Chapter 92: The List (12)
The light behind the door spilled out like a flood, bleaching the endless black away.
Lucien stepped through, shielding his eyes against the glare that lanced into his skull like hot needles.
His breath caught in his throat as shapes began to coalesce, walls, a ceiling, corners.
The world snapped into focus.
And Lucien stopped breathing.
It was his old living room.
Not just a memory, not some hazy dreamscape stitched together by his subconscious.
No, this was real.
It had to be real.
Tangible.
The pale wallpaper he remembered hating.
The cheap, gray couch sagging in the middle from years of use.
The chipped TV stand crouched against the far wall.
Except… it was all wrong.
The coffee table was shattered, jagged shards of glass glittering like frozen tears across the carpet.
The cupboards along the wall had been torn from their hinges and lay in splintered heaps, drawers gutted like carcasses.
The air reeked faintly of iron, clinging to the back of his tongue like rust.
And then his gaze found the stains.
Dark, rusty blotches soaked into the carpet, painting obscene shapes where the fibers had drunk deep.
Some streaked toward the sliding glass doors, trailing like broken footprints.
The doors themselves gaped wide, the curtains flailing in an unseen wind, whispering like shrouds.
Lucien’s stomach turned.
His mind screamed at him to run, to claw his way back through the door, back into the void, anywhere but here.
But his legs moved.
Slow.
Heavy.
Each step a battle against invisible chains winding tight around his chest.
He drifted deeper into the wreckage like a ghost haunting his own grave.
It felt wrong to breathe here.
Wrong to exist in this shattered diorama of his life, a museum exhibit dedicated to the ugliest night he had ever lived.
Lucien’s throat clenched as his gaze swept the carnage.
His old home, gutted and hollow, stared back like an eyeless skull.
No sound but his own heartbeat thundering against his ribs, too loud, too fast.
He found himself standing before the sliding doors, staring into the darkness beyond.
Curtains whispered against his arms as the wind teased past, cold and damp.
Beyond lay the balcony, pale moonlight dripping like milk over the tiles.
And on those tiles-
A stain.
Bigger than the rest.
It spread out like a grotesque blossom, petals of deep maroon stark against the gray.
Thick and dull, dried to a sticky sheen.
A pool of blood so heavy the air tasted of it.
Lucien froze.
His pulse roared in his ears, drowning everything else.
His throat worked, swallowing bile that surged like a tide.
He didn’t need to ask whose blood that was.
He knew.
God, he knew.
His feet moved anyway.
One step.
Then another.
The carpet sucked faintly at his soles where it was stiff with gore.
The curtains brushed his shoulders like accusing fingers as he passed through, into the chill night air.
His breath fogged faintly, misting in front of him before vanishing into the dark.
The smell hit him then.
Metallic.
Sharp.
Old but stubborn, like it had soaked into the bones of the world and refused to leave.
He stared down at the pool, at the way it gleamed dully under the moon.
His shoe made a wet sound as it kissed the edge of it, a muffled squelch that sliced through the silence like a blade.
Lucien flinched, his lungs hitching on a ragged gasp.
His vision tunneled.
His grip shot out, desperate for something solid, and his fingers closed around cold metal, the railing.
His knuckles blanched as he clung to it, the chill biting deep into his bones.
The metal was slick where condensation had gathered, but beneath that, he could feel faint grooves where paint had peeled, details he remembered, and hated himself for remembering.
He didn’t want to look.
He didn’t want to…
Every nerve screamed against it, every thought clawed at him to keep his eyes forward, to glue them to the balcony tiles, to the blood pooling at his feet.
He knew what waited below.
He knew why the glass table laid shattered inside.
He knew why his body trembled like a dying leaf in the wind.
He knew what he would see if he looked.
And yet.
Something dragged at him.
A sick, magnetic pull winding around his spine, curling cold fingers under his jaw, tilting his head toward the abyss.
His breath sawed in and out, harsh and broken, clouds blooming and dying before his eyes. Sweat crawled down his temple, stinging his lashes.
“Don’t,” he whispered to himself, the word trembling like a plea, like a prayer.
His nails bit into the railing, carving crescents into his own flesh.
His arms shook, tendons standing out like ropes as he fought the urge clawing at him, that unholy compulsion to see.
But the silence was louder than his heartbeat now.
Louder than his breath.
Louder than the voice that had mocked him in the dark.
And then, slowly, like an automaton wound too tight.
He leaned forward.
The wind curled past his ears, whispering secrets he didn’t want.
His vision tilted, tipped, spilled downward in a slow, sickening arc.
His stomach churned.
His muscles screamed.
But he couldn’t stop.
His eyes slid over the railing.
And Lucien looked down-
***
Lucien’s breath caught as his gaze plunged into the night.
