09 Apr Shadows of St. Augustine

Part I

The iron gate at the edge of Charlotte Street let out a brittle screech as Camille Wren pressed it inward with her forearm, careful not to let her suitcase topple sideways against the uneven brick. The fence, once black, now bore the fading bronze hue of salt-weathered paint, and the wrought-iron pattern above the entrance curved like thorned vines curling in on themselves. The gate led to a narrow, shaded walkway of coquina and moss, flanked on either side by camphor and wild oleander. Though it was just past noon, the path held onto the shadows as if reluctant to let the daylight pass.

She paused at the first worn step of the porch, adjusting the strap of her shoulder bag and glancing up at the house that would be hers for the week. It was two stories tall and painted a soft seafoam green that had since faded to something closer to parchment. The lattice beneath the porch was crooked in places, and the railings had begun to peel, exposing the graying wood underneath like bones breaching the skin. A blue-and-white placard hung beside the door—Redding House Inn – Est. 1890—though Camille, having done her research, suspected the building was far older than that.

She knocked twice, and the door opened with such immediacy that she flinched slightly.

Mrs. Redding stood in the doorway without expression. Her white hair was twisted into a tight bun and her clothing, though plain, appeared freshly pressed. Her eyes, pale and watchful, flicked from Camille to her bag and back again. “Miss Wren,” she said, voice dry and formal, “you’re earlier than most.”

Camille smiled politely and stepped inside when offered. The interior smelled of lavender polish and timeworn paper. She was led through a narrow hall where paintings of Spanish forts and galleons hung beneath aging crown molding. The floor creaked with each step, but the house had none of the artificial charm of modern B&Bs—it was authentic in the way that mattered. The way that left no doubt it had once stood alone in a different city, one built atop hard-packed sand and broken treaties.

Mrs. Redding stopped at the foot of the stairs and gestured upward with two fingers. “Room Five. It’s at the end. Toward the back. Cooler there, usually.” Her voice dropped half an octave. “And quieter.”

Camille nodded, murmured her thanks, and began to ascend, only to stop as the woman spoke again.

“If you’re here for the beaches, they’re best before noon. The wind picks up after that.” A pause. “And if you’re here for the ghost stories, I recommend you stay where the maps can still find you. The city forgets people sometimes.”

The remark might have been flippant, but the delivery was too exacting, the tone too measured. Camille offered a nervous smile and continued up the stairs without pressing the point.

She unpacked slowly in her room, placing her books on the old dresser beneath the window and folding her shirts into the drawers one by one. Outside, the garden was overgrown and rustling in a way that didn’t quite match the movement of the breeze. Spanish moss hung low from a leaning oak near the property wall. Every so often, she thought she saw something shift just beyond the boundary, though when she leaned closer, there was only wind.

Camille had chosen St. Augustine not for sand or sun but for its layers. The city was built in strata—Spanish, British, Confederate, and modern—all stacked atop the bones of something far older. It had never quite shaken its sense of intrusion, of having been placed where something else once ruled.

By late afternoon, she wandered the old quarter, scribbling notes into her leather-bound journal and browsing the outdoor racks of a used bookstore. She admired the massive coquina walls of the Castillo de San Marcos and walked the perimeter of the old cemetery just off Cordova, where wrought-iron crosses jutted like broken teeth from the sunken grass.

It was in a narrow alley between a print shop and a wine bar that she saw it—a flyer, aged to a tobacco hue and affixed to a bulletin board with a rusted tack. The paper looked older than it had any right to be, curling at the edges and stained with old watermarks.

“Jeremiah’s Midnight Walk”
Follow the flame through the city’s forgotten skin
Lanterns provided. Departing nightly at 11:30. Meet at the stone arch near Aviles.

There was no website listed. No contact number. Just a hand-drawn compass rose and an intricate border of ivy and thorns.

Camille tore off one of the pull-tabs along the bottom and slipped it into her pocket.

That night, after returning briefly to change into something warmer, she made her way to the rendezvous point. The archway at the mouth of Aviles Street stood silent beneath the orange glow of gaslights, and Camille wasn’t the only one waiting. A small group had gathered—five or six in total—each standing apart from the others, as if aware on some level that intimacy might be discouraged.

