearing sound. The skin peeled away in two drooping sheets, revealing a bleached skull gleaming with slime. Remnants of the former face hung around the bone like soggy drapes.

Apricot screamed and fired.

The muzzle flash painted the horror in stuttering orange. The bullet tore into its shoulder. A chunk of meat and oily ichor sprayed the wall. The phantom did not flinch.

It shrieked and swung one elongated arm. The hand had transformed into a hooked blade of exposed bone.

Apricot dropped instinctively. The scythe ripped through the air above her head, carving a gouge into the tunnel wall and sending stone chips raining down.

Adrenaline took the reins.

She turned and sprinted deeper into the tunnel. Logic no longer mattered. Only survival. The pulsing vein-lights overhead quickened, throbbing as if the tunnel itself thrilled at the hunt. Behind her, the creature’s footfalls slapped and skittered across the stone.

She risked a glance.

The thing was almost on her. Its limbs, now disturbingly long, scrabbled along the floor and ceiling with insect speed. The last scraps of its dress had fallen away, revealing a chitinous brown exoskeleton beneath flayed remnants of human skin. Hooked bone arms scraped sparks from brick. The skull face clicked and gnashed.

Apricot skidded to a halt, spun, and fired.

The tunnel strobed. One bullet pinged off its armored shell. Another punched through a membranous patch of its abdomen, spraying dark fluid. The phantom shrieked but did not slow.

She dove aside as it lunged. A razored limb grazed her arm, ripping a hot line of pain. She crashed to the ground, cheek smacking cold stone. The pistol flew from her grasp and skittered into darkness.

She scrambled backward on all fours, tears blurring her vision. The thing towered over her, rearing back. Its blades gleamed crimson in the pulsing light.

She raised her arms over her face and braced for the end.

A sound cut through the tunnel. Metal on bone. A bright, crackling snap that strobed the corridor blue-white.

The phantom shrieked and recoiled.

Apricot’s eyes flew open. Someone stood between her and the creature. A figure that had not been there a heartbeat ago, holding a slender metal rod that hummed with residual charge. He moved fast, efficient, already pressing the advantage before the phantom could recover. She caught fragments through the adrenaline haze: the rod connecting with the creature’s thorax in a spray of sparks, the phantom’s scythe-arms scraping the walls as it was driven backward, the stranger’s movements precise and unhurried, like a man performing a task he had performed many times.

No hesitation. No fear. Just work.

The phantom fled deeper into the tunnel, limbs scraping frantically. The stranger flicked his wrist and hurled the rod. It struck the retreating horror squarely in the back. Lightning erupted along the rod’s length, spreading into a web of crackling energy that engulfed the creature. Its scream rose into an insectile whistle that made Apricot clutch her ears. Its limbs convulsed, slamming against the walls. The veins overhead pulsed wildly, then withered into black husks.

The creature crashed to the ground.

Silence.

The red glow faded. The living veins shriveled into curling ash. The body writhed once, twice, then collapsed in on itself, sloughing into tar-black sludge that evaporated until nothing remained but the stench of ozone and decay.

Apricot realized she had been holding her breath. She dragged in air, shaking, her palms pressed flat against the cold stone floor. Her cheek was wet. She could not tell if it was blood or condensation or tears. Everything smelled like copper and smoke.

The stranger walked forward, retrieved the rod, and nudged the empty spot with his boot. He crouched briefly, examined the dark residue, then straightened. Satisfied. He turned.

“On your feet.”

The voice was clipped and flat. He extended a gloved hand.

Apricot took it. He pulled her up with mechanical strength, steadying her when her legs nearly buckled. Up close, he was young, early twenties, sharp-featured with the kind of composed stillness that came from training or breeding. Something about him tugged at her memory, a face she had seen on screens or in newsfeeds, placed at galas and political functions.

“My name is Shiori Kinjo,” he said. No warmth. No introduction beyond the fact itself.

Apricot stared.

Kinjo. Old money. Old power. One of the noble families whose names appeared in headlines about policy summits and charitable endowments and, occasionally, sealed court records.

“You’re a Kinjo,” she said, voice raw.

He did not confirm it. He did not need to.

His gaze dropped to the pistol on the ground between them, then to her arm where blood trickled from the shallow cut. He studied both with the same flat assessment.

“An illegal firearm and a tunnel full of things that eat people,” he said. “Interesting evening.”

Apricot’s stomach dropped. She had forgotten the gun. An unregistered weapon was a capital offense in Blue Ash. If Shiori Kinjo reported her, she would be dead before dawn. She moved toward the pistol, then stopped, uncertain whether picking it up would make things better or worse.

He watched her deliberation with no visible reaction. Then he glanced away, as if the matter had already been weighed and filed. “I’ll disregard the weapon,” he said. “For now.”

The qualifier hung in the air between them.

“Why are you here?” she asked, forcing her voice steady.

