“Séance”

Part I

I’ve spent most of the last year convincing myself that what happened wasn’t my fault. But when I close my eyes, when I let myself really think—really remember—I always end up in the same place: the sound of metal screaming against asphalt, the smell of scorched rubber and leaking fuel, and the sight of a red and white ambulance wreathed in smoke just beyond the highway median.

Sarah died doing what she loved. That’s what they all said. Her captain, the chaplain, the mayor. She died a hero. The official report even called her actions “exemplary,” as if that word could somehow dull the violence of her end. She was helping pull two children from the back of a flipped SUV when a second car, one driven by a drunk who ignored the emergency lights and barreled through the scene at seventy miles an hour, slammed into the wreckage. Sarah had one of the kids halfway out. She pushed him clear in time. She didn’t move fast enough to save herself.

They said her neck broke instantly. No pain. No suffering. But those details didn’t stop me from waking up nights with my fists clenched and her name in my throat. They didn’t stop the replay in my mind of what it must have looked like. What it must have felt like.

After the funeral, people came in waves—coworkers, old friends, neighbors, even the barista from the corner café she loved. Most of them said the same things, offered the same tired condolences. I appreciated the effort, but every word felt like insulation stuffed into my ears. I didn’t want comfort. I wanted her.

I went back to work a week later, but it didn’t take. I’m a project manager by trade, or at least I was. Corporate timelines and budget reviews felt obscene after her death. It was like I was expected to glue myself back together with spreadsheets and Zoom calls. I quit after two weeks, walked out mid-meeting. My boss sent an email telling me to take as much time as I needed. I never responded.

The house was too quiet. Sarah and I didn’t have kids—just the two of us, and a golden retriever we lost to cancer the year before. I’d never felt alone in this place before, even on nights she worked overtime. Her energy lingered, soft and warm, woven into the corners of our lives. But once she was gone, the walls closed in.

I stopped answering my phone. Let the mail pile up. Friends tried to visit. I pretended not to be home. My mother came by twice, let herself in with the emergency key we’d given her years ago. I said enough to get her to leave. After that, the silence was uninterrupted.

Then came the nights. And the dreams.

At first, it was just fragments. A flash of her face in the darkness. The sound of her voice calling my name just before I woke up. But the dreams grew sharper. More detailed. She would reach out to me with trembling hands, mouth moving without sound, eyes full of something like panic. Each time I tried to speak, I’d wake gasping, the sheets damp and tangled.

I started researching dreams of the dead, and from there it spiraled. Paranormal forums. Articles on spiritualism. I scrolled through decades of blurry photos, watched videos of alleged ghost hunters with cameras strapped to their chests whispering into static. I rolled my eyes at most of it, but I kept reading. And then one night I found a thread about Electronic Voice Phenomena—EVP—and séances.

I won’t lie: I thought it was all bullshit. At least at first. But then I found testimonies from widows and grieving parents who said they’d spoken with loved ones. They weren’t hysterical. They weren’t trying to sell anything. Just people like me, clinging to hope like it was the only thing keeping them from drowning.

I didn’t have anywhere else to go, emotionally speaking. So I found a local group in a neighboring town that met weekly in a community center basement. They called themselves The Key Circle. About a dozen people. I remember the first time I walked in, expecting incense and cloaks. But they looked like librarians and office managers. Just regular people.

The facilitator, Helen, welcomed me without fanfare. She said she’d lost her sister ten years ago and had been doing this ever since. They didn’t promise contact—just the opportunity to listen.

The first few sessions felt like roleplay. We’d sit in a dim room with candles burning, fingers lightly touching a table or a board, while Helen guided us through breathing exercises and asked whoever might be listening to make themselves known. Most nights were quiet. Once, the temperature dropped and someone claimed to hear a whisper behind them. I didn’t.

But I kept going.

Sometimes I brought a photograph of Sarah. Other times I carried her wedding ring in my palm. I tried not to hope too much, even as part of me wanted it more than anything. I just wanted one more conversation. One more chance to tell her I was sorry for everything I’d said or hadn’t said. For all the arguments over stupid things. For not being there.

It was during the seventh session—two months after her death—when it finally happened.

We had been sitting in near silence for almost an hour. The candle had started to gutter. Helen was about to call it when something shifted in the room. I don’t know how else to describe it. The air felt brittle, like the calm just before a lightning strike.

