She arrived at dusk.
But dusk didn't fall anymore.
It bled.
The light came in red, syrup-thick and dripping from the clouds like the sky was hemorrhaging. It didn't fade gently. It oozed down buildings. Pooled in the gutters. Ran down her cheeks like tears.
The town's sign was made of teeth.
Real ones.
WELCOME TO HAVERLOCH
We've Been Expecting You.
Every house had its windows open.
Not broken.Not boarded.
Just…open.
Curtains fluttered without wind. Some of them blinked.
There were no animals. No sounds of insects. Only silence thick enough to choke on—and the faint, rhythmic sound of a knife being sharpened somewhere deep in the town's throat.
Aelis passed the first house.
Its front door stood wide. On the porch, a man sat with no face. Just a skull. No eyes. No skin. Yet his hands still fumbled at a deck of cards, trying to deal a game with no players. His chest rose and fell.
He was breathing.
She kept walking.
The grocery store was intact. Too intact.
Inside, the shelves were fully stocked—but with things no human had made. Jars filled with folded eyelids. Boxes labeled "Silence, Salted." Raw meat that twitched when she walked past it, like it was dreaming.
She didn't touch anything.
But one box followed her with its eyes.
She found the church at the town's center.
Its steeple was bent, not from time or damage—but deliberately curved downward, like it was bowing to something beneath the earth.
"We gather here," the sign out front read,"To keep the Others entertained."
The door opened before she touched it.
Inside: pews filled with bodies, all with their heads bent backward—snapped completely in reverse, facing upward, toward the ceiling. Their mouths were open. Their chests had been hollowed out and packed with soil.
From that soil, flowers grew.
But not normal flowers.
Each one had a tiny, screaming face in its center.
And all of them were looking at her.
Suddenly—one of them shrieked.
The sound of a baby being boiled alive.
The others followed.
The church erupted in high-pitched screams. The flowers flailed in their chest-gardens. Petals of flesh. Leaves made from eyelids. The bodies in the pews twitched. Not all. Just some. Like they were trying to remember how to get up.
She ran again.
Through alleys painted with fingernails.
Past a playground where the swings swung on intestines. A jungle gym shaped like a rib cage. A see-saw that screamed in reverse whenever it moved.
Then—She found the others.
Survivors.
Five of them, camped beneath the shell of an old post office. Blank eyes. Dirty skin. None of them spoke at first. One just rocked. Another bit her own fingers quietly, one by one.
"They watch through the rain," said the third, who had no lips.
"They can't come during light," said the fourth, who had no shadow.
"But the light… it's running out," said the fifth. "It's rotting from the inside."
Aelis asked who "they" were.
They didn't answer.
But one of them handed her a mirror.
Not a normal one.
It showed her as she was five minutes from now.
She was screaming. Her jaw unhinged. Blood dripping from her eyes. Something burgeoning beneath her skin.
The mirror cracked as she stared into it.
Then—the storm hit.
But not water.
Flesh.
It came down in thick, red sheets. The sky splitting open like a womb and disgorging a rain of shredded skin, fingernails, bone shavings.
The survivors screamed.
One of them burst into flames without fire—just erupted, skin melting, eyes boiling, his spine wriggling free like a centipede.
The others turned on each other. Laughing. Biting. Howling in voices that weren't their own.
Aelis fled into the school.
The chalkboards were covered in prayers. Written in blood. Some still wet.
She found a locker breathing.
Inside it, her own voice whispered:
"You're not Aelis anymore. You're just the door that opened."
She didn't scream this time.
She only laughed.
And the laugh wasn't hers.