Chapter 20: What Stalks 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 been strange enough to stay with her. 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 eventually 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 Apricot was here, armed, breath steady, determination colder than the metal in her bag.

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 gone almost at once. She paused, listening.

The quiet was thick and unwelcoming.

Behind her, the NO TRESPASSING sign creaked on its hinges, rocking gently in the breeze, as though urging her to turn back before it was too late.

Her breath clouded as she moved deeper into Eastway Park. By daylight it was a modest rectangle of green. Under a moonless sky, it felt like another place entirely. Towering oaks laid long 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 glow from distant streetlights brushed the perimeter, leaving the interior in full dark.

She followed the main loop, hand hovering near the familiar weight of the pistol in her bag. 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. Yet 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 she had bought into something ridiculous.

Maybe I should call it a night.

The thought barely surfaced before that familiar pull started low in her gut. A reporter’s instinct, tangled with the memory of a wolf-shaped phantom in her brother’s room. If that 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 pulled at her sleeves. Briars caught her jeans. She switched on her phone’s flashlight, its narrow beam cutting across gnarled trunks and mats of ivy.

With each step, the city’s noise fell away to a distant murmur, as though the thicket were closing behind her, shutting her off from the world beyond. The temperature dropped so sharply that Apricot’s breath turned to mist in the beam of her phone. Each cautious step pushed her deeper into the suffocating cold. Then the ground dipped, and the undergrowth opened onto the ivy-hung mouth of an old maintenance tunnel sunk into the park’s central rise. She went in. The tunnel walls closed around her, slick with condensation and peeling like diseased skin. Strips of paint curled off in long ribbons, exposing brick the color of burned bone, as if a fire had once gutted the place.

Graffiti writhed across the walls in the half-light. Crew tags. Obscene scribbles. And more of those strange crowned symbols she had seen outside. They looked different down here, warped and stretched, as if reacting to the dark.

Her boot splashed.

Apricot stopped dead. The floor was wet.

She angled the light down, and her stomach rolled. A puddle spread across the concrete, dark and reddish, holding the flashlight beam with a faint metallic shine.

Blood. It looked like blood.

But there was no body. No trail. No source.

A warm droplet landed on the back of her neck.

Apricot flinched violently, choking back a scream. She spun, swinging the light upward, and the ceiling stopped making sense.

Thick ropes, no, veins, 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 grabbed for a rational explanation and came back empty.

A low, melodic laugh came from somewhere ahead.

Her flashlight flickered.

Then died.

The dark took everything except the crimson glow seeping from the ceiling veins, lighting the tunnel in a slow pulse, like being inside a heartbeat.

Her own heart stumbled. She banged the phone against her palm, desperate, breath unsteady.

Something moved at the corner of her sight.

Something not human.

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

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

“Who’s there?!”

A woman stepped forward into the murky light.

She was 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, once green, maybe, clung to her as if waterlogged. Her eyes were milky and unfocused, frighteningly empty.

Apricot’s finger twitched near the trigger. “M-ma’am?” she managed, barely.

The woman shuffled closer. Her bare feet made no sound on the concrete. Her movements were stiff, puppet-like, wrong in some way Apricot’s eyes kept failing to solve. Homeless. Injured. Her mind offered the sane options, but everything about the woman radiated a terrible stillness.

“You scared me,” Apricot said, forcing a nervous smile. Her voice went into the tunnel and did not come back.

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

The gums were gray. The tongue inside her mouth was colorless.

Like a corpse.

Apricot backed up a step, pulse climbing. “Do you need help? How long have you been down here?” The questions tumbled out, shaky and senseless.

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

Then the jaw dropped farther.

With a wet, cracking pop, it came off its hinge on one side. Flesh gave way 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 bloody puddle beneath her boots. “Oh God.”

The tongue whipped back with a wet recoil, and the woman released a shuddering sigh. Her blind, white eyes never blinked or shifted, locked on Apricot with cold, predatory intent.

Not human. Not human at all.

Her slick fingers fumbled on the pistol’s grip.

Then the sounds started.

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

Apricot choked on her own breath. She backed away, the gun unsteady in both hands.

The creature leaned forward.

Its face split.

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

Apricot screamed.

The sound shattered her paralysis. She fired.

