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The church was gone.
Or rather, it was folded away, as if some vast, unseen hand had slid my reality into the back of a drawer and replaced it with another.
I was eight years old again.
The air smelled of old stone and varnished wood — the drawing room in my parents' estate. Afternoon light bled in through the tall windows, casting bars of sun that turned to prison gates when I looked too long.
My father sat in his high-backed chair, head bent over correspondence that never seemed to end. Mother's voice drifted from the hall, brittle and cold, like icicles knocking together. They did not look at me, not even when I spoke.
In dreams, I always tried harder here. I would shout, wave my hands, even knock over the silver-framed portraits on the mantle — but their eyes slid past me as though I were an intruder in my own home. My name would catch in my throat. I would try to scream it, but it would come out wrong — jumbled, half-swallowed, like a foreign word not meant for a human tongue.
Even as a boy, I knew that sound didn't belong to me.
I think now — I fear now — it never did.
I turned toward the fireplace. The coin was there, lying in the ash. It had no place in this memory, and yet it sat waiting, glimmering faintly as if lit from within. I knew that if I touched it, I would leave this moment and never come back.
But I couldn't stop my hand.
The instant my fingers brushed the metal, the light from the windows darkened — not dimmed, darkened, as though something had stepped between the sun and the world. Shadows began to lengthen from the corners of the room, dragging the furniture out of shape, stretching my parents' figures until they were no longer human silhouettes at all.
They turned toward me at last.
And they were smiling.
It was not love.
It was not recognition.
It was permission.
The whisper was here too.
Closer. Louder. More intimate than breath.
> "…I remember you…"
"…now you will remember me…"
The shadows converged. The smile on my father's not-face widened until it split his head into two jagged halves. My mother's hands — no, not hands — reached for me, long and jointed wrong, tipped with the same shifting sigils I had seen in the creature's teeth.
I screamed.
But the sound that came out was not mine.
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