Then he arrived.

Jeremiah moved with a grace that felt out of place in the modern world, his lantern swaying gently in his grip. His coat was long and black, flaring slightly at the knees, and his boots clicked in perfect rhythm against the pavers. His features were striking in a way that avoided beauty. His face was pale and elongated, his eyes too light to guess the color. When he spoke, his voice fell smooth and quiet, but reached the ears of all present.

“I thank you for joining me tonight,” he said. “The city you see by day is a painting. What we see by flame is what remains beneath.”

No one responded. No one needed to. He turned, and the group followed.

As they walked, Camille began to notice subtle inconsistencies in their surroundings. The air thickened in the alleys they passed through, scented faintly with burnt sugar and something acrid she couldn’t quite place. All the while, Jeremiah never stumbled or hesitated.

They passed a bakery with its shutters drawn, and a brindled dog laying nearby lifted its head. As Jeremiah drew near, the animal’s ears folded back. It stood abruptly and barked, once, then twice, low and furious. Its hackles bristled and it lunged forward, only to be jerked back by its leash. The sound it made was more growl than voice, the kind of warning animals give when something wrong is near. Jeremiah did not look at it.

Camille looked up.

As he moved past the next archway, the flame in his lantern flickered sharply. Overhead, the gaslights dimmed, then flared again once he had gone.

By the time they reached the first landmark—a weather-worn wall etched with 17th-century graffiti—Camille was no longer certain what day it was, or whether the others walking beside her had ever introduced themselves at all.

Part II

The group followed Jeremiah in uneasy silence, each drawn forward more by instinct than intention. He did not ask for names, nor did he offer his own again, as though he assumed anyone standing before him already knew who he was—or had, at the very least, been told.

Their path wove tightly between weather-smoothed buildings and shuttered galleries. Old iron gates stood half-open in arched entryways where candlelit patios once held music and murmured seductions.

Jeremiah raised his lantern as he walked, letting its flickering light dance across flaking plaster and chipped stone. He stopped in front of a wooden sign whose lettering had long since faded beneath layers of mildew and sea air, though faint traces of red still clung to the edges. Without needing to be prompted, he began his tale.

“In 1740,” he said, “this quarter was burned by Oglethorpe’s cannons. But what was left standing, what remained intact, became the foundation for something older. You see, when you build over fire, the things that burned down are never entirely gone. They linger beneath the surface. Sometimes in the mortar. Sometimes in the mind.”

He stepped forward again, and the group followed.

At a corner where the coquina wall curved in on itself, a narrow corridor revealed itself—too narrow for vehicles, and almost too narrow for the group to pass without brushing the sides. The alley was paved with irregular stones, some of them wet as if from rain that hadn’t fallen. Moss clung to the walls like frost in a dream. Camille heard Jeremiah’s voice again, this time quieter, almost reverent.

“Every city has a story it refuses to tell. In St. Augustine’s case, that story begins with a woman named Annabel Coyt.”

He turned and faced the group, letting the lantern hang low by his thigh.

“She was born in 1819, married in 1841, and disappeared in the spring of 1843. Her husband said she went walking in the early morning, hoping to watch the herons along the marsh wall. She never returned. They found her bonnet at the edge of the tidal basin, pressed flat into the silt as though placed there deliberately. No other trace remained. No drag marks. No footprints. Only that small, blue velvet hat, still damp with dew.”

Camille, arms folded now against the light chill in the air, felt herself draw forward unconsciously. Jeremiah tilted his head and smiled.

“Some said she drowned. Others whispered she had taken up with a soldier and fled north under darkness. But those who truly knew her—the maids, the tradesmen, the children she taught on Sundays—spoke of a different fear. They remembered Annabel’s stories. She used to tell them of a man in mourning black who walked the streets when the city slept. Not a ghost, she said, and not a man either. Just a thing in human shape. She’d seen him, once, staring from behind the cemetery gate, unmoving. In her final weeks, she swore to those who’d listen that she could hear him walking behind her, pacing the distance between them.”

