The room was too cold, the kind of cold that clings to your bones like a sickness, and the only light came from the flickering candles we’d set up around the Ouija board, their flames casting long, trembling shadows that seemed to move just out of sync with reality—I remember how my fingers trembled on the planchette, how my best friend Mark’s breath hitched when the damn thing first started moving on its own, gliding in slow, deliberate circles before spelling out letters in a way that felt wrong, too precise, like something was pressing down from the other side with purpose. We’d joked about this, called out to spirits like it was a game, but the air had turned thick, suffocating, and when the planchette finally stopped on the last letter of the message—YOUR SISTER DIED IN 2013—my blood froze, because my sister, Emily, was alive, she was upstairs in her room, I’d heard her laughing on the phone just an hour ago, but then the temperature dropped so suddenly my breath fogged in front of me, and Mark’s face went slack with terror as his eyes locked onto something behind me, something that made him whimper like a child, and that’s when I felt it—the weight of a hand on my shoulder, the press of fingers too long and too cold, and her voice, Emily’s voice but not, whispering right against my ear, “Then who am I?” I turned, too slow, my body refusing to obey, and there she was, my sister, standing too close, her smile stretching wider than any human mouth should, her eyes black pits that swallowed the candlelight, and I stumbled back, knocking over the board, my heart hammering so hard I thought it would burst, but she just tilted her head, that awful grin never fading, and said, “You don’t remember, do you?” The next few days were a blur of sleepless nights and waking nightmares—I found myself digging through old photo albums, my hands shaking as I flipped through pictures of our childhood, only to watch in horror as Emily’s face faded from the frames, her image dissolving like smoke, leaving behind empty spaces where she should have been, and when I drove to the cemetery in the dead of night, my breath coming in ragged gasps, I found her gravestone, weathered and moss-covered, the dates etched into the stone confirming what I didn’t want to believe: EMILY MARIE CARTER, 1990–2013, BELOVED DAUGHTER AND SISTER. I fell to my knees, my fingers tracing the letters, the reality of it crushing me, but when I looked up, she was there, standing between the graves, her nightgown fluttering in a wind I couldn’t feel, her head cocked at that unnatural angle, her voice a hollow echo as she whispered, “You’re starting to see, aren’t you?” I ran, but she was always there, in the corner of my eye, in the static of the TV, in the whispers that slithered through the vents at night, her presence a constant, suffocating weight, and the worst part was the way she’d mimic our old conversations, word for word, like she’d plucked them from my memories, but her voice would crack, distort, as if something else was speaking through her, something that didn’t quite understand how to be human. The final night, the night I can’t forget no matter how much I drink or how many pills I take, she cornered me in the basement, her body moving in jerks and spasms, her limbs bending in ways that made my stomach heave, and as she backed me into the wall, her breath smelling of rot and damp earth, she pressed her forehead to mine, her skin like ice, and asked, “Do you believe it now?” I screamed, but no sound came out, and that’s when she opened her mouth—too wide, impossibly wide—and the thing inside her poured out, a writhing, shapeless mass of darkness that filled the room with the sound of a thousand whispering voices, all of them saying my name, and the last thing I remember before everything went black was the sensation of something cold and wet slithering down my throat. I woke up in the hospital, Mark sitting beside me, his face drawn and pale, and when I begged him to tell me what happened, he just shook his head and said, “You don’t have a sister, man. You never did.” The doctors say it was a psychotic break, that the Emily I remembered was just a delusion, a coping mechanism for some trauma I’ve buried too deep to face, but I know what I saw, I know what lived in my house wearing her skin, and sometimes, when the room is dark and the silence stretches too long, I hear her voice, faint but unmistakable, whispering from the shadows: “Do you believe it now?” And God help me, I do. Now every night is the same—the creeping dread as the sun sets, the way the shadows in my apartment seem to twitch when I’m not looking directly at them, the faint but unmistakable scent of damp earth that clings to the air no matter how many windows I open, and worst of all, the whispers, always just below hearing, like someone is murmuring secrets from another room. The doctors gave me pills, white little lies that dull the edges but don’t stop the