Chapter 5: Voice Behind the Hedge

He didn’t sleep the second night either, not really. The book stayed on the floor beside the mattress, wrapped in the hoodie he’d found it under, like fabric could do anything about what it was. Every time his eyes closed he woke again within the hour, heart already going, sure for one bad second that something in the room had moved. Nothing ever had. That didn’t make it easier the next time.

By morning it showed. His mom took one look at him over breakfast and didn’t say anything, just set a second cup of tea by his elbow. He almost told her everything right then, just from how kind that small, wordless thing felt. He didn’t. He still didn’t have a way to say any of it out loud that wouldn’t sound insane.

"You look like a ghost," Jun said, stealing a piece of toast off his plate on the way past.

Lian didn’t laugh. Jun clocked that, and let it go, and somehow that was worse than if he’d pushed.

Their mom needed trash bags that evening real ones, not the cheap ones the last owners had left, which tore if you looked at them wrong. Lian offered before she even finished asking. Being in the house with the book one room away had started to feel worse than being outside.

The new neighborhood was quieter than the old one. Fewer streetlights, more space between houses, hedges tall enough to swallow the sidewalk in shadow once the sun dropped. He didn’t know the shortcuts here yet, so he stuck to the main road, phone flashlight on, telling himself that was just being careful.

He was two streets from the store when he heard it.

"Lian."

Jun’s voice. Close, coming from somewhere behind him, past a hedge tall enough to hide someone standing right on the other side of it.

He almost turned around. He’d actually started to shoulders twisting, weight already shifting when something stopped him. Not a thought, exactly. More like his body remembering something before his brain caught up: his grandmother, years ago, pulling his hand back from a window at dusk, telling him in a mix of dialect and broken explanation that if someone called his name after dark and he wasn’t sure who it was, he didn’t look. He didn’t answer. He just kept walking like he hadn’t heard it. He’d been maybe seven. He hadn’t thought about it since.

He kept walking.

"Lian." Closer now. Exactly Jun’s voice, right down to the flat, careful tone Jun used when he was trying not to sound worried. "Where’d you go? Wait up."

Jun was home. Jun had been on the living room floor with his phone when Lian left, complaining about the wifi password. There was no version of the last few minutes where he’d gotten up, left the house, and gotten two streets ahead without Lian noticing.

He kept walking. Faster now. Not running yet — some part of him still insisting that running would mean admitting there was something to run from, and he wasn’t ready to give it that.

"Lian, seriously." Hurt crept into the voice, the exact tone Jun used when he thought he was being ignored on purpose. "Why won’t you answer me?"

That was the part that scared him most. Not that it sounded weird . It sounded almost completely right, close enough that if he hadn’t known better, he’d have turned around without a second thought. It was only some small, specific piece under the words that felt off, something he couldn’t name, that told him this wasn’t his brother. It had gotten his brother’s voice from somewhere. It just hadn’t gotten all of it.

He passed a parked car with dark windows, and out of habit glanced at the glass instead of turning his head, using it like a mirror.

Something was behind him.

Roughly Jun’s height. Everything else was wrong. The skin had gone a grey-yellow, the color of something that hadn’t had blood moving through it in days. Its joints held at angles too stiff to walk properly, and yet it kept pace with him anyway, dragging forward in small, jerking hitches, like whoever was working it hadn’t learned how yet. Its mouth moved with Jun’s voice, but the jaw sat at different angle, hinged too low. Its eyes didn’t track him. They stayed fixed straight ahead, waiting for him to be the one who turned.

Lian did not turn.

He kept walking, counting his own footsteps because counting gave the part of his brain that wanted to scream something else to do. He didn’t run. Some instinct he couldn’t explain told him running was for things that could see he was scared, and he didn’t want to give it that either.

"Lian." The voice cracked, thinner now, closer to something that might once have been a real, frightened person asking a real question. "Please. Just look at me. Just once."

He hit the corner where the streetlights started again dense, orange, ordinary, cars passing with their windows up and their radios going, a whole indifferent world two streets over from whatever had been behind him and the voice stopped. Not fading. Stopped, the same way the crying in the lot had stopped, clean, like it had simply lost interest the moment there were people close enough to see.

He didn’t look back to check. He’d learned that much.

He didn’t buy the trash bags. He barely remembered the rest of the walk, only the front door under his hand, the warm ordinary light of the hallway, and Jun’s actual voice, alive and immediate, calling from the couch, "Did you get the bags or not?"

Lian stood in the doorway a long moment, chest still working too hard, looking at his very real, very alive brother sprawled on the very real couch, exactly where he’d left him.

"Forgot," he somehow managed to persuade his mom .

"Seriously? It’s one thing. One job."

"I’ll go back tomorrow and buy the trash bags mom."

Lian was thinking how the ghost imitated his brother Jun voice and kept talking,but Lian tried his best to not hear it. He could still remember the vivid sensation ..

He thought what if I turned around?? I’m sure I would have been doomed....