Jeremiah stepped backward then, placing himself beside a wrought-iron gate that led into a small, overgrown plot of land. The space was enclosed by broken fencing and scattered with marble fragments—what may once have been tombstones, but were now reduced to illegible shapes, eroded by centuries of wind and salt. Camille thought she saw something scratched into one of the stones, but the angle was wrong, and the lanternlight too erratic.

“She was last seen,” he continued, “wandering toward the marshes. Her face was pale. Her hands were bare, even in the cold. A woman who had prepared to leave, but had not brought anything with her to stay away.”

He let the silence breathe before continuing. “The man in black, it’s said, still walks the alleys. He is not always seen or felt—but those who vanish in this city tend to vanish in his direction.”

Camille looked around then, expecting to see curious, uneasy faces beside her. But the man who had been standing to her right—the one in the red windbreaker who had earlier joked about bringing sage—was no longer there. She scanned the group quickly, counting only four besides herself. Hadn’t there been six when they began?

Before she could speak, the woman to her left muttered under her breath. “Not again.”

Camille turned, but the woman had already turned away, stepping to the rear of the group with her arms crossed and her face half-hidden beneath her hood. Jeremiah said nothing. He resumed walking.

They passed beneath an archway where the walls narrowed again, and the group’s footsteps fell quieter, muffled by moss and moisture. Overhead, the branches of a sprawling tree leaned into the space, casting shadows across the stone. Camille stepped lightly, eyes scanning the shapes and patterns etched along the alleyway’s base. Most were initials—dates, hearts, and crosses—but some markings were stranger: circles with flared ends, tiny handprints, spirals broken in two. They were too low to have been graffiti. Too old to be recent.

Jeremiah paused and turned to a metal grate in the ground, round and blackened with age. “Here,” he said, “is the true threshold.”

He knelt, setting the lantern beside the grate. The flame shuddered and lowered, though no wind moved through the corridor.

“This marks the entry to the original cistern system,” he said. “Built by the early Spanish settlers, it served not only to catch rain but to channel runoff from the higher streets. In time, the tunnels beneath began to erode, and a decision was made to seal them.”

He looked up, meeting Camille’s eyes for the briefest moment.

“But not all tunnels were sealed.”

He rose and walked again, leading them toward the southeastern edge of the old district. The buildings grew older here, less touched by renovation. Windows bore slatted wood, some nailed shut. Shutters hung at crooked angles. Doorways sloped to one side as if tired from holding their shape for too long. The alleyways bent at irregular angles, forcing the group to pivot every few paces.

By now, Camille had begun to feel a dull pressure in her ears, like the sensation that follows sudden altitude. The sound of the others’ footsteps seemed to lag behind them by half a second. The night had cooled significantly, but the air had taken on a dampness that clung to the skin. It smelled like wet rope left too long in a basement. Beneath that, something sweeter lingered—cloying and sharp, like dried herbs left to rot in their bundle.

The group passed beneath a carved stone lintel that bore no writing. The arch it supported narrowed into a tunnel framed by coral-studded walls and low wooden beams. It was here that the path changed.

Camille saw it first in the light—how the glow from Jeremiah’s lantern no longer fell evenly. The darkness ahead did not recede from the flame, but rather seemed to absorb it, swallowing its edges and softening its reach. The tunnel smelled of incense gone stale, of oil and mildew, and something beneath that—metallic, old, and sour.

She hesitated.

Jeremiah, noticing, turned and extended a reassuring hand. “There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before,” he said. “Only what you’ve forgotten.”

Camille stepped forward. The flame quivered again, and for a moment, just before she passed beneath the lintel, she thought she heard whispering from somewhere below.

Part III

Camille awoke later than she’d intended, the light already cresting high through the lace-curtained window at the rear of Room Five. She had dreamed, though the fragments slipped too easily from her grasp, dissolving into the fabric of morning like vapor trailing off a pane. What lingered was the sense of having wandered too far from safety, of voices spoken from mouths that were never seen, and footsteps that did not echo her own.

