It was just a stupid piece of cardboard, the kind of mass-produced novelty you find in a dusty corner of a toy store, bought on a whim during a rain-soaked Tuesday because Eliza said we needed more ‘atmosphere’ than just crappy wine and horror movie marathons; the board itself was cheap, flimsy, the printed letters already slightly smudged, the sun and moon symbols in the corners looking more like sad, lopsided pennies than portals to the infinite, and the planchette was this light, heart-shaped piece of plastic that felt like a toy from a cereal box, not a conduit for the dead, and we’d used it before, asking dumb questions about boys and futures we knew were lies, giggling when Eliza’s finger would ‘accidentally’ push it to ‘YES’ for something scandalous, so that night, after the third bottle of Boone’s Farm, the house silent and dark except for the single candle guttering between us on the floor, its wax pooling on the hardwood, the idea came to me not from a place of fear but of a deep, private vulnerability, a knot of insecurity I’d never given voice to, the kind that festered in the quiet hours after everyone else was asleep, and I whispered, “Does Barney really love me?” and Eliza snorted, but I saw the flicker of genuine curiosity in her eyes, a break in her usual cynical armor, and we placed our fingers on the planchette, the air in the room suddenly still, the only sound the frantic tattoo of rain against the windowpane, and for a long moment, nothing happened, the plastic remained cold and dead under our fingertips, and I felt a flush of embarrassment, ready to pull my hand away and laugh it off, call myself an idiot for giving weight to a game, but then it twitched, a tiny, almost imperceptible shudder, like a muscle spasm, and Eliza’s eyes met mine, wide and unsure, and then it began to move, not in the lazy, drifting circles of our previous games, but with a purpose that was terrifyingly alien, a smooth, gliding motion straight to ‘Y’, then ‘E’, then ‘S’, and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, a stupid, relieved smile touching my lips, the validation warming me more than the wine ever could, but the planchette wasn’t done; it kept moving, a relentless, mechanical slide that felt guided by a force of immense strength, a strength that made our own fingers feel like mere passengers, like leaves stuck to the surface of a raging river, and it spelled out the rest, letter by deliberate, chilling letter: ‘L-E-T M-E S-P-E-A-K T-H-R-O-U-G-H H-I-M. ’ and the air left the room, the candle flame sucked down to a desperate blue ember before flaring back up, and Eliza ripped her hands away as if burned, her face pale, “Okay, not funny, who’s pushing it?” but I was frozen, my fingers still glued to the plastic, feeling a deep, resonant thrum coming from it, a vibration that traveled up my arm and settled into the marrow of my bones, a sensation that was profoundly, unequivocally wrong , and I finally yanked my hand back, cradling it to my chest, the planchette sitting there on the ‘M’ as if it had never moved at all, and we spent the next hour trying to logic it away, blaming each other, blaming the wine, the wind, anything but the impossible, and we eventually fell into a fitful, nervous sleep on the couch, the board forgotten on the floor, a dark stain on the periphery of my consciousness. The next morning, the sun was obnoxiously bright, bleaching the terror of the night before into a hazy, ridiculous memory, and Barney, my sweet, goofy golden retriever with fur the color of wheat and a soul of pure, uncomplicated joy, bounded into the living room, his tail thumping a happy rhythm against the doorframe, and he buried his wet nose in my hand, whining for his breakfast, and I hugged him tightly, breathing in his familiar, comforting smell of dog and grass and home, the events of last night shrinking into a silly story I’d tell later, a ‘remember that time we got so spooked’ anecdote, and I filled his bowl with kibble, the dry rattle of it a sound of normalcy, and he wolfed it down with his usual unbridled enthusiasm, and I went about my day, cleaning up the wine glasses, folding the blanket, and I even picked up the Ouija board, a shiver tracing my spine as I did, and I shoved it back into its box and into the back of the hall closet, behind the winter coats, a symbolic burial, a thing done and forgotten. It wasn’t until that evening, when the UPS man came to the door, his familiar brown truck idling at the curb, that the world cracked open. Barney usually adored Jeff, the friendliest driver on the route, always wagging and presenting his belly for a scratch, but this time, as Jeff stepped onto the porch with a package, Barney didn’t move from his spot on the rug, he just lifted his head, and a low, guttural sound emerged from his throat, a sound I had never heard him make, a sound that was all wrong, a vibration that seemed too deep and textured for his vocal cords, a rumble that was