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Klein's eyes wrenched open. His lungs burned as if he’d been holding his breath for years, and his heart struck out with a blatant desperation that should have woken the entire rectory. Somewhere nearby, a clock tolled—Klein tried to count the chimes, to root himself in the passage of time, but the sound was off, as if heard underwater or through thick velvet. He'd had the old nightmare again, and the suffocating terror clung to his skin like sweat, refusing to dissipate even as his mind clawed for waking clarity. He kept very still, every muscle in his body tense, his single eye tracking the black-draped ceiling, then the window, the jagged rectangle of red light spilled across the floor.
Hadn’t he been in the ward, with thin white curtains?
His eyes scanned the room again as the moon hung low and swollen, so charged with color that Klein wondered for a moment if he was still dreaming. Red, no crimson moonlight shifted through the tall painted windows. He waited for the memory of the nightmare to fade as it always did, to be replaced with the banal aches of morning, but it only pressed closer, cold and close as a lover's hand at his throat.
The nightmare remained. Not just darkness, but an absence—a void where even shadow couldn't exist. Then came movement: something ashen and formless, rising like breath in winter before sinking back down. Mist without source or substance.
A fog.
A gray fog.
And then, back to nothing.
Klein let out a chilled breath then tried to will himself upright, but a tremor ran through his chest, and he hesitated, afraid he might shatter if he moved too quickly. His breath rasped in and out, loud in the dark, and he wondered if Cesimir, the red-gloved priest, had heard. And if the clergyman who was beside his bed would burst down the hall, with lamp and cross, demanding to know what had happened within the night.
Klein was disheveled, as he had been when they found him, and as discombobulated as he felt, he knew that they were looking for something. Information what exact information they were looking for he wasn't sure. But he was almost certain that the reason he was being kept here was to get more information out of him.
But nothing came.
The hall was silent except for the blood pounding in his ears and the soft hush of the wind as it pressed against the ancient glass. He swallowed, tasting iron and old paper, and looked down at his hands. They seemed distant, as if belonging to someone else—a trick of the dark, or the lingering effects of sleep paralysis. Klein shivered and tried to remember the last moments of the dream.
There had been a door—no, a gate—and something behind it that promised salvation or damnation, maybe both. He had reached for the handle, but it grew hot and slippery, and he could feel the shape of the thing waiting on the other side, vast and patient. Klein could not recall if he'd opened the gate or not. Was this world the one behind it, or the one left behind? He smiled thinly at his own melodrama and tried again to sit up.
At first, there wasn’t any difference. Nothing changed. He felt his chest rise and fall, but the rest of his body remained heavy and inert, as if every muscle and tendon had been unspooled and replaced with lead. He tried to swallow, and even that felt like labor. Klein’s eyes darted frantically to the corners of the room, searching for a cause, a culprit, a witness—anything that would explain this sudden, all-consuming inertia.
He struggled to will his hand up to his face, to rub away the gluey, sleep-paralysis numbness, but neither hand responded. When he tried to lift his head from the icy pillow, his skull stayed fixed, as though bolted directly to the mattress. The effort was so foreign, so deeply wrong, that a wave of panic crashed through his chest and nearly stopped his heart.
Klein tried again, this time with more focus, and his jaw twitched just enough for him to bite down on his tongue. The taste of blood flooded his mouth and gave him a small anchor, a reason to keep fighting. He forced his eyes to the corners of the room, willing his vision sharper, and saw—at first—nothing more than shadow and the slow creep of that unnatural moonlight across the wall.
But then, as the silence pressed in, he caught a glimmer of movement. Something glistened in the periphery: fine, hair-thin lines cutting through the darkness, glinting with each subtle shift of his vision. It was only by the grace of that sickly red moon that he saw them at all, but once he did, it was impossible to unsee. Wet-looking, blood-red threads, thin as spider silk but pulsing with their own sick translucence, as if they were alive. They started at his wrists, his throat, the points of his elbows and knees, and then snaked outward, disappearing into the black corners of the room.
