Chapter 22: The unknown Caller
SPENCER'S POV
The silence in the room after Wednesday's spectral departure was not empty; it was a solid, suffocating entity. It was the silence of a slammed door, of a final verdict, of a heart freezing over. I remained sunk into the plush cushion, my body feeling both leaden and hollow, as if her words had physically beaten me down and then scooped out my insides. The luxurious hotel room, with its tasteful art and soft lighting, felt like a mockery, a gilded cage where my emotions were being systematically dismantled. I didn't move, barely breathed, trapped in a sea of my own churning thoughts.
The initial, raw sting of her insults—pathetic loser, weakling, puppet—began to recede, like a tide pulling back to reveal the solid, stubborn bedrock of my own nature. And my nature was not that of a victim. I was Spencer Postlethwaith. I built a billion-dollar empire from a seed of an idea and a mountain of grit. I faced down ruthless competitors and cutthroat investors before I was thirty. I may be arrogant, I may be rude when provoked, but crucially, damningly, I am not stupid.
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow, jerking me upright on the cushion. This wasn't the real Wednesday. This was a performance. A brutal, calculated, and terrifyingly convincing performance,a brutal performance nonetheless. The ghost who had laughed with me until tears streamed down our faces, who fought beside me with a fierce, protective energy that felt more real than anything in my life, who had kissed me back with a desperate, frozen passion that shattered the very definition of impossibility—that was real. These…all of these is a shield. She was trying to push me away, to build a wall of thorns between us using the most hurtful words she could conjure.
But why? What celestial pressure, what unspoken, dire possibility of her ghostly existence, was forcing her hand? What consequence was so terrible that she would rather have me hate her than risk the alternative? She was unwilling to tell me, cloaking her truth in a costume of cruelty. So, if I wanted the truth, I would have to draw it out. I couldn't succumb to the easy path of anger, to push back and fulfill her prophecy of being a "weakling" who couldn't control his emotions. No. To unravel this, I had to be smarter, more cunning. I had to draw her closer by pretending to push her away. I had to make her want to break her own rules, all while I feigned a cold indifference to the very connection that was keeping me sane.
A cold, determined strategy began to form in my mind, a blueprint for an emotional siege. I rubbed my palms together, a slow, deliberate motion, as if I could physically shape my plan with my hands, molding my own pain into a weapon.
I love Wednesday.
The admission, silent and absolute, finally settled in the ruined landscape of my soul. It was a disastrous, impossible, heartbreaking truth. I loved a dead girl. A ghost. A being of memory and vengeance, whose touch was ice and whose future was an eternity of judgment or nothingness. There was no future in it, no white picket fence, no growing old together. There was only the present, a terrifying, thrilling, and tragic present.
And then, as if my conscience had been waiting for that moment of vulnerable admission, my inner voice, the ghost of my old, simpler life, spoke up with brutal, pragmatic clarity. And what about Megan? She's been loyal and good to you. You almost forgot her, didn't you? She's in a hospital bed because of the chaos that follows you. Because of her --Wednesday--
I flinched, the mental image of Megan flashing behind my eyes with painful clarity—her warm, trusting smile, the genuine concern in her eyes when she'd found me soaked and shaken on her doorstep, the way she'd looked at me before Wednesday's cruel illusion had shattered her sense of reality and left her broken on the kitchen floor. Guilt, hot and acidic, washed over me, so potent I could taste it. No doubt, I still cared for Megan deeply. The thought of causing her more pain, of being the source of her trauma, was a physical sickness in my gut. She was real. She was human. She was safety and normalcy. She was a future—a tangible, breathing life with marriage, children, and growing old together. A life that made sense.
That is the reality of things, my inner voice insisted, relentless and logical. Maybe Wednesday is doing the right thing. This distance… it's a mercy. The closer you get, the more you love her, and the more that love becomes a poison for you both. It's a forbidden equation with no solution. Five meters might as well be five thousand miles. It's a distance designed to kill the spirit that loves her, and maybe yours needs to die for you to finally live a real life.
The logic was irrefutable. It was the sane choice. The safe choice. It was the path of a man who wasn't constantly jumping off buildings, being hunted by assassins, and falling in love with ghosts.
And so, I made a decision. I would act like other, simpler men would. I would give Wednesday the sterile, business-only relationship she was so vehemently demanding. No more softness. No more searching for the girl behind the glacial eyes. No more offering ice cream like a peace treaty. If she wanted a puppet, I would be the most cold, efficient, and arrogantly detached puppet she had ever seen. I would focus solely on the mission: survive my brother, survive the demon, and help her kill her siblings. Nothing more. My heart would be taken off the table, locked away in a vault, and the key thrown into the same ocean where my car rested.
