The stillness in the house was a heavy, physical presence. After Ira knelt by the broken mug, a long, unnerving silence stretched, filled only by the sound of their own breathing. It was in this quiet that Lio first noticed the smell. It was faint, hidden beneath the familiar scent of salt and rot, a sickly sweet, cloying odor like old, forgotten flowers.
A morbid gravity seemed to pull them from the kitchen, drawing them deeper into the heart of the house. They moved without speaking, a trio of ghosts drifting through their own memory. They entered the dining room, a space they had rarely used in the final years, preferring to eat at the kitchen table.
The dining table was set. Four plates, four sets of silverware, four glasses, all coated in a thin, uniform layer of dust. It was set for a meal that had never been eaten. And seated at the table were four figures.
In the dim, grey light filtering through the grimy windows, they looked like crude mannequins, or strange, lumpy sculptures left behind by a previous tenant. Lio's mind stuttered, trying to process the scene, trying to fit it into a reality that was already stretched to its breaking point. He took a hesitant step closer.
And the truth, in all its quiet, mundane horror, resolved itself. They were not mannequins. They were bodies.
He recognized the worn blue sweater on the figure slumped at the head of the table. He recognized the long, dark hair of the woman who sat so unnaturally upright in her chair.
A wave of nausea and vertigo washed over him as he forced his eyes to see what they were already seeing. He was looking at his family.
He was looking at himself.
Slumped forward, his head resting on a tattered, useless map spread on the table, was his father. His posture was one of utter defeat, a man who had died staring at the architect of his own doom. Seated to his right was his mother, Sera.
She was not slumped. She sat perfectly erect, her hands folded neatly in her lap, a look of calm, weary resignation on her still, grey face. She looked as though she had simply been waiting for this.
And in his own chair, Lio saw himself. Or a version of himself. A boy of fifteen, his head lolled back against the chair, a fork held loosely in a hand that rested on the table. His eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open, as if in mid sigh.
They were all there. Preserved. Posed. A tableau of their own final failure.
The fourth chair, Mina's chair, was empty. But placed neatly in the center of the seat, a small, heartbreaking splash of color in the dusty gloom, was the red woolen mitten.
Lio felt a profound, horrifying sense of disconnection from his own body.
He was here, breathing, his heart hammering against his ribs, and he was there, a still, cooling corpse at a dinner table. He reached up and touched his own cheek, the warmth of his skin a shocking contrast to the grey, waxy flesh of the boy in the chair. Am I real? Am I a ghost? The questions screamed in the silent theater of his mind.
A sound, a low, guttural moan of pure, soul deep despair, pulled him from his trance. It was Sera. She was staring at her own placid, dead face, her hands covering her mouth. This was not a scream of terror. It was a sound of dreadful, final understanding. This was the trap.
This was the end of the story. They hadn't escaped. They had simply… sat down for dinner.
The sight seemed to detonate the last wall of fog in Ira's mind. He stumbled back, his eyes wide with a lucidity that was more terrifying than any madness. He stared at his own dead body, then at his dead wife, his dead son. He was not just seeing a horrific scene; he was remembering it.
This was not a discovery; it was a recollection. He finally understood. Their journey had not been a flight from this fate. It had been a dream, an echo, a story they told themselves after the real story was already over.
The silence in the room was absolute. It was the silence of a tomb, the silence of a final, unchangeable truth.
And they, the living echoes, were now trapped inside it, standing face to face with the bodies they were always meant to be.