They didn’t just pin him. They seemed to drink from him, tiny droplets of blood clinging to each thread, quivering with each of his heartbeats. Klein’s breathing grew ragged, and for a moment he imagined he could feel the tug of the threads inside his veins, siphoning something vital from him into the dark. He tried to scream and found his lips glued shut, the sound dead before it could even reach his teeth. Terror, bright and clear as a bell, resonated through his mind. But then something else—a cold curiosity, a need to know. He forced himself to follow the threads with his eyes, tracing their paths across the room, to where they vanished into the deepest shadow.
A flash of patriotic colors caught his eye—blue and red with white trim. His gaze darted to their source and found a marionette suspended in the darkness. Its limbs hung from translucent joints, elbows and knees and knuckles all clicking softly as it moved. The thing was stained black in patches with what looked like oil. Its face bore the garish makeup of a carnival clown—crimson cheeks against sickly yellow skin. Its smile stretched unnaturally wide, revealing teeth that seemed too numerous and too pointed for any human mouth.
The puppet lurched toward him, its movement neither falling nor walking but something horribly in between. Klein strained against his invisible bonds, willing just one finger to twitch, one muscle to respond. Nothing came. He remained frozen, aware only of his thundering pulse, the copper taste flooding his mouth, and the ravenous silence that seemed to watch him from every corner of the room.
Klein’s heart pounded at his ribs as the doll drew closer. He felt the shimmer of fear in his jaw, the cold sweat beading at his hairline, the slow, juddering collapse of his breath into fast, tight stabs. The puppet advanced with boneless steps, arms trailing behind like tangled string, the obscene, rictus smile frozen in delight. Its glassy eyes never blinked, never shifted, only bored into Klein’s own with an unspoken certainty: it would reach him. It would touch him. It would know him.
He tried to scream again, but an unseen force sealed his lips. The threads at his wrists and ankles pulsed, growing fatter, drinking deeper. Each one seemed to tug at him with insistent hunger, draining his will, his heat, his very sense of self. He felt the world closing in, vision tunneling to a thin line, red on black, then nothing at all. The doll’s silhouette hung above him, immense and insistent, then dissolved into a smear of darkness as Klein’s eyes fluttered shut.
But in the silence that followed, a sound began to weave itself into the fabric of the dark—a song, slow and sweet, with the faltering rhythm of a music box unwinding—a lullaby, faint but insidious, threading through the marrow of the hush. Klein fought to hold on to himself, to anchor his mind to something that was his, but the tune wound through him, soft and irresistible, until even his terror unspooled into a gray, weightless drift.
He floated in that liminal nothing for an age. The feeling of the puppet’s gaze persisted, but distant now, as if filtered through leagues of water and gauze. The lullaby grew louder, then softer, then warped and slowed until it was only a pattern: three notes rising, three notes falling, over and over, like a heartbeat in sleep.
When awareness returned, he found himself suspended in a kind of gray half-light, not quite awake. Every limb was numb, leaden, but his mind flickered in and out of clarity. He tried to move, to call for help, but nothing happened. A sense of helplessness settled on him, heavy and profound, until at least some detail broke the trance: the cold press of a mattress beneath his back, the iron taste still thick on his tongue, the high-pitched ticking of a clock somewhere out of sight.
The marionette was gone, but an even stranger feeling remained—a total, immovable paralysis, as if he’d been sewn into his own body. Klein’s breathing fell into the rhythm of the lullaby’s echo, shallow and regular, but his mind whirled, trying to make sense of how he had come to this state.
He blinked, and in the moment that his eyelid moved, a sliver of the world returned, the dim scarlet of the curtained window, the ancient, peeling paint of the ceiling above, and hair as dark as the night hanging like a curtain blocking his eyesight from the rest of the room.
From behind the dark veil, a voice glided out, not at all the croak or whisper he’d unconsciously expected, but a bright, unmistakable lilt, as if the speaker were only playacting at being a shade.
“Hello, little one,” the woman called to him, her head canted as if she were peering through the haze of her own mask. He squinted and saw her shape more distinctly: a figure tall and stooped at the shoulders, draped in a robe that shimmered midnight blue, overlaid with a spangled net of silver—each point of starlight stitched so fine that if he blinked it seemed to pulse with its own cold fire.
