“Daddy, the blanket is talking again,” Sarah whispered, her small fingers clutching the doorframe of her father’s study.

James barely glanced up from his laptop. “Honey, emergency blankets just make that crinkly noise. Remember what Mom used to say about imagination?”

Sarah’s bottom lip quivered. “But Mom’s gone now. And this isn’t like before.”

The mention of his late wife made James’s chest tighten. Three months had passed since the accident, and he still wasn’t handling single parenthood well. He sighed, closing his laptop. “Show me.”

In Sarah’s room, the metallic emergency blanket - a security item she’d claimed from their camping supplies after her mother’s death - lay crumpled on her bed. The silvery material rustled softly in the still air.

“See? It’s just the material moving,” James explained, though something about the movement seemed odd without any breeze.

“No, Daddy. Listen closer.” Sarah’s voice trembled. “It’s saying Mom’s name.”

James froze. Beneath the synthetic crinkle of the blanket, he heard it - a whispered “Claire” riding the static-like sound of shifting mylar.

“We’re going to Grandma’s,” he announced, reaching for the blanket.

Sarah screamed. “Don’t touch it!”

The material writhed away from his grasp, its metallic surface rippling like mercury. James stumbled backward, pushing Sarah behind him.

“Hello, darling.” The voice emanating from the blanket was Claire’s, but wrong - like hearing someone speak underwater. “I’ve missed you both so much.”

“You’re not her,” James said firmly, though his voice shook.

The blanket rose, forming a vague human silhouette. “Don’t you want our family whole again? Sarah needs her mother.”

“Daddy,” Sarah whimpered, “it sounds like Mom, but it feels wrong. Like when you’re really hungry but food makes you sick.”

The figure drifted closer. “Such a clever girl. Just like your mother. Come here, sweetheart.”

James felt Sarah step forward and grabbed her arm. “Stay back!”

“You always were overprotective, James.” The voice hardened. “She’s my daughter too.”

The blanket-figure lunged. James shoved Sarah toward the door. “Run!”

Sarah bolted, but James wasn’t fast enough. The metallic material enveloped him, its touch burning cold. He heard Sarah screaming from the hallway as the thing that wasn’t Claire whispered in his ear.

“If I can’t have my family back, no one can.”

The material tightened, conducting away his body heat with supernatural efficiency. His last thoughts were of Sarah, praying she’d reached the neighbors.

When police arrived, they found eight-year-old Sarah huddled on the Peterson’s porch next door. In her room, they discovered James wrapped in the emergency blanket, frozen solid despite the summer heat. The coroner would later note it was the strangest case of hypothermia he’d ever seen.

The blanket was logged into evidence, where it sits today, occasionally rustling in its sealed container. Sometimes, late at night, evidence clerks swear they can hear it whispering names - Claire, James, and Sarah - in an endless, lonely chorus.

Sarah, now living with her grandmother, refuses to sleep with any kind of blanket at all.