The moment I fully nurtured this new, hardened resolve, a strange alchemy occurred within me. Her words, which had felt like burning coals searing my soul, suddenly cooled, hardening into a shield of diamond-edged ice around my heart. The part of me I had suppressed—the arrogant, ruthless billionaire who built an empire out of nothing—returned in a flood, filling the desolate void her rejection had created. She had her terrifying, silver-eyed transformations, a power granted by the underworld. I had my own dreadful, cold-blooded traits, forged in the boardrooms and battlefields of the corporate world. It was a power I knew how to wield with precision.
It was in this state of icy, calculated resolve that I felt it—a familiar, cold pressure approaching the door, a subtle drop in temperature that was as unique to her as a fingerprint. I had studied her energy, her unique spectral signature, in just a few days. It was Wednesday, returning. Perfect. The stage was set.
I began moving around the room, my eyes scanning the empty air with a focused intensity, searching, no my hands patting down the surfaces of the desk, the couch, the minibar, as if I'd lost something of immense value. I heard the subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the air as she phased through the solid door, a whisper of displaced reality. I felt her presence solidify in the center of the room, a concentrated spot of cold in my peripheral vision. But I didn't acknowledge her. I didn't flicker a glance in her direction. I continued my charade, walking right past her, so close I felt the chill of her form, around her, my expression one of utterly focused irritation, as if she were merely a piece of furniture in my way.
I saw her, from the corner of my eye, stand there, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her form shimmering with a mixture of confusion and growing annoyance. The silence stretched, thick and heavy, a battle of wills fought in absolute quiet. She broke first.
"What are you searching for?" Her voice was tight, laced with that familiar impatience, but underneath it, I could hear a thread of that same puzzled curiosity I had come to know so well.
I stopped my frantic search and slowly turned to face her. I crossed my arms, mirroring her defensive posture, a deliberate and mocking gesture. I finally met her gaze, my own eyes flat, cold, and devoid of the warmth, the hope, the desperate longing she'd seen there just hours before.
"I'm looking for the Wednesday I had left here last night," I said, my tone deceptively conversational, yet edged with a steel that made her blink. "The worst part is that I don't even know where I left her."
She rolled her eyes, a gesture that once would have been endearing, a quirky habit of the girl I was falling for, but now just seemed like a tired part of her brittle act. "Oh, please. Cut me the crap."
I took a deliberate, challenging step closer, invading the five-meter space she had so fiercely and publicly mandated. The air around her grew colder in response. "It's no joke," I said, my voice dropping, becoming more intense. "I'm looking for my Wednesday. Because you…" I let my gaze sweep over her from head to toe with a clinical, dismissive detachment that made her physical form seem to flicker, "…you are not her. You don't act like her. You don't talk like her. You just carry her looks. You're a poor imitation."
Her arms dropped to her sides as if the strings holding them up had been severed. Her face, already pale, lost all remaining vestiges of color, becoming as white as the spectral form she took when enraged. She looked… deeply wounded. Stricken. It was a look of pure, unguarded pain, and it lasted only a second before she tried to shuttered it away, but I had seen it. I had my confirmation.
I feigned a sudden, sharp realization, looking down at the precise spot on the carpet between us as if it were marked with toxic paint. "Oh, sorry. My mistake." I took five measured, theatrical steps backward, each one a hammer blow on the nail of our separation. The distance felt vast and insignificant all at once. "Five meters. Wouldn't want to jeopardize your mission with my… what was it again? My 'weakness'?"
I stood there, across the new chasm I had just theatrically reinforced, and watched the storm of emotions war on her face. The mask of anger was there, a fierce scowl trying to form, but beneath it was a raw, profound sadness and a pain so deep it seemed to dim the very light in the room. Her lips trembled almost imperceptibly. She was a terrible liar when it came to this.
"Return the Wednesday I know from wherever you kept her," I said, my voice a low, commanding whisper that brooked no argument. I let a slow, creepy smile spread across my lips, a smile that was all cold calculation and no warmth, a silent promise that the game had changed. "Understood?"
Without waiting for a reply, a reply that I knew would either be a lie or another hurtful barb, I turned on my heel and walked out of the room, leaving her standing alone in the center of the space she had demanded, the echo of my words hanging in the air between us. The victory felt as hollow and cold as her touch, but it was a necessary move in this new, brutal game we were playing.
