September 1965
I found the pen buried beneath a cluster of old corks in the crate. Its ink had thickened to a sluggish crawl, but it still moved when I tested it against the side of a wine-stained box. The lines stuttered like a heart giving out—but they were lines. That was enough.
I spent most of the morning just staring at the blank page I'd torn from the back of a forgotten ledger. The wine merchant's logo curled in the corner like a watermark of another life. I traced it once with my finger, then began to write.
The words came slowly at first, scraps. Sentences that felt too clinical, then too poetic. I didn't know how to speak to the page yet. I didn't know what kind of creature I was writing as.
But I wrote anyway.
I had to.
Because the hallucinations—or whatever they were—had started whispering again. Voices behind the walls, shapes shifting in the wood grain, flickers of old conversations rising from the stone like breath in winter.
And worse still: they were beginning to feel real.
If I didn't write something down, anchor a thought to the page, I feared I would disappear entirely into them.
I am not human, I wrote.
I am not dead.
I am something else.
That sentence stayed with me longer than it should have. I stared at it until the words lost meaning, just shapes with no breath.
Something else.
It didn't feel like a diagnosis anymore.
It felt like an identity.
---
PATIENT ECHOES – Entry 1
Subject: Sylvain Noirel (presumed) – initial post-crisis evaluation
It has been nearly Five months since I awoke beneath the vineyard. My memory, though intact in fragments, is still unreliable under emotional strain. My body does not fatigue, but my mind fractures under prolonged silence.
Today I heard myself speaking again. Not aloud—not quite—but clearly enough that I responded with my own voice, aloud, in return.
I do not believe I am alone.
Not because there is someone else here, because I was someone else here.
What remains now is... residue. A flickering self, distorted by hunger and solitude.
Clinical note: patient resists acceptance of altered physiological state, despite overwhelming evidence—no breath, no sleep, no pulse, no decay. Minor sunlight reaction suggests photosensitivity, though no direct exposure yet. Primary need remains unclear, but instinct directs toward blood.
Still no ingestion.
Still resisting.
Still afraid.
I dream of the orchard often.
Not of the girl—but of the sky.
Of wings.
Of hunger.
—S.N.
---
I put the pen down.
A draft moved through the cellar. The slit in the ceiling allowed only a blade of gray light, but I imagined the vineyard above—how it might look this month, vines heavy with early rot, fruit clinging like bruises to the wire.
The kind of harvest no one drinks from.
The kind that sours on the tongue.
I closed my eyes.
I no longer dreamed, but the memories found their own shape, cycling like reels from an old projector. I saw my parents' house in Dijon. My first office. The boy Adrien, hiding beneath the desk and pretending he was invisible.
And me.
Always watching. Always listening. Always trying to fix what was broken in others so I didn't have to acknowledge the cracks in myself.
But I was broken now.
Irreparably.
I pressed two fingers to my neck. Still nothing. Not even the ghost of a pulse.
And yet I felt. Anger, loneliness and guilt.
Worse: curiosity.
What if I stopped resisting?
What if I drank?
The thought should've repulsed me. But it didn't, not anymore. Hunger had a way of softening morality, dissolving it slowly like sugar in warm water.
I exhaled through my nose—a reflex I hadn't lost, even if it no longer served a purpose. The illusion of breath. The illusion of life.
Sylvain Noirel, the illusionist, I thought bitterly. Even my existence is a trick now.
But tricks have rules.
And one of mine would be this: I would not drink without understanding. I would not become a monster, not yet. I would learn, I would study this curse, this transformation. If I couldn't cure it, I would catalogue it.
Even the dark deserves observation.
I reached for the pen again and continued my notes.
---
PATIENT ECHOES – Entry 1.2
Possible hypotheses:
1. I am dead, and this is a post-mortem state of consciousness sustained by a biological anomaly.
2. I am undead, in the folkloric sense, and require blood to maintain function.
3. I am mad. This is psychosis layered atop severe trauma and isolation.
More likely: a combination of all three.
Physiological changes persist. Cold skin. Unaging. Shattered wine bottle healed over two weeks ago—no injury. No scarring. Muscles responsive beyond baseline human limits. Stronger than before.
Emotional state: degraded but stabilizing with structure. Writing helps. It forces me to use my language, not the borrowed voices in the stone.
Plan: Continue documentation. Explore cellar boundaries. Attempt self-regulation through routine. Avoid hallucinations—engage only when necessary. Do not respond to the mirror.
Do not look too long into the mirror.
—S.N.
---
I set the pen down once more and watched the ink dry. The paper curled slightly at the edges, but I didn't mind. It looked lived-in. Like something I could hold onto.
A tether.
A patient file.
Mine
My stomach—or the place where hunger lived now—pulled tight again. I had no more animals to draw close, no deer to watch with reverence and regret. Only the ghosts in my head and the fading trace of a voice I wasn't sure had ever been real.
But I wasn't ready to die again.
Not yet,
Not this time.
So I gathered the pages together, folded them carefully, and tucked them beneath the floorboard I'd pried up months ago. The cellar didn't offer much, but it gave me time. And time, if nothing else, offered clarity.
I might never escape this.
But I could make meaning of it.
And in the end, isn't that what I'd always done?
I didn't know if the man I once was would approve of the thing I had become.
But for now, I would watch, and write.
And I would endure.