August 1965
There was a scent drifting through the cellar that I hadn't noticed before.
Not animal
Not blood
Something older, deeper
Wine.
Not the sharp tang of newly crushed grape or the vinegar bite of neglect, but something between the two—aged, breathing quietly through the cracked corks of long-forgotten bottles. I should have grown used to it. I had lived beneath it for months now, surrounded by vineyard earth and ancestral dust. But on this day, it was different.
On this day, it remembered.
---
It began subtly. A whisper in the air as I lit the last of my candles. Then a brush of warmth across my upper lip, like a ghost scent that refused to fade.
Pinot noir, 1962. My father's pride.
I hadn't thought of it in decades. He'd opened a bottle the day I graduated—smiling in that stiff, formal way of his, glass raised, but eyes looking somewhere else.
The scent made me freeze.
And when I turned toward the corner where the bottle had been kept…
It was there again.
Uncorked, full. Glass half-raised.
And my father was sitting in my chair.
---
I didn't speak,
He didn't look up.
Only turned the glass slowly in his hand, watching the way the candlelight danced in the liquid.
His voice, when it came, was the same as I remembered: clipped, patient, weighted with restrained disappointment.
"I thought I raised you better than this."
I stared at him, throat dry.
"You did," I whispered.
"Then what are you now?" he asked, lifting his gaze at last.
There was no fury in it, no sorrow.
Only examination.
"I don't know."
He took a sip. Red stained the rim of the glass.
"You knew how to listen once," he said. "To others. To yourself. But now you've locked yourself in a box and thrown away the key."
I backed away from him.
"You're not real."
The wineglass trembled in his hand.
"And yet here you are," he murmured, "still answering."
---
The hallucinations—or illusions—had grown bolder.
They no longer waited for me to lose focus. Now they bled into scent, into memory, into the way dust settled on an old barrel and made it look like a coffin.
My childhood bedroom reappeared in a shadowed corner. I saw the metal toy horse I'd broken and buried, hoping no one would find it. The scent of lavender soap drifted from an empty crate.
I heard my mother humming, though she'd died when I was nine.
I watched her back as she stirred a pot over a hearth that wasn't there.
And when she turned to look at me, half her face was gone—peeling away like paper left out in the rain.
---
The wine, I began to believe, had a memory of its own.
It seeped into the air and curled around the present, melting it. I hadn't fed in weeks, the fox hadn't lasted. Nothing lasted.
Perhaps that was why the memories came easier now—because I had grown thin in more than body.
One night, I took the bottle my father had held and set it on the crate before me.
I uncorked it.
The scent hit me like a blow: crushed berries, tobacco, old wood, regret.
It was the same blend we'd bottled the year after my grandfather died. The vineyard was quiet then. My father spoke less, my hands were raw from pruning.
I could almost hear the snip of shears, the crows calling from the vineyard poles.
Then someone laughed behind me.
Victorine.
She leaned against the far wall, head tilted, her laugh brittle and bitter.
"This is how you mourn?" she said. "By pretending wine can bring back the dead?"
"You're dead," I said softly. "You shouldn't be able to laugh at all."
She stepped forward, arms crossed.
"And yet here I am."
---
Some nights, the hallucinations argued with each other.
I watched Serge pace the cellar, muttering about therapy models and moral failures, while Élodie stood at the far end shaking her head in silence.
"You were always too clinical," Serge snapped at me once. "What did you expect to find in a room full of mirrors, Sylvain? The truth?"
Élodie touched her temple.
It was never about you.
"I know."
Do you?
The candlelight flickered. The wine darkened in the bottle, thick as clotting blood.
---
I stopped pretending to drink water, stopped pacing.
Even my illusions seemed uncertain of what to do with my stillness.
Sometimes they faded into nothing.
Sometimes they multiplied.
One day, I caught sight of myself in the shard of mirror I hadn't broken.
Not the creature I saw before.
Something else now.
Pale, yes. But drawn, old and young at once.
The hollows under my eyes had deepened, and my irises gleamed faintly gold in the low light.
I remembered a patient who once told me she feared aging because it meant she was becoming invisible.
But I—
I was becoming too visible.
Too much of myself in all directions.
---
I went to the wine cellar proper—the stone passage leading deeper into the vineyard's foundation. I hadn't dared venture far in months.
But the scent pulled me.
Barrel after barrel. Labels I remembered from my youth. Some had burst from rot, others remained sealed.
I crouched before one, and pressed my hand to the cask.
It was warm.
And in the quiet that followed, I remembered the night before I left for university. The sky had been low with stars, and I had walked through the rows of vines alone. I'd thought I was escaping something.
Now I understood I had only been postponing it.
---
Back in the main cellar, the wine bottle sat uncorked beside the candle.
I poured a single glass and held it in both hands.
I did not drink,
I only breathed.
And for a moment, the cellar held its breath too.