He stared, trying to distinguish her eyes through the star-spotted veil, but the fabric blurred her features, and he remembered in a flash the odd, loving fear she’d always inspired in him as a child: that sense of being watched by something not quite of this earth, but fiercely invested in his fate.
“Aunt Evie?” Klein heard his own voice croak, raw and unsure. His mouth felt thick with sleep, tongue slow and clumsy on the syllables.
“Hello, Klein,” she repeated, and her lips, though indistinct, seemed to smile softly beneath the mesh. The syllables were wrapped in the peculiar cadence of Evie’s voice—part lullaby, part commandment—that had always made children go quiet in her presence. Klein felt both embarrassment and relief, a strange comfort in the familiarity.
He reached for her, or tried to, the threads were gone, but his fatigue remained, and the best he could manage was a tremor in his fingers. Still, he needed to know: “Aunt Evie, you’re here. I missed you.”
“I know,” she said. The answer was simple, decisive, the way all her answers had been. He noticed a sway in the way that the ceiling moved and realized he was being rocked like a child in need of comfort.
Something changed in the air between them. She began to hum, a sound that was neither tune nor vibration, but a pattern: three notes rising, three falling, looped again and again. It permeated the air around them. The music was familiar, though he couldn’t place the origin—maybe a memory from early childhood, or a song from the dusk-lit kitchen on nights when she’d watched him, her hands always busy with some impossible tasks. The lullaby’s pulse seemed to thread itself directly into his bones, and with it came the first pull of sleep, soft but inexorable.
No, he thought. Not again. Klein forced his eyes open, tried to focus on her, to speak.
“Wait,” he called, and heard the desperation in his own voice—a plea, raw and childish. “Aunt Evie, please.”
He wanted to tell her about the marionette, about the bloodred threads, about the thing behind the gate, but the words tangled and died in his throat. The music pressed against the inside of his skull, gentle but absolute.
Evie held him closer, rocking him back and forward with every movement. Her veil shimmered, casting wild constellations across the walls and ceiling.
“Shhh,” she said, the sound as warm and final as a blanket pulled over his head. “You need rest, Klein. You always have.” Her voice dropped, close and confiding. “You’re stronger than you think, little one. But you must be careful. There are things in this place that feed on noise, on unrest. If you give them too much, they’ll never let you go.”
He tried to laugh, but the sound came out wet and broken. “What things? The marionette? The priest?”
She shook her head, the veil casting shadows. “Not them. Not really. Think deeper. There’s a sickness here, Klein, and it wants to wear your face. You can’t let it.”
The threads binding him grew hot, almost electric, and he felt fresh beads of sweat break out along his brow. “Aunty, please—what do I do?”
The lullaby faltered, then returned stronger, looping back on itself until the notes seemed to braid together. “You let yourself sleep, and you dream of nothing. Nothing at all. Do you hear me?”
He wanted to say no, wanted to fight back, but her voice was the tide and he was only a stone, worn smooth by years of the same song. The world blurred at the edges; his limbs went first, then his chest, then the final shimmer of red light at the base of his vision. He felt the air grow cold as she leaned in, closer and closer, until the silver mesh of her veil brushed his lips, damp with her own tears.
“I will always be here, Klein. Believe that,” she whispered. “Tell Benson and Melissa: I received their gifts. I am grateful.” Her voice faded, and the stars on her dress flickered out, one by one, until only the memory of her remained, a warmth fading from his cheek.
Klein blinked against a hot, blinding triangle of sunlight that came at him from the upper tier of the window, flaring red through his eyelids until he groaned and rolled away, feeling as if someone had scrubbed the back of his retinas with steel wool. The memory of the lullaby retreated, replaced by a high, hissing whine that made his skull hum. He was still in bed, and the sense-memory of the puppet—the marionette, its mouth full of splinters—trailed after every movement, so that even the slow act of breathing felt like a hazard. The press of the mattress beneath his back was cold, and scattered over it were the blue shadows of the netted curtain, cast in the sharp angles of morning.
