A six year old kneels before the flaming candles. Jimmy’s mother kneels next to him. Words pour slowly from his mouth. They are the first words he ever spoke. He knows them by heart. He has no idea what they mean.

Up ahead of him a girl hung from a noose latched onto a tree in the front yard. He slowed his car to stare at the hanging body. Her dead face was youthful, only a teenager, but long wet brown hair obscured most of her face from Derrick’s view. She wore a t-shirt and jeans, bare feet swaying lightly above damp grass.

Rows and rows of closed doors greeted him. Behind all of them he could hear the scratching, the faint screams of pain, the warbling cries of things he’d never seen in the flesh before. Some doors creaked open as soon as he passed them, but a quick glance back showed only an empty, silent hall of wooden doors.

Something clicked lightly to his right. He stared at the far wall to the living room. Just briefly he thought he heard a soft shuffling, like feet shifting positions on the other side of the wall. Before he could reach the door to his apartment that soft click repeated as someone slipped the panel back in place.

He walked around the red, nearly past it, when he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Although it seemed impossible, he thought he’d seen a human hand, ever so briefly, brushing along underneath the ice. A closer look revealed nothing, and after a full minute of staring, he decided he hadn’t seen anything to begin with.

“Your marriages, Mr. Reynolds, and the way they both ended.”
“I told you, they both left me.”
“I would hardly think that you killing them and them leaving you are one in the same, Mr. Reynolds, but that might just be a matter of personal opinion.”

“I want to know something,” Roy said.
“And what might that be?” the teen asked, to which Roy smiled. He let every yellowed tooth shine, not at the question, but at the realization in the teen’s eyes right before the gun fired.

Hank stood in the doorway to the bathroom, unable to move, listening as the voice repeated itself, over and over again. It started talking again as soon as it was finished, the echo of the bathroom removing any pause between the words. The statement was never ending, each sentence blending into the next.

They considered themselves to be beyond mere friendship, until what began as a petty fight escalates, threatening what they once knew about each other, and their lives.

Deep within the remains of what was once the city of Tacit Falls lurks Adam’s twin brother, and the answers to what slowly consumes him.