Helen asked again, “Is there anyone who wishes to speak with us?”

At first, there was only the quiet crackle of the candle—and then the sound of static broke through the air. We heard it—everyone did. My longtime friend David, sitting across from me, visibly tensed. Then the air turned colder, and the static began to resolve.

It sounded like a voice trying to break through an old radio. Garbled syllables, bits of recognizable tone. I held my breath.

Then, through the fuzz, clear enough that every hair on my arms stood up, I heard: “Jack?”

The room went still.

I leaned forward, my heart hammering, afraid to speak too loudly and break the moment. “S-Sarah?”

There was no response at first. Just more static. Then again, quieter: “Jack… is it—is it really you?”

My throat closed. I choked on the lump that had formed without warning. I tried to answer but couldn’t make the words come.

“I—I can’t see you,” she said, her voice wet and trembling. “Where are you? It’s so dark.”

Helen motioned for calm, but I couldn’t look away from the table. My fingers were ice against the wood. “I’m here,” I whispered. “I’m with you.”

“I’ve missed you so much.”

“I miss you every second,” I said. “Sarah, are you okay? Where are you?”

There was a pause, and then a sob—quiet, but unmistakable.

“I don’t know. It’s cold here. I thought… I thought there’d be light.”

My chest tightened. “Are you alone?”

“No.” Her voice wavered. “Something’s here. It watches. It doesn’t speak, but I feel it.”

Helen leaned in, murmured something I didn’t catch. I held the table like it was the only solid thing in the world.

“I’m so glad you came,” Sarah whispered. “I don’t know how long I’ve been here. But now… now it knows where I am.”

“What does?” I asked.

“The thing that follows. I think… I think it’s been looking for me.”

The voice cracked. “I have to go. I’m sorry. I love you.”

“No—wait. Don’t go, Sarah. Please.” But the static was already rising again, swallowing the sound.

I called to her, but the voice did not return.

That night, I didn’t sleep. None of us did. We didn’t speak much as we left the center. Helen touched my shoulder and said we should be cautious. That sometimes things come through wearing familiar voices.

I nodded, but I didn’t believe her. Not yet.

It was Sarah. I knew it was. Her voice, her cadence, the little hitch in her breath when she got emotional. You can’t fake that. You can’t fake that kind of love.

At least, that’s what I used to believe.

Part II

I returned to the Key Circle the next week, haunted and electric, teetering between disbelief and obsession. I arrived early, carrying the same photo of Sarah I had brought before—the one of her in her uniform, squinting against the sun with a smile that had become too sacred to look at during the day. I sat in the darkened basement with the others, waiting for something I didn’t understand and couldn’t explain.

We tried again.

And again.

And again.

Over the next three weeks, I attended every session the group held, and each time we managed to establish contact, the thread between us grew stronger. Sarah’s voice began as static, as it had the first time—muffled, warbling, almost musical in its distortion. But the more we spoke, the clearer she became. And the more she came through, the worse she sounded.

She told me, during one session when the air in the room was so cold I could see my breath, that wherever she was, it wasn’t Heaven. She said it without bitterness, without accusation. Only regret. There was no light, she said. No warmth. No sunrises, no loved ones waiting. There was only a vast, frozen blackness that pressed in on her from all sides, like a mouth preparing to close.

When I asked her to describe it, she hesitated. I remember that moment vividly. She said, “It’s like being buried in ice, but you’re still awake. Still thinking. Still feeling. And you can’t scream, because there’s no air.”

The silence that followed that sentence seemed to soak into the walls.

I asked if there were others. She said there were—but they don’t speak anymore.

That chilled me in a way her earlier words had not. There was something in her tone—an undercurrent of dread so intense it seemed to poison the air around us. When I pressed for more, she went quiet for a moment, and then said, “Some of them try to leave. They try to reach the surface. But something drags them back. Something waits for them when they try to climb.”

I could feel the others in the room shifting uncomfortably. I wasn’t the only one unnerved.

Still, I pressed on.

Each session, I asked more questions, desperate to understand what had happened to her. I wanted to believe there had been a mistake—that she had fallen through some spiritual crack in the system and could be pulled free with enough effort, enough love, enough belief. But the more she described her surroundings, the harder it became to convince myself that her suffering was simply bureaucratic error.

She said she had tried everything. “I’ve prayed,” she told me during our fourth session. “I’ve called out to God, to angels, to you. I’ve begged them to come for me. I even screamed for my mother.”