He took in the unfamiliar geometry of the room: the quarter-moon arch of the ceiling, the row of other beds made up in neatly white sheets, or at least those that did not occupy the sick. The curtain surrounding his bed was opened before he woke.
The threads were gone from his wrists and ankles, but he could still feel them as a ghost-pressure, a memory of restraint that lingered in the tissue of his joints. He flexed his hands, then his feet, half-expecting to see the telltale red ligature of thread burned into his flesh, but there was nothing. Only the pale, spidery tracery of veins under skin.
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, landing them with a graceless thud. The world spun, righted itself, and he sat there for a long moment, elbows on knees, palms pressed to his temples, waiting for the aftershocks of the dream (vision? visitation?) to subside. There was an impression of Evie’s veil, cold and damp against his cheek, and then the memory of the doll, its painted-on smile and the way it had reached for him as if to cradle or consume. It was impossible to parse, dream logic leaking into waking life, but Klein found himself repeating the three-note pattern under his breath, as if it were a spell that could ward off the next incursion.
The shaking in his hands wouldn’t stop, so he dug his nails into his thighs and forced himself to look up, to see if anything had changed. The room was empty. He could almost sense the shape of absence. The spot Evie had filled is now gone, just as darkness is never fully replaced by light. Klein stared at the blank patch of wall opposite the bed, expecting a message, or a sign, or even a hint of the marionette’s presence. But there was only the slow creep of sunlight up the paint, illuminating the cracks and old water stains, and the silence that followed, so complete it felt intentionally constructed.
“Klein?” A voice called to him, the syllable twisting through layers of haze, seeming first impossibly distant, then blaring right in his ear. It was like being yanked by a string up through the surface of a dark pool—his name, again, closer this time, followed by a fluttering of motion at the edge of the curtain. He turned his head, and the pain that followed was sharp and white, but for a moment, he forgot it, because Melissa stood there, hair let down in heavy brown ropes, a dress the color of antique glass, and a look on her face like she’d just spotted a wounded bird on the kitchen windowsill.
“Klein?” The second invocation, and the way she said it, was both an accusation and a benediction.
He tried to answer, but all that came out was a half-swallowed, “Yeah?”—a sound like a groan trapped in molasses.
She moved toward him, settling on the edge of the bed with a practiced ease, her hands folded in her lap. “I thought you’d be asleep for another hour.” There was the ghost of a smile on her lips, but her eyes—deep, old-soul brown—kept flicking to the bandages around his wrists, to the dried blood crusted under his fingernails, to the patchwork of bruises blooming across his arms where the threads had held him down.
He stared at her, waiting for his mind to catch up, to remember exactly how long it had been since he last saw her—days, surely, but the line between before and after seemed irreparably blurred. “Melissa,” he said, savoring the name. “I thought you had school today.”
She made a noise—half scoff, half apology—and shook her head so that her hair fell forward, creating a dark curtain between them and the world. “I did. Yesterday.” She blinked, as if surprised to discover herself in the present tense. “But I wanted to check in. And—well—after what happened, they said it would be excused.”
He nodded, grateful but also ashamed, as if he’d personally inconvenienced the entire educational system by nearly dying.
“You’re here,” he said, and the words felt foolish, unnecessary, but she didn’t comment.
“I’m here,” she repeated, softer, and reached out to touch the back of his hand. Her fingers were cool and dry, and he wondered what she saw when she looked at him now. The silence between them was thick—heavy with all the things that could not, or would not, he said. Klein searched his memory for some small, ordinary detail, something to place them back in the world they’d left behind.
“Did you bring my things from the apartment?” he tried. They were supposed to let him out today. In their rush to get him to the church, he hadn’t brought a new set of clothes with him to change into.
Melissa winced, a second spasm, then quickly smoothed her face. “Some of it,” she said. “But Aunt Evie came by with Benson and—well—she insisted on going through your things first. You know how she is.”
He did. The thought of Evie rummaging through his possessions—a shoebox of letters, the notebook with its unsettling diagrams and half-poems—sent a cold flush through him. He tried to picture her at the kitchen table, but then he realized he couldn’t really imagine her. He couldn’t imagine her in the apartment either. The apartment was just too dull to be rundown enough to host someone as important as her.