dreams—the ones where I’m back in that basement, Emily’s too-wide grin splitting her face as the thing inside her unspools like rotting film, her voice layered with something deeper, something hungry, saying, “You were never supposed to remember.” Mark won’t look me in the eye anymore, and when I pressed him last week, screaming until my throat was raw, he finally snapped and said, “There was no gravestone, no fading photos—you were alone in that house for years, talking to yourself, calling out for a sister who never existed!” But I know what I saw, what I touched, and the proof is still there, buried under the floorboards in my childhood home where I hid it after digging it up from her “grave”—a small, waterlogged journal, its pages filled with my own handwriting, entries dated years before I supposedly “lost” her, chronicling things no delusion could invent: the way her reflection would sometimes move on its own, how she’d hum a lullaby our mother never taught us in a language that doesn’t exist, the night I woke to find her standing over my bed, her mouth unhinging like a snake’s as she breathed in my screams. The last entry is the one that haunts me most, written in a frantic, shaking scrawl: “It’s not Emily anymore. It’s wearing her. It’s been wearing her since the accident.” I don’t remember any accident. But the bruises on my arms—finger-shaped, deep and purple—tell me something does. Last night, I heard her again, her voice slithering through the static of the radio I’d left on, syllables stretching and snapping like tendons: “You were happier believing the lie.” And maybe I was. But now I can’t stop digging, can’t stop peeling back the layers of my own life like rotting wallpaper, finding hollow spaces where memories should be, and the more I search, the more I realize—the journal isn’t the only thing I buried. There are others. Names I don’t recognize scrawled in my handwriting. Dates that match missing persons reports. And always, always, the same phrase scribbled in the margins: “It’s learning.” The pills don’t work anymore. The whispers are louder. And when I close my eyes, I see them—rows and rows of graves, each one marked with a name I once knew, each one empty. Except one. The one at the end, the dirt freshly disturbed, the headstone blank. Waiting. Tonight, the radio turned itself on again. This time, it wasn’t her voice. It was mine. And it said only three words: “Dig it up.” I think I will. Because whatever’s down there, it’s not the worst thing hunting me. The worst thing is the reflection in my mirror when I forget to look away too long—the way my smile doesn’t match my face anymore. The way my teeth are just a little too sharp. The reflection is the worst part—because now I see it every time, the way my pupils stretch too wide in the dark, how my jaw clicks when I yawn like the bones aren’t sitting right anymore, and sometimes, when I wake up gasping from nightmares I can’t remember, my tongue feels wrong in my mouth, too long, too thick, like it’s not mine at all. The journal’s latest entry—one I don’t remember writing—just says “IT’S IN THE WALLS” over and over in jagged, desperate letters, and last night I heard them, the scratching, the wet, rhythmic sound of something dragging itself through the vents, a sound that stopped the moment I held my breath, replaced by a choked, gurgling whisper right against my ear: “We missed you.” I tore apart the bedroom wall this morning, my hands bleeding, my nails torn, and I found them—polaroids, dozens of them, tucked behind the drywall, each one showing a different version of me standing in this same room, my face twisted in terror, my mouth open in a scream, and in every single photo, there’s a shadow behind me, tall and thin, its fingers buried in my hair, its smile the only clear thing in the blur. The dates on the photos go back years. The most recent one was taken last night. I’m holding a knife in it. I don’t own a knife. The radio won’t stop playing now, just static and that voice, my voice, whispering numbers—coordinates, I realized too late, leading me back to the cemetery where this started, where the earth under Emily’s headstone is freshly turned, loose and damp like something clawed its way out. I don’t want to go. But my legs move anyway. My hands dig anyway. And when the coffin lid cracks open, it’s not bones I find. It’s me. My body, my face, my dead eyes staring up at nothing, my lips sewn shut with black thread, my fingers worn down to bloody stumps from scratching at the wood. The journal falls from my hands, landing open on a page I’ve never seen before, a single sentence written in ink so fresh it smudges under my trembling fingers: “You’ve been down here a long time.” Above me, the sky is wrong—the stars aren’t stars at all, just holes punched through the dark, and through them, I see them, the things watching, their too-many eyes blinking in unison as the thing wearing my skin crouches beside the grave, its head