"Grandma, what is that?" a little boy asked, not hiding his surprised face, looking directly at the elderly woman sitting at the base of a large stone.
They were on the edge of an old meadow, overgrown with yellowing autumn grass. The wind rustled the dry stalks, and in the distance, a forest was visible, already touched by the crimson and gold of fading foliage. The sky above them was clear, cloudless, gradually darkening as the sun dipped towards the horizon.
Grandma's gaze fell on the boy's hand, which was reaching towards the sky, and his index finger guided her gaze high up, where the first stars were lighting up one by one.
"Oh... Grandson, have you really never seen stars?" the woman chuckled softly, teasing the boy.
"Stars... There are so many... What are stars? Why are they so small?" The boy paid no attention to his grandmother's laughter and continued to bombard her with questions with wide-open eyes.
"Stars are our reflection; one star is one human soul. If a person dies, the star goes out, and with the arrival of new life, a new star is born." As she said this, the corners of Grandma's lips turned up, bestowing a warm smile upon her grandson.
"Wow, that's cool! But why are they so small?" the boy asked, crawling closer and leaning his shoulder against his grandmother's.
"Because they are incredibly far away. So far that the distance to them is measured in years."
"Wow! No way, I want to go there!" the boy said resolutely, staring into the boundless heights.
"And you will, just you see, because somewhere out there, among these stars, yours is too. Now, I'm hungry, shall we go inside?" the grandmother suggested, slowly rising from the ground and dusting off her dress from the clinging blades of grass.
The pupils, having lost focus, regained sharpness. The memory dissipated like smoke, leaving behind only a bitter emptiness, and Finn's gaze once again fell on the cold railway tracks before him.
He stood on the outskirts of the city, where the asphalt gave way to a worn dirt road, and sparse streetlights barely illuminated the path, casting long, writhing shadows. Fields stretched around, already harvested, leaving behind only withered stubble, resembling the bristles on a giant's cheek. The air was permeated with the smell of decaying leaves and the smoke of distant bonfires—autumn was asserting its rights.
Finn watched the late sunset, as the last upper edge of the sun had almost disappeared behind the edge of the forest, painting the horizon in blood-red tones, as if the earth itself were bleeding. The wind rustled his hood, thrown over his head, and made him shiver from the cold that came not from outside, but from within.
A long whistle sounded in the distance—a train was approaching. The sound, like a needle, pierced the silence.
"One step..." Finn's thought flashed through his mind, and this thought echoed with deafening emptiness. "Just one step—and you will no longer be awaited by endless torment, this crush in the subway of your own thoughts. One step—and you will get rid of all this dirt, this unbearable weight that has pressed on your shoulders for years. One step... and it will all be over. It will simply cease to be." Despair squeezed his throat into a tight knot, pushing everything else out.
He examined his hands—pale, almost transparent from the cold and fatigue, with bluish veins at his wrists. His fingers trembled slightly, not from fear, but from the piercing wind that penetrated even through the thick fabric of his black oversized hoodie. The jacket was unzipped, hanging on him like a shroud on a living person, and the hood was pulled so low that it almost hid his face.
The train was already close, its light, blind and merciless, cut through the darkness, and the whistles grew louder, deafening, as if the driver was trying to dissuade him from the last step, shouting a final warning.
The roar of the approaching train drowned out everything—the beating of his heart, the whistling of the wind, even his own thoughts, which had turned into a solid white noise. Finn felt the vibration from the rails rising through his legs, merging with the tremor in his whole body, promising quick liberation.
"I hope it doesn't hurt too much..." the last pathetic, childish thought managed to flash, and there was so much longing in it that the world swam before his eyes.
He squeezed his eyes shut. A scorching wind hit his face, and the roar of steel exploded in his ears. Finn involuntarily recoiled, but...
The roar of the train suddenly died down, as if someone had turned off the sound in reality. A deafening, oppressive silence fell. Finn slowly opened his eyes, feeling cold sweat trickle down his temples, and his heart pounding somewhere in his throat.
At first, he saw only a blurry spot on the tracks. Then his vision cleared, and his gaze was met with a sight that made his blood run cold.
On the embankment lay an severed arm—pale, almost waxy, with fingers frozen in a final spasm. The blood had already turned into a black crust on the gravel. But something was wrong... eerily familiar.
Finn took a step closer, his legs feeling like cotton. His boot stepped on something fragile—fragments of teeth scattered with a dry, disgusting crunch.
And then he saw the face.
It lay to the side, half-covered in rubble. His own face. One eye was closed, the other—cloudy, glassy—looked directly at him, point-blank. The skin had already taken on a grayish hue, but the features were frighteningly recognizable.
The corpse's lips twitched.
"Are... you... still... afraid... of death...?" they whispered in his own voice, but with a kind of underground echo, as if the sound came not from his throat, but from hell itself.
Finn recoiled, bumping into something soft and shapeless. He turned around and saw the rest—a torso without a top, a crushed rib cage from which a dark, almost black mass of intestines was spilling out. All of it was dressed in tatters of a familiar black hoodie, in scraps of his own clothes.
Finn collapsed to the ground, his body ceasing to obey, overwhelmed by a wave of pure, animalistic terror. His palm, instinctively seeking support, plunged into something viscous and warm—his own shattered leg. The femur protruded from the torn flesh like a white mast from a bloody sea. The kneecap had split into three sharp fragments, connected by ligaments.
He tried to scream, but his lungs refused to fill with air, only wheezing soundlessly. "What is happening? Is this death? Is this the end?" flashed through his mind as he noticed the first signs of the approaching darkness, but it was not the blessed darkness of oblivion, but something else, alive and hostile.
The shadows began to move unnaturally:
The outlines of the trees on the horizon began to flow downwards, like black tar. The lampposts bent and melted like candles. Even the puddles of blood on the tracks began to evaporate in the form of dark smoke, enveloping everything in a haze.
The last thing to disappear was his dead face—the glassy eye clouded over, then retracted inward, as if someone had drunk it through a straw, leaving only emptiness behind.
A sudden flash blinded Finn, burning his retina. When his vision returned, he saw something that made his mind ready to retreat:
A black wooden writing desk, covered in a web of cracks, like dried mud. On it lay a huge book bound in human skin—the veins on the cover pulsed with a dead, lazy rhythm. The pages rustled on their own, covered in script that constantly changed shape, writhing like worms.
A figure sat in a chair. It was impossible to see clearly—the contours constantly trembled like the flame of a black fire. Long fingers with claws resembling polished ivory stirred the pages. When the creature raised its head, Finn saw:
A face without features, just a smooth dark surface reflecting a distorted semblance of his own horror. Instead of eyes—two voids, in which distant, indifferent constellations flickered. A mouth appeared only at the moment of speech—a black slit from which frosty steam, smelling of ozone and dust, poured out.
"Well, hello, Finnlein Reinbach," a voice sounded, in which the sounds of breaking bones and children's laughter were mixed, making goosebumps crawl on his skin. Its fingers pointed to the last page of the book: "How do you like the end of your story?"
On the parchment, Finn saw an exact image of himself standing on the tracks. The text under the drawing slowly formed from drops of ink flowing like blood, coalescing into the final sentences…