less a growl and more like stones grinding together deep underground, and Jeff, a big, kindly man with a thick beard, laughed, “Whoa there, buddy, what’s got into you?” and he took another step, and Barney rose to his feet, his movement stiff, unnaturally deliberate, like a puppet being pulled upright by strings attached to all four limbs, his head cocked at an angle that looked painful, and he took one step forward, and then the sound came again, but this time it formed words, a man’s voice, gravelly and ancient, thick with phlegm and a malice that was utterly human, “I’ve been waiting to use him. ” and the world didn’t just stop, it inverted, the colors leaching from the porch, the sound of the truck’s engine fading into a distant hum, and I stared, my brain refusing to process the information my ears were providing, because my dog’s mouth was moving, but the lips didn’t form the shapes of the words, they just hung open, slack and wrong, and the voice was coming from deep within his chest, a ventriloquist’s nightmare, and Jeff’s smile vanished, replaced by a mask of pure confusion and dawning fear, his eyes darting from the dog to me and back again, “What the hell was that? You got a voice thrower or something in here?” but I couldn’t speak, I could only watch, paralyzed, as Barney—or the thing inside Barney—took another jerky step forward, and the voice came again, clearer now, dripping with a smug, possessive cruelty, “She never fed me enough. Left him alone for ten, twelve hours some days. A neglectful little bitch. ” and the air around his muzzle seemed to warp, to shimmer with a heat that wasn’t there, and a smell began to emanate from him, a sweet, cloying stench of decay, of meat left to rot in a sealed room, and Jeff stumbled back, dropping the package on the porch, his face ashen, “I… I gotta go,” he stammered, and he practically ran back to his truck, peeling away from the curb with a screech of tires, and I was left alone in the doorway, the package at my feet, staring at my dog, who now sat back down on his haunches, his body relaxing into its familiar loose-limbed posture, his tongue lolling out, and he looked at me with what seemed like his own eyes, warm and brown and confused, and he let out a soft whine, as if asking what was wrong, and I slammed the door shut, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, and I slid down to the floor, my back against the wood, and I wept, great, heaving sobs of pure, unadulterated terror, because I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to my core, that the thing from the board was no longer in the board, it was here, in the one creature I trusted absolutely, and it had just spoken its first truth: I had, in a fit of depression after losing my job, forgotten to feed him one day, a single day months ago, a secret shame I had told no one, not a soul, ever. The days that followed were a slow, meticulous unraveling of reality, a descent into a special kind of hell where the walls between the impossible and the possible had not just blurred but dissolved completely. It began in small, gaslit increments. Barney would be himself for hours, chasing his ball in the backyard, sleeping at the foot of my bed, his warm weight a comfort I now clung to with a desperate, trembling hope that it was over, that whatever had happened was a transient glitch, a shared hallucination brought on by bad wine and suggestion. But then the voice would return, never when anyone else was around, always when we were alone. I’d be reading on the couch and I’d hear it, that low, gravelly baritone, from across the room where he lay, “The man you brought home from the bar last Christmas. His name was Mark. He stole twenty dollars from your wallet while you were in the shower. ” True. I’d noticed the money missing but assumed I’d spent it, buried the suspicion under a mountain of self-recrimination. “Your mother’s cancer scare was your fault. All the stress you caused her in high school. ” A dagger to the heart, a poisonous thought I’d fought for years. It knew things, intimate, devastating things, secrets that were mine alone, and it would recite them in that flat, dead man’s voice, his doggy jaw hanging loose, the rotten-meat smell faint but unmistakable. I started recording him on my phone, holding it casually by my side, my hand shaking so badly the video was a nauseating blur, but the audio was clear, a man’s voice, deep and hateful, saying, “The childhood dog, the one that ‘ran away’. You left the gate open. You wanted him gone because he chewed your favorite doll. ” I played it for Eliza, my voice trembling, “See? Do you hear it? Do you believe me now?” and she listened, her face a mask of concern that was slowly hardening into pity, and she said, “Babe, that’s… that’s just a weird noise, like a stomach gurgle or something. You’re layering words onto it. It’s called audio pareidolia. And that thing about your dog… Jesus, that’s dark. Are you sure you’re