That night, Clara woke screaming.Her dream had been painted in blood. She saw the Holloway house not as it was but as it must have been—an old woman pinned to her bed, her chest caved in, her throat gnawed open as though by a starving animal.
And in the corner of the dream stood the stranger. His mouth crimson, his eyes alight with hunger.
She woke with her sheets damp in sweat, her pulse pounding so hard she thought her chest would split. But worse than the dream was the certainty it left her with:
This was not imagination.This was memory.
She had seen him. Not with her eyes, but with something deeper. And she knew: he would come again.