The sheets were cold beside her. Her shoes, damp from the night before, sat where she had left them beneath the sill, though there was now a smear of dark residue near the heel that hadn’t been there before. She dressed with care, her fingers lingering at each button, and then made her way down to the first floor, hoping to find tea and perhaps something to settle the unsettled feeling in her chest.

Mrs. Redding was already in the parlor, polishing the silver teapot with a cloth worn thin from use. The air smelled of beeswax and orange peel, though the windows remained closed and the sky outside showed no intention of letting the wind move freely. When Camille entered, the woman looked up with that same assessing glance she’d worn on their first meeting—sharp, searching, and quiet.

“You stayed out late,” Mrs. Redding said.

Camille offered a half-smile and folded herself into the corner chair beside the bookshelf. “I took the ghost tour,” she replied.

The older woman’s hands slowed.

“The one with the man in black?” she asked, too casually.

Camille hesitated, then nodded. “Jeremiah. He’s… different.”

The cloth in Mrs. Redding’s hand stopped moving entirely. She set the teapot down with an audible clink and turned toward Camille with an expression that did not mask its concern. “You should leave that one alone,” she said. “You should’ve left the moment he spoke to you.”

Camille leaned forward, frowning. “Why? You said there were stories in this city. That’s all he’s telling. Stories.”

“Is that what you think he’s doing?” Mrs. Redding asked. “My cousin June took a tour in 1956. Summer. Hot as hell. She was sixteen, foolish, and convinced the world could be sorted out if only you walked far enough into it.”

Camille sat back slightly, listening.

“She told me the man she met was charming, educated, and kind. That he took her down roads that weren’t in any book she’d read. He spoke of things no one should know—dates, names, and smells. How the execution square used to run thick in the rain, how the gallows rotted from the inside, how a man’s heart sounds different once it realizes the noose has caught.”

Mrs. Redding lowered herself into the chair opposite Camille and folded her hands.

“She said his eyes looked like a priest’s, steady and solemn. But his hands, she said… they were wrong. Wrong in the way a crow’s wings are wrong when you see them up close. Too careful. Always hiding what they meant to do.”

Camille said nothing, her fingers now resting on the edge of her knee.

“June was never seen again,” Mrs. Redding said. “We found her locket buried in the courtyard by the mission ruins two weeks later. No other trace. Not a thread. And no record of the man she’d met. Only her letters. One mentioned a name she couldn’t spell properly. Started with an A. Ended in something like ‘-leth.’”

Camille felt the room tilt slightly around her.

“Aqen-Saleth?” she said.

The older woman’s face turned pale in stages, as if the color were draining not just from her skin, but from the memory behind it.

“I’d forgotten that part,” she admitted. “Until now.”

Later that day, Camille made her way to the city archives. The building, constructed from heavy brick and lined with tall, narrow windows, stood just outside the historical district and bore the kind of silence that invited reverence. She passed through the metal detectors, signed the visitor’s log, and was led by a volunteer to the back rooms, where old city records, property surveys, and photographic collections were maintained on microfilm and sealed in temperature-controlled cabinets.

She asked to see anything related to public executions held between 1850 and 1870, claiming it was part of a university thesis. The volunteer nodded, indifferent, and returned ten minutes later with a thin folder and a magnifying plate.

Most of the photographs were indistinct—blurry captures of haphazardly assembled crowds, soldiers in loose formation, and wooden platforms erected in front of shuttered chapels. Many of the images were too degraded to be useful.

But one was not.

In the center of the photograph, a man hung limp from a gallows beam, face turned away from the lens. Standing at the base of the platform were three clergymen and a woman in mourning attire. To the right, separated slightly from the others and caught half in shadow, was a tall figure in a long black coat.

His face was not entirely visible. But Camille recognized the posture, the lean of the shoulders, the angle of the jaw. The fingers, long and gloved, rested lightly atop the brim of a wide hat. He was watching the proceedings with no apparent emotion.

She stared at the image for a long time, then took a quick photograph of it with her phone before returning the file and stepping out into the afternoon light.

The streets were louder now, filled with foot traffic and music spilling from corner bars. Yet Camille felt none of it touch her. The city moved around her like a current passing someone already underwater.