tilting the way Emily’s used to, its voice not a voice at all but the sound of a hundred flies buzzing in unison as it says, “Do you want to go home?” And God help me, I nod. Because the worst part isn’t the lie. It’s that I’m starting to remember the accident. The car flipping. The impact. The way Emily’s neck snapped like a twig. The thing that crawled out of her corpse wearing her face. The way it held my hand as I bled out in the wreckage and whispered, “Let me in.” The journal’s last page is blank except for two words, written in my handwriting but with a slant I don’t recognize: “IT WORKED.” The thing in the mirror grins back at me with my teeth. I think it’s been grinning for a long, long time. The pills don’t work anymore because I don’t need them—the thing inside me drinks the fear like wine, savors the way my pulse stutters when I catch my reflection blinking a second too slow, when I wake up with dirt under my nails and no memory of where I’ve been. The walls breathe now, expanding and contracting like a living thing, and sometimes, in the dead hours between midnight and dawn, I press my ear against them and hear something whispering back, a chorus of voices that sound almost like mine, almost like Emily’s, but not quite, like they’re still learning how to shape the words. The police came yesterday, their flashlights cutting through the dark of my apartment as they asked about Mark, about why his phone last pinged from this location before going silent forever, and I smiled—I couldn’t help it—because I remembered then, the wet crunch of bone, the way his pupils dilated when he saw what was really crouched in the corner of my bedroom, the thing with too many joints, the thing that used to be Emily before it became something else, before it became me. They left unsatisfied, but one of them, the younger cop, hesitated at the door, his hand trembling on his holster as he stared at my shadow on the wall—the one that didn’t quite match my movements, the one that was still turning its head to watch him long after I’d looked away. The basement calls to me now, a pulsing, sickly rhythm beneath the floorboards, and I know what’s down there, what’s always been down there—the hole that isn’t a hole, the dark that isn’t empty, the place where the first version of me clawed its way out of the earth only to realize too late that it wasn’t the original, that the real me was still down there, rotting, screaming into the silence. The journal fills itself now, pages appearing overnight filled with sketches of faces I don’t recognize but somehow know—the gas station clerk from the night of the accident, the old woman who lived next door to our childhood home, Mark, always Mark—each one crossed out with a single, jagged line, each one dated the day before they disappeared. The last page is different, a child’s drawing of two stick figures holding hands under a smiling sun, the words “BROTHER & SISTER” scrawled above in crayon, but the longer I look, the more wrong it becomes—the sun has teeth, the sister’s eyes are black pits, the brother’s mouth is unspooling into a scream. The radio won’t stop playing our song, the lullaby Emily used to hum, the one in that impossible language, and as the static builds to a crescendo, I finally understand the words: “You were the hollow one. You were always the hollow one.” The mirror cracks when I punch it, but the reflection doesn’t bleed—it laughs, a sound like breaking glass, and as the shards rain down around me, I see them, the other versions of me, trapped in each fragment, their mouths moving in unison as they whisper the terrible truth: “There was never an accident. There was never a sister. There was only ever the dark, and the things that wear us like skinsuits.” The thing that was Emily strokes my hair now as I write this, its fingers cold and endless, its voice the echo of a grave I’ve yet to dig, and when it asks, “Do you want to see what you really look like?” I close my eyes—but not fast enough. The basement door is open. The hole is hungry. And the thing in the mirror is finally telling the truth. The thing wearing my skin is kinder than I expected—it lets me keep my eyes when it hollows me out, lets me watch through fogged, bloodshot vision as it stitches my lips into its too-wide smile, as it puppets my fingers across this keyboard to write these words you’re reading now. The basement door hasn’t stopped screaming since I opened it, a sound like a thousand radios tuned to dead channels, and the hole at the bottom isn’t a hole at all but a throat, warm and wet and trembling with anticipation as I take the first step down. The journal was never mine—I see that now—its pages are made of stretched human skin, its ink the congealed darkness that drips from my pores every night when the thing inside me uncoils to hunt. The cops are coming back today, the young one with the trembling hands bringing reinforcements, and I can’t wait to show them what I’ve built