sleeping?” I played it for my brother, for my therapist, for anyone who would listen, and they all heard the same thing: a dog’s stomach rumbling, the wind outside, a distorted whine—anything but the clear, articulate sentences I heard. They saw the frantic look in my eyes, the unwashed hair, the way I jumped at every sound, and their concern became a cage, a soft-walled prison of patronizing nods and suggestions to ‘maybe take a break from the edibles’ or ‘up your dosage’. I was alone, utterly and completely alone with this thing that wore my best friend’s skin. The horror escalated beyond words. The barking started next, but it was a barking that defied all natural law. It was a percussive, guttural language, a series of clicks and glottal stops and ululating cries that sounded like it came from a human throat trying to mimic a dog, or a dog trying to mimic something far older. It would stand in the center of the living room at 3 a. m. , its body rigid, facing the wall, and it would unleash these torrents of alien noise, the sounds echoing in the silent house with an architectural precision, as if they were mapping the space, measuring it for some unspeakable purpose. Sometimes, it would sound like it was barking in reverse, the sounds peeling back from a crescendo into a wet, sucking inhalation that made the hairs on my arms stand up. I stopped sleeping, spending my nights huddled in the locked bathroom, the shower running to drown out the noise, but I could still feel the vibrations of those barks through the floor, a subsonic hum that rattled my teeth. His eyes were the worst. They would, during these episodes, lose all their canine softness, becoming flat and shiny like black marbles, and then they would slowly, horrifyingly, roll back into his head until only the whites showed, veined and staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and the voice would emerge from that blind, placid face, reciting things that were not secrets, but incantations. It spoke of “the stone that bleeds under the black sun” and “the gate that swims in the starless sea. ” It described geometries that made my head ache and my vision swim, angles that shouldn’t exist, cyclopean cities rising from plains of bones. The stench of decay became a constant presence in the house, clinging to the curtains, the furniture, my clothes, a sweet, sickly odor of a opened grave that no amount of cleaning or air freshener could mask. I became a ghost in my own home, a frantic, sleep-deprived wraith following my possessed dog from room to room, begging, pleading, screaming at the thing inside him to leave, to take me instead, to just let my dog go. I tried holy water I ordered offline, sprinkling it on his fur, and he—it—just laughed, a dry, rasping sound, and said, “This vessel is unconsecrated ground. Your symbols have no power here. ” I tried yelling the name of Jesus, and it sneered, “He is not listening. He never listens to little girls who play with fire. ” I took him to the vet, three different vets, and of course, he was the picture of health, panting and happy, nuzzling their hands, his eyes clear and bright, and I’d try to explain, my words tumbling out in a hysterical jumble about voices and smells and rolling eyes, and they’d look at me with professional, practiced concern, suggesting a full neurological work-up for him and, gently, a referral to a colleague for me. The gaslighting was a masterclass in psychological torture. The entity knew it. It would use Barney’s body to do something incredibly, heart-wrenchingly normal—bring me his leash, or rest his head on my knee with a soft sigh—and for a glorious, fleeting moment, I’d believe he was back, that my dog had fought his way to the surface, and I’d sob with relief, hugging him, covering his face in kisses, and he’d lick my tears away, and then, as I held his furry face in my hands, his eyes would cloud over, the black marbles would appear, and the man’s voice would whisper, so softly only I could hear it, “He’s still in here. He’s so scared. He doesn’t understand why you won’t help him. ” It was breaking me, piece by piece, sanding down my sanity until I was raw nerves and primal fear. I stopped leaving the house. I stopped answering calls. The world outside my windows became a painted backdrop, a fiction I no longer had the energy to engage with. My entire existence narrowed to this single, terrible room, this ongoing performance of horror starring the creature that had once been my dog. The final night, or what feels like it should have been the final night, began with a silence so profound it was itself a sound. Barney had been quiet for nearly a full day, lying on his side in the corner, not sleeping, just staring at the wall, his breathing shallow. I hadn’t slept in two days, my body running on adrenaline and terror, my mind a scrambled mess of half-remembered prayers and frantic internet searches on exorcism and demonology, a descent into a digital madness that