The shadows no longer waited until dark.
They moved in the light now—quiet shifts just beyond the edge of vision, curling at the corners of my perception like smoke under a door. The cellar hadn't changed, and yet nothing was the same.
I knew it wasn't haunted. Not in the way children feared monsters beneath their beds, it was worse than that.
It was me.
Or something inside me.
The voice hadn't spoken again, but it no longer needed to. Silence, I was learning, could be just as cruel.
---
There was a door in the cellar—half-rotted, sealed from the other side. I noticed it weeks ago, buried behind crates and rusted tools—the kind of thing I might have ignored if I weren't so desperate for distraction. I cleared the way and stood before it now, running my fingers over the swollen wood.
No handle, no latch, and no lock. Just a door that refused to open.
I pushed.
It didn't budge.
I struck it—hard, with enough force to shatter any human-made object. The wood cracked, but the door held.
Behind it, I imagined breathing.
Not real, I told myself. Just the fox rot in the earth. Just damp and dust.
But part of me whispered otherwise.
That something was waiting on the other side. Not to be freed, but to be acknowledged.
And I couldn't do it.
Not yet.
---
The heat thickened. Outside, summer beat down on the vineyard in golden waves, but down here, it turned to weight—humid, unmoving, oppressive. Sweat no longer touched my skin, but I remembered what it felt like. The sticky back of the neck, the grit in your shirt. Memory was cruel that way.
I no longer kept candles burning for light. I did it for company. Watching the flame—its hesitant dance—became the only sound I could trust.
The thirst, too, had become more cunning still.
It began to whisper in other voices.
Voices I knew.
"Doctor Noirel," came Élodie's voice, soft as old paper. "You used to say that progress isn't linear."
I closed my eyes.
"You said healing could look like it was breaking first."
"Stop," I muttered.
"Is this what you meant?"
I pressed my palms to my ears. It didn't help.
"Or is this just what failure tastes like?"
---
I daydreamed again—waking dreams that curled in daylight and shadow alike.
Victorine stood in the far corner one night, arms folded, the scent of jasmine and ash surrounding her like a shroud.
"Do you still think you can save anyone?" she asked. Her voice was level, calm. She didn't accuse—she observed.
"I don't know what I think anymore," I said.
"That's convenient."
She stepped forward, her eyes catching the candlelight. But they were wrong—too wide, too empty. Not Victorine at all.
A face stretched across memory.
A reflection made flesh.
I stood, heart hammering with something not quite fear.
"You're not real."
She tilted her head. "Neither are you."
---
I began to avoid the mirror I'd dragged down from the main house. I'd kept it once to try to see what I had become, but it told too much truth now.
The thing it showed moved like me, yes—but with delay, as if unsure it still belonged to this world.
It smiled when I didn't.
It breathed when I didn't.
Sometimes I'd catch it with its eyes already open, watching.
And in that gaze, I saw no madness—only patience.
---
The cellar creaked with memory.
I saw Séraphine now, sitting in the dirt with her knees hugged to her chest, her face drawn and silent. A child I'd known years ago—long before I'd been dragged into this horror.
She'd never spoken during our sessions.
Just stared.
Until the day she tried to jump from the second-story window of the clinic.
Now she stared at me again, but from across the years, across death.
"You said pain makes people real," she said.
I shook my head.
"I was already real," she whispered. "You just didn't see me."
The walls swam.
I clawed at my scalp, teeth bared, and screamed into the shadows.
No answer.
Only a door that wouldn't open.
---
I tried writing once.
Scrawled names into the dirt. My own. The patients I'd failed. The ones I still remembered.
They blurred, shifted. Victorine became my mother. Serge became a boy I'd seen in passing. Faces slipped, and names changed.
I no longer trusted memories.
Only the thirst stayed true.
---
One night, I stood at the base of the stairs again, the trapdoor above still open, moonlight spilling down like grace denied.
I could leave.
I could.
But the moment I set foot on the first stair, a weight gripped my chest. A pressure behind my ribs, like something coiling tighter with every step.
I couldn't breathe.
Couldn't move.
My legs refused.
I staggered back down, gasping though I had no breath to give.
I dropped to my knees beside the wall and pressed my forehead to the cool stone.
"I am still in here," I whispered. "Aren't I?"
The shadows didn't answer.
But they wrapped around me like arms.
---
The next morning—if morning it was—I returned to the door.
The one with no handle, no lock.
This time, I did not push.
I knelt.
Waited.
Laid my hand against the wood.
It was warm.
Not fever-warm, not sunlight-warm.
But the warmth of something alive.
Something waiting.
And still—
It did not open.