“She said,” Melissa continued, lowering her voice, “that she was worried about you. That she’d had a dream.” She looked away, embarrassed, as if being the messenger made her complicit in the family’s collective madness. “She said you’d understand.”
He did. But the memory of the dream—the repetition of voices, the lullaby, the sense of being watched—felt too raw, too close to the bone. He wanted to ask about the marionette, about what they’d found in the church, but the words tangled and died in his throat. Instead, he let the silence stretch, watched the way the light from the window made patterns on Melissa’s dress, the way her hands nervously kneaded the hem.
Eventually, she seemed to tire of the quiet, or maybe she sensed the approach of the next visitor, because she straightened, smoothing invisible wrinkles from her skirt. “Benson’s here, too,” she said, glancing over her shoulder toward the door. “He wanted to come earlier, but they… They wanted to keep things quiet until you woke up.”
Klein nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He wanted to apologize, to explain, but the words would not align in his head. He knew that his getting hurt and ending up in this state wasn’t good. They couldn’t afford it. Instead, he watched as Melissa stood, gave him a quick, awkward smile—her default when she wanted to be brave—and drifted toward the doorway. She paused at the threshold, hand on the frame, and called out, “Benson?”
The reply was instant. “Yeah?” A shadow detached itself from the dim hallway, growing larger and more solid until it resolved into the figure of Benson, older and broad-shouldered, dressed in the black uniform of his job, hair combed and face freshly shaven but still somehow wild around the eyes. He hovered for a moment, as if uncertain he was welcome, then crossed the threshold and took up position at the foot of the bed, arms folded tight across his chest.
“Klein,” he said, the word almost a question.
Klein tried to sit up straighter, but the motion made his vision go briefly gray. “Hey,” he answered, and the word sounded smaller than he wanted it to.
For a moment, the three of them existed in a standoff, none willing to break the line of sight first. It struck Klein how much they all looked like children playing at adulthood—Melissa with her ancient, anxious eyes, Benson with his desperate attempt at control, and himself, bandaged and frail, propped up like a mannequin for the gods to judge.
“You look like terrible,” Benson said at last, but there was a flicker of tenderness under the insult. “They said you’d be out for a while.”
“I was,” Klein said, wishing his voice didn’t tremble. “But I’m back. I think.”
Benson snorted. “I’m glad you're ok. Just do not do this again.” Melissa misspoke to Benson about the notebook and how it could be connected to his injury.
Benson’s jaw worked, as if there was something he wanted to say but didn’t trust the room to keep it secret. Melissa, sensing the tension, moved to stand beside him, her posture both supportive and defensive.
“Did they tell you,” She said, “about the officers? About the priest?”
Klein shook his head, trying to clear the static from his memory. “Not really. Just that they’d ‘contained the situation’ and I needed to rest.” He glanced at Benson. “What happened? Where did they take the—” He stopped himself, unwilling to say the word marionette aloud.
Benson understood. “They say you're better now and can go home, so let’s take it easy for a while,” he said.
Melissa smiled, this time with a hint of mischief. “I’ll make your favorite,” she teased.
Benson smiled and asked, “Are you ready?”
Klein looked from one sibling to the other, then down at his own hands, the pale fingers that trembled ever so slightly in the cool air. He pressed them together, willing himself to be steady. “Sure,” he nodded.
Melissa led the way, stepping out into the hall with the crisp, determined stride of someone who’d spent years navigating bureaucracy on behalf of their family. Benson followed, pausing at the door to wait for Klein, who swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood, only wobbling a little. The three of them moved together, almost in step, past the other beds—some occupied, some vacant, all illuminated by the relentless geometry of the morning light.
Klein glances back and freezes. The police captain stands in the hallway, flanked by an officer and a third man—a priest with crimson gloves that catch the fluorescent light. Their gazes lock onto him with unsettling intensity. Klein's chest tightens. If he can make it back to the apartment, perform the ritual one more time—maybe then he'll truly escape. The thought of encountering either the captain or the priest again makes his newly steady legs threaten to buckle.