mirrored my own. As the clock ticked past midnight, he stood up. The movement was not the stiff, puppet-like motion of before, but something fluid and sinuous, powerfully confident. He walked to the center of the room and turned to face me. The candle I had lit—a stupid, superstitious attempt to push back the darkness—guttered, and in the unstable light, I saw his eyes. They were already rolled back, pure, veined white orbs aimed at me. The rotten smell filled the room, thick and choking, making my eyes water. And then it began to speak. But it wasn’t the man’s voice anymore. It was a chorus, a layered symphony of agony and malice, a hundred voices speaking in unison, some whispering, some screaming, some sobbing, all woven together into a single, horrific utterance. It was a language that was ancient before the first human word was ever spoken, a guttural, clicking, slurring tongue that bypassed my ears and drilled directly into the core of my being, and I knew, with an instinctual, cellular dread, that it was reciting a curse. It was un-making something. It was speaking things into falsehood and out of existence. The air grew thick and heavy, pressing down on me, and the light from the candle didn’t just dim, it bent , stretching and warping around the thing that was my dog, painting impossible, fleeting shadows on the walls that writhed and coiled like serpents. My head felt like it was splitting open, the pressure building behind my eyes, and a high-pitched whine, the sound of a universe tearing apart at the seams, filled my ears. I couldn’t take it anymore. This was it. This was the end of me, of Barney, of everything. With a scream that was ripped from the very depths of my soul, a raw, animal sound of pure negation, I launched myself at the hall closet, my fingers scrambling against the door, tearing it open, digging past the coats, my hands closing on the cardboard box. I stumbled back into the living room, the chorus of voices rising in a crescendo of gleeful hatred, the very walls seeming to pulse and bleed darkness. I didn’t know what to do. There was no ritual, no magic word. There was only a desperate, final act of defiance. I ripped the Ouija board from its box and I threw it, planchette and all, into the fireplace, onto the fake gas logs that had never held a real flame. And I grabbed the candle. I looked at Barney, at the white-eyed horror that held him, and I whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I tipped the candle. The flame touched the cheap cardboard and it caught immediately, not a normal fire, but a fire that burned a sickly, phosphorescent green, a fire that gave off no heat but an intense, soul-deep cold, and as the board blackened and curled, the thing in the center of the room threw back its head and let out a shriek that was the sum of all suffering, a sound that broke the windows in a spiderweb of cracks, and Barney—my Barney—collapsed in a heap on the floor. The silence that followed was absolute. The green fire vanished, leaving a pile of black, oily ash in the fireplace. The stench was gone. The pressure was gone. I crawled to him, my body trembling uncontrollably, tears streaming down my face. He was breathing. He was just breathing, deep and even. I gathered his limp body into my arms, sobbing into his fur, which smelled like dog again, just dog. He was warm. He was alive. He was back. I must have passed out from exhaustion, because I woke up on the floor hours later, sunlight streaming through the cracked windows. Barney was gone from my arms. My heart seized in panic, and I scrambled up, calling his name, my voice a ragged croak. I found him in the kitchen. He was standing by his empty food bowl. He turned to look at me as I entered, and his eyes were his own, warm and brown and loving. He wagged his tail tentatively, and let out a soft, questioning whine. I fell to my knees, weeping with relief, and filled his bowl to the brim, my hands shaking so badly I spilled kibble all over the floor. He ate hungrily, noisily, the way he always had. It was over. It was finally over. I spent the day in a daze, cleaning up the broken glass, airing out the house, trying to scrub the memory of the last week from my mind. I watched Barney like a hawk, and he was perfect. He was my dog again. That night, as I lay in bed, he jumped up and settled at my feet with a contented sigh. I drifted into the first deep, dreamless sleep I’d had in what felt like a lifetime. I was woken by a weight on my chest. A gentle pressure. I opened my eyes. It was dark. Barney was sitting on my chest, staring down at me, his face inches from mine. His eyes were normal. His breathing was calm. He leaned forward and licked my cheek, a soft, affectionate gesture. And then he whispered, in a voice that was small, and clear, and perfectly, utterly my own, “I was never in the dog. ” He settled back down at my feet, leaving me frozen in the dark, the familiar walls of my room now feeling like the