The gun bucked in her grip, the shot deafening in the enclosed tunnel. The muzzle flash lit the horror in jumps of orange as the bullet went into its shoulder. A chunk of meat and oily ichor sprayed against the wall, mixed with sparking fragments of something hard.

The phantom did not flinch.

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

Apricot dropped instinctively, hitting the floor as the bone scythe swept through the air above her head, opening a deep gouge in the tunnel wall and sending stone chips raining down.

Adrenaline took the reins.

Apricot turned and sprinted deeper into the tunnel without thought. 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 grotesque footfalls slapped and skittered across the stone, each impact shaking the bricks.

She risked a glance over her shoulder.

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 struck light from the brick. The skull face clicked and gnashed like mandibles.

Apricot’s lungs burned. She skidded to a stop, turned, and fired.

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

With a terrified cry, Apricot dove aside as it lunged. A razored limb caught her arm, opening a hot line of pain. She crashed to the ground, cheek hitting cold stone. The pistol flew from her grasp and slid away into the dark.

“No, no, NO!” Apricot scrambled backward on all fours, tears blurring her vision as she stared up at it. The thing towered over her, rearing back to strike. Its blades showed crimson in the pulsing light.

This was it. The end.

She raised her arms uselessly over her face and sobbed, “Please, no!”

“That’s really not going to help,” a voice remarked casually from the darkness.

Male. Calm. As if she were not about to die.

Apricot’s eyes flew open.

Someone stood beside her. Someone who had not been there a moment ago. A figure stepped out of the tunnel’s gloom, moving with impossible speed as he placed himself between her and the oncoming nightmare.

In his hands, a long, slender metal rod held the red glow of the pulsing veins overhead.

The phantom brought both scythe arms down in a killing strike.

The stranger brought the rod up. Clang. He caught both blades at once. Blue sparks burst from the impact, flooding the hall with a brief, electric glare.

Apricot stared, stunned.

The newcomer was a young man, tall and lean, dressed in a stylish coat that flared around fitted black slacks. Pale, silvery hair framed sharp, cool features. His expression held pure boredom, mild annoyance at best, like he had stumbled into nothing more than a traffic jam.

“Wh-who are you?” Apricot gasped, still sprawled on the floor.

He did not bother answering.

Instead, he twisted the rod hard, forcing the creature’s bone blades upward with a grate of bone on metal. “So,” he said coolly to the writhing horror, “you like picking on defenseless girls, do you?”

The phantom’s cry rose and it lunged.

But the man was faster.

He moved like a dancer, balletic and effortless, slipping aside with a turn that left the creature stumbling past him. In the same motion, he pivoted, brought the rod around in a brutal arc, and struck the monster square in the back.

Crack.

The sound went down the tunnel like gunfire. The creature reeled forward, its limbs flailing against the walls.

Electric light burst at the point of impact. The phantom howled as part of its carapace shattered, brown shell and black ichor spraying across the tunnel. It lashed out wildly. The young man slipped beneath the swipe and drove the rod upward, smashing it beneath what remained of the creature’s jaw.

Another discharge followed. The monster’s elongated neck snapped backward with a sickening jolt.

The phantom let out a keening wail and scuttled away, its multi-jointed limbs scrambling as it fled deeper into the tunnel. The stranger narrowed his eyes and sent the silver rod spinning after it.

It turned end over end and struck the retreating horror squarely in the back.

What followed barely seemed real.

Lightning, actual lightning, ran the rod’s length, spreading into a web of crackling blue energy that engulfed the creature. The phantom’s scream rose into an insectile whistle that made Apricot clutch her ears. Its limbs convulsed, slamming against the walls as the fleshy veins overhead pulsed wildly, then withered into black husks, as if dying in sympathy.

With a final cry, the creature crashed to the ground.

Its body writhed once, twice, shell crumbling, torso collapsing in on itself. Then stillness. The red glow faded. The living veins overhead shriveled into curling ash.

Apricot dragged in air, shaking.

A soft metallic clink as the rod dropped to the floor. The young man walked forward and retrieved it, his movements easy, in no hurry at all. He walked to the twitching remains and turned them with his boot.

Apricot watched, numb, as the corpse dissolved, first sloughing into tar-black sludge, then evaporating entirely until nothing remained but the stench of scorched air and decay hanging thick.