She returned to the Redding House shortly before sunset, intending to rest and perhaps reorganize her notes, but Jeremiah was waiting on the porch.

He stood just beyond the reach of the overhang, his silhouette framed by the amber glow of the gaslamp across the street. His lantern was not lit, but he held it nonetheless, as if it were an extension of his arm rather than a tool he carried.

“Miss Wren,” he said, his voice soft, “you left before the tour concluded.”

She stepped back instinctively, her hand brushing against the edge of the railing. “I thought it was over.”

“It rarely is,” he replied. “There’s still one last stop. The most important one.”

His gaze was steady, but not without warmth. If he was disappointed, it did not show. There was no anger, only a quiet sense of anticipation, as if the moment had been rehearsed and now waited for her to play her part.

Camille hesitated. The warnings still echoed in her mind, and the image of the photograph had not left her thoughts. But beneath the anxiety was another feeling, one she could not entirely name.

It was not trust or hope, but curiosity.

“Where is it?” she asked.

Jeremiah’s smile was small, almost imperceptible.

“Close,” he said. “Closer than you think.”

She nodded once, more to herself than to him.

“I’ll go.”

Part IV

Jeremiah led her without a word through streets that seemed to stretch longer than they had the night before. The city was different in the half-light, less a place and more a suggestion of one, its edges softening as though slowly being forgotten. The gaslamps, though lit, shed only the most reluctant light, and Camille found herself walking not by visibility but by memory—recalling the turns they had taken previously and the angles at which buildings leaned, as if all St. Augustine’s structures had been crafted by hands trembling with age.

They passed beneath a cloistered corridor between two shuttered inns, then down a tight passage of broken stone steps, where vines curled in from between the walls. Jeremiah said nothing, nor did he check to see if she followed, but she did—because the alternative was to remain alone in a city that left her with the feeling that she was being watched from below.

As they descended, the architectural details began to change. The coquina blocks that had defined the Spanish era gave way first to smoothed sandstone, then to a material Camille could not identify—dark, glossy, and veined with milky quartz, like obsidian warped by heat and formed into unnatural angles. The walls narrowed, but the ceiling rose, forming an arched passage lined with shallow alcoves. Inside each recess stood a figure—not fully human, but sculpted in the semblance of one—tall, thin, and eyeless, their hands pressed together as if in mourning.

Jeremiah walked between them without hesitation. Camille, though slower, followed with a mixture of awe and apprehension. The air in this corridor was colder, the scent more ancient than anything she had known—damp earth, faded incense, and the coppery trace of something left too long buried. When her hand brushed the wall beside her for balance, it came away faintly blackened, the residue clinging to her fingertips like ash.

At a certain point, she realized that the light had changed. It no longer came from his lantern, though he still carried it. The flame remained lit, but it flickered without projection, its glow failing to reach the stone just inches beyond its curve. Instead, a faint luminescence issued from the very walls themselves—soft and grey, like bioluminescence glimpsed beneath deep water. The stone, now fully black and laced with thin veins of gold and bone-white, gave the impression of being alive. Its carvings, etched in looping vertical lines and interspersed with jagged indentations, formed no language she recognized. Yet they seemed to shift subtly when she looked too long, realigning their patterns like something reconfiguring itself in response to being observed.

She tried to speak—to ask where they were or how far they had gone, but couldn’t find the words.

Jeremiah finally stopped before a wide threshold framed by cracked pillars. Beyond it, the tunnel opened into a chamber far larger than the path that had led to it. The ceiling soared high above them in a vaulted dome, its surface patterned with inlaid discs of polished stone that caught no light but gleamed nonetheless. At the chamber’s center stood a raised altar, not of wood or marble, but of black coral—glossy, uneven, and speckled with flecks of silver. It was the kind of material one did not shape so much as reveal, as if it had always existed beneath the ground and merely waited for the correct rites to bring it forth.

The chapel that housed it was a ruin, but its bones remained intact. Columns wrapped in moss and carved with weatherworn figures lined its perimeter. At the far end of the chamber stood what must have once been a pulpit, though it bore no cross, no iconography familiar to any Western tradition. Instead, the shape etched into the back wall was a series of concentric rings broken by a single vertical line—unmistakably intentional, though its meaning was as opaque as the rest of this place.