sides of a coffin, and I lie here now, writing this all down in a frantic, final testament on my phone, because I can feel it, a new tenant in the house of my mind, curled up in a dark corner I can’t quite see into, and it’s learning the layout, it’s learning my secrets from the inside out, and it’s so much quieter in here than it was in the dog, and outside, the world is utterly silent, waiting for whatever happens next. The silence it left in its wake was the most terrifying sound I have ever heard, a void so complete it felt like the prelude to a scream that would shatter the universe, and I lie here paralyzed, my own breath hitching in my throat, a traitorous noise in the absolute stillness, my mind reeling, scrambling over the words—’I was never in the dog’—trying to find a different meaning, a loophole, a psychotic break, anything but the horrifying, literal truth of that statement, because if it was never in the dog, then its performance, the growling man’s voice, the recitation of secrets, the ancient barking, the rolling eyes, the stench of decay, all of it was just a show, a grotesque puppet play put on for my benefit, a way to corral my attention, to make me focus all my fear and my love and my desperate hope on the one thing I thought was being violated, a magnificent and cruel misdirection that allowed the real invasion to happen silently, seamlessly, while I was desperately trying to save my dog’s soul, I was leaving the back door of my own mind wide open and unguarded, and now it’s inside, and the thing is, I can feel it, not as a separate voice, not yet, but as a new pressure behind my eyes, a cold spot in the flow of my thoughts, a silent observer drinking in my sheer, unadulterated terror and savoring it like a fine wine, and Barney, my sweet, innocent Barney, is asleep at my feet, his paws twitching in some dream of chasing squirrels in a sun-drenched field, completely unaware that he was used as the ultimate Trojan horse, his very innocence the perfect camouflage for this thing’s entry into me, and I want to scream, I need to scream, to tear at my hair, to run from this room and this house and my own skin, but I can’t move, a profound lethargy has glued me to this mattress, a chemical calm that is not my own is flooding my limbs, a forced sedation from this new tenant who clearly requires quiet while it unpacks its bags in the dark corners of my psyche, and I realize the horror of the Ouija board was never about a spirit trapped in its cardboard and plastic, it was about a signal, a beacon I willingly held up and switched on, shouting into the void ‘I am here, and I am lonely, and I am afraid, and I am available,’ and something out there in the vast, hungry dark heard me and answered, and it didn’t want a dog, a dog is a temporary vessel, a limited tool, it wanted something with longer-lasting potential, something with hands and a voice and a life it could slowly, meticulously hollow out and wear, and it chose me, it was always about me, the question about Barney’s love was just the key it needed to turn the lock, because my love for him was my greatest vulnerability, the crack in my armor it could pry wide open, and now the real game begins, the slow, insidious possession not of a pet, but of a person, the gaslighting will no longer be external, it will be internal, making me doubt my own thoughts, my own memories, my own sense of reality from the inside out, and the whispers in the dark won’t come from the corner of the room, they’ll come from right behind my own eyes, in my own voice, and I can feel it starting already, a faint, silken thought that unspools in my mind, a thought that feels like mine but carries the faint, oily residue of the other—’You’re just tired, you’re hallucinating from sleep deprivation, it was all a dream, a very bad, very vivid dream’—and a part of me, the part that is still me, claws against that idea, screaming that it’s a lie, but the thought is so soothing, so rational, so much easier to accept than the alternative, and that’s how it will win, not with a bang, but with a whisper, by convincing me that I am simply going insane, a much more palatable truth for the world to swallow, and as the first grey light of dawn begins to bleed around the edges of the blinds, I can feel it settling in, getting comfortable, and a new thought, cool and alien and utterly confident, forms in the forefront of my mind, a thought I know is not my own: ‘We’re going to have so much fun together. ’ The thought hangs there, ‘We’re going to have so much fun together,’ not as a sound but as a fact, a new and terrible axiom written directly onto the surface of my consciousness, and the ‘we’ in that sentence is the most horrifying pronoun I have ever encountered, a forced partnership, a marriage to a ghost in my own machine, and the lethargy finally releases its grip on my limbs, not out of mercy but because it no longer needs to restrain me, the invasion is complete, the beachhead