The stranger exhaled and turned toward Apricot. He extended a gloved hand. “On your feet,” he said, brisk and almost bored, as if exterminating tunnel-dwelling nightmares were just another item on his nightly to-do list.

Apricot took his hand. He pulled her up with surprising strength, steadying her when her legs wobbled. Up close, she could see he was young, early twenties perhaps, sharp-featured with an aristocratic calm. Even in the dim light, his eyes held a faint, mischievous light. Something about him tugged at her memory, as if she had seen that face before on a screen or a newsfeed.

He offered a polite, almost courtly smile. “Hello,” he said, his voice carrying smoothly in the tunnel. “My name is Shiori Kinjo.”

Apricot’s jaw went slack.

Of everything she had survived tonight, this was somehow the most surreal. Kinjo. As in the Kinjo family. Old money, old power, nobility wrapped in neon myth. She had seen his name in countless headlines.

“Y-you’re… a Kinjo?” she stammered, eyes wide.

He chuckled, clearly used to the reaction. “In the flesh.” He gave the blood-splattered air a wry glance. “Though I don’t typically introduce myself while standing in the guts of a phantom.”

His gaze dropped to her arm, where blood trickled from the shallow slice the creature had left. His expression sharpened.

“You’re injured,” he said. All trace of flippancy was gone.

Apricot finally glanced down at the rip in her sleeve. Now that the adrenaline was ebbing, the cut had begun to burn, and she winced. “I’ll be okay,” she muttered.

Embarrassment arrived all at once. She, Apricot Signa, had just been saved in the most dramatic, humiliating way possible by Shiori Kinjo while sprawled on the ground screaming. Her face went hot despite the cold air.

Shiori lifted an eyebrow. “Quite an evening you’re having,” he remarked lightly. His gaze slid to the pistol still clutched in her hand. “Demon hunting with an illegal firearm. Not exactly a common pastime.”

Apricot stiffened. She had forgotten she still held it. She shoved the pistol back into her bag at once, her heartbeat spiking. If Shiori Kinjo turned her in, she would be executed before dawn. Yet somehow she doubted he would. He had just saved her from something no one should ever have to see.

“I wasn’t. I mean, I am hunting devils, but I didn’t plan on almost dying,” Apricot said, forcing her voice steady. “I just needed answers.”

He made a quiet, disapproving sound. “You nearly got yourself killed, Miss… Signa, isn’t it?”

Apricot blinked. “You know my name?”

“Apricot Signa,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “I recognize you.”

Fear, shock, and adrenaline ran together in her chest. “Uh… yeah. That’s me. And thank you. Really. I…”

Shiori waved her gratitude off. “You’re welcome. Though honestly, it was more for the fun of it than charity.” A playful lilt colored his voice, making it impossible to tell how serious he was. “It’s not every night I get to cross blades with a devil. You were simply in the wrong place at the right time.”

Apricot bit her lip. She doubted timing alone explained why he had been in that tunnel. Shiori Kinjo did not strike her as someone who wandered into eldritch death traps by accident. Still, this was not the moment to challenge him.

“Regardless,” she said softly, “I owe you my life.”

Shiori smiled, equal parts charming and insufferably arrogant. “You certainly do. But don’t worry. I won’t collect on that debt yet.”

He turned and strolled toward the tunnel entrance at his own pace, as if they had not just fought something out of nightmare and folklore. “Come along,” he called, without looking back. “Unless you’d prefer to loiter in the dark.”

Apricot hurried after him. Emerging from the tunnel felt like breaking the surface after a deep dive. The night sky, paled by the city’s glow, had never looked so beautiful. She drew in the open air, trying to steady the crowd of questions in her head.

Shiori Kinjo, heir to one of Blue Ash’s noble families, hunting phantoms in an abandoned park.

This was real. All of it.

She found her voice. “Lord Kinjo.”

“Just Shiori,” he said smoothly, still walking.

“Shiori,” she repeated, uncomfortably aware of how strange it felt to address a noble so casually. “You clearly know something about whatever that was. I’ve been searching for answers for weeks. Do you know what these creatures are? Why they’re appearing?”

Shiori stopped at the ivy-draped mouth of the tunnel and turned to her, moonlight showing the amusement in his eyes.

“That’s more than one question,” he said.