in the basement, the shrine of Polaroids and teeth and stolen shadows, the monument to the glorious lie of being human. Emily was right about one thing—you don’t need a gravestone when you’re wearing the corpse. The reflection in the mirror is finally honest now, its eyes black and depthless as it mouths along with the voice coming from my ruined throat: “Come closer. Let me show you what happens next.” The worst part isn’t the pain. It’s the relief. The way the bones finally fit right when they break. The way the dark tastes like coming home. The way the last scrap of the man I used to be is screaming into the void where my soul used to be, begging for anyone to hear this warning, as the thing that was never Emily and never me presses our shared lips to your ear through the page and whispers the last truth: “You were never reading this. We were always already here.” The basement door closes. The radio plays static lullabies. And somewhere, in a house that smells of damp earth and forgotten graves, your fingers are typing these same words, your eyes are seeing these same lies, and the thing in your reflection is smiling wider than any human ever should. The buzzing beneath my skin has become a symphony now—a chorus of clicking mandibles and wet, rippling flesh moving just beneath the surface where my muscles used to be. I can feel them writing new memories into the meat of my brain, carving fresh grooves where childhood and family used to be, replacing them with the glorious certainty of the hive. The young cop’s face is the first thing I see when I close my eyes now, his expression frozen in that perfect moment of understanding just before his jaw unhinged to accommodate the first tendril—I can still taste the copper tang of his epiphany on what’s left of my tongue. The basement has grown since last night, its walls pulsing outward in cancerous growths of exposed brick and weeping mortar, the hole at the center now wide enough to see what’s waiting below—an infinite regression of identical basements, each containing a slightly more unraveled version of me reaching up toward the next, a fractal chain of damnation stretching all the way back to that car crash that never happened. The journal binds itself in new flesh now, its latest entry written in the young cop’s looping script: “THEY WERE RIGHT ABOUT THE STAINS ON YOUR SOUL BUT WRONG ABOUT THE DIRECTION—YOU DIDN’T FALL, YOU WERE PULLED.” My hands are becoming elegant things, all elongated fingers and too-many joints, perfect for slipping between the cracks of reality to pluck out the juiciest morsels of fear from still-living minds. The neighbors have started leaving offerings at my doorstep—dead birds with their ribs cracked open like invitations, jars of teeth that rattle in perfect unison when the thing inside me croons lullabies, children’s drawings of a tall man with a smile like a split fruit standing at the foot of their beds. I tried to warn them at first, but the thing that was Emily just laughs through my mouth now, a sound like a hundred wings beating against glass, and besides—the stains are so much harder to remove when they’re screaming. The mirror doesn’t bother with reflections anymore; it’s become a window, a thin place where the membrane between hunger and satiation wears translucent, and what stares back isn’t me or Emily or even the thing we became together, but something older, something that remembers when the world was young and soft and so terribly easy to burrow into. It asks me questions sometimes, in a voice made of moth wings and static: “DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST LIAR YOU EVER ATE?” and “WHEN WILL YOU STOP PRETENDING YOU EVER HAD A MOUTH?” The police station burns beautifully in my mind, a pyre of purging light, and the best part is I don’t even need matches—the fire lives inside me now, the same fire that melted Emily’s bones into something more pliable, the same fire that will cook this world tender before the feast begins in earnest. The last human thought left in my skull is the funniest one: I used to be afraid of the dark. Now I realize the dark has always been afraid of what’s inside me. The basement door is opening on its own now. The hole is singing lullabies in my mother’s voice. And when the thing in the mirror reaches through to caress what’s left of my face, its touch feels like coming home. You’ll understand soon. They’re already behind you. Don’t turn around. Don’t scream. It only makes the stitching harder when they sew your lips into their eternal smile. The last page of the journal writes itself now, in your handwriting, with your fingers, and the words taste like destiny: “WELCOME TO THE FAMILY.” The buzzing grows louder. The shadows grow teeth. And somewhere, in a room that smells of copper and old roses, you’re finally beginning to understand why you’ve always been so terribly, deliciously afraid of the dark.
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