“Same reason you are, I expect. Though with considerably better equipment.” He tapped the rod against his shoulder. “Why are you here, Miss Signa?”

She froze. “You know my name?”

“I know a great deal about the people who wander into places they shouldn’t.”

That was not an answer. It was a boundary. Apricot recognized it, the way authority deflected rather than explained, the same institutional reflex she had encountered in police sergeants, university administrators, and every other gatekeeper in this city.

“I’m hunting phantoms,” she said.

He considered this. “Hunting implies competence,” he said, without cruelty but without kindness either. “What I just witnessed was closer to being hunted.”

Heat flooded her face. She wanted to snap back, but he was right, and he held every answer she needed.

“Then help me,” she said. “You know what these things are. You know why they’re here. Tell me.”

“That’s more than one question. Pick one and I’ll consider it.” He tilted his head, watching her the way someone watches a puzzle they have already solved.

Something shifted in Apricot’s chest. Not fear. Anger. White-hot and clarifying. The answers she had been bleeding for were standing right in front of her, locked behind a smug noble’s amusement.

“Do you know what that thing was?” she pressed.

“Yes,” he said.

Apricot waited.

Shiori offered nothing. A faint, satisfied stillness settled over his features, as if her frustration were a small gift he intended to savor.

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“No.”

“Why?” The word came out harder than she intended.

“Because I don’t know you.” He said it lightly, almost cheerfully, as though explaining something obvious to someone slow. “And because you came down here with a handgun and a tabloid article. That is not preparation. That is a death wish with footnotes.”

“I’ve survived more than you think,” she snapped.

“And yet I found you curled on the ground screaming.” He let the observation hang, not cruel exactly, but utterly unbothered by her anger. “I’m sure you have questions. Most people do, right before the things in the dark eat them.”

Apricot’s jaw clenched so hard her teeth ached. He was enjoying this. Every deflection, every withheld answer, every flicker of her frustration — he was enjoying it. And he would keep enjoying it all night if she let him.

“You’re an asshole,” she said quietly.

Shiori’s expression did not change. If anything, it brightened. “So I’ve been told.”

He turned and walked toward the tunnel exit. Not an invitation. Just a departure.

She followed.

They emerged into the night air, and Apricot drew in a breath that felt like the first real one in hours. The sky was pale with the city’s ambient glow. Distant traffic hummed. The park looked ordinary again, just trees and grass and neglected concrete. The tunnel mouth behind them might as well have been a storm drain. The violence that had happened inside it left no trace on the surface. Already the city was smoothing it over, the way it smoothed over everything.

Shiori walked without looking back, navigating the overgrown path toward the park gate with the ease of someone who had been here many times. Apricot followed a step behind, nursing her bleeding arm against her ribs. Questions piled up behind her teeth, but his silence was a wall, and she sensed that pushing against it would only confirm his assessment of her.

The padlock and chain were gone. Removed at some point after Apricot had climbed over. He pushed the gate open and held it, a perfunctory gesture, the kind of courtesy that operated on reflex rather than warmth. She noticed his hand on the latch. No key. The lock had not been picked. It had been opened, by someone with access.

She stepped through onto the sidewalk and turned to face him.

“You saved my life,” she said.

He acknowledged this with a slight incline of his head. Nothing more.

“If you won’t tell me what those things are,” Apricot said carefully, “at least tell me where to look.”

He regarded her for a long moment, the rod resting against his shoulder. A streetlamp cast his features in harsh white relief, hollowing his cheeks, making him look older than he was. Or exactly as old as the things he knew.

“The Crisis,” he said. “Start there.”

“The Crisis? Is that a person? An event?”

“That’s for you to discover.” He stepped back, the gate between them now. “You are the aspiring journalist.”

He turned and walked away, coat dissolving into the haze of streetlight and distance. No farewell. No backward glance.

Apricot stood with her hands curled around the cold iron bars, watching his silhouette diminish. She waited for something more, a final word, a parting reassurance. Nothing came. He rounded a corner and was gone, absorbed into the city as cleanly as the phantom had been absorbed into the tunnel floor.

She released the bars.

Her arm throbbed where the creature had cut her. The pistol sat heavy in her bag, useless against the thing it was meant to fight. The word Crisis sat heavier in her chest, a locked door with no visible keyhole.

He had known her name before she gave it. He had known the park well enough to remove the padlock. He had arrived in time to save her, which meant he had known she was there. And still he had told her almost nothing.

A Kinjo heir hunting phantoms in sealed parks. Noble families with institutional access and private weapons. Information dispensed like rations, controlled, portioned, never enough.

If the nobility knew about the phantoms, knew enough to fight them, then the silence surrounding every attack, every disappearance, every official cover story was not ignorance.

It was policy.

Apricot turned and started the long walk home beneath flickering neon and dim stars.

She was not the only one who knew. That should have been a relief.

It wasn’t.