"Grandma, what is this?" asked the little boy, not hiding his surprised face, looking straight at the elderly woman who sat at the base of a large stone.
They were on the edge of an old meadow overgrown with yellowing autumn grass. The wind rustled the dry stems, and in the distance loomed a forest already touched by crimson and gold of fading foliage. The sky above them was clear, cloudless, gradually darkening as the sun sloped toward the horizon.
Grandma's gaze fell on the boy's hand that stretched toward the sky, and his index finger led her gaze high up, where one by one the first stars were igniting.
"Oh... Grandson, have you never seen stars?" the woman chuckled lightly, teasing the boy.
"Stars... There are so many of them... And what are stars? Why are they so small?" the boy paid no attention to Grandma's laughter and, with wide-open eyes, continued to shower her with questions.
"Stars are our reflection; one star is one human soul. If a person dies, the star fades, and with the arrival of new life, a new star is born." As she told this, the corners of Grandma's lips lifted up, bestowing upon her grandson a warm smile.
"Wow, that's cool! But why are they so small?" asked the boy, crawling closer and leaning his shoulder on Grandma's shoulder.
"Because they are incredibly far away. So far that the distance to them is measured in years."
"Wow! That's something, I want to go there!" said the boy resolutely, staring into the boundless expanse.
"And you will go there, you'll see, because somewhere there, among these stars, there is yours too. And now I'm hungry, shall we go to the house?" suggested Grandma, slowly rising from the ground and brushing the clinging blades of grass from her dress.
***
Pupils that had lost focus regained sharpness. The memory dissipated like smoke, leaving behind only a bitter emptiness, and Finn's gaze once again fixed on the cold railroad tracks in front of him.
He stood on the outskirts of the city, where asphalt gave way to a battered dirt road, and rare lanterns barely illuminated the path, casting long, writhing shadows. Around stretched fields already harvested, leaving behind only withered stubble resembling the bristles on a giant's cheek. The air was saturated with the smell of decaying foliage and smoke from distant bonfires—autumn was coming into its own.
Finn gazed at the late sunset, when the last upper edge of the sun had almost hidden behind the edge of the forest, painting the horizon in blood-red tones, as if the earth itself were bleeding. The wind stirred his hood pulled over his head and made him shiver from the cold that came not from outside, but from deep within.
In the distance sounded a drawn-out hoot—this was the train approaching. The sound pierced the silence like a needle.
"One step..." flashed through Finn's mind, and this thought echoed with a deafening emptiness. "Just one step—and endless torments will no longer await you, this crush in the subway of your own thoughts. One step—and you will rid yourself of all this dirt, from this unbearable weight that has pressed on your shoulders for years. One step... and it will all end. It will simply cease to be." Despair clenched his throat in a tight knot, displacing everything else.
He examined his hands—pale, almost transparent from cold and fatigue, with bluish veins at the wrists. His fingers trembled slightly, but not from fear, but from the piercing wind that penetrated even through the thick fabric of his black oversized hoodie. The jacket was unbuttoned, flapping on him like a shroud on a living person, and the hood pulled so low that it almost hid his face.
The train was already close; its light, blind and merciless, cut through the darkness, and the hoots became louder, deafening, as if the engineer was trying to dissuade him from the last step, shouting the final warning.
The roar of the approaching train drowned out everything—the heartbeat, the whistle of the wind, even his own thoughts turned into a continuous white noise. Finn felt the vibration from the rails rising up his legs, merging with the trembling in his entire body, promising imminent release.
"I hope it doesn't hurt too much..." a last pitiful, childish thought managed to flash, and there was so much longing in it that the world swam before his eyes.
He squeezed his eyes shut. A scorching wind hit his face; the roar of steel exploded in his ears. Finn involuntarily recoiled, but...
The roar of the train suddenly fell silent, as if someone had turned off the sound in reality. An deafening, oppressive silence ensued. Finn slowly opened his eyes, feeling cold sweat trickling down his temples, and his heart pounding somewhere in his throat.
First, he saw only a blurry spot on the rails. Then his vision cleared, and his gaze revealed a picture from which the blood froze in his veins.
On the embankment lay a severed arm—pale, almost waxy, with fingers frozen in the last convulsion. The blood had already turned into a black crust on the gravel. But something was wrong... familiar to the point of goosebumps.
Finn took a step closer; his legs were cottony. His boot stepped on something fragile—shards of teeth scattered with a dry, repulsive crunch.
And then he saw the face.
It lay to the side, half-covered with rubble. His own face. One eye was closed, the other—cloudy, glassy—stared straight at him, point-blank. The skin had already acquired a grayish tint, but the features were recognizable to the point of horror.
The corpse's lips twitched.
"You... still... fear... death...?" they whispered in his own voice, but with some subterranean echo, as if the sound came not from the larynx, but from the depths of hell itself.
Finn recoiled, bumping into something soft and shapeless. He turned around and saw the rest—the torso without the upper part, the crushed ribcage from which a dark, almost black mass of innards spilled out. All this was clad in tatters of a familiar black hoodie, in scraps of his own clothing.
Finn collapsed to the ground; his body ceased to obey, overwhelmed by a wave of pure, animal terror. His palm, instinctively seeking support, sank into something viscous and warm—his own shattered leg. The femur bone protruded from the torn flesh like a white mast from a bloody sea. The kneecap had split into three sharp shards connected by ligament veins.
He tried to scream, but his lungs refused to fill with air, only wheezing silently. "What's happening? Is this death? Is this the end?" flashed through his mind when he noticed the first signs of encroaching darkness, but this was not the blessed darkness of non-being, but something else, alive and hostile.
The shadows began to move unnaturally:
The outlines of trees on the horizon began to flow downward like black tar. Lampposts bent and melted like candles. Even the puddles of blood on the rails began to evaporate in the form of dark smoke, enveloping everything in a haze.
The last to disappear was his dead face—the glassy eye clouded over, then retracted inward, as if someone had drunk it through a straw, leaving behind only emptiness.
A sudden flash blinded Finn, burning his retina. When his vision returned, he saw something from which his mind was ready to retreat:
A writing desk of black wood, covered with a web of cracks like dried mud. On it lay a huge book bound in human skin—the veins on the cover pulsed with a dead, lazy rhythm. The pages rustled on their own, covered with writings that constantly changed shape, writhing like worms.
In the armchair sat a figure. It was impossible to see it clearly—the outlines constantly trembled like black fire flame. Long fingers with claws resembling polished elephant ivory rifled through the pages. When the creature raised its head, Finn saw:
A face without features, only a smooth dark surface reflecting a distorted likeness of his own horror. Instead of eyes—two voids in which distant, indifferent constellations flickered. The mouth appeared only at the moment of speech—a black slit from which frosty vapor poured, smelling of ozone and dust.
"Well, hello, Finnleyn Reinbach," sounded a voice in which the sounds of breaking bones and childish laughter mixed, causing goosebumps to crawl over the skin. Its fingers pointed to the last page of the book: "How do you like the end of your story?"
On the parchment, Finn saw an exact depiction of himself standing on the rails. The text under the drawing slowly formed from ink drops flowing like blood, composing the final sentences…