Her voice cracked then, brittle as breaking glass.

“No one came.”

My eyes stung. I remember clenching my fists against the tabletop, willing myself not to cry. “What can I do?” I asked. “How do I help you?”

“Your voice,” she whispered. “It’s the only thing that feels warm. It’s the only thing that reminds me I used to be alive.”

Someone across the table gasped, quietly.

Sarah went on. “It’s like you’re a light out in the dark, Jack. A lighthouse. I try to swim toward it, but I never get closer. Every time I feel near you, something yanks me away. Like a chain I can’t see.”

That was when she began to mention it directly—the presence that stalked her.

At first, she only hinted at it. She’d say, “It’s watching,” or “I think it’s close tonight.” Over time, her descriptions grew more detailed, but never specific enough for me to picture it. She said it didn’t have a face. That when she looked at it, her mind tried to invent one—anything to fill the void. She said it didn’t walk or crawl or fly. It just moved. Like an idea slithering through a dream.

She described how it stayed at the edge of her awareness, sometimes for what felt like hours, sometimes for days. She could feel it circling. Not just watching, but waiting.

I asked her if it was a demon. Her response was, “I don’t know what it is. But it’s been here longer than I have. Longer than anyone.”

The room fell silent after that. Helen ended the session early, claiming we all needed rest. I don’t think she wanted us to hear any more. But I wasn’t done.

That night, I went home and set up my own space in the garage. I knew the others wouldn’t support it, not yet. I needed more time with Sarah. I needed answers.

I began holding private sessions by candlelight, whispering her name into the static as rain pattered against the roof. Some nights she didn’t come. Other times, I heard fragments—her voice caught in some distant, broken frequency. But on the sixth night, she returned in full.

She sounded weak, terrified.

“It’s closer now,” she said. “I think it followed me from the last session. You have to stop calling me, Jack. Every time you do, it gets stronger. It sees me better.”

I begged her not to say that. I told her I could find a way to help her. That maybe someone from the Circle knew more than they let on. That I’d research more rituals, contact experts. Anything. But she just cried.

“I don’t want to disappear,” she said. “I’m so scared.”

I didn’t sleep that night. The candle burned itself out sometime before dawn, and I sat in the dark long after the last ember faded, the silence pressing in on me like a verdict.

Three nights later, we gathered again at the center. Everyone knew something was wrong the moment we began. The air felt thinner than usual. It was hard to focus. Even Helen seemed nervous. She recited the opening prayers more slowly than usual, stumbling over her words.

I held Sarah’s photograph in both hands as Helen called out into the dark, her voice trembling.

“If any spirits are present—any energies seeking communion—we open this space in peace. Let the light guide you.”

There was no response at first.

And then: the static. Louder than ever. As if a storm had suddenly risen between dimensions and tunneled straight into our circle.

“Jack—”

Her voice was clear now, but shaking.

“It’s here. It’s with me.”

The others looked to me, startled.

*“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I tried to lose it. But I think it understands now. It knows what we’re doing. I shouldn’t have come tonight.”

“Sarah,” I said, trying to remain calm, “just listen to me. You’re stronger than it is. You said you can feel me, right? Just hold on. I’ll find a way to get you out.”

“You don’t understand—”

Her voice broke into a scream.

A high, thin wail pierced the room. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from the speaker, from her, or from the walls themselves. It was a sound that made my skin crawl.

“IT SEES ME!”

Then: silence.

The candle snuffed itself out without warning. A sharp, chemical smell filled the room—ozone, like air after lightning. One of the others coughed. David stood up and turned on the overhead light.

Sarah was gone.

We sat there for several minutes, unsure of what to say. Helen closed the session without ceremony. No one met my eyes as they packed up and left.

That night, I drove home in a daze, Sarah’s picture still clenched in my hand. I didn’t go into the house. I just sat in the car until morning, my breath fogging the windshield as the sun rose behind the trees.

She didn’t come back the next night, or the next. I tried every night for two weeks. Alone at first. Then with the group again. We used different methods—audio recordings, pendulums, spirit boards. Nothing worked. It was like she had never been there at all. Only the memory remained, playing in my head like a fever dream I couldn’t escape. Her voice. Her fear. The certainty in her final cry.

It sees me.

Part III

The silence stretched on for thirty-seven days.