Jeremiah gestured toward the altar with a faint inclination of his chin, and Camille approached. She could hear her own footsteps echoing off the walls now, but not in the way sound normally bounced through space. The echoes were staggered, delayed by fractions of a second too long, and they returned with a faint distortion—as if the walls themselves were answering back in some lost dialect.

Then she heard it.

It was not spoken aloud, not by him, but filled the chamber regardless—low and rhythmic, the sound of a name carried by the stone itself.

Aqen-Saleth.
Aqen-Saleth.
Aqen-Saleth.

It did not rise in pitch or tempo, but instead built itself into the texture of the room. The name became a vibration felt behind her teeth and inside her skull, growing stronger not with volume, but with presence, as though the chamber itself had begun to remember what it once was.

Camille turned to Jeremiah, her throat dry and her heart clenching with the slow panic of realization, but he was already walking the outer edge of the room, his lantern held low, swinging in an arc with each step, as though measuring something older than time.

She stepped closer to the altar. On its surface lay a single object: a small pendant made of yellowed bone, smooth at the edges but carved at its center with two initials—C.W.

She recoiled slightly at first, then extended her hand. The pendant was warm to the touch—not like something freshly carved, but like a thing held in a closed fist for a long time. The letters were exact. Her initials. There could be no mistake.

She looked back toward Jeremiah, but he did not acknowledge her. His face was turned toward one of the moss-covered walls, where he stood completely still, save for the slow rise and fall of his shoulders.

The walls behind him had begun to change.

It was subtle at first—the faint shift of surface texture, the glistening sheen growing stronger as if drawn upward from beneath the stone. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the carvings began to stretch, as though something beneath the surface were pressing outward.

Dust trickled from the carvings and drifted along the curve of the wall, hovering in place for a moment before being pulled back toward the ceiling. Camille took a step backward. The altar beneath her hand grew colder. The pendant, still clutched in her palm, began to vibrate.

Jeremiah turned then, his eyes not meeting hers, but fixed somewhere behind her, toward the entrance from which they had come.

“It’s listening now,” he said.

Camille did not ask what it was. She already knew.

Part V

The air in the chapel grew heavier, in a way that strained the senses. The light had no origin now—the glow coming from nowhere and everywhere, casting faint shadows that crossed in directions the architecture did not allow.

The walls no longer stood still. They moved in increments that defied motion—edges flexing, corners warping, angles bending inward without folding, as though some greater geometry had begun to press through the mortar and stone.

Jeremiah stopped beside the altar, his face lifted toward the ceiling, eyes closed, arms at his sides as if in the presence of something divine.

The wall behind him began to open, with the slow parting of material that had once masqueraded as stone. The shape that emerged took on the suggestion of a form, rising without lifting, advancing without moving. It was not made of flesh or bone or smoke or any material Camille could name, but it folded in upon itself in layers of black and gray, angles that bent toward her without traveling any visible distance.

Aqen-Saleth had arrived.

She did not scream, though she felt her body preparing to do so. Her throat tightened and her legs shifted, but her breath caught in awe. Not the awe of witnessing something beautiful, but the awe one feels at a void so deep it cannot be filled, a hunger older than language or thought, unrepentant in its existence.

Jeremiah’s voice, when it returned, was resigned.

“They asked for protection,” he said. “The ones who first built here. They wanted permanence. Legacy. They made a promise in a tongue not theirs, to a thing they did not understand. And it heard them.”

He looked at Camille, his expression absent of warmth now, filled instead with the blankness of ritual.

“It still hears,” he said. “And it remembers.”

The shape behind him had grown in volume, though not in clarity. Camille could not tell how far it extended or where it began. It was not bound by the room. It reached into her thoughts and curled around them like vines around stone.

“It’s not the body it takes,” Jeremiah continued. “It’s the name. The memory. The echo that lives in the minds of those who survive. Every generation must carry it forward. A remembrance offering. Not to die, but to know. And to never be allowed to forget.”

She wanted to move. To speak. To object.