His mind braced itself, already painting the scene in sick, vivid colors, his own body, broken and sprawled like discarded meat on cold asphalt.
Beside it, the stalker’s mangled remains, twisted limbs pointing in directions limbs were never meant to bend.
The echoes of sirens.
The memory of screaming.
But now?
In this place?
The street below… was empty.
And it remained empty.
No corpses.
No crimson stains.
Just the road, black and wet from a long gone rain, glistening faintly under the tremor of a single streetlight.
It flickered in uneven spasms, coughing out pale orange light that crawled over empty pavement before dying back into shadow.
On.
Off.
On.
Off.
The rhythm was wrong, jagged, almost alive, like a pulse convulsing in the dark.
Lucien blinked, disbelieving.
He leaned forward over the railing, eyes sweeping left and right.
Nothing.
The sidewalk stretched bare, the alley yawned hollow, the world below an abandoned stage stripped of actors.
‘Did it… not happen?’
The thought slithered through his mind, oily and desperate.
For a heartbeat, just once, an ounce of relief surged in his chest, warm and dizzying.
Maybe this wasn’t real.
He exhaled shakily, letting his white-knuckled grip on the railing loosen just a fraction.
The air tasted a little lighter.
His heartbeat slowed, just a notch.
Maybe.
Squelch.
The sound cut through the silence like a knife.
Wet.
Heavy.
Behind him.
A footstep.
Lucien froze.
Every muscle locked, his breath strangled mid-exhale.
The sound had come from inside the balcony.
From the pool of blood behind him.
His mind splintered with panic.
Every instinct shrieked to run, but his body was stone, his spine a rigid rod as cold sweat streaked down it in rivers.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, he turned his head.
There, standing in the ruined doorway, half-swathed in shadow, was-
Himself.
No.
Not Lucien Crowley.
Not the person he was now.
Kim Jihoon.
His old self from Earth.
Atleast.
That’s what it looked like.
The thing that wore his old flesh was a grotesque parody of what a human should be.
A corpse, dragged screaming from gravity’s mercy and then denied the peace of decay.
Its spine jutted through slashed skin in jagged peaks, vertebrae like a row of broken teeth.
Bones punched through flesh at unnatural angles, poking like white daggers from meat that had long since lost its warmth.
Its head-
The neck lolled at a perfect right angle, bent so far to the side the skin had split open in a yawning gash, exposing the sinew and glistening cartilage beneath.
From that split, something obscene bulged outward, gray matter slithering in threads, chunks of brain matter oozing like curdled fat.
One eye dangled loose from its socket, swinging by a tattered string of nerve like a pendulum, tapping gently against its cheek with each phantom sway.
The other eye was still fixed forward, glassy and white, staring without seeing, yet somehow drilling through him with a hate that felt almost alive.
Its lips were torn.
One corner ripped up to the cheekbone in a gash that made a grotesque smile, teeth bared like yellow shards.
Its lower jaw hung slightly open, crooked, as if it had tried to scream even after its lungs had been pulped into slurry.
Lucien’s breath came in tiny, splintered fragments as bile surged in his throat.
His stomach twisted, knotted, tried to heave itself empty… but nothing came.
His nails clawed at the railing, biting into the cold metal until blood welled beneath them.
The corpse didn’t walk.
It didn’t stumble.
It floated.
It hovered above the floor, just an inch, as if the earth had rejected the weight of it.
Its feet dragged lazily through the pool of blood, ripples whispering outward with each slight shift.
Blood clung to its toes, dripping slow, deliberate drops that merged with the crimson bloom below, thickening it, feeding it.
And it stared at him.
That slack-jawed, broken-necked thing, he stared at him.
Not as Lucien Crowley.
Not as the boy reborn in a world of magic and marble halls.
But as Kim Jihoon, the failure, the recluse, the hollow husk who had died in a puddle of his own blood on a winter night.
Lucien’s pulse battered against his skull like hammers on steel.
His vision swam, the edges blurring as panic crushed him in an iron vise.
His mind clawed at escape, at reason, at anything, but the void only answered with silence.
Then, as if to tear out the last thread of sanity clinging to him.
The corpse moved closer.
Slow.
Fluid.
Bone and meat bending with obscene elasticity as its body tilted forward, neck sagging like wet rope.
The hanging eye swung like a pendulum, droplets of vitreous fluid pattering into the blood below.
And when it spoke, because of course it spoke, it wasn’t with a voice.
It was with a sound.
A wet, broken gurgle that shivered through the hollow air, clawing down Lucien’s spine like rusted nails.
The thing opened its mouth wider, wider than jaws should ever go, and black ichor trickled down its chin as it loosed that gargled whisper:
“Why…?”