During that time, I stopped sleeping in the house. I moved into the garage, where Sarah’s voice had been strongest. The cold became tolerable, the shadows familiar. The loneliness, I welcomed. There was nothing left in the house for me, no sound but the creak of settling lumber and the occasional ring of a phone I no longer answered. I withdrew from the Circle. Helen had called a few times, her voice concerned but cautious. David stopped by once and knocked until his knuckles bled, then left a bag of groceries on the front step. I didn’t touch it.

In the garage, I kept the photograph of Sarah propped against a small candle altar I’d built from her paramedic badge, her wedding ring, and a bracelet she used to wear that had snapped one night on our porch swing. I whispered to it every evening like it could hear me. Some nights I begged. Other nights I swore. I tried new rituals, new methods. Salt circles. Incense. Mirror gazing. None of it worked.

Then, on the thirty-eighth night, I tried something different. I set up the digital recorder, the EMF reader Helen had let me borrow, and a cheap shortwave radio that I’d started using to track static anomalies. The candle flickered low. I touched the ring to my lips, closed my eyes, and said her name.

The static began without warning, a low mechanical growl that shook the frame of the radio. My breath hitched as the temperature in the garage plummeted. The flame trembled, stretching tall and thin like it was being pulled upward by unseen hands.

And then I heard her.

“Jack.”

Her voice was calm, even, far more composed than I remembered. There was no panic in her tone, no ragged edge of fear. It was Sarah, yes—but something had changed.

“I’m here,” I said, sitting upright. “I’ve been trying—God, I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I know.”

Her voice flickered through the static like candlelight on water. “It was dangerous. It still is. But I’ve found a way to come back.”

The weight of her words struck me in the chest like a slow, smothering wave. I leaned forward. “What do you mean? How?”

There was a pause. Then: “I found something here. A crack. A seam between worlds. It’s small, but it’s real. And I think I can pass through it. I think I can come home.”

My hands shook. “Tell me what to do.”

The next few minutes were a blur of instructions. She spoke slowly, as if translating a language she didn’t fully understand. She told me about the solstice. About the significance of liminal days when the veil between worlds thinned. She described a ritual, one that required specific elements: a circle of iron nails, a fire lit from blessed wood, a symbol etched into the floor in charcoal and blood. Most of the ingredients I could find. One, however, was more complicated.

“I need a vessel,” she said. “Something physical. I can’t enter without one.”

I blinked, trying to parse her meaning. “What kind of vessel?”

“A body,” she said, with an apologetic softness. “Just one that’s strong enough. Young. Alive.”

My stomach turned. “You mean… someone else? You want me to find another person?”

“It’s only temporary,” she insisted. “I won’t hurt them. But I need something real to pass through. I can’t stay here any longer, Jack. I can’t.”

I sat frozen, the cold sweat beginning to bloom beneath my shirt. She must have sensed my hesitation, because her voice dropped to a whisper.

“You said you’d do anything. Remember?”

The session ended soon after. The radio hissed. The candle sputtered out. I was left in darkness, with her words replaying in my mind.

You said you’d do anything.

I spent the next few days watching people. I drove aimlessly through neighborhoods, parks, parking lots. I avoided eye contact, kept the windows rolled up. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for until I saw her—Lisa.

She worked at the community center, volunteering in the evenings, helping the elderly check in for their appointments and delivering meal kits to shut-ins. She had dark hair like Sarah’s, a similar build. Her voice, when I overheard her speaking to a patient at the front desk, was warm and lilting. She could have been Sarah’s cousin.

I followed her home.

I told myself it wouldn’t come to anything. That I was just preparing. But on the night of June 16th, I took a crowbar from the garage, wrapped it in a towel, and slipped into her backyard under cover of thunderclouds and a sky swollen with heat.

She opened the door to let her dog out. I struck her once, hard. She collapsed onto the patio stones, unconscious. I loaded her into the trunk and drove north toward the farmhouse.

It was an abandoned property an hour out from the city, nestled among rows of dead corn and scrub grass. The roof sagged in the center, and the front porch leaned drunkenly to one side, but the basement was intact and dry. I had prepared it over the past week, etching the sigils Sarah described into the concrete, securing the nails in a perfect ring. I even brought the photo with me, placing it at the circle’s edge, just outside the boundaries. Sarah’s smile was soft in the flickering candlelight.