Instead, the altar pulsed once, then again, and something brushed against her temples.

Camille stumbled backward as her vision was seized by something vast and ancient. She saw a clearing deep in the swamplands, lit by torchlight, where masked figures in bone and ash danced around a pit dug deep into the earth. She saw their faces painted in blood, heard a chant in a language unspoken by any living throat. Then the scene changed. Spanish missionaries, gaunt and sun-struck, stood in circles around the same pit, holding crucifixes with white knuckles, whispering prayers while throwing oil into the earth.

The centuries passed before her like smoke rising through broken glass. British settlers followed, then Confederate deserters, then men in dark coats bearing surveying tools, each feeding the ground not with sacrifice, but with attention—with remembrance. And the thing beneath the earth drank of it all.

Camille staggered. Her knees hit the floor. The pendant clutched in her hand burned hot now, searing her palm. She opened her mouth to scream but only managed a dry croak. The entity pressed closer, its limbs—or what passed for limbs—coiling around the altar.

Jeremiah stepped forward. He stood above her now, his eyes fixed on nothing.

“The city endures,” he said. “And so does the pact.”

The name rose again.

Aqen-Saleth.
Aqen-Saleth.
Aqen-Saleth.

The stones beneath her vibrated with it. Her memories began to slip, not all at once, but in threads—names, dates, faces—dissolving from their edges inward. She tried to hold onto the sound of her mother’s voice and could not remember its pitch. She tried to recall her own age, her own phone number, her own middle name—and found them receding, replaced by circular glyphs and dark water.

Then, a command cut through the vibration.

“Down!”

A pouch struck the floor inches from her face, exploding in a puff of bitter red smoke and dust. Camille coughed, recoiling as the air thickened again, carrying with it the scent of salt, iron, and resin.

Disrupted, the shape twisted in on itself. It receded partially, as though interrupted mid-thought.

Jeremiah turned, startled, for the first time since the ritual had begun.

Mrs. Redding stood at the edge of the chamber. Her coat was torn, her hair wild in the flickering gloom, and her left hand clutched a bundle of herbs and crushed mineral wrapped in cloth. Her right held another pouch—this one still sealed.

“You don’t get this one,” she said, her voice hard and unfamiliar.

Jeremiah did not move, but the entity behind him reacted. One of its tendrils—or projections—reached toward the woman. She flung the second pouch, striking the air just above its outstretched curve. The smoke surged again, darker this time, and Camille heard something that resembled surprise.

The stone ceiling shifted, sagging, as though gravity had reasserted itself. The glyphs faded. The glow receded.

Jeremiah stepped backward, blinking as if only now realizing where he stood.

Then the voice returned—this time from Jeremiah himself.

“Take me, then,” he whispered, his gaze fixed on the altar. “I was the first. Let me be the last.”

He stepped onto the raised platform.

The room pulled inward.

The walls bent, and the space collapsed in on itself. The entity folded over Jeremiah’s shape like a cloak swallowing its owner. For a moment, Camille thought she saw his face—serene, almost relieved—before it was consumed by the weight of that ancient darkness.

Then, all at once, the pressure broke.

The stone cracked underfoot, and the light vanished.

Camille felt Mrs. Redding’s hand on her shoulder.

“We need to go,” the woman said, and she did not wait for agreement.

They ran through the corridor, the chants fading behind them, the name no longer spoken, though it still echoed in the walls of Camille’s thoughts.

When they reached the entrance—the cracked arch that had first admitted her into the chapel—it was sealed behind them. There was no path back, only root-choked stone and dripping moss.

Mrs. Redding did not speak again until they reached the surface.

By then, Camille’s thoughts were unspooling in ways she couldn’t organize.

In the quiet that followed, with only moonlight on their backs and the surf crashing somewhere unseen, she realized she had brought something with her.

The chant had not stopped.

It simply lived in her now.

Aqen-Saleth.
Aqen-Saleth.
Aqen-Saleth.