---
My new mission started now. I strode with purpose out of the hotel and into the city, the crisp afternoon air doing little to cool the simmering conflict inside me. The encounter had left me agitated, a live wire of conflicting emotions. I needed a tether to the real world, something to ground me. I found a high-end electronics store, the kind with glass walls and silent, hovering staff. The act of purchasing a new smartphone was swift, impersonal, and achingly normal. Holding the sleek, unblemished device felt like re-establishing a connection to a world that was rapidly slipping away, a world of board meetings and stock prices and dating Megan—a world that felt like someone else's life.
My first call had to be to Megan. The guilt was a lead weight in my chest, growing heavier with every moment. I had left her in the hospital, wounded and traumatized, because of the chaos that was my new reality. Because of Wednesday. I found her number in my cloud memory, my thumb hovering over the call button for a long moment, a pang of anxiety shooting through me. I pressed it, bringing the phone to my ear.
It rang once, twice, and then clicked over to a generic, automated voicemail. "The number you have dialed is currently switched off. Please try again later."
A cold knot of dread tightened in my stomach, colder than Wednesday's touch. Was she okay? Was she still sedated in the hospital? Had she changed her number? Had something worse happened? The not-knowing was a new, sharp-toothed anxiety gnawing at the edges of my control. I made a firm mental note to find out which hospital I'd taken her to and call the front desk directly. I needed to hear a human voice confirm she was safe.
Frustrated and increasingly worried, I scrolled to the next contact: Allen. My best friend. My brother in all but blood. The one anchor I had left in what used to be my normal life. He was my tether. I climbed the staircase back to my hotel floor, needing the physical exertion, the phone pressed to my ear as it rang.
He answered on the second ring, his voice laced with the usual casual curiosity he reserved for unknown numbers. "Hello? Bro?"
"It's Spencer," I said, my voice tighter, more weary than I intended.
The reaction was instantaneous, a volcano of concern erupting through the line. "OMG, Spencer! What happened? It's been days now! I'm done worried! Where are you? How are you doing?" His voice came out in a sharp, panicked rush, all in one breath, the words tumbling over each other.
A small, genuine smile, the first one that felt real in what felt like days, touched my lips. The sound of his voice was a balm. "Chill, man. I'm fine. Just having some… hectic crisis in my life." The understatement was so vast it was almost funny.
"Don't tell me to chill! I'm worried sick about you! No phone calls, no text, and you are all over the news! How can I not be worried when there's some virus or phenomena out there looking for you, huh?" he demanded, his voice rising with a familiar, brotherly fear and frustration. "They're saying it's a damn demon, Spencer! A demon! And it said your name!"
"I already told you I'm fine," I said, the lie feeling flimsy and transparent even to me. He knew me too well. "When I see you, I will give you the full story, okay? The real story." I promised, hoping it would be enough.
I heard him sigh heavily on the other end, a sound of reluctant surrender. "But I'm still not convinced. I want to see you now to confirm. Send your location. I need to see with my own eyes that you're in one piece."
"Okay," I relented, my shoulders slumping slightly. He was right. He deserved that much. I pulled the phone away from my ear, my thumb moving to open my maps app to get a pin for my location.
But the word was caught short, severed not by a dead line, but by a sound that froze the blood in my veins and stopped my heart mid-beat.
The call didn't just drop. It… corrupted. There was a sharp digital screech, a burst of static that was utterly alien, followed by a split second of absolute, vacuum-like silence. Then, cutting through that silence, came a faint, unmistakable, and deeply wrong sound: a low, guttural, multi-layered grin that seemed to be made of broken glass and corrupted data.
My feet stopped dead on the staircase. My entire body went rigid, every muscle locking in primal terror. My blood turned to ice.
I slowly, slowly pulled the phone away from my ear, my heart now hammering against my ribs like a frantic bird trying to escape a cage. My eyes, wide with a dawning, utter horror, were glued to the screen. It still glowed, innocently showing an active call to Allen.
With a hand that trembled so violently I almost dropped the device, I brought the phone back to my ear.
And the voice that came through was not Allen's. It was a cold, icy, synthetic rasp, a horrifying chorus of whispers speaking as one, a voice that should not exist, laced with a malevolent, ancient intelligence that knew my name and promised only suffering.
"Hello, Spencer…."
To be continued..