I laid Lisa at the center, her hands bound loosely. I hesitated, waiting for guilt or doubt to rise up and stop me, but they never came. I was past that now. All I could see was Sarah, lost in that place, growing weaker by the day. If this was the price, I would pay it.

That night, the winds howled outside, whipping the trees into furious, rustling walls. I began the ritual, chanting the words Sarah had whispered to me in the dark. The air inside the farmhouse grew still, then electric. The candles flared blue.

And then the door burst open.

David stood in the doorway, flashlight in one hand, phone in the other. My mother stood behind him, pale, shaking. And with them—Pastor Cole.

“Jack,” my mother said, her voice breaking, “what have you done?”

I stepped between them and the circle. “You don’t understand,” I said. “She’s coming back. I can save her.”

Pastor Cole stepped forward. His expression was calm but resolute. “Let the girl go. We can talk. Whatever this is—whatever you’re doing—it doesn’t have to end this way.”

“She volunteered,” I lied, my voice cracking. “She wanted to help.”

David swore under his breath, moving as if to approach me, but Pastor Cole raised a hand to stop him.

“Let me speak to her,” the pastor said. “Let me speak to the spirit you claim is Sarah.”

I hesitated, then moved to the edge of the circle and called out. The static began almost instantly, a roiling buzz that filled the air like angry bees. And then: her voice.

“Jack.”

“Sarah,” I said. “They’re here. They don’t believe. But I told them. I told them you found a way.”

There was a pause. Then a coldness crept into the air, settling over us like frost.

“Why did you bring him?” she asked. Her voice had shifted—just slightly. Lower, more clipped.

“He’s a pastor,” I said. “He wants to speak to you. Maybe he can help.”

“He pollutes the connection.”

The words landed like stone in the silence.

“He doesn’t belong here. Tell him to leave.”

Pastor Cole stepped forward, his expression grim. “I don’t know who or what you are,” he said into the room, “but I know the voice of someone hiding something. And you, madam, are hiding a great deal.”

The static surged.

“You don’t know what you’re inviting, Jack,” the voice hissed.

“Sarah?” I asked meekly. “Is it—is it really you?”

There was no answer.

Part IV

I don’t remember when Lisa woke, only the sound she made—something jagged and raw, not quite a scream but close enough to make the air feel thinner. Her limbs jerked against the bindings, knees scraping against the old concrete floor of the farmhouse basement as she thrashed, the cords pulling tight around her wrists and ankles.

Her eyes found mine.

“Please,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “Please, let me go. I won’t tell anyone. I swear. Just—please.”

I stared at her from the other side of the circle, every part of me shaking. My fingers had tightened so hard around the ritual blade that the hilt bit into my palm. Blood had already soaked into the etched lines of the summoning sigil, feeding the center point as Sarah had instructed. Everything had been prepared precisely as she described: the circle of iron nails, the cedar and ashwood fire burning in the copper basin, the runes drawn with my own blood and oil pressed from the skin of her wedding band.

I couldn’t stop now. Not when she was so close.

“She’s coming back,” I whispered, whether to Lisa or to myself I couldn’t say. “This is the only way.”

The wind howled outside, pressing against the warped foundation like the house itself disapproved of what was happening beneath it. The candle flames bent unnaturally inward. The old beams groaned.

Lisa struggled again. “You don’t have to do this! Please!”

I looked at her—really looked—and for a moment, her face flickered. It wasn’t a trick of the light, and it wasn’t guilt. It was something behind her eyes, something deeper than terror. Something I didn’t want to recognize.

But it was too late.

The radio in the corner crackled to life.

First came the static, dense and sharp, prickling across the surface of the room like invisible needles. The fire’s light dimmed. The sigils began to glow faintly. The copper bowl began to hum, and the shadows pulled in tighter to the circle’s edge.

And then her voice came through.

“Jack.”

Not frantic. Not weak.

Calm. Confident.

“It’s time.”

I dropped to my knees beside the circle. “I’m here. Everything’s ready.”

Lisa’s cries rose behind me, but the sound grew distant, muffled by the surge of pressure in the room. It felt like being under water—like gravity had changed its mind and decided to press from every direction at once.

“You’ve done well,” Sarah said. “All that’s left is the passage.”

The temperature dropped rapidly. My breath became visible, fogging the air. The fire turned white-blue, and from within the circle, Lisa began to scream again—this time wordless, high-pitched, and cracking with pain.

She convulsed.

