Jay gasped awake—wrong.
His hands were small, soft. Child's hands. The sleeves of Tom's old hand-me-down shirt swam around his wrists, scratchy wool smelling of lye soap and sunshine. Panic seized him. "No… wake up. Dream, it's just—"
"Hey!" A familiar voice, bright and bossy. "What're you doing? Daydreaming again?"
Young Tom stood in the doorway, freckles stark on his sunburned nose, that lopsided grin plastered across his face. Alive. Whole. Jay's breath hitched.
"C'mon, num-nut!" Tom grabbed his wrist, dragging him down the hall. "Mama made roast pheasant. Smell that? If we're late, I'm eating your share!"
The dining room glowed. Firelight danced on polished oak. Mrs. Lea— Mum —stood by the hearth, her apron dusted with flour, worry etching her brow as she placed a steaming platter on the table.
"Jay?" Her voice was soft honey, warm as the bread rolls piled high. "Your food's getting cold, love. You haven't touched a bite."
He stared at his plate. Golden-brown pheasant, glazed carrots, gravy pooling like liquid amber. The scent wrapped around him—rosemary, hearth-smoke, home. A sob clawed up his throat. Tears blurred his vision, hot and shameful, dripping onto the linen tablecloth.
"S-Sorry, Mum," he whispered, the word foreign and fragile on his tongue. "I'll… I'll dig in."
He speared a piece of pheasant, raised it slowly—
—DON'T EAT IT! TRAP!—
Tom's voice. Not the boy beside him. The real Tom. Raw. Desperate. A shriek from beyond the grave.
Jay flinched. The fork clattered onto the plate.
"Wha—?" Young Tom began.
The world shattered.
—
Light bent. Sound curdled.
The warm wood of the table rotted black, crawling with centipedes. Mrs. Lea's kind face dissolved into smooth, featureless bone-white porcelain. Where her eyes should be—empty hollows. Where her mouth should be—a jagged, stitched-like gash stretched ear to ear.
Young Tom's freckles melted like wax. His skin bleached alabaster, his eyes vanishing into blank, polished sockets. His grin remained—but now it was that same terrible, lipless slit, carved deep and permanent.
The pheasant on Jay's plate writhed. It wasn't bird flesh. It was a human eye, clouded and staring out from a face frozen horror, impaled on the fork's tines. The platter held not carrots, but severed fingers, blue-tinged and stiff. The gravy? Thick, congealed blood.
All around the table, more figures materialized from the warping shadows—tall, impossibly thin, their bodies draped in tattered shrouds the color of grave dust. Faceless. Mouthless. Silent.
Their blank, bone-smooth heads tilted towards him in unison.
From the jagged slit on the figure that was once Mrs. Lea, a wet, clicking sound emerged. Not words. The sound of maggots squirming in dead meat.
Jay screamed. No sound came out.
He scrambled back, chair toppling. He ran—not towards the hall, but through the rotting wall, into swirling, formless gray mist. Behind him, the clicking grew louder, hungrier. The faceless things didn't chase. They simply… watched.
And in the mist, a final whisper—Tom's voice, broken and fading:
"Run, Jay… They remember your hunger…"
---