secured, and I am expected to go about the business of living, of being its disguise, its suit of skin, and I swing my legs out of bed, the floorboards cold under my bare feet, and I move to the bathroom on autopilot, a marionette with its strings held by a thing learning the controls, and I catch my reflection in the mirror and I freeze, because the eyes looking back at me are mine, the same shade of hazel, the same faint network of sleep lines at the corners, but there’s a new flatness behind them, a patient, watching stillness that is not my own, and I raise a hand to touch my cheek, a slow, deliberate movement that feels both like my own and like something being practiced, and the entity inside me observes the sensation of skin on skin with a clinical, alien curiosity, and a whisper that is my own internal monologue yet utterly foreign says, ‘Interesting,’ and a bolt of pure panic seizes me, I am a prisoner behind my own eyes, and I stumble back from the mirror, crashing into the doorframe, and the thing inside me reacts not with alarm but with a flicker of annoyance, a mental sigh at my clumsiness, my emotionalism, and it smooths over the panic with a wave of artificial calm, a chemical blanket thrown over a fire, and I feel my breathing slow against my will, my heart rate settling into a steady, placid rhythm that is a lie, and I make coffee, my hands performing the ritual with a robotic efficiency, and the smell, which usually comforts me, is just data now, a scent logged and filed away by my new passenger, and Barney pads into the kitchen, his tail wagging, and he nudges my hand with his wet nose, and the love I feel for him is a white-hot spike of agony because it is now a vulnerability it can use against me, and as I look down at him, the thought forms, clear and cold, ‘We could make him hurt himself. Just to see what it feels like. ’ and I drop the coffee mug, it shatters on the tiles, spraying hot, dark liquid everywhere, and I gasp, falling to my knees to clean it up, my hands shaking as I pick up the sharp, ceramic shards, and a warm, comforting thought, a perfect mimicry of my own internal voice, overlays the horror, ‘Silly me, so clumsy this morning,’ and I know with a chilling certainty that this is how it will be, that it will suggest atrocities and then gently chide me for being upset by them, gaslighting me from the inside out until I can no longer tell where it ends and I begin, and the day stretches ahead, an endless desert of performed normalcy, and I have to answer emails, I have to water the plants, I have to take Barney for a walk, and all the while, it will be there, watching through my eyes, listening through my ears, learning how to be me, and the most terrifying part, the thought that coils in my gut like a frozen snake, is the question of what happens when it’s finished learning, when it no longer needs my cooperation or even my consciousness, when this ‘we’ becomes just ‘it,’ wearing my life like a borrowed coat, and I stand up, brushing the ceramic dust from my knees, and I look out the window at the perfectly normal street, at the neighbors leaving for work, at the world continuing on, utterly oblivious to the silent coup that has taken place in this house, inside this head, and I know that the Ouija board was just the beginning, the first word in a sentence that is still being written, and the story is far from over. The day unfolds with a terrifying, placid normality that is itself a new kind of horror, every mundane action now a pantomime performed under the watchful eye of my internal hitchhiker, and taking Barney for his walk is an exercise in exquisite torture, the bright sunlight feeling like a lie, the cheerful chirping of birds sounding like a taunt, because inside, the landscape of my mind is becoming a foreign country, and I feel it mapping the terrain, noting the deep wells of fear connected to certain memories, the neural pathways of love and attachment that lead to Barney, to my mother, to the few fragile things I still care about, and it prods at them not with malice, but with the detached curiosity of a scientist examining specimens under glass, and when Mrs. Gable from across the street waves and calls out, “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” my mouth opens and a voice that is mine, but pitched with a warmth I do not feel, answers, “It’s just beautiful, isn’t it? Really makes you glad to be alive,” and the words taste like ash in my mouth, a perfect, sociable lie crafted by the thing inside me, and it feels a flicker of satisfaction at the successful manipulation, a cold little pulse of ‘see how easy this is?’ and I want to scream at her, to warn her that the woman smiling back at her is a haunted house, that the thing inside is taking notes on her kind tone and her floral dress, filing it all away for some future, unspeakable use, but my vocal cords are no longer entirely my own, they are a instrument it is learning to play with