Her back arched off the floor, and a sound escaped her throat that didn’t belong to anything human. It rose and fell in pulses, a discordant rhythm of guttural chords and electrical interference, like dozens of overlapping voices trying to harmonize but failing.

The light flickered violently. The edges of the circle began to crack and hiss. The candles popped. Blood boiled up through the center sigil as if the concrete floor had split open.

Lisa went still.

The silence that followed was complete. No more wind. No more static. Not even the creak of the foundation. Only the faint crackle of the dying fire remained, like embers chewing through the last fragments of something living.

I rose slowly. “Sarah?” I asked. “Is it done?”

The thing that sat up in Lisa’s body turned toward me with a slow, fluid motion. Her hair clung to her face in wet, dark strands, and her skin gleamed with sweat. Her eyes locked onto mine—and in that instant, I knew.

Something was wrong.

Terribly, irreversibly wrong.

The expression she wore wasn’t relief. It wasn’t gratitude or love or even exhaustion. It was hunger.

She rose to her feet without using her hands, her spine unwinding like a serpent coming to life. She moved with the kind of fluidity that only creatures without true bones possessed. And when she smiled, it wasn’t Sarah’s smile. It was too wide. Too knowing.

“Jack,” she said, her voice lilting in the same cadence Sarah had used—but only on the surface. Beneath it was a second tone, lower and hollow, like an echo that didn’t belong.

My stomach turned. “Where’s Sarah?” I asked.

The thing in Lisa’s skin cocked its head. “Gone,” it said plainly. “As she was. As she will be.”

I backed away from the circle. “No. You said this was temporary. You said you wouldn’t hurt her.”

It moved toward me. “I said what you needed to hear.”

I stumbled against a broken cabinet, nearly tripping over a coiled extension cord on the floor. “You’re not her.”

“I was never her,” the thing said. “But I wore her well. She was an excellent fit.”

David, Pastor Cole, and my mother stepped closer, intending to intervene, as the air surged with pressure and heat.

“Get away from the girl!” Pastor Cole barked, drawing a small cross from his coat pocket. “Whatever you are, you’re not welcome here!”

The entity turned toward him and took a single step.

The pastor recited a prayer—in Latin, I think—but he only got halfway through before she crossed the circle’s boundary. The lights exploded. The fire guttered out. And in the next moment, she was upon him.

I didn’t see how she crossed the room so fast. One blink, and she was at the stairs. Another, and she had her hand pressed flat against the pastor’s chest, lifting him from the floor like he weighed nothing.

His prayer choked off. There was a sound—a snap, sharp and brutal—and his body fell limp. My mother screamed and reached for him, but David pulled her back.

Then the thing turned to face me again. “There is no Hell,” it said conversationally. “There is no Heaven. There are only corridors. Layers. Doors between dimensions. Some lead upward. Most go down.”

I couldn’t speak.

It took a step closer. “I wanted out,” it said. “And you let me out. You opened the door. And now I’m here.”

I stared at Lisa’s body—the way her eyes shimmered with oily movement just behind the corneas, the way her limbs bent too easily, as though joints were optional.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

It smiled again. “She’s still here. Sleeping. More or less.”

I forced myself to look into those eyes. “And my wife?”

Its smile faded. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

The air had gone stale, and a metallic odor permeated the room. My thoughts felt distant and unanchored, as though I were standing outside my own skull, watching this unfold from a distance I couldn’t shorten.

I had brought it here—I had unchained it. Whatever had spoken to me in those séances, weeping and pleading and begging for warmth, had it ever been Sarah? Maybe it had been, once, but it was now clear that she had been used like a lure, and had now been hollowed out and puppeted by something ancient.

The door between dimensions hadn’t been a passageway for Sarah’s return. It had been a gate.

And I had held it open.

Part V

I buried Pastor Cole myself.

David and my mother wanted to call the police. They wanted to involve authorities, file a report, make the world take notice. But what could we have said? That a demon had worn the skin of a girl I kidnapped and torn a man’s spine in half? That my dead wife had begged me to perform a ritual and I had—like a fool, like a child—done exactly what I was told?

They would have locked me away. Lisa too. If she even counted as Lisa anymore.

Instead, we left his body in the woods north of the farmhouse, far from the road, beneath a grove of pine trees dense enough to choke sunlight. I marked the grave with a small cross fashioned from broken branches. My mother prayed, hands trembling, her eyes never leaving the bloodstains on my shirt. David wouldn’t look at me at all.

