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The scream tore me from the drawing room — ripped me from that childhood hell as though someone had yanked the film reel from a projector.
I was back on the church floor.
The blood was still pooling.
The coin was still in my hand.
But the church was no longer empty.
Something stood in the aisle between the warped pews. Its height was wrong — too tall by half, but the stoop of its shoulders made it seem as though it were bowing in mockery. Its face was exactly what my mind could tolerate before breaking: a blur of symmetry, half-human features sliding into one another like oil on water. I knew this was not its true shape. This was the mask my mind forced upon it to keep from splintering.
Its eyes — if they were eyes — pinned me.
I felt the marrow-deep hum again, rattling the cages of my ribs.
> "…call me…"
"…as you did before you were born…"
It moved without motion. One blink and it was closer, the shadows behind it sagging forward like they were being poured from some greater darkness beyond the church walls.
I tried to crawl, to turn away, but every muscle obeyed the hum instead of my will. My jaw ached — the tendons pulling taut like wires — as the first half of the name clawed its way up my throat. It was not speech; it was the retching expulsion of something that had been lodged in me all my life.
The sound was wrong.
Every vowel bent.
Every consonant was three sounds at once.
And the effect was immediate.
The walls buckled outward, as if the church were an eggshell being pressed from within. The floorboards groaned, then split into splinters, revealing nothing beneath — not soil, not stone, but a yawning absence.
It leaned closer. The blur of its face shifted, and for a heartbeat I thought I glimpsed its real form — something so vast and elaborate it could not fit in a single moment of vision. My eyes watered blood.
The rest of the name was there, right behind my teeth. One more syllable and it would be whole.
It smiled.
I understood then that I had never been speaking its name. It had been speaking through me.
And that was when the gunshot tore the world in half.
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