Part VI

When Camille emerged from the narrow corridor that had once been a stairwell and now resembled only a rent in the foundation of some abandoned warehouse, the city appeared foreign. The familiar buildings along the outer edge of St. Augustine’s historic quarter stood in place—her map had not betrayed her—but their facades appeared somehow dimmer, dulled by a film that seemed to hang across their surfaces like dust suspended on glass. The colors were wrong in subtle ways: bricks redder than they should have been, shutters faded beyond their years.

The foot traffic moved as it always had, yet the echoes of footsteps returned just a beat too late, as if the stone beneath them were remembering how to mimic sound. Even the air carried something new—or perhaps something old newly returned. It smelled not only of the sea and stone and citrus from the nearby café, but also of incense and salt and a strange, dry sharpness she couldn’t quite name, like wood that had burned too long in a sacred fire.

She followed Mrs. Redding in silence back to the Redding House Inn, neither of them speaking until the iron gate clicked closed behind them. The sound echoed louder than it should have, reverberating against the siding of the house before dying in the overgrown shrubs.

Inside, the light was warmer, and the scents more human—lavender polish, beeswax, and aging paper—but Camille remained unable to let go of the sense that something had come with her.

Mrs. Redding sat across from her in the parlor. Her left sleeve had been torn, and a streak of soot or ash still traced the side of her cheek, though she did not seem to notice. Her hands, however, moved with steadiness, wrapping the pouch she had used in the ritual inside a strip of linen before placing it into a cedar box lined with folded cloth and pale stones.

“You should leave in the morning,” she said, not unkindly. “The longer you stay, the deeper it settles.”

Camille nodded, her fingers curled around the bone pendant, which no longer felt hot.

She spoke softly. “Is it gone?”

Mrs. Redding did not look at her when she answered.

“No. It’s never gone. Only sleeping. And sleeping things always wake.”

The rest of the night passed in sleepless silence. She closed her eyes, but they opened again at intervals, always uncertain whether she had been dreaming or simply blinking for too long. When morning arrived, it did so without ceremony. No birdsong, no golden rays cast across the bedspread—just a slow brightening of the sky beyond the windowpane, diffused through fog that had rolled in from the east and blanketed the rooftops in a pall of quiet.

She packed her things and left without ceremony, pausing only once at the front door, where Mrs. Redding handed her a slip of paper. Written in pencil were three names—each one crossed out—and beneath them, a fourth name she did not recognize, left untouched.

“If you ever feel it rising,” the woman said, “go here. They’ll know what to do.”

Camille took the note without speaking and stepped out into the fog.

She left St. Augustine that day, her car taking her across the narrow bridge and out past the salt marshes, where the sun began to burn through the mist. The sky above the mainland was clearer, the trees more distinct, but she found herself checking the rearview mirror often for signs of movement where there should have been none.

In the weeks that followed, she returned to school and resumed her studies. The term paper she had once planned to write on colonial architecture remained unwritten, and her professors, noting her distraction, offered her extensions she did not request. She no longer walked alone at night. She no longer listened to music without headphones. She no longer dreamed of anything that did not involve stone walls and breathless silence.

And always, just before waking, she heard the name.

Aqen-Saleth.

Not spoken aloud, but there nonetheless.

The dreams grew less frequent, but never left.

Then one evening, weeks later, beneath the lengthening shadows of an early spring sunset, another young woman arrived at the Redding House Inn. She looked to be a student, not much older than Camille had been, with a soft blue backpack and a half-finished iced coffee in one hand. She knocked twice, waited, and then knocked again.

Mrs. Redding opened the door, and for a moment, her eyes lingered on the girl’s face.

The student smiled.

“I called last week? I’m here for the weekend.”

Mrs. Redding nodded, stepping aside to let her in.

Across the street, just beyond the iron fence, a flyer fluttered loose from a telephone pole and drifted on the breeze. It spun, lifted once by the wind, and caught against the foot of a streetlamp, half-folded and stained by dew.

“Jeremiah’s Midnight Walk”
Lanterns provided. Departing nightly.

The ink shimmered faintly beneath the streetlight, its lettering unmarred by time.

Somewhere, not far below, the stones beneath the city stirred in their sleep.

Beneath the oldest city, the oldest thing waits. And still, it remembers its name.