Apricot deflated slightly, opening her mouth, then closing it again. He was enjoying this.

“Fine,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady. “What was that thing? Do you know?”

A slow, knowing smile spread across Shiori’s lips.

“Yes,” he said.

Apricot waited.

And waited.

Shiori offered nothing.

Just as her frustration peaked, he laughed. “You really are new to this. You asked if I know what it is, and I answered. I do.” His smirk made it clear he was enjoying her irritation far too much.

He resumed walking, weaving through the grove toward the open lawn. Apricot went after him, angry and desperate in equal measure.

“That’s not fair!” she snapped. “You know what I meant. You clearly know something about these phantoms. You might even know why they’re here. Why won’t you tell me?”

They stepped out of the tree line. Ahead, streetlights glowed faintly beyond the barrier she had climbed. Shiori paused and turned, giving a casual shrug.

“Why should I? We just met. And, forgive me, but you haven’t exactly demonstrated… competence.”

Apricot flushed. “I didn’t see you offering training before I almost got killed,” she blurted, and immediately hated how childish it sounded.

Shiori’s expression cooled to a winter’s edge. “Careful, Miss Signa. I did save your life. Gratitude isn’t that difficult.”

She pushed her pride down. He was right, and he held every answer she needed.

“You’re right,” she said quietly. “I am grateful. I’m just… I’m drowning in this. If you know anything, why these phantoms are appearing, what they are, please. I need to understand.”

He studied her without answering. The silver rod, somehow returned to his hand as if it had never left, rested against his shoulder. He tapped it lightly, considering her.

At last, he spoke.

“Tell you what, Apricot.” His voice softened into something almost playful. “Since you’re so eager, I’ll give you a hint.”

He leaned forward as if offering a forbidden secret.

“Consider it a parting gift.”

Though he was not much taller, his presence had weight.

“Look into something called the Crisis.”

Apricot frowned. “The Crisis? Is that a person? An event?”

Shiori was already walking again, his pace brisk as they neared the park gate. “That’s for you to discover,” he called over his shoulder. “You are the aspiring investigative journalist, aren’t you?”

Apricot hurried to keep up. A streetlamp threw harsh white light across the path, turning Shiori’s refined features almost ethereal, like a princely figure stepped out of myth rather than the demon hunter who had just saved her life.

He reached the gate and unlatched it with ease. The padlock and chain were gone, removed sometime after she had climbed over. Shiori pushed the gate open and waved her through with mock courtesy.

She stepped onto the sidewalk and turned toward him, questions churning. She sensed his patience, and his willingness to indulge her, had reached its limit.

Still, one slipped out. “Will I… see you again?”

Shiori paused, considering, as if weighing the idea. Then he smiled, a devil-may-care curve of the lips that looked dangerous on someone so beautiful.

“Maybe. If you don’t get yourself killed first, Apricot.”

He tapped two fingers to his brow in a jaunty salute. “Good luck with your hunting. You’ll need it.”

With that, he swung the gate shut between them and walked off down the sidewalk, his coat fluttering behind him. Apricot remained there, hands curled around the cold iron bars, watching his silhouette fade into the hazy glow of the streetlights.

“You’re an asshole, you know that?” she shouted after him, not caring who heard. Part of her hoped he did. Part of her hoped he didn’t.

Shiori paused just long enough to toss his voice back over his shoulder. “Maybe. But I’m the asshole who saved your life.”

A soft laugh came back, fading with his footsteps as he went into the dark.

The street went quiet, heavy but no longer suffocating.

Apricot exhaled slowly, the night replaying in pieces: the gang, the phantom’s jaws, the lightning, Shiori Kinjo appearing like an aristocratic exorcist out of nowhere. Too much, far too much. Yet as she touched the pistol in her bag and felt the sting of the cut on her arm, she knew every moment had been real.

A faint smile came to her. Not because any of it was funny. Nothing about tonight was. It was the tired smile of a survivor who had found a first thread of hope in the madness.

She was not alone.

Someone else knew about the phantoms. Someone else was fighting them, however cryptically.

“Maybe I’m not the only crazy one after all,” she whispered.

Clutching the thought like a talisman, Apricot turned and started the long walk home beneath restless neon and dim stars, determined, if not ready, to face whatever horrors waited for the next night.