The moniker "Nightmaretaker" was not chosen at random. It describes the unique, terrifying affliction that characterized his presence. Witnesses in the folklore claimed that the man could absorb the night terrors of those around him, but not to offer relief. Instead, he weaponized them.

"Older than what?" Martin asked.

He went to the garden at dusk and waited for the man with no shadow. He could have called Father Armitage, told him the truth, asked for help. He didn't. That felt like bargaining too.

Later, the hospice staff found, tucked into his coat, a small, black book not unlike the ledger itself but filled with blank pages and one final note:

From that night he could not stop seeing the ledger in corners of the world. He glimpsed it reflected in a stainless-steel tray, in a puddle, in the pupil of a sleeping child's eye. It called to him with the rustle of pages. If a patient murmured a name, the ledger would appear beside it in his mind, a tally swelled by tiny ticks. When he arrived at a room before dawn, he sometimes found a black smear on the blanket beside a sleeping body—like soot but finer, like the residue of dried ink. The scrub nurse claimed it was mold; Martin knew better. He began to avoid mirrors.

Then wind moved through the basement though no window was open. The ashes assembled in a whisper and rose like doves, and the smell of ink stitched into the smoke. In that smoke the man with no shadow stood, waiting. He reached inside the plume and drew out a single charred scrap that had not burned. On it, in ink that had not been consumed, a new name unfurled: Martin Hale.

: Developed using the KiriKiri engine , common for Japanese-style visual novels .

Those who slept in proximity to him reported experiencing identical, vivid horrors:

At first glance the Nightmaretaker is an archetype assembled from old fears: the night watchman, the traveling exorcist, the itinerant storyteller. Folk tales place him on the thresholds of houses, where threshold is a liminal geometry that nightmares exploit. He appears where grief and small cruelties have opened a crack in the world: a woman’s loss that will not close, a town that forgot why it used to pray, a child whose laughter has been replaced by a ticking silence. He keeps receipts of these misfortunes, catalogues them in a notebook stained by candle wax and the occasional tear. In those rooms he performs his duty: he ferries nightmares back into the dark where they belong, or—when something darker stirs—he bargains with it.

Under sour sky he sat and watched his breath fog and disappear. The man came like a stain of ink in a white page. He sat without rustle and regarded Martin as one might regard a ledger overdue.

He arrives with the hour when most of the world exhales — after midnight, when the last lights wink out and the city’s hum thins to a distant, indifferent breath. People who talk about him do so in low tones, as if raising their voices will rouse him, as if naming him aloud invites a visitation. “The Nightmaretaker” is both title and profession: a man who tends nightmares the way a groundskeeper tends hedges — pruning, transplanting, sometimes uprooting entirely. But this is no benign gardener. He is the man possessed by the Devil, and possession here is not only a theological condition; it is a transformation of vocation, imagination, and moral geography.

The small town of Ravenswood was never the same after the arrival of a mysterious stranger known only as Malakai. He was a tall, imposing figure with piercing eyes that seemed to bore into the souls of those he encountered. His presence was shrouded in an aura of malevolence, and whispers quickly spread throughout the community that Malakai was a man possessed by the devil himself.

: It is standard practice to save at major decision points to explore different endings without restarting the entire game. English Patches

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It was said that on certain nights, when the moon hung low in the sky, Elijah would disappear. Some claimed to have seen him walking into the woods, his eyes glowing with an otherworldly light. Others whispered that he was taken by dark forces, dragged down into the depths of hell itself.

Paranormal investigators have since attempted to locate Arthur Holloway's grave. No records of an "Arthur P. Holloway" exist in Maryland state archives. Likewise, no Dr. Marcus Vane is listed with the American Psychiatric Association. The Pikesville Lunatic Asylum? It never existed—at least, not under that name. There is a Pikesville Armory , but it was never a hospital.

But here is where fact and nightmare blur.