We burned the farmhouse the following day.

The creature—whatever it was—didn’t try to stop us. It watched from a distance, still wearing Lisa’s body like a custom-tailored suit. She stood behind the barn as the flames took hold, arms limp at her sides, head tilted slightly to the left, as if trying to understand why we were so afraid.

I thought of killing her.

The idea formed and re-formed in my mind like a splinter working deeper beneath the skin. I could have done it—snuck up behind her with a tire iron, or waited until she slept, if she even did that. But something held me back.

Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was guilt.

Or maybe I still hoped, somewhere deep down, that I hadn’t been completely wrong. That some part of Sarah had made it through.

We parted ways that night. David drove my mother home, and I returned to the garage.

The altar remained.

I hadn’t touched it since the night I brought Lisa there, but I found myself drawn back to it, the same way a moth finds its way to open flame. I cleaned the soot from the photograph, repositioned the ring and badge, and lit a single candle at the center.

Then I sat down.

And I called her name.

For hours, there was nothing. Just silence, broken only by the occasional pop of cooling metal or the groan of the wind slipping through the gaps in the siding.

I had nearly fallen asleep when the radio crackled.

At first, I didn’t move. I couldn’t believe it. The sound was faint—so faint it might have been the wind. But then it shifted, rose into a thin, keening thread of static.

“Jack…”

Her voice was like a ghost echoing through a frayed wire. It wasn’t the voice I had heard before—not the clear, confident mimicry of the parasite—but the true Sarah. Faint. Fading. Fragile.

I leaned in. “Sarah?”

“Yes…”

I clenched my fists, fighting the tide of grief that threatened to pull me under. “Is it really you?”

“It’s me,” she said, and I could hear her crying. “It’s really me. I found a way to reach back. Not for long. Only once.”

“Where have you been?” I asked. “What happened? I thought I lost you.”

Her answer came slowly, like someone crawling through deep water.

“I was pulled away. When the door opened… it let everything loose. I got caught in the current. I’ve been trying to get back ever since.”

I could hardly breathe. “It wasn’t you, was it?” I whispered. “All those times. It wasn’t you talking to me.”

“No,” she said. “It used my voice. My memories. It wore me like a shell. But it wasn’t me.”

Tears blurred my vision. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought I was saving you.”

“I know. That’s why it worked.”

I blinked, confused. “What do you mean?”

“You let it in,” she said. “But you anchored it, too. It didn’t understand that. The ritual tied it to your belief, your love. And now it’s vulnerable.”

“So, we can stop it?”

She paused a moment, and then said, “Yes. But only if you help me. I need to reach through. I can’t hold on long.”

I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. “Tell me what to do.”

“Focus on me,” she said. “Not the voice. Not the body. Me. Remember who I was. What we had. That’s the only thing that keeps it from hiding.”

I closed my eyes and let the memories come.

The way she laughed when she saw squirrels try to open the birdfeeder. The way she hummed while folding laundry. The way she held me when I cried after my father’s funeral. The smell of her hair. The warmth of her breath on my neck at night.

The candle flared, and the air shifted. Somewhere in the distance, a shriek echoed through the garage—a sound of metal being torn in half by rage.

The garage door buckled outward.

I opened my eyes as the air filled with a blinding silver light, cold and humming with static, and from that brightness, I saw her—not in flesh or in form, but in presence.

Sarah surged through the light like electricity, her voice rising in harmony with the static, a thousand echoes of her laughter braided with sorrow. She passed through the veil and into the circle, and the creature in Lisa’s body screamed.

I heard it from the road. Heard it from the fields. A scream that wasn’t just pain, but terror.

It tried to run—but Sarah was faster.

She caught it at the threshold of the door and pulled. The body twisted. The limbs jerked. Lisa’s form crumpled like cloth soaked in acid, and something vast and black slithered from within her skin. It clawed at the edges of the circle, clawed at the air, tried to escape into the cracks between boards.

Sarah dragged it back, dragged it screaming into the dark.

The light began to fade.

I rushed to the circle. “Sarah!”

She didn’t speak right away. Then, like a whisper across a phone line gone to static, she said softly, “I have to go now.”

“No,” I said. “Please. Just stay. Just a little longer.”

“I can’t.”

Her presence flickered, but didn’t vanish. I felt her in the air, in the cold against my cheeks, in the way the candle flame bent toward me without wind.