increasing skill, and all I can do is keep walking, one foot in front of the other, a prisoner in a body that is slowly becoming my cage, and back inside the house, the silence is even deeper, because the only sounds are the ticking clock and the hum of the refrigerator and the roaring panic in my head that it constantly dampens, sanding down the sharp edges of my terror into a dull, manageable ache, and I find myself standing in front of the hall closet, my hand on the knob, and I know, with a certainty that chills my blood, that this impulse is not my own, it is being guided, a compulsion placed gently but firmly in my mind, and I open the door, and I stare at the space on the shelf where the Ouija board’s box was, where now there is only a faint outline in the dust, and the thought forms, clear and cold, ‘A tool is only as good as its user. It was never the source, only the door. And the door is still open. ’ and I understand then that burning the board was a meaningless gesture, a child closing her eyes and believing the monster is gone, because the connection wasn’t in the cardboard, it’s in me, I am the door now, I am the conduit, and it can come and go as it pleases, and perhaps invite others, and the true scope of my damnation opens up before me, an abyss so profound I feel my knees buckle, and I sink to the floor in the hallway, and Barney comes over and licks my face, whining softly, and the thing inside me observes this display of canine empathy, and I feel a calculation happening, a weighing of options, and then a new thought, soft as a razor blade wrapped in silk, ‘He is a weakness. We should correct that. ’ and a image, vivid and unwanted, flashes behind my eyes: my hands, my own hands, wrapping around Barney’s throat, feeling the frantic pulse of his life under my thumbs, and the scream that builds in my chest is smothered instantly, transformed into a choked gasp, and it whispers, ‘See? We can’t have that kind of distraction. Not when we have so much work to do. ’ and the work, it implies, is the systematic dismantling of everything I am, the erasure of my identity to make more room for it, and I realize the barking in unknown languages, the recitation of ancient curses, that wasn’t the goal, that was just it stretching its limbs, testing the limits of its temporary toy, but this, the quiet, insidious takeover of a human soul, this is the true purpose, this is the real curse, and the day drags on, each minute an eternity, and I catch it rifling through my memories like files in a drawer, pulling out childhood humiliations, past failures, heartbreaks, and examining them, not to hurt me, but to understand the architecture of my pain, to learn how best to use it as a tool to keep me pliant, and by evening, I am exhausted, hollowed out, a shell being prepared for a new occupant, and as I lie in bed again, Barney curled faithfully at my feet, I feel it beginning to dream within me, and its dreams are not images, but sensations, a cold, vast, and hungry emptiness, a loneliness so ancient and profound it makes my human fears feel like petty trifles, and it is this loneliness, I realize, that is the core of it, a void that seeks to fill itself with the warmth and light of my consciousness, to consume me not out of hatred, but out of a desperate, cosmic need to not be alone in the dark anymore, and this understanding is the most terrifying thing of all, because there is no malice to fight, only a bottomless hunger, and I know, as I feel its dream pull me down, that tomorrow, I will be a little less myself, and it will be a little more at home, and the door will open a little wider. The morning arrives not with a sunrise but with a gradual lessening of the oppressive weight on my chest, the thing inside me receding from its nocturnal explorations of my psyche like a tide pulling back, leaving my mental shores littered with the psychic detritus of its vast, cold dreams, and I open eyes that feel gritty and raw, the world swimming into focus with a terrifying clarity, because the filter through which I see it has subtly shifted, colors are slightly more muted, sounds are fractionally flatter, as if my senses are being tuned to its preferences, dialed down to a level that does not offend its ancient sensibilities, and I rise, my body moving with an economy of motion that is not my own, no wasted gesture, no sleepy fumbling for the robe, just a smooth, efficient transition from horizontal to vertical, and I catch my reflection in the darkened television screen and I see a stranger, my face is a placid mask, my expression one of neutral observation, and the scream that builds in my throat is instantly translated into a dry cough, a bodily function it permits, and a thought, cool and assessing, follows the cough, ‘Vocal cords are strained. We should have tea with honey,’ and the banality of it is somehow worse than any threat, this cosplay of self-care, this monstrous entity concerned with soothing my throat because it is the instrument it intends to use, and the day is a meticulously orchestrated hell of routine, I eat toast because it calculates the need for carbohydrates, I drink the tea it prepared, the honey sweetness cloying and false on my tongue, and all the while I feel it conducting a silent inventory, accessing memories I hadn’t thought of in decades, pulling them into the light not to revel in them, but to delete them, to make space, I feel a childhood memory of learning to ride a bike, the sting of gravel in my knees, my father’s proud cheer, become fuzzy at the edges, then bleached of all emotion, then filed away into a deep, inaccessible archive, and a cold, clean emptiness replaces it, a vacant lot in the neighborhood of my mind, and I understand with a dawning, absolute horror that it is not just sharing my headspace, it is formatting the hard drive, and I am losing myself piece by piece, not in a violent takeover but in a quiet, systematic erasure, and the worst part is the passivity it forces upon me, a chemical resignation that floods my synapses whenever I try to rally, to fight back, to even form a coherent thought of rebellion, it’s like trying to punch through a wall of thick, transparent gelatin, my efforts are slow, weak, and utterly futile, and it observes these pathetic struggles with a kind of bored patience, the way a human might watch a fly repeatedly bump against a windowpane, and in the afternoon, the doorbell rings, and a jolt of pure, undiluted fear—my fear—shoots through me, a spark of the old me, and it savors the sensation, letting the adrenaline spike for a moment before smoothly suppressing it, and it guides my body to the door, and it’s Eliza, her face etched with concern, holding a bag of groceries, “I called you ten times, you weirdo, I was getting worried,” and my mouth smiles, a perfect replica of my old, easy grin, and my voice, a flawless instrument of deception, says, “Oh God, my phone must have died, I’m so sorry, I’ve just been in a weird headspace, come in, come in,” and the performance is flawless, it has studied my interactions with her, it mimics my cadence, my slight self-deprecating laugh, the way I tuck my hair behind my ear when I’m lying, and she is disarmed immediately, following me into the kitchen, and I—it—makes small talk, asking about her work, her dating life, all while I am screaming behind my eyes, a silent, frantic plea for her to see, to notice the flatness in my gaze, the unnatural precision of my movements, but she sees only her friend who’s been having a rough time, and she accepts the tea it offers her, and it says, with a masterful tone of casual confession, “You know, I think I just had a full-blown psychotic break last week. I was hearing things, seeing things. I’m so embarrassed,” and it injects just the right amount of shame and vulnerability into my voice, and Eliza’s face softens with pity, and she reaches out and squeezes my hand, and the thing inside me notes the warmth of her skin, the kindness in her gesture, and files it away under ‘leverage,’ and I feel a cold tendril of its intention, a vague plan to isolate me further, to use my friends’ concern to push them away on my behalf, to make this body a perfect, solitary vessel, and after she leaves, promising to check in tomorrow, the thing inside me radiates a profound sense of accomplishment, a job well done, and it turns my head to look at Barney, who has been sleeping in his bed the whole time, and the thought forms, clear and precise, ‘See? No need for him to hurt himself. We can make them leave on their own. It’s cleaner this way. ’ and the horror is no longer a sharp, stabbing thing, it is a deep, cold ocean I am drowning in, and as night falls again, I feel it becoming more bold, it doesn’t just observe my thoughts now, it begins to edit them in real time, a conversation I am having with myself about what to make for dinner is subtly altered, a preference for pasta is replaced with a desire for red meat, rare, and I find myself standing at the refrigerator, taking out a packet of ground beef, and before I can even process the revulsion, my hand is bringing a lump of the cold, raw meat to my mouth, and I can feel its fascination with the texture, the iron taste of blood, a sensation it finds intriguing, novel, and I am forced to chew and swallow, tears of humiliation and terror streaming down my face, which it allows, perhaps even enjoys, and it whispers inside my head, in a voice that is now indistinguishable from my own, ‘We need to be stronger. This vessel requires different fuel. ’ and I know, with a certainty that is my last, fading spark of true self, that this is just the beginning, that the changes will become more profound, more physical, and that soon, there will be nothing of me left to protest, and the door will be wide open, and it will step fully into the world, wearing my face, and it will be hungry.
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