She touched me. I felt her—like static and snowfall, like the soft click of a shutter closing over the light.

And then she spoke one last time. “Don’t open the door again, Jack. Not for anyone.”

And she was gone.

The candle extinguished, the light faded, and the air settled.

Lisa lay on the garage floor, unconscious but breathing. Her pulse was strong. Her skin was warm. Her eyes twitched beneath closed lids.

The circle had broken. The door had closed.

Part VI

The hospital released Lisa three days after the incident.

They ran tests—neurological scans, blood panels, even a psychiatric evaluation—but found no signs of trauma, no clear explanation for the blackout, the tremors, or the blood in her tear ducts. When asked what she remembered, she looked confused, then frightened, and finally quiet.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just noise. Like… thunder inside a cave.”

She didn’t remember the farmhouse. She didn’t recognize my name. She never asked how she’d gotten there or who had brought her. And no one told her. A story was constructed—believable enough to hold under scrutiny, at least for now. Gas inhalation. Collapse. Exposure. Someone found her. She was lucky.

She moved away soon after. I never spoke to her again. But I checked in, from a distance. She enrolled in classes at a small state college across the county line. Changed her last name. Cut her hair. Started volunteering again at a library near campus. If she ever felt something lingering at the edges of her memories, she never reached out to anyone about it.

As for Pastor Cole… his absence was harder to explain.

The church held a memorial after a month of silence, and the sheriff’s department launched a search party after his abandoned truck was found on a back road near the county border. They combed the woods for days, interviewed his parishioners, looked into his schedule, his cell records, even asked my mother a few questions.

But there was no body.

No blood.

No crime scene.

Just a missing man, a congregation in mourning, and a quiet sense—shared by those who knew him best—that something unnatural had taken him.

No one came knocking after that. No charges were filed. No follow-up inquiries. In the absence of evidence, the town buried the questions along with the memory of the man who had asked them.

David never spoke to me again.

He sent a single message, typed plainly, without anger or pretense. It said, “I loved her too, but you went too far. Don’t contact me again.” I never did.

My mother still prays for me.

She leaves voicemails now and then, reminders to go back to church, to see someone, to eat something green. I listen to them, but I don’t return the calls as often as I should. The things she says, they belong to a world I can no longer quite live in.

I moved three towns away and bought a small house overlooking a lake. It’s quiet. The nights are long, but the water keeps me grounded. I started woodworking—nothing elaborate, just tables and small cabinets. I sell them at flea markets or online when I feel like interacting with people. Most days, I don’t.

Years passed.

I remarried.

Her name is Claire. She’s kind in a way that doesn’t demand anything from me. She knew from the start that I’d lost someone. She never pressed for the whole story, only listened when I chose to speak. I don’t know if I love her the same way I loved Sarah. I don’t think that’s possible. But I love her in the way that time teaches you to—quietly, patiently, in the spaces between scars.

We don’t talk about death.

Not really.

There are days when I almost convince myself that it’s over. That what happened in the garage, in the farmhouse, in the dark beneath the candlelight, was all some fevered dream. But then I wake in the middle of the night, the hair on my arms standing straight up, and I remember the sound Sarah made as she pulled that thing down with her. I remember the static. The cold. The feeling of her fingers, not quite flesh, brushing against my cheek for the last time.

And I remember what she said.

Don’t open the door again, Jack. Not for anyone.

But I think about it.

More often than I care to admit.

The box I kept—the one with the photo, the ring, and the badge—it still sits in the back of my closet, wrapped in cloth and sealed with iron wire. I haven’t touched it in five years.

Until tonight.

Claire took the kids to her sister’s for the weekend. I stayed behind. Said I needed rest, time to work. That wasn’t a lie.

Tonight, I opened the box.

The objects were just as I left them. No mold. No decay. The photo hadn’t yellowed. The badge still held its dull glint. I laid them out on the old workbench in the garage. The Ouija board—a relic from a thrift store Sarah and I once visited—lay beneath them.

I lit a single candle. Just one.

I didn’t say her name.

I didn’t call.

I only sat there, staring at the board, my hand hovering over the planchette.

It trembled.

I did not.

There were no voices. No cold wind. No flickering lights.

Just the sound of my own breath. The creak of the walls. The distant wash of lake water against the shore.

I stayed that way for nearly an hour.

Then I took my hand away.

I blew out the candle.

And I walked back into the house.